all posts tagged 'social media'

Mark Zuckerberg: creators and publishers ā€˜overestimate the valueā€™ of their work for training AI


šŸ”— a linked post to theverge.com » — originally shared here on

I think that in any new medium in technology, there are the concepts around fair use and where the boundary is between what you have control over. When you put something out in the world, to what degree do you still get to control it and own it and license it? I think that all these things are basically going to need to get relitigated and rediscussed in the AI era.

When I downloaded Llama 3.2 yesterday, I had to agree to a rather lengthy licensing agreement which constrained how I could use it.

When you sign up for a Instagram or Facebook account, you have to agree to lengthy terms and conditions in which you give up your rights around the content you create.

If you want to push my buttons, all you need to do is something deeply hypocritical. Like, for example, the kind of insipid, hand-wavy remark that billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg make when they want "rules for thee, not for me" treatment.1

Thereā€™s another pull quote here which deeply offends me:

ā€œLook, weā€™re a big company,ā€ he said. ā€œWe pay for content when itā€™s valuable to people. Weā€™re just not going to pay for content when itā€™s not valuable to people. I think that youā€™ll probably see a similar dynamic with AI.ā€

Seriously, the gall of this guy to say ā€œyour content isnā€™t valuableā€ while raking in billions of dollars serving ads against it.

I keep getting the urge to join Facebook so I can sell some unneeded treasures on marketplace, but this article serves as a reminder that Meta is helmed by an individual who has a truly warped definition of the word ā€œvalue.ā€


  1. Or filibuster for an entire year into blocking a Supreme Court nomination until the next election takes place because ā€œitā€™s the will of the people.ā€ Then, four years later, when an election will take place in less than a month, cram your awful nomination through because itā€™s important to fill those spots as soon as possible. I have tried for a few years now, but Iā€™m not sure Iā€™ll ever be able to forgive that particular instance of hypocrisy. 

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Coming home


šŸ”— a linked post to aworkinglibrary.com » — originally shared here on

To step into the stream of any social network, to become immersed in the news, reactions, rage and hopes, the marketing and psyops, the funny jokes and clever memes, the earnest requests for mutual aid, for sign ups, for jobs, the clap backs and the call outs, the warnings and invitationsā€”it can feel like a kind of madness. Itā€™s unsettling, in the way that sediment is unsettled by water, lifted up and tossed around, scattered about. A pebble goes wherever the river sends it, worn down and smoothed day after day until all thatā€™s left is sand.

At some point I became acutely aware of a sense of scattering or separation whenever I glanced at the socials. As if some part of me, or some pattern or vision that I cupped tenderly in my hands, was washed away, wrenched from my grasp before I quite realized what it was.

This brilliant post is essentially four narratives weaved into one.

We are still reeling as a society from the impact of the internet. Being able to summon and mobilize our collective attention is not something we evolved to be able to handle.

My generation is the last one who remembers a time before it, but even that memory is slipping away amongst the daily grind of paying attention to the internet.

The early days of the internet felt a little easier to understand. It wasnā€™t like everybody was on it in the late nineties; in fact, it was usually the dorks and nerds that were on it.

Any community could be represented so long as there was someone nerdy enough to set up a message board and dorky enough to pay for the hosting costs.

And those early days felt like an escape. It didnā€™t feel like the internet dominated my mind the way it does today.

Today, though, is completely different. The internet doesnā€™t offer the same sort of escape that it used to. Now, it feels like a compulsion. Something I wish I could stop but canā€™t easily without resorting to drastic measures like ditching my iPhone.

And so I remain at an unresolvable juncture: the intersection of the very strong belief that we must experiment with new modes and systems of communication, and the certain knowledge that every time I so much as glance at anything shaped like a social feed, my brain smoothes out, the web of connections and ideas Iā€™m weaving is washed away, and I tumble downstream, only to have to pick myself up and trudge heavily through the mud back to where I belong.

