2022
“To be very online is to be in a toxic collective solitude where everyone is battling their own demons in their own infinite echo chamber, their own confirmation-bias machine. I felt as if I’d broken free of all that for a while. Solitude is good and valuable in the right proportion, but so is connection. Ideas might grow in silence but they can’t thrive without other people.”
— The Farthest Shore by Alex Roddie 📚
While enjoying Winterwatch on the BBC, I got to wondering why summer is the only season that doesn’t get a Watch. And it, turns out, there are two reasons.
“I also saw someone else describe NFTs as “content-free DRM” and reader, I howled.”
This is one of the more thoughtful takes I’ve seem on dealing with the problem of online anonymity without ending it: Curtailing anonymity is a first step to reducing online abuse
The Undeath of the Author
(With apologies to Barthes.)
“But social media has tilted things so that books by contemporary authors—let alone essays—are no longer portable worlds that awaken when a reader enters and slumber when one leaves. Today, the author is not dead until the author is actually dead. In the meantime, every published piece of writing is treated as the beginning of a conversation—or worse, a workshop piece—by some readers, each of whom feels entitled to a bespoke response.”