Good morning, good morning, for the one thousand, six hundred and thirty-third time. I hope you are doing okay. Is all well? You freaking out that, oh, I don’t know, let’s pick one at random from the last 24 hours shall we? People gotta submit five years of social media posts to the government to even visit the land of the free now? Sweet lord ‘o' mercy.

Sad story time:

I was sitting at the pizza place with my fam last night and it was real nice and we were having a good time and a woman walked in who bore a passing resemblance to an old friend who, I suddenly realized, had been rattling around in my subconscious nostalgia circuits for a few weeks now. We payed youth soccer together. Her dad was a good friend of my dad and my soccer coach. Loved them both, father and daughter, good people. Realized I hadn’t heard about their big ole family in any of my Fairbanks trips. They had like five kids and a lot of my friends of different ages were friends with assorted kids in the family and suddenly it just struck me as weird I’d not heard about them in years.

Both father and daughter have very Googleable names so I Googled Kagi’d them and:

Dad passed away seventeen years ago. Which would have put him in his late sixties, which is very sad. He had moved to Florida. So, it seemed from his obituary, had the vast majority of his kids, which lead me to believe they moved down quite a while ago? I mean I’ve been out of Alaska for 35 years, seems possible.

Then I Googled the daughter and… oh god. She had left Alaska with her dad, lived in the Lower 48 near him. Became a sports reporter, and was good at it by all accounts. But she had a minor Sickle Cell Anemia attack — she had always had it, even when we were kids. It is how I first heard of it. But she always managed it fine. The article said she had had such attacks before, and they had, in the past, put her in the hospital for less than a day.

But apparently this particular hospital fucked up this particular attack and it left her in a coma for quite a while, and when she came out of the coma, she had the mental capacity and abilities of a ten-year-old, and could not walk without assistance.

The dad sued the hospital on her behalf and was awarded $22 million, one of the largest judgements of its kind. It was appealed and the dad settled to avoid a lengthy trial for “more than enough money to provide for her care for the rest of her life.” The goal, the 2004 article said, was that she would eventually move in with her dad.

Except, now, reading this, I know that the dad died.

So she is out there somewhere. With enough money to provide for her care, and a large family in the same state as her, so I hope she is getting good care? I hope no one’s taking advantage of her? I hope she is okay.

Gawd. Imagine.

Join the GMHHAY slack! Reply to this email and ask for an invite if you’re a human who likes chatting with other humans about topics such as these within!

We are working on getting through our To Investigate playlist some more this morning. Found a trove of albums I’d not listened to, stuck in the middle of the 42 hours of music. I thought I’d listened to them all at least once but nope. Which means I gotta leave these albums in the list, so they get their deserved second listen. Every album deserves a second listen. Put that on a t-shirt. Shit omg I want that on a t-shirt so bad now.

Still, we have gotten through 11 hours of this in the last two days. I think we might make it before the year end, or my work end next week. We have 31 hours left. Right now I am listening to an awesome post rock band called bloodsports (sic) that sounds like something Bill would have recommended me but I do not remember. It is really good. Album is called Anything Can Be a Hammer which implies a Adam Savage affinity I can get behind.

This band has their tone knobs on their distortion turned up significantly brighter than your average post rock band, and less reverb on the distortion. Bit ‘o Albini in the guitar tones. I can appreciate that.

Big news, assuming the record arrives, I have completed my collection of Mr. Airplane Man records. I have such warm nostalgic indie-rock feelings about seeing them busk in Central Square in Cambridge “back in the day” and for the last year or so I have been slowly accumulating their records from Discogs and each time one is acquired and arrives at my house, I put it on the turntable and feel young again for 36 minutes or so

Then I cry old man tears into my Zevia.

More big news, Meta is leaving Durham because that’s where they were gonna build the Metaverse, lol. And McKinsey is moving into Durham because Durham is a grown up city now, ready to have value extracted. Or something. I wonder if they have a single big client in Durham. I thought McKinsey was, like, dying from AI or something but I guess not.

Triangle living.

Australian social media ban went into effect yesterday. I am in support. I am over this whole open internet thing. It didn’t work. Let’s try some other shit. I am a man who stupidly dedicated his life to a failed endeavor I am in no position to complain when people try other shit. Sure, ditch Section 230, I’m game. I mean, I am not saying I’m over every aspect of open internet, nor am I saying closed internet is the way. But…

Basically the two big macroeconomic, geopolitical fallacies of my life have been:

1. Leave the internet alone and let it grow on its own and the openness and wisdom of crowds will guide it and humanity to a benevolent future lol nope that so did not happen.

2. Engage economically with China and they will become more democratic lol nope that so did not happen.

I am not saying they were lies. I think people genuinely believed them. But they both were proven definitively incorrect and we should stop pretending.

