This edition of Gnamma is a reaction to the newsletter service I've been using, Tinyletter, announcing their shutdown. Tinyletter is owned by the larger email platform Mailchimp, and I've always appreciated that they've had a smaller and simpler tool for sending out little newsletters. No longer! Tinyletter closes at the end of February 2024; if you want to unsubscribe, do so now (no guilt/shame!): in early February I will transfer all subscribers over to some replacement service. As of now I am leaning towards mailerlite, as I am not quite ready to start paying for something like buttondown unless I start monetizing this newsletter somehow.
Leaving Tinyletter adds just one more layer to the long list of internet services I have migrated to and from. While it still generally feels like what goes on the internet stays on the internet, I think this is mostly the result of the compostability of online content: photos and text and now video rapidly proliferate by web scrapers and compilations and reposts etc, gaining longevity via redundancy rather than by any particular platform providing stability. All of these services are mutable entities, subject to changing hardware and software and financing and personal or corporate priorities and cultural norms. I would love to see the day when Facebook (Meta) goes bankrupt and dissolved all their data, but I suspect they'll have my college-age selfies for a few more decades still, taking up a little bit of memory in enormous server complexes wherever the energy bills are cheap and privacy regulation loose. And after that, honestly, I bet all the data will be harvested by other layers in the corporate/state stack.
Some of my first internet accounts were early LEGO forums: Classic Space, Classic Castle, Saber-Scorpion, and some services that supported them. I truly cannot believe Brickshelf (LEGO image hosting) still functions, and my accounts are still there. Even the web design is the same. It takes so much work to maintain a web-based platform: keeping up the domains, keeping up with browser development, the ballooning of web dev tooling, maintaining anti-spam and security measures, paying server fees and migrating between providers, user management: I am generally in awe whenever small sites with even medium-sized user bases make it more than a few years. I don't use Pinboard any more, but I still enjoy checking in on it because its creator is vocal about many of the details of keeping the whole machine running.
While PHPbb forums were my first real "social media" accounts, they were pretty one-off. The genuine platforms started emerging circa 2006: the LEGO community moved to flickr, I became a tumblr boy in high school through the middle of college, I lugged around a facebook profile for a while, I spent my later college years and some thereafter in the twitter-sphere, I was in a bunch of Slack groups in the twenty-teens. I've essentially permanently logged off of each of these now, too. I do still use Instagram, although with an air of hatred. It feels like an absolute algorithmic brain-nuke every time I log on. I guess I keep going back because Instagram remains a way to learn about events happening that are of interest to me; interestingly, the long tail of event details was the same reason I stayed on facebook longer than I should have. There are also some unique folks playing with and posting on Instagram that keep me attached, like David Horvitz. When I finally log off, I will miss some things like that.
Of course, the online service I still use the most is Are.na. I feel pretty indebted to the Are.na team for maintaining an incredible crucible of value against the maelstrom of cultural change online in the past decade; for seeking transparency in how the whole operation is maintained; and for simply keeping it working and interesting. I hope Are.na (and the values it represents) is around for a lot longer than all of these other tools. My friend Bryan recently wrote a piece called What Happened to the New Internet? which chronicles an online social scene from the late twenty-teens I was/am deeply intertwined with, broadly part of the Learning Gardens network. The article then chronicles crypto, which was a trajectory that I was not really involved with, although one that was inescapably present for anyone optimistic about the direction of the "new internet." The essay also ends on a note of optimism about tools like Are.na.
Communities inevitably come and go as their constituent people ebb and flow, or maybe their reasons-to-be cease to exist, or maybe, as in the case of many online spaces, the tools that host the communication degrade. Bryan touches just a bit on how the culture that was substrate to and grew intertwined with a specific group of people outlasts any specific "community" entity. It evolves into either a more loosely woven social network or persists as shockwaves of cultural production that reverberate out from a scene in a particular moment. To dive into ideas about cultural longevity more deeply, I think I'd need to read some anthropology...
At a personal level, I am increasingly thankful that I have quite low professional benefits to "be online" any longer. (I'm trying to be a coastal engineer or academic.) In this age of enormous normative platforms and dense advertising, it's a relief to not be forcibly attached to these social platforms for the sake of making money. 20 years of being super logged-on was more than enough to cause permanent brain damage. It's an extremely difficult extrication from my decades of online persona(s), which Kyle Chayka helps describe in his recent New Yorker piece. When I am not pushing stuff online or consuming I feel I have a bit of a phantom limb, despite now having good social networks that I primarily interact with in-person (is that why events are so "sticky" in their online feed value?), or via pretty lightweight tools like group chats. Emphasizing this feels correct to me at this moment in time, but perhaps in the future I will find my people online once more... we'll see where life goes! I am overdue for a major refactorization of my online consumption: brooding tools like CycleMarks or old tools like RSS may be useful in further de-centering of data-harvesting firehose content platforms like Instagram.
I've never felt like my email newsletter is a "community": it is too one-directional, from one-to-many. But I have really valued friends and strangers alike reading my words and bouncing ideas around, and it helps me scratch the itch to publish something online, so I'll keep writing. Email is so strangely resilient as a tool, likely because of how decentralized and platform-agnostic it can be: I hope you'll stick with me as we migrate once more.