Itā€™s exhausting. It is, at this point in my life, unsustainable. I cannot dip into the stream, even briefly, and also maintain the awareness and focus needed to do my own work, the work that is uniquely mine. I cannot wade through the water and still protect this fragile thing in my hands. And perhaps I owe to my continued senescence the knowledge that I do not have time for this anymore.

This is the same conclusion I came to after I did, in fact, ditch my iPhone this summer.1

I find myself pulling my phone out at night and just sort of staring at it.

Whatever world Iā€™d been building in my mind to that point is completely washed away.

And more often than not, I find myself jumping into the water feet first dozens of times a day, hoping to find meaning, instead emerging each time covered with a viscous layer of grime that leaves me feeling guilty and ashamed.

This realization is possibly one of my most important ones to come out of this sincerely horrifying year.

All of those sleepless nights where my anxiety-raddled brain conjured up infinite scenarios in a vain attempt to derive meaning in a place where none can be found.

Itā€™s time to get out of the water for a while.


  1. Albeit much more eloquently put here by Mandy Brown. Sheā€™s also the author who penned the unified theory of fucks, which I must now revisit. 

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I'm getting rid of my iPhone for a month

originally shared here on

Long time readers of this blog may recall that I've been psyching myself up enough to try switching to the Light Phone.

Iā€™m legit embarrassed to admit just how much Iā€™m addicted to my iPhone.

It happened slowly over the course of the last 15 years. Today, I find myself frequently incapable of putting it down, even when itā€™s actively making me feel terrible.

The biggest expense of always being virtually connected is never feeling connected to the physical moment happening in front of me.

That wasnā€™t so much of a problem to me when I was sitting in front of my Compaq desktop in the basement of my parentā€™s house.

Back in those days, I used to hate being away from my computer. The very first thing Iā€™d do when returning from a family vacation was to jump on the computer and catch up on a week of message board posts.

Here in 2024, though, I donā€™t subject myself to that experience.

The other day, I was playing a Lego game with my son and while he was explaining an aspect of the game to me, I pulled out my phone and went to turn on music. Mid sentence, he stops and says, ā€œDad, can you put your phone away? Itā€™s distracting me.ā€

Oof. Thatā€™s not how I want my son to remember me.

Iā€™ve tried all the techniques people say can help limit screen time. Grayscale the screen. Delete apps. Block toxic websites. But because none of those tricks are actually working, itā€™s time to take more drastic measures.

My plan is to move my phone number onto the Light Phone for a month. Just a month.

I'm going to do this during the month of August. That will give me a couple weeks to prepare for it. I am honestly worried about what Iā€™ll be giving up, and so I'm doing what I can to brace myself for that impact.

Iā€™m mostly excited, really. After more than a decade in the comfortable, walled garden of the Apple ecosystem, I think it will be nice to experiment with new tech tools again.

The Light Phone is designed to be as boring and practical as possible. It can make phone calls, send texts, and give driving directions, among a few other things.

But there are certainly some activities that the Light Phone wonā€™t do very well which I am unwilling to give up. So here are those activities, along with how I'm thinking I'll deal with those activities for the time being:

Taking notes and reminders.

A notepad with a pen. āœ…

Next.

Reading.

Sometime in the last couple of decades, I stopped reading books.

Iā€™m not exactly sure why. I used to love reading books when I was a kid. I would go to the library and read every book they had on building websites and computer programs. Iā€™d also read every new edition of Animorphs, Goosebumps, and Harry Potter as soon as my library stocked it.

But beginning in high school, I stopped reading books for fun. Reading felt like a burden, something you were assigned as punishment. I resented reading so much, in fact, that I used to pride myself on not buying books for class in college and finding a way through without them.1

If I read books these days, I almost only read non-fiction, which is fineā€¦ but I miss reading for fun.

Earlier this year, I helped my wife proctor some tests at her school. I wasnā€™t allowed to be on the internet, so I brought a book along that a friend recommended called What You Are Looking For Is In The Library. I burned through it in a day, and it got me interested in reading fiction once again.

I think I wanna try getting into a fiction series. The last series I read was the Left Behind books in high school, so uh, yeahā€¦ Iā€™m a bit out of the loop with whatā€™s good out there.