Which leads me today to the new Resonant Computing Manifesto that is making the rounds amongst the aging, depressed internet workers of yore. In Theory this should be right up my alley. I cannot particularly fault the five “principles” upon which the whole thing rests. Software that is private, dedicated, plural, adaptable and prosocial. I could quibble about adaptable, as currently defined in the (evolving) manifesto. These sound good in theory. And I guess I kinda like this “resonant” framing: software should be resonant which, like, resonates with people, as in “‘quality without a name,’ this intuitive knowing that a place or an architectural element is in tune with life.” Sounds lovely. I like that that there’s a little poeticism in this whole old-school faux-academic manifesto endeavor.

And yet, and yet. Ironically, the whole thing… does not resonate with me? I find myself conflicted between trying to ascertain whether I have specific gripes with this endeavor, or if it is just my knee-jerk gen-X cynicism.

Who is the leadership what is this thing? It’s at a dot org address but it does not seem to be an org of any real type. There are fourteen “contributors” to the manifesto. I Googled them all. Well, I Kagi’d them all but you know. No less than half of them are ex-Googlers. Several of them omit this fact from their top-level bio. Feels like they wanted the access and sheen of Google in their professional life but not the public liability for it. Weird. Not a single person works at Apple, which is really weird given that they are mayhaps the most sympatico to resonant computing of the large tech companies. Five VCs. Couple academics.

Not a single artist, musician, politician, economist, deadbeat gamer living in their mom’s house, professional Facebook dweller, normal basic citizen of the world nothing nada. Half these people went to college in Boston at one point or another and I’ll wager they barely, if ever, stepped into Man Ray or the Middle East or Charlie’s Kitchen or.. god I don’t know. Look I don’t want to criticize, but it just doesn’t sit well with me.

They do have the guy who built Fire Eagle, though. That is rad. I love Fire Eagle. RIP. Still have the shirt.

There is a manifesto and a thesis, and we, anyone, can chime in and edit the thesis, which is just weird, because, you know someone is the master editor accepting or rejecting these editing selections, but they are not specified. And I guess look, Adbusters, Naomi Klien, Occupy Wall Street, non-centralized leadership in political action to minimize the chances of capture-by-the-charismatic yadda yadda. I grew up in that dark and this ain’t it. This is the High Sparrow. Leaders pretending not to be leaders.

But I suppose all that shouldn’t matter if the manifesto were solid. I remain unconvinced. To me, sitting here in my Aged Perch of Regret™ (more people should get one of these BTW), the biggest failing of the promise of the open web was that it was always capturable by dark forces. It was built for openness for openness’ sake and not built for resilient and protected openness. And in the end it actively aided and abetted fascism and racism.

And I guess you could lump all that into the unspoken words of the “Prosocial” tenant: “Technology should enable connection and coordination, helping us become better neighbors, collaborators, and stewards of shared spaces, both online and off.” Maybe. Sort of. Gives the whole tenat a plausible deniability, so that it may feel more inclusive to a certain type of fascist racist who, shall we say, happens to be somewhat more statistically represented in a certain part of Northern California. Racists and fascists who still find it convenient (or even believe it, given how much it has served them) to support the open web.

But I dunno, man. I am over pretending politics don’t come into it.

There are a lot of great people who have signed this thing. People I know and respect. And at first, I was gonna just sign the thing. Anyone can sign the thing but who knows if you make the weird list of signatories below it listed in some sort of clear popularity order. Which has always annoyed the fuck out of me about open letters, etc. But still. Why not sign it? What’s the harm?

And I guess I could double down on some toxically satisfying font of indignation welling up inside me right now (like this vaunted resonant internet would still encourage in me) and go on a rant about how this takes energy and steam away from more potentially effective endeavors, yadda yadda, but. It doesn’t really. It’s some people feeling better about things and signing a thing. They can still do other things. I won’t get too outraged here.

For the last few weeks I’ve been thinking a lot about UX discourse and what has become of it in our era of fascism. What’s become of A List Apart and the Adaptive Path blog and those conferences of earnest and well-dressed people who passionately debate the humanstic design aspects of the web. I’ve obviously fallen out with that crowd through the years, but I feel like I’m still online-brained enough that I’d at least be ambiently aware of their discourse. And it’s felt like it has just… disappeared?

But, in this Resonant Computing Manifesto, I feel like I’ve found them again. Here they are. They are working on it. They are, baby steps, reckoning with online fascism in their own way.

Kinda reminds me why I stopped being a designer.

Jane’s back on her toothbrushing shit but she has a dentist appointment today. Business idea: pediatric dentists with on-site child therapists to help them work through their tooth brushing issues.

They did add the vault to her gymnastics class, though, and let me tell you. Nothing warms your heart like watching a buncha little kids go flying through their air maniacally, as they vault for the first time.

Adorable chaos.

We have a W Hotel Lobby in a Better, Alternate Universe playlist for you today though man, I don’t know I haven’t been to a W Hotel in so long. Though people do occasionally send me music from W Hotel Lobbies due to this ongoing series — a friend almost made it to a European W last week just for this purpose. So I think that my playlists are still a bit better than the music there? But shit, maybe they’ve gotten better. Or I’ve gotten worse tastes. I certainly have in dad jokes.

Have a lovely day. Be kind and have fun. Wait did I already tell you that’s what I tell Jane every day as she leaves the car? I did, right? I meant to.

Be kind and have fun.