I grew up in the neon-drenched worlds of post-apocalyptic speculative fiction. These stories and worlds were as much a warning about the past and a meditation on the present as they were an attempt at predicting the future. I can’t find the exact William Gibson quote I’m thinking of now - although this one is pretty cool - but he said something in an interview that I’m approximating as basically that because the past has led up to the present, the future is in the present moment if only you could step outside of time to observe it.

The 80s was a particularly almost time. Technology was almost there. Concepts like AR, VR, and AI, which all feel ultra-modern were, in reality, explored in mostly theoretical discussion and incredibly clunky devices back then and even before, while the thing that would truly revolutionize society (the iPhone and the subsequent smart phone and...

I’ve been thinking a lot about friendship and connection lately. Actually, before I continue, a fair warning: this post is probably going to be about loss and discovery, about coping with loss and the process of trying to find myself on the other side of it. If that feels too prickly for you right now, it might be best to skip this one.

Disclaimer disclaimed, let’s continue.

I’ve been thinking about friendship and connection a lot lately. Growing up, life felt a lot like the old saying about running away from a bear: you don’t have to be faster than the bear, only faster than the slowest runner. But what if you are the slowest runner in this metaphor? Aside from dying to the bear, you learn to become invisible.

I never dated growing up - running far enough away from the bear to have time to don the invisibility cloak and then feeling invisible will do that to a person - and the woman...

It’s Friday evening and it’s raining outside. It’s been raining all day and I worked from home. I ran to the grocery store at lunchtime, sudden gusts of wind testing my skin’s ability to provide tactile feedback for my grasp reflex around the umbrella handle.

Aside: I tend to not hold things properly, I grip too lightly and have a tendency to accidentally drop things for no apparent reason. It’s possible that it’s an early warning sign of some sort of degenerative cognitive function disease, except that I feel like it’s more of a distraction thing. Sometimes I forget I’m holding something. Which, in itself, could also be an early warning sign of some sort of degenerative cognitive function disease, but let’s pretend we didn’t notice that.

I’m listening to three hours of woodland ambience, wrapped in my noise cancelling headphones, because the dull monotony of urban sounds puts me on...

Social media. Continuing where I left off in my first ever post on this blog, social media is the opposite of communication. The internet has always been about yelling into the void, about putting a collection of thoughts out there for anyone to read. Ironically, it’s always been an offline medium. Posting on the internet in the early days required writing, composition, thoughtfulness, a coherent point, time invested in an original idea.

Well, maybe not in the comments section, where it became a trope to yell “FIRST!!” in claiming the first comment on a freshly-minted article. But that’s sort of the point I’m making anyway. Social media is the comment section. There’s no substance to it; just a bunch of people yelling incoherently.

If that is true, then why it is so prevalent and - apparently at least - so important in today’s world? Because it’s yelling at scale, and scale is useful.

GeoCities, AngelFire, later spirits like tumblr. Even, to an extent, AOL’s “walled garden” of keywords and an FAQ page that described RTFM as read the fine manual. All of these were an attempt to make consumerist, commercial sense of the internet. Okay, so, AOL was also an ISP and you needed one of those to get on the internet in the first place - not that you don’t now, it’s just that your cell provider or cable company became the ISP - but that’s not the point.

GeoCities let you choose a name and number, based on your interests, and then gave you a place on their site to start writing. Sharing your thoughts. This might sound like social media, but it wasn’t.

It wasn’t about instant gratification, likes, subtweeting your friends or selling someone else’s product to make a living. Hell, if you had friends IRL you weren’t telling them about your GeoCities site. Back then, the internet...