I spent a couple of summers in the early eighties selling ice cream, chatting up the odd grockle and looking out over the sea to Portland.
The other stream that I take to when I need to calm down a bit is NASA’s HD Views from the International Space Station
Recent conversations about “the media”, reboots and regrowing cultures have had me looking back to the good old days of 2006 when I disclosed the contents of my “one-person media empire” bag and David Wilcox was starting to talk about “Social Reporting” – (btw the first link in that piece goes to one of David’s typepad sites, but “Thank Brewster!” it was captured by the Wayback Machine.)
In those days it appears it was all about the kit. The first iPhone was just around the corner. And now I carry all of that stuff *and* the software to edit and publish it around in my pocket every day. And so do you, probably. Utopian 2006 me would have imagined only a blossoming of enlightened civil society as a result. Silly Utopian 2006 me.
Something else happened in 2006 that seemed to offer hope for said blossoming and enlightenment. But the way it turned out makes that hope look appallingly naive. Twitter.
In that December I said:
If it’s quiet on this blog of late, the partial explanation is twitter.
It’s kinda diverting the energy that usually goes into blogging. It is a temporary diversion as I’ve also got some big posts to get out too, but they might come slowly over the festive season.
Dear reader, that “temporary diversion” ended up lasting another 10, 15, 20? years and one might argue that it actually broke what we were doing altogether. It takes practice and willpower to get back into writing in anything more than 140 character chunks (not solved when the limit got stretched to 280) especially when other parts of the ecosystem are working against you.
Dave Winer was pointing out how stuck we were with this stuff in 2014
Twitter says our posts don’t have titles, and can’t be longer than 140 chars. And Google Reader said our posts had to have titles, and could be unlimited in length.
This is why my world is fractured, and so is yours.
Now, I got a lot of good things done with a combo of Twitter (and Facebook/Instagram) and blogging in the intervening years – it wasn’t all gloomy. And I have friends who make a living now from people who pay them to write e-mails (and have Substack deal with the distribution details and some of the marketing. Oh and the payment processing) or make little films and let YouTube pass on some of their ad revenue.
You don’t have to be a wild conspiracy theorist or some sort of nostalgic Web 2.0 obsessive to recognise that giving that much power over your work to a third party owned by billionaires carries significant risk, especially given the way such billionaires have behaved in the past. But most people, me included, don’t then get farther than “Well, whatcha gonna do?”
I don’t have the whole answer yet, but I’m picking away at it here. I inwardly groan when my morning inbox is full of messages from group mailing lists that belong on a linkblog. Or I have to download an interesting-looking article from a friend on a WhatsApp group because it’s behind a paywall or some other barrier to reading it on the web.
Why is this? Why can’t I just accept that the media ecosystem is fractured and that I have to treat this kind of information in one way and that kind of information in another way, because that’s just the way it is.
You can’t expect the world to just organise itself according to your whims, Lloyd!
Well yes, partly it is my own idiosyncratic ways of organising my work and thinking and how I think about information and knowledge. But it’s also the understanding of why these tools get organised in such a way as to enable the exploitation of our collective labour by people who already have more money and power than they know what to do with.
I’m not making generic recommendations for the whole world. I’m thinking here in particular about some small-ish groups I’m in, that could imho accelerate and improve the thinking and activity and effectiveness of the group, if there weren’t these strangers in the room, intermediating between us as friends, and taking their cut at the same time, the owners and managers of these platforms.
Perfect Path 