Deplatforming,
Lukas
p.s. I finished my PhD in December and am now between jobs! Woohoo! I'll be surfing and reading and trying to un-fuck my brain for the next two months.
Leaving Tinyletter adds just one more layer to the long list of internet services I have migrated to and from. While it still generally feels like what goes on the internet stays on the internet, I think this is mostly the result of the compostability of online content: photos and text and now video rapidly proliferate by web scrapers and compilations and reposts etc, gaining longevity via redundancy rather than by any particular platform providing stability. All of these services are mutable entities, subject to changing hardware and software and financing and personal or corporate priorities and cultural norms. I would love to see the day when Facebook (Meta) goes bankrupt and dissolved all their data, but I suspect they'll have my college-age selfies for a few more decades still, taking up a little bit of memory in enormous server complexes wherever the energy bills are cheap and privacy regulation loose. And after that, honestly, I bet all the data will be harvested by other layers in the corporate/state stack.
Some of my first internet accounts were early LEGO forums: Classic Space, Classic Castle, Saber-Scorpion, and some services that supported them. I truly cannot believe Brickshelf (LEGO image hosting) still functions, and my accounts are still there. Even the web design is the same. It takes so much work to maintain a web-based platform: keeping up the domains, keeping up with browser development, the ballooning of web dev tooling, maintaining anti-spam and security measures, paying server fees and migrating between providers, user management: I am generally in awe whenever small sites with even medium-sized user bases make it more than a few years. I don't use Pinboard any more, but I still enjoy checking in on it because its creator is vocal about many of the details of keeping the whole machine running.
While PHPbb forums were my first real "social media" accounts, they were pretty one-off. The genuine platforms started emerging circa 2006: the LEGO community moved to flickr, I became a tumblr boy in high school through the middle of college, I lugged around a facebook profile for a while, I spent my later college years and some thereafter in the twitter-sphere, I was in a bunch of Slack groups in the twenty-teens. I've essentially permanently logged off of each of these now, too. I do still use Instagram, although with an air of hatred. It feels like an absolute algorithmic brain-nuke every time I log on. I guess I keep going back because Instagram remains a way to learn about events happening that are of interest to me; interestingly, the long tail of event details was the same reason I stayed on facebook longer than I should have. There are also some unique folks playing with and posting on Instagram that keep me attached, like David Horvitz. When I finally log off, I will miss some things like that.
Of course, the online service I still use the most is Are.na. I feel pretty indebted to the Are.na team for maintaining an incredible crucible of value against the maelstrom of cultural change online in the past decade; for seeking transparency in how the whole operation is maintained; and for simply keeping it working and interesting. I hope Are.na (and the values it represents) is around for a lot longer than all of these other tools. My friend Bryan recently wrote a piece called What Happened to the New Internet? which chronicles an online social scene from the late twenty-teens I was/am deeply intertwined with, broadly part of the Learning Gardens network. The article then chronicles crypto, which was a trajectory that I was not really involved with, although one that was inescapably present for anyone optimistic about the direction of the "new internet." The essay also ends on a note of optimism about tools like Are.na.
Communities inevitably come and go as their constituent people ebb and flow, or maybe their reasons-to-be cease to exist, or maybe, as in the case of many online spaces, the tools that host the communication degrade. Bryan touches just a bit on how the culture that was substrate to and grew intertwined with a specific group of people outlasts any specific "community" entity. It evolves into either a more loosely woven social network or persists as shockwaves of cultural production that reverberate out from a scene in a particular moment. To dive into ideas about cultural longevity more deeply, I think I'd need to read some anthropology...
At a personal level, I am increasingly thankful that I have quite low professional benefits to "be online" any longer. (I'm trying to be a coastal engineer or academic.) In this age of enormous normative platforms and dense advertising, it's a relief to not be forcibly attached to these social platforms for the sake of making money. 20 years of being super logged-on was more than enough to cause permanent brain damage. It's an extremely difficult extrication from my decades of online persona(s), which Kyle Chayka helps describe in his recent New Yorker piece. When I am not pushing stuff online or consuming I feel I have a bit of a phantom limb, despite now having good social networks that I primarily interact with in-person (is that why events are so "sticky" in their online feed value?), or via pretty lightweight tools like group chats. Emphasizing this feels correct to me at this moment in time, but perhaps in the future I will find my people online once more... we'll see where life goes! I am overdue for a major refactorization of my online consumption: brooding tools like CycleMarks or old tools like RSS may be useful in further de-centering of data-harvesting firehose content platforms like Instagram.
I've never felt like my email newsletter is a "community": it is too one-directional, from one-to-many. But I have really valued friends and strangers alike reading my words and bouncing ideas around, and it helps me scratch the itch to publish something online, so I'll keep writing. Email is so strangely resilient as a tool, likely because of how decentralized and platform-agnostic it can be: I hope you'll stick with me as we migrate once more.
Deplatforming,
Lukas
p.s. I finished my PhD in December and am now between jobs! Woohoo! I'll be surfing and reading and trying to un-fuck my brain for the next two months.