If anyone has recommendations, let me know!

Taking pictures.

I used to be really into cameras when I was really into making clips2. When my oldest was born, we thought it made sense to buy a good SLR, so we picked up a Canon Rebel T6i.

I do still grab it out of storage and bring it along to the occasional soccer game or choir performance, and the shots feel better to me than the ones I get with my iPhone. It helps that I have a decent assortment of lenses, but I think it also speaks to the joy you get from using a tool that was intentionally built to complete a task.

Of course, I canā€™t realistically carry an SLR with me all the time. I need something more practical.

When I sold cameras at Best Buy3, the camera I recommended the most was the Canon SD800 IS, and it was the camera that documented some of the most fun moments of my life. It was small enough to fit in my pocket alongside my iPod.

Even though it fit, I still didnā€™t carry it with me every day, which makes the pictures I did take with them feel extra special when I browse through them today.

Maybe having a camera on me all the time is less necessary than Iā€™m worried about. I mean, in a normal day for you, how many situations can you envision where you must take a picture of something and can't flag down someone to take one and send it to you?4

So Iā€™m in the market for a camera thatā€™s small like the SD800 was, but perhaps more professional. I remember seeing someone mention the Canon PowerShot G7 X Mark III and I thought the silver one looked kinda dope.

It makes me happy to see Canon keeping these devices up to date. The G7 X can shoot 4k video, and itā€™s got WiFi and USB-C so itā€™ll be easy to get media off of it. Most importantly, its size means it can stay in the drawer by the door and leap into service at a moment's notice.

But anyway, what about yā€™all? Anyone else use something besides their phone to take a picture or a video?

Listening to music.

The whole reason I wanted to make this post is because I wanted to brag about my restoration project with my old fifth generation iPod.

But because of course this is what happens when I brag, Iā€™ve been stuck for a few days trying to debug a hardware failure that is proving exceptionally frustrating to resolve. Chefā€™s kiss.

So instead of bragging about that, Iā€™ll instead confess that Iā€™m one of those sickos who maintains their own library of MP3s.

Iā€™ve always looked at streaming services with squinty eyes. Maybe itā€™s because Iā€™m still mad at what they did to our beloved Napster. Maybe itā€™s because I think itā€™s important to not give complete control of my cultural history to massive corporations5. Maybe itā€™s because buying an MP3 version of an album from an artist will give them vastly more money than my combined streams would ever account for. Maybe itā€™s because I am an aging boomer.

Either way, transitioning away from Apple Music will not be too excruciating for me. Iā€™ll still use it because I have HomePods all over my house, but when Iā€™m not home, I want need a way to bring my music with me.

The Light Phone does have some storage and an MP3 player option, but because of the intentional design, youā€™re limited to a single playlist and 1gb of tunes. That doesnā€™t work for me, brother.

Iā€™ll keep yā€™all posted with my progress on the restoration process. I want to get Rockbox installed on it so I can experience what the home brew community is doing with this old hardware.

In the meantime, if anyone knows how to address issues with an iFlash Solo syncing with an M1 Mac mini, holler at your boy.


Iā€™d like to take this opportunity to express how pathetic I feel that I need to take these extreme steps to reclaim some part of me that I feel like Iā€™ve lost ever since going whole ham on the mobile revolution.

I talk at length about the joy that comes with technology, but I should also recognize the negative impact that tech can make.

We went through an era of unfettered growth from Silicon Valley-powered firms who had nearly no supervision and did everything they could to exploit our political and economic systems for their own gain.

And to be clear, their growth did bestow some incredible tools onto us.

But as much as our society derides subgroups like the Luddites and the Amish for their apparent aversion to technology, there is clearly some merit to how they approach technology. You should adopt technology because itā€™ll help you, not because everyone else is using it.

Every night around 10:30pm, I find myself lying in bed, entering the casino that is my iPhone. Every app is a different section of the game room floor.

