i was very tempted to call this whole newsletter thing “thought having juice”, as an hommage to this essential meme. (i still am.)
if i were you, i would probably be confused: what is this? why am i getting this?
it’s good that i’m not you, you’re not me, and such silly questions would’ve never crossed your mind. you’re smart. you’re better than this.
you are reading. you are excited.
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at a certain point in the past three years, somehow you ended up on my website. it didn’t change much during that time — which is code for i didn’t touch it and it collected quite a bit of internet dust — but a few weeks ago i got quite fed up with Notion taking good 15 seconds to load the page, and did a quick dirty redo overnight, with bare HTML. result: 1.5s loading time, cleaner grid — and a chance to slightly reorganize the works: throw away something completely irrelevant, add a bit of new things. clean up the garden.
that’s in fact how i started thinking about this: not as a Personal Website as the holy and mighty Final Iteration, but rather as a constant work in progress — an online garden indeed; a place to construct your identity, in a way; a public reflection; just thinking out loud.
when you worked too much in corporate-adjacent worlds, you’re just way too used to the idea that everything should be perfect, polished, shiny, splashy, finished — and that by the end of a project everyone should hate it, and one another. i don’t want that anymore. it’s artifical, and contrary to human nature, which is, admittedly, a fucking mess.
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as an experiment, on that website where you somehow ended up, there was a form. i didn’t think much of it at the time: just yet another experiment. but as i was reworking the website, i stumbled into that form, took a deep breath, and looked into the results. oh my god. 62 people left their emails. well, this is nice, and sweet, and scary, and what the hell can i possibly say? and why would i do that?
but then again — my initial premise was that feeds on social apps turned into something very strange. there’s complete lack of control on who sees what — on both ends — and i simply don’t want to be subjected to algorithmic censorship, wherein ephemeral forces decide who gets to see my dumb memes, and who’s spared from them.
one way to think about is this: let’s call it “dancing for the algorithm”. the influencers are putting out stuff that will be picked up by the algorithms — not necessarily the stuff their audiences want/need. they reverse-engineer the algorithm, and optimize for it, and the feedback loop continues endlessly. the algorithm knows better.
it’s nothing new, but it’s scary and disturbing, and all i want is a way to (1) subscribe to stuff that my friends post, (2) somehow get access to all that stuff, (3) have full control over what i see and how i see it, (4) make sure that pp.1–2 work both ways, i.e. my friends can subscribe to my stuff, and then i can be 100% certain that they’ll see it (eventually).
it isn’t much to ask, i think, but all the social platforms are so opaque that you have zero understanding and zero control over who sees what and why. it’s best not to think about it at all.
another metaphor that i find handy is an aquarium made of very thick glass. the glass is perfectly transparent and polished and otherwise state-of-the-art. you see all your friends through the glass and you shout at them, but there’s no way of knowing if they heard you or not. (i’m obviously borrowing from Sylvia Plath here, with The Bell Jar — and for a good reason, too.)
being on social media feels like an endless gamble; Las Vegas in your pocket. this is not the future any of us wanted.
shall we go back to RSS?
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but enough. i’ll try to make this newsletter into a small intimate place to share thoughts and ideas and drafts and what not — at length which twitter doesn’t permit.
what i’d really like — what would be ideal, i think — is if these emails would end up serving as prompts for conversations. an email without responses is basically a failed conversation starter, and i think it’s vital to have conversations, dialogues, arguments, debates — instead of quick dopamine rush of likes and subsequent silence and isolation.
so, if you have an idea, an opinion, or fair criticism — please don’t shy away from writing back.
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a bit of culture:
i’ve been listening to a lot of episodes of Tech Won’t Save Us — a heavy left-wing podcast with quite a self-explanatory name — wherein Paris Marx, a Canadian tech journalist, presents a very critical and skeptical point of view of tech. it’s very refreshing, important, and a must listen to everyone with the slightest interest in how the world currently works. the technology simply has too much power, and it’s vital to understand it. a good starting place would be an episode about privatization of the internet, an interview with Ben Tarnoff who just published a book: Internet for the People, which demands a paragraph of its own; briefly speaking, it’s wonderful.
i was very moved with Nathan Fielder’s new show, The Rehearsal, and immediately wrote some words about it. it’s nothing like Nathan For You, but also it is a bit like that. as i began: “The Rehearsal, a new show by Nathan Fielder, who i absolutely love (platonically) back from Nathan For You and other things, is a very mature, sentimental, earnest work; a blend of Smokers Allowed (NFY s3e5) and Finding Frances (NFY finale). no cringe, just life — and depth.” (quite a lot of silly fun is happening over at a related Facebook group. interesting that facebook groups are one of very few areas of facebook which resemble real life with real people, a strong argument against the dead internet conspiracy theory.)
i’m currently reading Debt: The First 5000 Years by David Graeber, which is technically a history of money, but one which keeps your jaws wide open. in the first twenty pages it tears apart the foundational principles of modern economics; then it starts out as an anthropological overview of African tribes living many years ago, and how their economy worked, then unexpectedly quickly shifts to African slave trade, patriarchy, wars, and religion — simply showing how money is deeply connected to all of it. an absolutely fantastic book.
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holy fuck that’s a long email. would anyone read this far? i would never know. but it’s kinda nice to just jot down your thoughts, and not contain them in Notes.app.
the email is intentionally kept noise-free; no images; no headlines; just an occasional bold here and there. i’ll keep experimenting with the format. i’m not massively happy about it, but it’s a fair starting point.
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this is definitely high time to stop. thank you for reading; please write back; if you liked it, send it to a friend. if you hated it, send it to an enemy.
i’ll be in Berlin, Germany, until the end of September — if you’re here, too, and want to talk about internet or web art of theatre or silly puns.
till next time
—Eugene