About me

Yeah ... no. No personally identifiable information here - nice try. I do, however, feel some sort of innate need to describe myself. I consider this a weakness. I tend to indulge my worst insticts. In my defense, I'm not dead yet.

The state of me, as of 2024.

I, being a middle-aged male in current society, find myself at a bit of a crossroads. Information technology afforded me an incredible existence. My young adulthood spat me - for better or for worse - into the late-90s tech boom in the United States. Oh, the world promised us a heady future. We democratized information, allowed anyone to publish their thoughts on a whim and unlocked an uncompromising future of some mutant anarcho-capitalist utopia that would spur Ayn Rand to hang up her grudges, unbutton her top and engage in sweat soaked copulation with Murray Rothbard.

For those that do not know, They. Fucking. Hated. Each. Other.

However, William Gibson demands his tribute (Narrator: He does not). The future inevitably ends up far weirder than any one person, though seemingly prescient, can predict. Gibson also stated that and he was flawed in his foresight and he is - and always will be - correct. I don't want my teenage sci fi dystopian fantasies to manifest as reality, but those did. These consistently do and far more horrifically than even the best of us could have foreseen.

Our great distributed, democratize future has been colonized by demagogues. We share far, far too much of ourselves.

Nothing to fear, nothing to hide. Amirite?

Yeah, not so much. Humans, without some measure of privacy to express, process and exorcise our worst instincts will seemingly succumb to our worst insticts.It's Id incarnate (yes, I know the Feudian concept of Id is greatly problamatic. And yes, I know, it's been thoroughly disproven. But, the analogy works and its problematic nature works as a sort of recursive reference).

"So ... what," I can mentally hear you ask. "What do I do with that?"

Exactly the question I ask myself.

Increasingly, my response is to retreat. Fall back to a medium that promised the liberty and peronsal autonomy that we were promised. Fall back to the future we were promised. Progression through unlearning (the demands of what the current "Internet" demands).

At this point, I'm more than happy to forsake the glossy, betraying face of onlife life circa 2024 (soon to be 2025) for the old net. Yes, it posed a tall barrier to entry (not really) but it was, as far as I can tell, demonstrably better.