My email app is a slot machine, where I hope Iā€™ll hit the big bucks and get an email saying ā€œyay youā€™re hired!ā€, but the odds are better that Iā€™ll see an email saying ā€œlol you owe me money still.ā€

LinkedIn and Reddit are craps tables, where I sometimes roll an 11 and see a post from a friend who had a successful day at work or a post on /r/AskHistorians that teaches me something interesting (like Did President Andrew Garfield ever eat lasagna?). But more often than not, I roll snake eyes and see something which makes me feel like a failure or living in a dumpster fire of a society.

Even my beloved RSS reader app, filled with feeds that I explicitly opted into, can feel like a game of blackjack. Yeah, I often walk away with at least some money, but I still sometimes leave the table feeling unsure why Iā€™m passionate about anything anymore.

I let this happen to myself. And every time I pull my phone out of my pocket during a family dinner, I rob myself of what makes life worth living in the first place.

Like our Silicon Valley overlords like to say, you canā€™t stop the march of progress. Technology is rapidly improving, and major advances in our collective understanding of the universe are unveiled at an overwhelming pace.

Thereā€™s gotta be a way where we can harness the good parts of technology without entirely succumbing to all of its detriments. The first step, I suppose, is defining what I want to get out of life.

And really, itā€™s pretty simple:

  • Play Legos with my son
  • Sing karaoke with my wife
  • Watch Rockoā€™s Modern Life with my daughter
  • Make music, work out, and learn new things
  • Be able to visit the doctor when Iā€™m not feeling well without going bankrupt
  • Build something useful for people
  • Not make other peopleā€™s existences any worse than they already are

If those are the things that are important to me, then why would I burn precious energy spending time on a device which gives me anxiety attacks on a daily basis?

So yeah, come August, Iā€™m signing off from my iPhone for a bit. Itā€™ll feel good to step out of the casino and focus on building legos, taking walks, shredding on the guitar, singing karaoke, hanging out with friends, and listening to music.


  1. At the time, I was extremely anti-book because the book publishing market is an extreme racket, issuing frequent updates to textbooks with minimal tweaks while commanding insane prices. Today, part of me wishes I read the assigned works for most of my liberal arts classes. Maybe I wouldā€™ve picked up more useful facts about the Australopithecus or found useful anecdotes from Cold War geopolitical conflicts. 

  2. This is what we used to call videos before YouTube. We'd record a bunch of segments of a video on someone's dad's camcorder, then use a capture cable to play back the video onto a computer, and then edit it in something like Pinnacle Studio. Wild times, indeed. 

  3. Which seems to be my point of reference for where to look for all of these problems... I worked at Best Buy from 2005 to 2010, so basically, what were the tech solutions we had for these problems before the iPhone came out? And is there anything from the past 15 years that has improved on that tech? 

  4. Maybe this is a hypothesis born out of privilege, but letā€™s call a spade a spade: this entire article and premise is only possible for someone who is drowning in technology and choosing to reduce his consumption. 

  5. Brennan Lee Mulligan recently had an excellent monologue about this topic, but I donā€™t have a direct link to it. Just look at Paramountā€™s recent decision to remove all of MTV and Comedy Centralā€™s backlogs of content as all the proof you need that you should back up what you care about. 


Ā The Internet Is About to Get Weird Again


šŸ”— a linked post to rollingstone.com » — originally shared here on

Thereā€™s not going to be some new killer app that displaces Google or Facebook or Twitter with a love-powered alternative. But thatā€™s because there shouldnā€™t be. There should be lots of different, human-scale alternative experiences on the internet that offer up home-cooked, locally-grown, ethically-sourced, code-to-table alternatives to the factory-farmed junk food of the internet. And they should be weird.

If you missed this one when it was making the rounds seven months ago, Anil Dash did not disappoint with this think piece about the weird internet.

