Monday Music for a Splintering Internet
Last week bluesky blocked access to all of Mississippi because of an age verification law in that state. This is a supposed federated service that, in their own words, is “designed to not be controlled by a single company”. This is going to happen more and more (see UK’s Online Safety Act.)
If you run any sort of website you probably see that the majority of bandwidth is consumed by bad-faith scrapers for LLM models (perplexity has been extra toxic.) For smaller ventures, like libraries or any knowledge sharing sites, this is disastrous: they can be so voluminous they’re effectively denial-of-service attacks.
The internet was meant to be resilient and route around damage. Yet, when a handful of large companies control all the routing, when nation states can turn off access at a whim, when corporate store gatekeepers can delist you into oblivion at a whim, when large super clusters of computers financed by literal fraud can overwhelm any corner of the internet with their traffic, is there anything left to route around?
The true decentralized web was personal sites and email, I believed. My faith is faltering. Personal sites are getting destroyed like collateral in the AI race, and the vast majority of email accounts in the world are managed by a handful of companies, all free to block and mark as spam anything at their sole discretion. Like this! I spent a lot of effort on something just to have it be marked as junk mail, equivalent to some “lonely women available in your area” blast.
If you missed it here’s an archive link:
Persistence, Part 1 • Buttondown
A couple weeks ago we road tripped across Iceland, in a fully electric BYD Dolphin. Here in Canada where the political class still fears China, despite...
If it is in your spam folder do me a favour and mark it as “not spam.”
Resident Advisor recently had their 1000th mix / podcast episode and they celebrated it in grand fashion: a cool website, reposting all their old ones that might not be online anymore, and 10 new mixes. There’s some vintage Frankie Knuckles on there, Mark Ernestus (who generally never does stuff like this), and Tim Reaper’s massive 7 and a half hour mix of “hey I like stuff other than jungle too.” Great stuff.
It’s the last Monday of August and we’re trying to plod through it all with some tunes. So in the spirit of RA’s 1000th here’s some classic mixes I’ve had open in my tabs that I’ve been cycling through:
Peshay Studio Set 1996 (2025 Remaster). This kept getting taken down by bogus claims and here’s hoping this 2025 remaster lasts longer than the previous dozen uploads. Glad that it’s back again so I don’t have to link to the archive.org’s .wav version. Bonus: the YouTube version has of-the-era CGI renders that give it an extra aesthetic.
A twelve hour set from London in 1995. That’s all the info I have on it; that’s all that is needed.
Everything is cyclical. This mix is ten years old, covering a scene twenty years before it, and feels topical again in 2025.
A more recent mix where Pinch looks back at 20 years of Tectonic. Really solid back-catalog of bass music if you want to dig in, featuring a lot of singles by some of my favourite producers out there.
Definitely not spam.
Signing off, sometimes.