works of wanderlust

Tag: the socials

  • poetic war

    It’s December and for me that means it is “blog every day month” an effort for which I have long since concocted a list of blog-able reflective topics called my December-ish posts each of which should do little more than offer a leaping off point for some rambling writing to fill up my daily blogging quota.

    Today that topic is…

    Describe your 2025 in politics, culture, and the universe?

    No.

    Ugh.

    Ok. 

    I’ll bite …a little bit, for the blog.

    I was doing a little experiment the other week. I had a perfectly good reason to post a pointless video clip on social media the other day, but I didn’t want to use my main account. Nor did I want to use any of my other side accounts. So I did what any sane tech savvy nerd would do and I created a brand new account, followed no one, gave it a stupid profile name and pic that pretty much no one would associate with me, and posted my video. I did nothing special, did not share it, followed no one and did not tag it or add any meta data. It was not clever, funny, or controversial. I was merely posting it as a random clip I’d filmed to check how some function of the system was appearing. Within two hours it had received 12 likes.

    For context, we just spent nearly three weeks in Japan and I posted a few dozen curated photos representing some of my best work and amazing photography in that country, and my best post, with five hundred and fifty odd followers, got 8 likes. Eight. Just eight. Total.

    Somehow, this temporary burner account had received 50% more attention in the duration of our car ride home for a (completely random and the content was not the point) jittery eight second video of a snow plow out the front window of our car (what I just happened to be looking at while I was plotting this technology query) than for something I had purposefully shared for beauty and enjoyment …and to put a little of both out into the world. A fucking snow plow. Twelve likes.

    This really isn’t a bitter post about not getting any likes on my content. I don’t actually try to promote my stuff. I just put it out and whatever. And I really don’t even care. I’m not posting for validation. Or money. Or to be found. Or anything other than curating my own public collections of my creative work and personal giggles… whatever.

    But “likes” represent something else entirely. They represent exposure. They represent voice. They represent the attention and interests of others. They represent the choices made by programmed, unthinking, not-human algorithms, choices about who gets to see what …and when …and how frequently.

    And what most people are sharing these days happen to be things that largely represent culture and politics. And we all kind of understand that those folks… well, they are not trying to represent anything in a balanced or nuanced way. And same are even working and designing content to divide and anger us.

    Put those things together into one big brainy thought and you might get a glimpse of the major imbalance and deep illness in our culture this past year (and probably even further back). 

    I have this (probably controversial) notion that I’ve spoken aloud to a few people this past year about our culture and our political reality in 2025. It basically posits that while were all standing around here in fear of some nuclear world war three, what has happened is that the third world war has come and gone and most of us missed it.  That is, WW3 was a war of misinformation and the western world, democracy specifically, has been attacked and has lost …and now most people are wandering around in a state of post-psychic shock trauma not really wrapping their heads around that they and their families have been under literal assault and a kind of emotional and propaganda-based warfare for the last decade or so.  It didn’t ravage bodies in the physical sense, but it has destroyed institutions, collapsed trust in each other, broken relationships, and turned our path forward into one strewn with debris and rubble. It was launched by foreign states who understood that they could not win a conventional nor a nuclear war. It was fought on Facebook and Twitter and a list of other social media sites. It was launched through the traditional media who played their role as unwitting vectors of informational violence. It was bolstered by algorithms that we trusted had our best interest in mind but were really just blindly amplifying whatever seemed to be popular or match a narrative that made us each uniquely cozy and comfortable. The truth was shattered. Reality was broken. It weaponized the minds of the weak and easily-swayed. It turned friends and family into dirty bombs of radicalized falsehoods and conspiracy-laden mistruths. And even now most of us, nearly all of us, are simply in denial that it even happened… all while we keep scrolling through the same militarized platforms that caused it all in the first place and each in our own pretending that it is still all ok. 

    The battle rages unfortunately.

    That was 2025.

    Does 2026 look better for me right now? For any of us?

    Like and subscribe to find out, I guess.

  • on online

    It’s December and for me that means it is “blog every day month” an effort for which I have long since concocted a list of blog-able reflective topics called my December-ish posts each of which should do little more than offer a leaping off point for some rambling writing to fill up my daily blogging quota.

    Today that topic is…

    What is your perspective on the culture of 2025?

    Can I write what I really want to write here without getting put on a list somewhere that prevents me from crossing borders? Hmm…

    I mean, you’re online. You’re almost certainly reading this on a screen, in a web browser, through a magic wire that connects you all those other people out there in the world. Online. Participating. Consuming. Having an opinion about things, huh?