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TikTok Has Made Shoegaze Bigger Than Ever


šŸ”— a linked post to stereogum.com » — originally shared here on

In early 2023, an 18-year-old college student decided to make her first-ever shoegaze song. Her friend sent her a ā€œbeat,ā€ a grungy shoegaze instrumental crafted by the producer grayskies, and she spent two hours recording herself singing over it into her phone, using her everyday Apple earbuds as a microphone. No guitars were strummed, and no reverb pedals were stepped on. The next day, she titled the song ā€œYour Faceā€ and uploaded a snippet of it on TikTok, posting under the artist name Wisp. The video gained 100k views overnight, so she made another. That one got 600k views. She made another. That one quickly racked up 1 million views. Soon after, ā€œYour Faceā€ was being streamed millions of times on Spotify, and before Wisp even released a second song, she had signed a deal with Interscope Records.

Fast-forward eight months later and ā€œYour Faceā€ has been streamed nearly 30 million times on Spotify, almost twice as much as My Bloody Valentineā€™s classic Loveless closer ā€œSoon.ā€ The official sound snippet has been used in 126k TikTok videos, almost as many as Mitskiā€™s runaway TikTok goliath ā€œWashing Machine Heartā€ (174k videos). In the real world, Wisp sold-out her first-ever show in less than a half hour, and then her second just as quickly.

Consider this article a bit of a ā€œshot, chaserā€ to my previous post.

Iā€™ve been really into shoegaze lately. This article does a fantastic job of highlighting how zoomers used TikTok to give the genre a renaissance.

It's a good reminder that social media isnā€™t innately awful. It warms my heart to see the children using these incredible technologies to unite under the banner of ethereal and somewhat depressing tunes.

Go check out Duster's album Stratosphere.

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Instability


šŸ”— a linked post to robinrendle.com » — originally shared here on

The whole point of the web is that weā€™re not supposed to be dependent on any one company or person or community to make it all work and the only reason why we trusted Google is because the analytics money flowed in our direction. Now that it doesnā€™t, the whole internet feels unstable. As if all these websites and publishers had set up shop perilously on the edge of an active volcano.

But that instability was always there.

The only social network I post on anymore is LinkedIn. I have close to 2,000 followers there.

Lately, Iā€™ve noticed that the ā€œengagementā€ on my posts is increasingly sparse. Earlier this year, I was routinely seeing thousands of views per post. These days, Iā€™m only seeing hundreds, and when it comes to sharing links to my newsletter, Iā€™m seeing only dozens.

Meanwhile, here on my rag tag blog, I know my thoughts end up reaching people who matter the most to me.

Itā€™s certainly less than the 2,000 people who follow me on LinkedIn, and substantially less than the tens of thousands of people a week who ā€œengageā€ with my ā€œcontentā€1 thereā€¦ but I donā€™t care.

By posting here, Iā€™m taking the harder route of building an audience without the flashy shortcuts promised by platforms like LinkedIn and Google.

Whenever I try to take shortcuts and play SEO games, I end up doing things to my website which make it feel less authentic.

And these days, I find myself asking, ā€œwhat exactly do I need to take a shortcut for?ā€

Robin also quotes this piece by Jeremy Keith where he discusses our need for human curation:

I want a web that empowers people to connect with other people they trust, without any intermediary gatekeepers.

ā€ØThe evangelists of large language models (who may coincidentally have invested heavily in the technology) like to proclaim that a slop-filled future is inevitable, as though we have no choice, as though we must simply accept enshittification as though it were a force of nature.

But we can always walk away.

Itā€™s tough to walk away from the big tech companies, but I can assure you it is possible.

Facebook used to dominate my daily existence, but besides perhaps Marketplace for selling my junk, I do not miss any of Metaā€™s properties since I left several years back.

Google was my portal to my email, search, and maps for years. In the past few years, I have switched to primarily using Fastmail, Ecosia, and Apple Maps. Here in 2024, they all work well.2

I do my best to avoid ordering stuff off of Amazon, and I hardly stream anything on Netflix anymore.3

I havenā€™t made the move over to the Light Phone yet, and I find it hard to believe that Iā€™ll give up my Apple Watch, Apple TV, or iPad/Macsā€¦ but I do find myself questioning the prolific presence of Apple in my life more often than I did, say, ten years ago.

