Jump To The Front And Back

[countblastula]

It has just come to my attention that it's 2023. I signed up for Livejournal in 2003, which means this will be my 20th anniversary (although, like most of you, I haven't really used it much in the past 10 years). To commemorate this, however (and I love nothing more than commemorating), I'm going to try to update once a month in 2023. Please join me if you feel so inclined, and if you somehow miraculously actually see this post.

In May 2003, Livejournal was my first attempt to join what we now know as "social media". Catherynne M. Valente has written a brilliant piece explaining the history of social media, the demise of Livejournal (as well as Myspace, Friendster, Tumblr, Twitter, etc), and where we go from here. I highly, highly recommend that you read the entire thing, but here are some excerpts:



The Cycle:

1. Internet good! Want to make website.
2. Oh no need users. People no use non-storefront site with nothing to do on it.
3. Provide a bunch of loss-leader tools to let users make their own reasons to use the site. Chatrooms, blogs, messaging, etc. Use good moderation to make non-monster humans feel safe expressing themselves and feel nice about site so they use it more.
4. People love site! Use all the free tools to connect with each other and learn and not be lonely and maybe even make a name for themselves sometimes.
5. Hey stop talking and start buying things. Internet not supposed to make only some money. Internet supposed to make all money. It’s the rules.
6. People don’t really want what little a site that’s now solely supported by the free content created by the community has to offer. They want the community.
7. Yell about it. Insult userbase. Blanket site with ads. Get rid of moderation. Moderation keeps out users who will spend money to be mean. Oooh right-wing press LOTS of dollars into screens. Sell user data to anyone who wants it. Crack down on marginalized communities because your advertisers/investors don’t like them. Get VC capital. Do an IPO. Splinter formerly-free services and start charging for them. Probably don’t pay any attention to the oncoming train of changing trends and don’t bother adapting to them, because with the help of evil d*ckholes, you’re making money now, so why bother?
8. Everyone is mad.
9. Sell the people you brought together on purpose to large corporation, trash billionaire, or despotic government entity who hates that the site’s community used those connective tools to do a revolution.
10. Everyone who invested their time, heart, labor, love, businesses and relationships into this site is sh*t out of luck and scattered to the winds. Maybe they find what they had again, maybe they don’t. But your shareholders and/or buddies have more money so who cares?
11. In a couple of years, what happened finally comes out, but it’s just a Wired article no one reads. The site may or may not still be technically accessible, but it doesn’t matter. What made it good is gone, because what made it good was us.
12. Use new money to fund weird right-wing sh*t that hurts the people who made website popular because right-wing sh*t says no taxes and new money hates taxes.
13. Lather rinse, repeat. Prodigy, geocities, collegeclub.com, MySpace, Friendster, Livejournal, Tumblr, Twitter. More besides. More next. And if one were to get big enough, like Facebook, this cycle doesn’t stop, it just sort of happens all at the same time without interruptions in service.

It’s not just about making enough money to keep the servers going and buy everyone in the office a house, it’s not even about making shareholders rich, it’s fundamentally about the yawning, salivating need to control and hurt. To express power not by what you can give, but by what you can take away. And deeper still, this strange compulsion of conservatism to force other humans to be just like you. To clone their particular set of neuroses and fears and revulsions and nostalgias and convictions and traumas so that they never have to experience anything but themselves, copied and pasted unto the end of time. A kind of viral solipsism that cannot bear the presence of anything other than its own undifferentiated self, propagating not by convincing or seduction or debate, but by the eradication of any other option.

And I’m so tired of it. I’m so tired of running from that Nothing, that creeping enforced sameness, that self-programming grey goo of empty fear of the Other. Running from oasis to oasis in a desert of uncaring where empathy never wets the sand.

I’m so tired of just harmlessly getting together with other weird geeks and going to what amounts to a digital pub after work and waking up one day to find every pint poisoned. Over and over again. Like the poison wants us specifically. Like it knows we will always make its favorite food: vulnerability, connection, difference. I’m so tired of lunch photos and fanfic and stupid jokes and keeping in touch with family across time zones and making friends and starting cottage industries and pursuing hobbies and meeting soulmates and expressing thoughts and creating identities and loving TV shows and reading books and getting to know a few of your heroes and raising kids and making bookshelves and knitting and painting and fixing sinks and first dates and homemade jam and, yes, figuring out what Buffy characters we are, listening and learning and hoping and just f*cking talking to each other weaponized against us. Having our enthusiasm over the smallest joys of everyday life invaded by people who long ago forgot their value and turned into fodder for the death of thought, the burial of love.

Don’t give up, don’t let them have this world. Love things. Love people. Love the small and the weird and the new. Because that’s what fascists can’t do. They don’t love white people or straight people or silent women or binary enforced gender or forced birth or even really money. They want those things to be the only acceptable or even visible choices, but they don’t love them. They don’t even want to think about them. They want them to be automatically considered superior and universally mandated so they don’t have to think about them-or else what do you think the fury over other people wearing masks was ever about? The need to be right without thinking about it, and never have to see anything that wakens a spark of doubt in their own choices.

This being the January update, I should probably share some resolutions and projects for the upcoming year.

1. My main resolution for 2023 is to continue electrifying our house to cut down on fossil fuel usage. In 2022 we replaced our old gas furnace with an electric heat pump. This year we hope to replace our gas stove with an induction range. Bill McKibben has written extensively and convincingly about this topic. In the SF Bay Area, BayRen offers a $750 rebate. My dream stove is this one, but I'll probably have to settle for something a little more affordable like this. 
2. Music projects for 2023: The Corner Laughers have recorded a song for a Kinks tribute album coming out on Futureman Records later this year. The Kinks have been my all-time favorite band for the past 25 years, so I hope we did OK. I played bass on a couple of Andy Z singles which will be out in March, to commemorate World Wildlife Day. And goldenmoonbear and I will be in Michigan in June to play some acoustic shows. More about that as it gets nearer the date. 
3. Octavia is currently working on a class presentation about Ring-Tailed Lemurs, and practicing some show tunes to sing at the prologue to her school's Spring musical (which surprisingly takes place in early February). She's enjoying having her Michigan grandparents here for an extended visit and her favorite game is "9-year-old Grandma Judy", in which she time travels to the 1950s to meet 9-year-old Grandma Judy. They go to a one-room country school, visit the cottage at the lake, drink root beer floats, and all kinds of other old-timey hijinks. 
4. The big news at work is our upcoming colloquium with movie star physicist Kip Thorne. He's going to be speaking about the film Interstellar, which he worked on as science advisor and executive producer. (I watched it last night and he definitely has some explaining to do.) 
5. Lastly, and this is so geeky and insular that it could not possibly interest anyone outside of me, but I'm putting it here anyway so I can have it as a reference. Since the mid-90s I've kept paper lists of all albums listened to for the first time, movies seen, books read, etc. I switched to digital lists sometime in the mid-2000s, but I never really copied the old lists over or had a unified database. Long story short, I did a big data entry project (still ongoing) at the beginning of the year, and now I do. 

Albums 2000 - 2023

Movies 2000 - 2023

Books 2000 - 2023