works of wanderlust

Tag: social media

  • state of the blog, one: un-curated

    When I relaunched this site back in April I suggested that I would try not to write too many navel gazing posts about the blog itself.  I mean, to be fair, I like reading about how the sausage is made—as it were. I wish a lot more people who maintained personal websites and writing projects were actually interested in the creative process as much as they are interested in click-through optimization and search engine manipulation and all the other topics that seem as much about duping users into reading your drivel as is was about actually creating extensive collections of online expression.

    I probably don’t need to mention that writing this as I am in October 2025 the world is in a period of retracting rights of personal expression.

    I have been consciously moving further and further away from the corporate social networks and continuing to build a slow-but-steady presence here online. To my earlier point, this site was never about click-throughs or search engines or tricking you, the reader, into reading anything you don’t want to read. This is just the manifestation of opinion from one guy here on the Canadian prairies and the things I write about span a hundred different topics—you’re going to find something interesting and you’re probably going to be bored by just as much.

    When I relaunched this site, scraping it together from the remains of about four other niche blogs I was maintaining, while I was trying to find my footing and my rhythm I did stray into writing far too often about the blog itself. So, I declared that I would only drop one of those navel gazing “meta” posts no more than once per week. I’ve held pretty solid to that, and the number has been more like once per month.

    But here’s the sausage-making part: a lot goes on behind the scenes to write the words and collect the photos and too, keep the lights on here. No one would or could afford to have me sit here and recreate this kind of thing for them. It is a kind of work of personal madness that it even exists. My blogs have always been a kind of personal passion project. 

    All of that is to say that I do appreciate readers. I do appreciate clicks and when you find this on search. I have some light stats running and so I have a rough idea that people are visiting and they are reading certain topics. I know that, for example, if I shared more cast iron recipes I could flood this site with traffic. If I posted more hiking tips for the rocky mountains, I would probably build a dedicated user-base. Or, if I complained more about oddball observational neighbourhood gripes the search engine would light me up like a firework. I’m not a performing monkey, tho—so you get whatever I feel like writing about and you can feel free to dig through the archives and look for anything that is more interesting.

    Social media really has trained us to expect an internet built for an audience of one. That’s the simultaneous beauty and danger of the algorithm. When it’s acting nice we call it curation. When it’s isolating us to niche information we call it siloing our perspective.

    This blog is my perspective, but there is no algorithm. I have written about that before—somewhere here—and all to the point that like in yee good ole days, when papers and the evening news showed us everything they could jam into their publication-slash-broadcast allotments, we didn’t live in these curated silos of expectations. We just read everything, whether it was something that made us clap like a trained seal or not. 

    I’m no news outlet, but as I keep writing on this blog and filling it with stuff that interests me (knowing only a fraction of it will interest you) I do so understanding that I have far more in common with traditional media publications than I do with corporate social media feeds. There are (as of right now) about four average-length books worth of writing on this site and not a word of it is curated (or siloed) to you. And I think that’s a good thing.

    Thanks for reading.

  • social games, three

    I spent an hour curating. 

    Look, I’m sorry: If you follow me and I follow back, that’s the powerade of what is supposed to make social media work—but if I open up the feed and literally the only thing you do on there is repost angry memes and incite capital-lettered ranting commentary above links to random articles, I may need to unfollow you.

    I probably just did, actually.

    A fairly famous cartoonist I follow wrote something about his ideal social media feed, and it being free of algorithms and video reels, sorted in a meaningful (read: chronological) way, and a place for good discussion. Or, as he footnoted, he wanted the internet of 2008 back. I agree. Jokingly, sure, but gawd am I sick of whatever these spaces have become. 

    The flood of stupid is inescapable. You’ll notice that this blog, my site, and anything I control may be thought of as a highly managed and ordered space, but unlike the vomiting algorithms of The Socials, mine are purposefully curated to reflect a kind of personal expression on my part. That difference is important. 

    Dropping reshares and drivel into a big churning algorithm whose only job is to grab ahold of your attention and never let go, as is the case on social media platforms these days, is the polar opposite of what I attempt to do here.

    Yeah, to the untrained eye, they look pretty similar. But that similarity stops at a level so shallow that it would make the silver scratch off goop on a lottery ticket look like an atomic blast shield. 