As I continue to experiment with LLMs, Iā€™ve noticed that the locally-run, open source models getting closer to the performance you see in closed source models like GPT-4o and Claude Sonnet 3.5 Sonnet. Itā€™s only a matter of time that theyā€™re good enough to do the tasks that I find myself turning to ChatGPT to complete today.

Enshittification isnā€™t inevitable. Like depression, itā€™s an indicator that something in your digital life needs to change.


  1. Sorry for the obnoxious emphasis on terms like ā€œengagementā€ and ā€œcontentā€ā€¦ Iā€™ve reached a point where I feel like those words are meaningless. A lot of the themes of this post can be summed up with trust, and in order to accurately engagement, you have to trust that the metrics provided by the platform vendor are accurate (which I do not). And calling our collective knowledge ā€œcontentā€ as though itā€™s the equivalent of feed for the cattle also upsets me.  

  2. Ecosiaā€™s results are powered by Bing, which traditionally havenā€™t been that great, but I just consider this to be a benefit of Googleā€™s results becoming terrible. Now both search engines return subpar results, and by using Ecosia, I am helping to plant trees. It ainā€™t much, but itā€™s honest work

  3. The last couple weeks have seen my most Netflix action in years, because I did watch Muscles & Mayhem, the American Gladiators documentary, on Netflix last week, and I do highly recommend it. Iā€™m also gonna give the Tour de France documentary a shot as well. 

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Itā€™s Time to Dismantle the Technopoly


šŸ”— a linked post to newyorker.com » — originally shared here on

[Techno-selectionism] is a perspective that accepts the idea that innovations can significantly improve our lives but also holds that we can build new things without having to accept every popular invention as inevitable. Techno-selectionists believe that we should continue to encourage and reward people who experiment with what comes next. But they also know that some experiments end up causing more bad than good. Techno-selectionists can be enthusiastic about artificial intelligence, say, while also taking a strong stance on settings where we should block its use. They can marvel at the benefits of the social Internet without surrendering their kidsā€™ mental lives to TikTok.

As much as I personally enjoy hanging out on the cutting edge and experimenting with new technologies, I would consider myself a techno-selectionist when it comes to adopting these tools into our lives.

I am sure some people enjoy the new Google search results that are driven by AI, but when it still recommends you add glue to pizza despite the widespread mockery they received initially, maybe we should take a step back and demand better from our techno overlords.

Or, since we know thatā€™ll never happen, maybe we need to decide for ourselves which tools are worth incorporating into our lives.

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On Ultra-Processed Content


šŸ”— a linked post to calnewport.com » — originally shared here on

In the context of nutrition, weā€™re comfortable deciding to largely avoid ultra-processed food for health reasons. In making this choice, we do not worry about being labelled ā€œanti-food,ā€ or accused of a quixotic attempt to reject ā€œinevitable progressā€ in food technology.

On the contrary, we can see ultra-processed good as its own thing ā€” a bid for food companies to increase market share and profitability. We recognize it might be hard to avoid these products, as theyā€™re easy and taste so good, but weā€™ll likely receive nothing but encouragement in our attempts to clean up our diets.

This is how we should think about the ultra-processed content delivered so relentlessly through our screens. To bypass these media for less processed alternatives should no longer be seen as bold, or radical, or somehow reactionary. Itā€™s just a move toward a self-evidently more healthy relationship with information.

This mindset shift might seem subtle but Iā€™m convinced that itā€™s a critical first step toward sustainably changing our interactions with digital distraction. Outraged tweets, aspirational Instagram posts, and aggressively arresting TikToks need not be seen as some unavoidable component of the twenty-first century media landscape to which we must all, with an exasperated sigh, adapt.

Theyā€™re instead digital Oreos; delicious, but something we should have no problem pushing aside while saying, ā€œI donā€™t consume that junk.ā€

Brilliant analogy from Cal Newport.

