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New Essay + Newsletter + Book Club Sunday (Patreon)

Published:
2024-03-01 22:52:52
Edited:
2024-03-03 17:48:01
Imported:
2026-06
Tags:

Content

Hi, theoretically you have recieved an email about the new essay on my website. I took my Patreon and Substack mailing lists and mixed them with my cjthex.com mailing list. If anyone didn't like that you can unsubscribe immediately with the big red button.

Posting it here too for now to make sure you see it if you want to.

An essay about tangible solutions to the social media dilemma. Weird to make things that are so outwardly focused but feel so intimate. Kind of intense but I hope you see my heart in it.

I've been calling this final month of work on the video The Cascade. The universe chants it.

[Me reading Status & Culture by W. David Marx which is melting my brain. Listening to some cyberpunk mood playlist on YouTube]

KTi Book Club starts this Sunday!!! 

Intro + Chapter 1 of You Are Not A Gadget by Jaron Lanier due in two days. See ya there.

Files

What Is To Be Done?

I don't want to criticize people who seem to like the situation... Instead I'll focus on people who are trying to do something other than be a number, even as they are subsumed by the new reality of number supremacy.

Comments

dateariane

Loved your analysis of the internet, and yes I am tired of the never ending AI served ads on the free social media platforms, serving me stuff I don't give a crap about. As an incredibly old school internet nerd, web 1.5 can be summed up in 5 letters: "phpbb" We communicated via simple web bulletin board forums, divided into topics. Every forum focused on different communities, and had different member lists. We were anonymous, but were encouraged to be friendly. Web 2.0 didn't kill web 1.5 though. Phone apps did. No one was able to make a good app to navigate the phpbb, so a lot of the web forums moved to social media to take advantage of the social media apps. Sad really.

SkateLouis

Beautifully well said and complete. To have a website is to have something yours, completely yours. It is not part of the YouTube or Meta or Twitter sphere, that belongs to other people who don't even know you and place arbitrary rules uppon your content. A blog holds incredible personal meaning, you're the one in charge. It's hard to get people invested tho, but do the numbers equals value?? Isn't a profund connection with a person more important than 10k passangers? HELL YEAH! When I look back at the things I created and posted, I feel good about them. Not because it got x or y likes, but because I made them. Because they are out there, even if in digital form. I recently lost very personal and important pictures that were made in Instagram stories cus they just don't load anymore because Instagram sucks like it can't do the fucking bare minimum sometimes. I'm still mourning them. I'll be lying if I said I don't cry for time to time because of it. It mattered so much to me but the app made me believe it cared for them as much as I did, that it would protect and curate them. It didn't, it doesn't. This system doesn't have our best interest at heart, but still wants our purest trust. We should make things ours again.

Shannon

Wonderfully written, thank you for what you do!! brb going to make a website :]

annadante

funny you've written about web rings! which is a thing i had on my mind for awhile now. also as an avid reader of fanfiction i love ao3 and their infrastructure which is open source! we can literally take the code of ao3 and build something for ourselves. i don't know ruby on rails but i might just start looking into it!

gabi

about six months ago now i put time restrictions on the social media on my phone, likely sometime after my third rewatch of burnahm vs bezos. then about 3 months later i made a discord server with just my friends, where i hosted channels with mental health and productivity resources for my fellow gaming addict college students. Reading this essay made me want to make a website, duh (good art), but also i noticed just how much of this i already subconsciously knew. that i was putting into action via my small discord server. now i can more easily understand and maintain the values i used to make that server and stuff. to changing the world one deep connection at a time.