    I curate what I post, I figured, so why shouldn’t I take more care curating what I see? Weed the garden, as it were.

    I mean, I need to spend less time online in these apps. I really do. And I barely spend any time at all in them, so I can only imagine what other more deeply entrenched social media addicts feel from their mainlining the algorithmic feed juice. Curating only does so much for that effort. And in fact, it may be that by curating I give myself more reason to stay on them longer. Sigh. But the hard reality is that I need to curate now so that when my energy levels are lower and more susceptible to the doom-scroll flow of the feed I have already done some of the work to reduce its potency. 

    So last night I unfollowed some of the people who I have incidentally picked up along the way. They will not notice. They don’t engage that way. They don’t comment or reshare or like. They are on there to firehose themselves, and give almost nothing in return.

    I had this rule: the courtesy follow. Had. If you are not a bot, and you seem like a real person posting real things that are not trying to sell me something, I would follow you back. But that rule has bit me in the ass. Angry shit-posters.  The hyper-political. The influencer repost machine. The caps lock granny. The patriotic sledgehammer. You all have a role, sure, but you are overwhelming me and you have created an internet that is dank and sickly. 

    My amendment to the courtesy follow has changed (even if it has not been posted so clearly elsewhere) that I will follow back anyone who is not a bot and who appears to be curating a web more closely resembling the internet of 2008: creativity, discussion, and something leaning in the direction of their own truth.

    I’m not rushing back quite yet, but I am trimming the digital weeds because I know I almost certainly will go back soon.

  • social games, two

    We all start to sound a bit like junkies when we ponder aloud the idea of fleeing the social platforms once and for good, weaning ourselves off our feeds, setting limits and goals and self moderation parameters, or screaming digital curses to the gods of going cold turkey.

    It has been a week. A fucking week of social media garbage.

    Let me define my parameters. I used to vaguely claim that blogs and personal websites and sharing platforms all fell into some common harmonious categorization under the term “social media” and that posting on facebook or twitter or bluesky were just another form of socially participating online. No longer.

    When I write from here on in about The Socials I am strictly referring to the toxic sludge pool of low friction group-text platforms that slurp up our engagement vibes for likes and shares and algorithmically grind it into a type of endless digital slop hose. It may be photo sharing sites like instagram or discussion forums like reddit or hate-text engines like shitter, but those are the targets of my current ire.

    These machines had such potential for good, but humanity it seems had different plans. First came the artists and philosophers, sharing ideas and vibes. Then came the marketers spinning webs of greed and consumption. Next came the bots in their AI legions attempting to con us into clicking and buying and selling our secrets for a hint of fake human contact. Finally have arrived the ideologies, hate filled rhetoric machines set on dividing and destroying the fragile peaces of times through misinformation and threats and raw, unfiltered hate.

    Each time a new platform arrives I dip my toe in the digital river and see if the current is any different than the one I just left.  But people never really change, it seems. Even the most honourable approaches to creating a space of the kind we all seem to yearn is thwarted by sinister agents of chaos hell bent on shaping the world to their dark visions of division and rage. 

    Bluesky was my latest attempt at participation, and yet nine months on my efforts are once again beset by the unavoidable impression that it has become a whirlwind of political rage and a blur of misinformation. Post sweet nothings and you are ignored. Post creative joy and it attracts hoards of malicious bots bent on deception and digital theft. Post opinion and someone will set their heart on vengeance and attempt to destroy your life. Post truth and someone will dispute it with every fibre of their being.

    If there was a kind of metaphorical temperature dial to control all this, the ouija spirits of the internet cranked it up another notch last week upon hearing the echo of a sniper rifle. Orwell warned us of the dangers of crowdsourcing our hate to the masses and of handing off our power to an unchecked state. We did not listen. And in fact if the vibe resonating within the socials is to be analyzed with any confidence democracy is rasping it’s last breaths. The end of meaningful freedoms may not be completely over, but the front line of expunging them from the modern world will be on the feeds of social media.

    I may not be done writing and posting, but I am considering if I am now finally done writing and posting there, or if I am just another junkie who will never truly break free.