    This question is basically a punch line this year. What’s the culture of the world in 2025? Um… yeah, about that.

    If you are reading this and you know me you are probably well aware that while I still poke and prod at the various social media platforms, I have reduced my participation there—all of theres—to about five percent of what it was even a year ago… which itself is a fraction of it was, say, five years ago. I haven’t done this because I’ve become some sort of technophobe or whatever, but for a reason of culture. Online culture is dark and f-ed up beyond explanation these days. It hurts to go online. Literally hurts. I have palpitations and gurgling stomach acid in my throat. This isn’t because I’m triggered or offended, but rather because I’m beyond saddened by the raw evil that has spawned in those spaces, and then almost moreso, the meta-evil that embraces it and fans it and blurts out with joyous laughter at the pain of strangers. If you are a person who think this is some kind of exaggeration then look at the medium you are reading these words upon because it’s probably not a screen and you’re probably not online. 

    Simply put, the culture of 2025, or at least the culture that has dominated and blasted and consumed our attentions is shit.  And it’s not clear it is on track to improve next year. Hold on.

  • 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.

  • code monkey, one

    I have been writing code for nearly as long as I have been using computers—which, ugh, it sparks my nostalgic angst fuse to write it but that was in grade school in the nineteen eighties. 

    To that point, I have been coding increasingly more and more these last few years, and making more and more meaningful tools in code.

    I thought it was high time I started a reflective series of posts on the topic. 

    Oh, sure, you can toddle on over to one of my other blogs and read about the intricacies of my coding efforts when I choose to write about them. I am specifically referring to my game development blog where I was for a while simul-writing about the creative processes behind indie game design—but bluntly those posts tend to get into coding and design weeds quite deeply and are not everyone’s cup of joe. 

    Code monkey, part one then—and it begins with a wistful reflection on the recent overhaul of my Microfeed Applet. 

    Three years ago I was livid.

    I was so damn sick of the broken-ass nature of social media I set out to divest myself of participation on the platform which I had once loved and cherished, but which had betrayed my trust: Instagram.  Doesn’t that sound weird, to confess such adoration for a social media platform? Well, it was once a triumphant tool of personal expression and sharing. I could make comics or photos or art and spread them to friends and the world. It was like perfect digital self-publication tool made real and easy.  But those damn platforms do as those damn platforms are wont to do: they blurred the notion of customer and user and suddenly I noticed that I was no longer a customer, but just another user who flailed about in algorithmic hell of lost potential. 

    In reaction and protest, I wrote some code to upload my photos and text to my own server: 8r4d-stagram, I called it.  It kinda looked like a rudimentary version of Instagram, which back then was the whole point: if they are going to fuck up their platform, then I can just make my own. I can code personal projects, and it’s not like I was going to sell it so who cares how or who or what I replicated? 

    We went to New York a couple weeks later and there I used the new little photo posting system every day to post pictures from our trip. It was clunkier than Instagram, to be sure. Of course it was. It was essentially a home-brewed, web-based, beta-version of a billion dollar platform. It could never compete in real life, but it was good enough for me—and I took a lot of notes on what worked and what didn’t. QA on the fly, on the road.

    That was nearly three years prior to writing this post. In those years I have tweaked and improved the tool in fits and bursts, but improved it nonetheless. I have extended it, adapted it, fine tuned it and overhauled the guts of how it worked inside. I have added features, removed some of them days or weeks later, enhanced security, broadened the flexibility and made it work so much better than it did during that trip to New York trial period. 

    Code, after all, is one of those iterative efforts. A thing you make might never be done, so long as you can think of new ways of bending and blurring what you are trying to make it do, but then you can update it and improve it. That’s the joy.

    I have built hundreds of little programs over the decades, but only a handful have amounted to anything more than toys. My Microfeed Applet is one of those that has become in its own right so much more than a throwaway project.

    The last couple of weeks I have put my head back into the code and worked to push it even closer to maturity and even further from a simple Instagram clone. I reskinned the design. I added a menu system. I fine-tuned the back end code that you’ll never see but removes even more of the “clunk.” I refined the usability. All of this is not just in anticipation of another vacation trial period and me taking the tool to Japan to post our adventures in a few months, but because I am an iterative code monkey-type who thrives on continuously improving his tools, sharpening his blade, and enhancing his own skill. I use it. I learn from making it.

    And now that I have over a thousand posts on my own faux-social site, every code tweak it makes it easier to keep using it and not go back to broken-ass platforms.

  • 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.