Things I Like
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Substack does not have a clear future as a newsletter business, I'm not the first to notice that. But it doesn’t have to fail outright to be a disaster. It just has to keep trying to become a life-sized map of the internet: maximum content, maximum churn. The center cannot hold—especially not for newsletters, a format that depends on intimacy and long-standing trust.
This piece was really interesting to me because of the numbers. If you've worked in tech or around start ups you know the numbers presented here aren't good. Substack is trying everything to keep people on their platform (what other platforms does that sound like?) and yet newsletters are things you get in your inbox and I agree, that creates an intimacy that all the other things Substack is doing can't recreate. I've been incredibly disappointed over the past months to see so many folks whose work I admire starting "a Substack" as they say. There are alternatives, it's possible, and if any of the people I really enjoy reading were to do that, I might consider a paying subscription, but not as long as they're on Substack.
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I’m conscious of the fact that it is, in some sense, stupid of me not to be on Substack. At the very least, I could be sending my newsletter for free, instead of paying a hundred bucks a month! Yet I suppose I think it’s the stupid choices that are the important ones. And I suppose I think a standard for art is that it doesn’t just play a game, but invents one. On an internet crowded with creators eager to obey each platform’s demands, follow their Best Practices (which harden into mandatory genres: quick-setting concrete), there is, I believe, an incandescence to stubborn specificity.
I'm not sure how many times I've seen this piece linked, but it's worth the quick read and Sloan is right about how platforms steer content in certain directions and people adapt to that, even if they aren't quite sure they're doing it.
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Bochy, 70, isn’t as nimble as he once was. He possesses two new hips and an artificial knee. In his third year with the Texas Rangers, he walks slowly, a hitch in his deliberate gait. But he still believes in the power of a good walk — an hour of exercise, fresh air and contemplation, a peaceful break to mull lineup decisions, brainstorm tactics and ideas and think through tough conversations with his players.
Yup, there's a baseball tie in here, but I love walking and find that it's a key part of me keeping my mind clear just as much as it is about moving my body. I think a lot while walking, starting writing posts, think about what to do about a problem, and work through any anxieties I'm having. This article gets in to a lot of details, but I love hearing about a baseball manager using a simple walk to process through the pressures of the job.
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Unfortunately, this is what all of the internet is right now: social media, owned by large corporations that make changes to them to limit or suppress your speech, in order to make themselves more attractive to advertisers or just pursue their owners’ ends. Even the best Twitter alternatives, like Bluesky, aren’t immune to any of this—the more you centralize onto one single website, the more power that website has over you and what you post there. More than just moving to another website, we need more websites.
There's a bit of a theme in the links I'm posting today, and it's all about being on the web and owning your site and getting away from any platform. In my adult life we've spun through so many different platforms, they're all listed in this article, and yet people who've lived through this all seem to forget when the new hot platform comes along.
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I don’t think I want a map of everything I’ve ever read. I want a mind free to read what it needs. I want memory that forgets gracefully. I want ideas that resurface not because I indexed them, but because they mattered.
Over the past couple of years I've started writing down less and letting go of things I have written down, so it was interesting to read Westenberg talk about deleting it all. I read without a pencil most of the time, knowing that the important bits will stick and I'm OK if I forget things. The ideas that I can't stop thinking about, that come back to me on a walk or while driving, those are the ones that I'll pursue and I'm OK with letting go of the rest.
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I think of all the fun, unexpected, and unintentionally hilarious real-life interactions many people miss out on because they’re either too needlessly immersed in the daily distraction or are too programmed to utilize online services for mundane tasks. If I were a comic, I’d have plenty of source material for an observational stand-up routine because I brave the outside world and watch life unfold, as intended.
I'm with Jen here. I do most of my errands in person and order online as little as possible. It's one way of getting out of the house but also the interaction with people is important. Yes, I sometimes end up annoyed (the parking lot of our coop is the worst) but also you never know when you may have an interesting small interaction.
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More subtly, it feels like our own aliveness is what’s at stake when we’re urged to get better at prompting LLMs to provide the most useful responses. Maybe that’s a necessary modern skill; but still, the fact is that we’re being asked to think less like ourselves and more like our tools. It makes you wonder if Wendell Berry had it right when he wrote: “It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.”
I like the way Burkeman talks about aliveness and how much of what we do in life for ourselves brings us that feeling. On the flipside, AI takes that feeling away. I've largely stayed away from reading a lot about AI because I don't have to deal with it. But I like the framing here, that we may have to deal with it in some fashion, but we should orient ourselves towards aliveness.
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I agree that novels, and other long narratives, have become less culturally central, less influential, than they were fifty or sixty years ago. (And I regret this.) But are they less culturally central than they were a hundred years ago? I’m not sure about that. Two hundred years ago? Hard to say.
I found the questions Jacobs asks about Krause quote interesting and I don't disagree that maybe books are less relevant today, but I also can't help but disagree with Krause that we're loosing our ability to read and focus. So many people I read on the web or watch on YouTube talk about the books they're reading. My list of books I'm interested in reading grows regularly because I get so many recommendations from folks.
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I don’t have the capital to start my own Fourth Estate university or newspaper. But I do have this blog. A minor stake in the Fifth Estate. But my blog plus your blog, mix in some RSS and the power of sharing interesting blogs and podcasts… we might make a dent.
I haven't read the book Dave talks about here, but I loved this piece. I've been having a hard time lately with how much of the knitting and sewing world uses Instagram and I left there and don't want to go back. I've doubled down on my digital home and I'm slowly finding more and more makers who're also blogging. I'm hoping more people join in.
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I have very little at the town square, because it’s not a public one. It’s a walled-off town square, whose rules and borders change at the whims of those who created it. The secret is that it’s not even that: it’s actually a panopticon.
Catching up on some things I saved and I've been remiss in posting. This is a great piece by Naz and highly recommend reading it and thinking about making your site your home. It's worth it.
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The hoop displays motifs detailing our travels and adventures, the damn election, a potential move due to too much bass from a nearby nightclub, losing a toenail and enduring a norovirus, copious amounts of food, footwear and apparel, kitchen appliances, health-related items, hobbies and sports, etc.
This is amazing and I love it and wanted to share it, even if belatedly.
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The trap and the fallacy that people have fallen into is the idea that these platforms are the ONLY way to get further: to sell, to advertise, to be seen. You trade convenience and a "free" app for the ensnarement and caging of your creativity.
A good reminder from Naz, another blog I'm enjoying so much lately. His post on simpler screens has helped me think through how I use my phone as well.
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Life feels gentler lately. But also horrific. Gentle in my personal spaces. Horrific in the public spheres. Both true at the same time.
I've been really enjoying Annie's writing lately and last night I read this post and the above resonated so strongly. I immediately copied it into my journal. I've been home alone for a few days and they've been quiet, slow moving days. Snow is still on the ground and the sun has been shining so brightly warming the house that I feel languid in the afternoons. And yet there is so much awful out there. The dissonance is odd, but also as Annie says, both things are true.
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If we are spending our energy on outrage or its opposite, apathy, we won’t know what’s ours to do. We won’t volunteer to coach the basketball team in the first place, and we certainly won’t know it’s Senior Night, let alone make the drive to be there.
Murphy-Kangas has been a voice I've really appreciated over the last year or so and this post hit perfectly this week. I'm finding the things I can do and trying my best to let go of the rest.
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If my choices had been different, everything would have been just…different: a quantum rippling.
A short, but wise post.