sirathena

I remember web rings and my early geocities site, I remember the customizability and non endless scroll features of MySpace bc I graduated from high school during a MySpace popularity boom and the summer after I graduated was very MySpace-y, that summer expanded my friendships from my high school to friends of friends at surrounding high schools. The connections on there so often led to in person friendships. MySpace music is something that held a special place in my heart because the subculture I existed in wouldn’t have existed without MySpace and the goal of “virality” didn’t really exist in a “hey world look at me!” Way. It was more directly about finding other musicians in the same genre and being able to play shows together. I dream of The Static Webpage where you land, where it is designed with expression and aesthetic appropriate to the person who made it. And I have one bc I’m an actor and a lot of actors and artists maintain online portfolios that are easily accessible to people who might hire them but I’ve also, over the years been encouraged to use Instagram because “everyone’s there and it is easier to be visible”. I’m a believer in drawing in the RIGHT people, not a broad array of people. And I’ve been wrestling with how I present my work for a long time. I notice in behavior of others and occasionally myself that I’ll see who follows my new contacts, look at their list of followers and I really missed the days of the webring where a person would have a place on their page like “this is my friend tony he’s also an actor. I love his this film he’s in here’s his website” and there was something so earnest and human about the style of that. I think one of the worst things about the advertising model being pervasive on Instagram is the aesthetic and people being influenced by advertisers, like companies w money can produce a “professional looking image” and people see that as a standard and outsider artists making things simply with what they have are put in a category of “not doing well” in comparison. People trying to add beauty to the world or express themselves are put in a square next to an ad for a lush looking vitamin or something. These platforms don’t help us measure quality and fullness, they flatten beauty and information. I love websites bc they encourage us to work with blank canvasses and dare to make decisions that might express us. Lanier spoke recently w Brian Greene about his collection of musical instruments and he said they are the best user interface that has ever existed. And I think we often don’t even frame an instrument or like a spoon as a technology anymore bc we see TECH as something that has to be novel. During the pandemic I taught a lot of movement classes online for actors and non actors seeking embodiment and I realized what was most needed was to give people back their mind’s autonomy to create a dimensional picture of their bodies in an abstract, non flat, non face centric way. I’ve done this kind of body abstraction work in my own performance for a long time and occasionally taught but the degree to which people have flattened their conceptions of their bodies is so extreme the more we decide stuff like Instagram us our “normal”. I think everyone being presented w a blank slate for their internet presence, the ability to be dimensional w their tools and conception of self is literally healing for self image and gives people a chance to realize they are dimensional. These tools we use impact how we mentally structure reality, ourselves, others, bodies. Their ability to disconnect us from proprioception and interception takes away autonomy in a profound bodily level. When I post a photo of my face, specifically feminized in a certain way, it gets large numbers of engagement. When I post a video of me performing Butoh in the woods, the engagement is limited but those three people are moved, connected with me and more likely to have real conversations with me about my work. It happens so often as someone who makes outsider art. If I’m on a red carpet, the likes come rolling in bc I’m validated by something “official”. If I make an experimental film from my heart and post it, I see three likes as my true kindred audience. Witnessing who values prestige and who values art and a conception of success has broken my heart over the years and made me realize I don’t want the big number of hearts—-even though it hacks my brain into feeling manic joy. Even though I notice the euphoria of a larger amount of approval, What I get from the smaller, more important posts is DEEP. it’s deep joy, sustainable connection, solidity. I want that kind of connection to be how we build the social web.

Stormsdream

I get sooooo many phishing email because of where I work . . . long story, don't ask, but it's a university so not like government espionage or anything overly ridiculous . . . anyway, I assumed the email was phishing because the addresses were of the "easily spoofable" variety. Glad to know it was legit. I really must get around to reading the essay.

Lou Corben

been wanting to get into some Spinoza. is the book next to your laptop a good place to start?

Bloom

love this line from the essay: “Our societal confusion about accountability contributes to our inability to build communities. How can we have community without sin? Where will we find heroes that never fail us? If we can’t have them, the platform will have to do. You can’t cancel the platform. So we hold to the platform instead of the community. Instead of people.”

alexinthevoid

This is beautiful and exciting. In this realm where everyone is so densely packed and polarised it will be nice to get some personal space. Thank you. This solution sounds a lot like something I and 16 other artists made a few years ago. We submitted our art via e-mail to be part of an artist collective e-zine called ABFA zine*. This was a great way of sharing work and creating a community without social media. Our submissions included a *hand written* description of our process in response to the prompt given. This led to a collection of some very personal and pretty pieces of art. I think the form of the zine is really interesting. The fact that physical zines started from a need to spread political messages independently and efficiently likens the creation of an "e-zine" to an online form of social movement, which I think is important! I would love to see more of these, honing in more on the zine's inherently political nature. *Link to the zine website: https://www.abfazine.com/ - There's also a page for people to write and express what brings them joy! Lovely!

Stormsdream

Anybody here old enough to remember Usenet? It was free. It was pre-web. It was kind of that space between very old school BBS and America On Line. The big difference between those "more free" days and now is accessibility. It was always kind of addictive just harder to access. I doubt "harder to access" is necessarily the way to go to cut down on addiction, but I suppose it is an intermediary step. Also very amused by the part about designing one's own website. I've been hand coding my site for more than 20 years. I would mention the URL but this isn't supposed to be about me

silentcrystaltears

kind of fun to me that this came out right after i learn html and design a web 1.0 webpage for my friend’s video game, and that in the conversation around that alongside spotify screwing me over recently i decided i should start self-hosting my music, on a website i’ll make and host on my home server, and i learned about webrings from talking to my dad about all of that. nice to at least not be behind the curve