  • ghosts in our spaces

    please note: I am writing a substack blog about artificial intelligence and its implications in society and will be cross-posting some of the articles here. This is one of those articles.

    Have you heard the theory about spaces? 

    I think formally it is referred to as Third Space Theory, and having just spent some time reading about the background of it I can share that (a) it is a kind of sociological theory of culture and identity that is meant to help us understand our modern society but which may not reflect on other non-western cultures or historical cultures and (b) you should almost certainly read a more reliable source than my meanderingly philosophical blog post if you want to know more.

    But I can simplify it here to make a point.

    And a point about AI, even.

    The theory kinda posits that modern humans in the western world are creatures of multiple spheres of identity and existence: first, second and third spaces—or home, work, and recreation if one wanted to simplify the concept for a meme post like where I first stumbled across this concept before reading more about it.

    The first space is our domestic sphere: where we live, the place where we are part of a family unit, probably where we sleep, maybe where we eat in privacy and away from the public, and a space where we generally spend our quiet, personal moments. This space may be a house or an apartment or just a room to call ones own, but could alsobe something less physical.

    The second space is where we contribute to public life or society. For most people this work or school or public service or a job-slash-career space. Again, this can be a physical space like a building or a worksite, or can be something more transient like a video meeting or a conference in a faraway city or a job interview while wearing a visitor badge in someone else’s second space.

    Then comes the third space, and the theory talks about the variety of these spaces but often we can consider these, simply, spaces of public participation: recreation activities, playing sports, going to the library, attending a church, shopping at a mall, eating at a restaurant with friends. Other spaces not home or work and spaces where we can relax, socialize, and be our authentic selves for the purpose of playing and enjoying our lives.

    The theory also leans into some ideas about value of these spaces, particularly the third space, on the health and wellbeing of not only us as individuals but of society as a whole. Society, you ask? Well, according to the theory, but where else in the public sphere can we as individuals plot our dissent and dissatisfaction with the state of our society and work to communicate ways to improve it—or perhaps overthrow those who are seeking to oppress it? These theories always have a serious side, don’t they?

    But perhaps I digress. I was getting to AI, wasn’t I?

    So, consider for a moment what has happened to these spaces in the last few years. 

    Consider, for example, what happened to the second space of so many office workers during the pandemic: work from home became a collapse of the second space into the first space for many, myself included. My kitchen was suddenly my office, and I was staring through a digital window into the living rooms, basements, and (yes, really) messy bedrooms of many people I formerly only knew as nine-to-five office people. Many have only slightly decoupled this collapse since, and a lot more have remained (sometimes stubbornly oblivious to the downsides) still living in this blurring of first and second spaces for half a decade.

    And now consider what has happened to many third spaces in the last few years: libraries have lost funding, malls have gone bankrupt, the price of admission to public facilities has either gone up or simply been privatized and gated and thus become a barrier to entry for many and all the while many third spaces have just generally been usurped by the so-called digital town square of social media, or online shopping, or multiplayer video gaming, food delivery apps, or even unidirectional media platforms streaming content into our screens.

    To recap: the first and second spaces have collapsed and blurred together, and too the third space has become limited or completely virtualized as a collection of apps for others and consumed from the couch while sitting around that same blurry first-meets-second space.

    And all that might be manageable if one sad fact about those virtual third spaces wasn’t also simultaneously true: that more and more the participants we meet inside that third space are not other human beings but rather AI algorithms, bots and chat agents and tour guides to this artificial public sphere where we are supposed to exist for the sake of forging and maintaining a healthy society.

    What is the impact of that to not just our personal health, but to the strength of our political and social structures?

    On the one hand, AI is not necessarily to blame for our whole cloth migration into the virtual or our physical abandonment of second and third spaces, but at the same time it has likely eased the transition and gobbled up our willpower to go back to how things used to be when we had three fulsome spaces and all those spaces were populated by real people, for better or worse. And I suppose one could ask: does it even matter if the end state of all this is that enough people blur all three spaces into a single digital virtual sphere populated by artificial intelligences? Maybe that’s just what some people prefer, the health of themselves and a broader society be damned.

    But that’s just a theory.

  • The Poets Against the Processors

    I ask you: What is AI?

    Artificial intelligence, you reply.