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Smartphones, social media, and parenting teens/tweens


šŸ”— a linked post to virginiaroberts.com » — originally shared here on

I was recently part of a big parenting discussion group about whether a parent should allow her tween to have a smartphone with Snapchat. It produced a lot of stories and anecdotes and feelings and opinions, including a few tales of teens finding ways to circumventing parental controls or even picking up burner phones in order to be able to do things like keep up streaks. There were also some anecdotes of real-life consequences around location tracking, hazing, content getting shared and saved without consent, etc.

It was eye-opening and terrifying, because my kids are too young for this sort of thing today, but Iā€™m sure the options will be even more overwhelming and difficult to manage by the time theyā€™re this age. The social pressures in their and your peer group will influence whatā€™s considered appropriate, regardless of any age listed for any terms of service, and there are so many things that are technically permitted but not exactly good for us in this world.

I wanted to take the time to formulate the long reply I had composed into a more publicly shareable blog post ā€“ which will likely come back to bite me in the ass! Iā€™m sure things will shift between now and when my eldest hits iPhone age, but for now, my perspective on giving a 13yo a smartphone with Snapchat is a hard NO, and this is my reasoning why.

My daughter is already asking me for a phone for her eighth (!) birthday, and right now, itā€™s an easy no.

I understand that social media is obviously where all your friends are and you donā€™t wanna feel left out, but to me, there is no difference between using social media and using drugs or alcohol.

The thing I keep telling my kids with stuff like this (swearing, adult themes, etc.) is that itā€™s all about context.

There will come a time when you are able to fully understand the context of when to deploy an F-bomb.

There will come a time when I canā€™t shelter you from the maelstrom of crap that rains down on you from every direction on social media. I hope if you choose to engage with social media, you do so with the knowledge of both the benefits of these platforms (connectedness, sharing your life) and, more importantly, the detriments (data privacy, mental health struggles).

But yeah, for now: no phones. Sorry, gang. My number one job as a parent is to keep you safe, even if you arenā€™t happy with me.

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We can have a different web


šŸ”— a linked post to citationneeded.news » — originally shared here on

Okay, I guess this blog is just turning into a bunch of links about why the internet sucks these days.

But I should stop framing these links as a ā€œhereā€™s why what we have right now sucksā€ because truthfullyā€¦ it doesnā€™t.

Or rather, it doesnā€™t have to.

I really enjoyed Molly Whiteā€™s metaphor about gardens1. Iā€™ve been tending to my own garden on this site for more than a decade, and Iā€™ve kept up patches of turf on the web since the mid 90s.

I just like being here. I like having a place where friends and other folks can see what Iā€™m all about and choose to interact with me or not.

A part of this article that stuck out to me was Mollyā€™s observation that the internet started becoming less fun when we all came here to work. I couldnā€™t agree more.2

Somewhat related here: this past weekend, I decided to finally do something about my IRL piece of land. You see, most of my backyard is now just dirt. My front yard is patches of grass but primarily dominated by weeds.

My back patio is in literal shambles, chunks of broken patio paver strewn around the yard.

The screens on my windows are either broken, bent, or missing altogether.

The cool Govee lights no longer stick to my overhang, so they dangle like a complete eyesore.

Itā€™s frustrating.

This past weekend, I went to the hardware store and spent way too much money on grass seed. It felt incredibly rewarding to do the hard work of ripping up the old junk and trying to build something new.

It felt like a sign for me to log off a bit more often and tend to reality.

But thatā€™s not to say this garden is going away anytime soon. Iā€™ll keep sharing articles like these here because I think it fits nicely with the thesis under which I am about to launch a newsletter: technology is so cool, and we could all use a reminder of that sometimes.

We also could use a friend to help us figure out how to use it right.

Much like I could use a friend to help me figure out how to replace my busted up patio.


  1. As an avid anecdotalist, Iā€™m bummed I havenā€™t been using this metaphor the whole time. I mean, we even use the term ā€œwalled gardenā€ to refer to massive platforms like Facebook or TikTok. Get your head in the game, Tim! 

  2. And as someone who nearly swore off programming altogether during my senior year of high school because building Simpsons websites wasnā€™t as much fun anymore, I find myself once again disappointed that I didnā€™t see this one coming. 0-for-2, Tim, youā€™re slipping! 

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