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There’s something cathartic about putting half-baked ideas into the world and getting feedback. Losing Twitter is hard to quantify, even though I didn’t like it, because it amplified voices literally out of obscurity. I’ve seen similar laments from academics who did important but disconnected work in random places. Conferences help, but gatekeepers structure our world in ways that make it hard for those not at “the right schools” or with “the right titles” to pole vault into consciousness.
Many people I came up with in the early 2000s blogosphere have risen from Blogspot to prominent publications and media. It’s cool to see their ascent. A challenge has been figuring out how to market myself, message my ideas, and where to start.
Mostly, I’ll talk about sharing ideas freely, owning my ideas, and tie this to my post on the anti-engagement era, where disinformation and rage tweets are currency in a metamodern world.
Generative AI tools like Midjourney show bias plainly by revealing their default audience. Now it may seem fun, but when a few people “train” the new canon on what we’ll see and hear, they determine what’s important.
There’s never been another Oprah, because she was a glitch in the matrix, benefitting from timing, self-belief, and assuming her show wouldn’t work, ensuring there would be no other like her. We see this in tech too.
What will happen if the tech monoculture designing our tools erases key parts of our existence due to blind spots or malice? It doesn’t matter for those who know how to find things without them. But future generations won’t remember life before the internet or making things from scratch.
The experimentation gold rush is a 1.0 thing. The next generation learns to consume, not build. Early adopting means wasting time learning the new puzzle, contextualizing it, and adding it to life. It seems wasteful from outside, because it mostly is. But taking these tools and breaking them to understand how they work, think, and are programmed is crucial for living in an increasingly modern and hostile world.