    Sure, but what is it? Really?

    I suppose we first need to get a handle on what defines those two terms: artificial & intelligence—and I think the first is likely easier to get our minds around than the latter.

    Let’s get that one out of the way then: the term artificial can perhaps be defined easily by its negative. Artificial, for example, might be thought of as something that is not genuine. Something that is not natural. Something that is an imitation, a simulation or a fabrication designed, perhaps, to mimic what we might otherwise consider to be real.

    More precisely, the etymology of the word gives us a more positive example. Something artificial is something that is crafted by art, made by humans, designed, built and invented by effort of us. Something artificial then might simply and most clearly be thought of as something that someone used their human intelligence to bring into existence.

    Ah, but what is intelligence then?

    A much more complex answer is required for that, I say.

    For example, a dictionary will simply tell you that intelligence is the ability of a thing to gather and synthesize information into knowledge and understanding.

    Sounds easy, you reply.

    But wait, I reply, what you may not see is that from there on in we delve into what is almost certainly a quagmire of philosophical pondering and metaphysical analysis: the human mind trying to understand itself is a profession nearly as old as humans themselves. A mirror looking at its own reflection. What is thought? What is consciousness? What is the self, the mind, the soul and the spirit? What is it that makes us human? How can we even know that every other person we know thinks in the same manner as we do—and by that we don’t refer to content or concept, but simply trying to gauge the depth to which their mind is actually a mind like our own and that they are not simply a reactive automaton, a robot, an alien force, a simulation, an… artificial intelligence.

    Together we join these words into a modern catchphrase and shorten it to just two letters that carry all the weight of a shift in the course of human history: artificial intelligence or AI.

    AI then is, not-so-simply, something that we made that has the ability to gather knowledge and synthesize understanding.

    AI is a tool, a technology, and a kind of metaphorical progeny of ourselves: our attempt to remake our own minds in craft and art and design.

    We have chosen as a species (dictated by the history of our scientific pursuits, of course) to have done this with silicon computers—though, one might speculate that in an alternate timeline perhaps we may have sought to accomplish such things with steam valves and brass cogs or neutrinos colliding with atoms or quantum interference patterns resolving upon clouds of stardust or even with microscopic sacs of self-replicating organic chemistry brewing inside a calcium-rich orb. We take computer circuits etched into silicon wafers as the de facto method because it is a mature craft: we can make complex things with this understanding we have. We can build machines of such enormous complexity that any other approach seems as much science fiction as thinking machines would have seemed to our recent ancestors.

    Yet, here we are. I say. Look at us. We have made something that, though often arguably lacking or laughable or uncanny or a thing that draws any of a hundred other pejorative pokes, is an imperfect beast and now made and unleashed. It is far past time we all started asking what exactly this artificial intelligence might actually be—and what it will bring upon a society and a species whose perhaps greatest competitive advantage in the universe has been its higher cognitive prowess.

    This is an introduction to what I am hoping will be a series of reflective essays and technological deep dives into the social implications of AI.

    I have been told repeatedly, often by people with stake in the game of business, life, and culture, that AI is nothing to be feared, a tool to be embraced and a paradigm that has shifted long past and to just climb aboard.

    But while these systems will almost certainly not challenge our physical humanity with violence or in any of the multitude of science-fiction spectacle ways of popular literature and media, what I see happening already is that we seem to be emmeshed in a fight for intellectual effort for which we may have neither the endurance nor strength to win: out-competed by automated systems, siloed by information algorithms, strip-mined of our creative outputs and reduced to a livestock-like herd for our attention by technology so fast as complex that it is steps ahead of us in a race we don’t even realize we are running.

    It is the poets against the processors.

    And what then is AI? I ask you.

    We made it to mimic ourselves, our minds. It is yet imperfect, and perhaps little more than a simulation of our humanity. Yet, it is a tool that amplifies evil as much as it does good. It is a technology that yokes us into dependency. It is a system that robs us blind and vanishes into the digital ether. It is something we can barely even define, let alone understand and control—and it would be arrogance in the extreme to think otherwise.

    please note: I am writing a substack blog about artificial intelligence and its implications in society and will be cross-posting some of the articles here. This is one of those articles.