I have recurring frustration with the state of the web. I still have a utopian dream and attachment to people using open tools rather than the (semi-)closed platforms to publish their work and knowledge and thinking.
On one level, this is a purely selfish desire. I would rather have one place to go to see and interact with the bits of insta, FB, masto, bluesky, tiktok, youtube, substack, buttondown, patreon et al that I’m in some way “subscribed” to. And I’d like to be able to just put my stuff in one place and know that the people who want to see and interact with it can do so too.
But also, I have a number of communities or groups, of which I’m a member, that I believe could learn and grow together much better if we all had a view into each other’s worlds. This was one of the founding ideas of Tuttle – to see how productive it could get when you regularly brought a bunch of people to the same place in person who were used to creating stuff online together.
And I imagine that there are people who are still working like this, blogging regularly, having creative conversations in the fediverse and using all of that learning and knowledge-sharing to create new things, have new thoughts and find people to collaborate IRL.
But many of the people around me have walked away from writing in public – I have too, it’s hard to write this post without second guessing the responses. But to not write in public feels like a really sad resignation and failure. It feels like letting the bad guys win, and since a lot of bad guys seem to be winning quite often these days, I’m still tempted to believe that there’s a responsibility to put away the closed platforms and only do things that are on the web and controlled by me and to help the people in my communities to do the same.
Ugh, that was all a bit earnest…
My early morning viewing regularly includes the lates from the BBC Archive on YouTube.
This was today. The finished objects themselves are interesting enough, especially to know that they were in such widespread use even in 1974. But the real pull of it for me is these blokes in their workshop in Peckham, talking like South Londoners used to talk. With a craft that they’d gained mastery over throughout their working lives. I know I would go mad if all I had to do all day was make bits of wood, in shapes that I could stick together with glue and fix brass fittings to, but there’s also a romance to the simplicity of these machines and the simplicity of the lives of the men who made them.
Perfect Path 