Persistence, Part 1
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 literal threats from our direct neighbour, BYDs and all Chinese EVs are tariffed at 100%. Canadian policy is just crib notes from Biden, the second last person in the world you’d want to copy. At 100% they are effectively banned from the market.
There have been some calls to ease that, though little action. They speak of protecting the Canadian auto industry from Chinese imports while also crying about southern protectionism and tariffs destroying the Canadian auto industry. Then they cry foul when China reciprocates on canola. It’s all quite contradictory.
The trip was to disconnect, explore nature, form new experiences, so it feels insincere to mine it for ‘content.’ I posted a couple photos on Instagram through a misguided attempt to hold on to the times of yore when I followed photographers and was served photography, instead of the suggested reels, forced threads1, and slop that I get now. Another platform I’m done with. Another thing to cut out.
Naturally, this got me thinking about zines and digital archives.
Unfortunately I can not fully delete my Meta account, for reasons, so it stays. For now. Eventually I will be free and once again I will be forced into the eternal platform lock-in dilemma: leave it and let it rot, delete it altogether, or work around the barriers and try to export and archive manually. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve had to make this decision2. I’m tired of doing it. In my old age I want the freedom to fuck off.
Fucking off, however, requires effort. The platforms benefit from user laziness, it’s what keeps the lock-in. Fucking off has upfront costs and expenses. The platforms subsidize their service with your data, your eyes, your addiction. In the era of 'who cares' many will stick with the status quo. Fucking off requires you to care.
I started to print out more photos this year. Pictures of our son, of our trips, us. There’s a permanence to it. They’re tactile. I plan on doing it more, starting with the latest batch of vacation pictures.
My son’s entire life is documented by “pictures under glass”, stored on servers I do not control, located in the United States of America, dependent on a subscription being paid. Today this is feeling increasingly risky. The CEO of those servers and subscriptions is literally appeasing a wannabe dictator with tacky ass gold gifts. “Liquid ass” indeed.
I’m not heading to “I printed my Instagram feed for a month” levels: just the memorable stuff. The ones you want to remember after cleaning out an old drawer, the stuff to be put on walls, the stuff I hope someone will hold onto when I’m dead.
I have started to think the same about all my dumb writings over the years. While we were on vacation, local magazine shop Issues had a zine festival selling various physical zines from around the world. Wired, in their resistance arc, recently put out an article about the power of zines (archive link) during this era of online censorious control.
“By producing physical, tangible objects that don’t exist on the internet, you can circumvent or avoid feeding into that machine,” says Kyle Myles, a photographer who sells zines out of his Baltimore shop. “I think a lot of people worry that when they share things on, say, Instagram, suddenly it’s the property of Mark Zuckerberg or Meta.”
I also recently came across Austin, Texas’s Sherwood Forest Zine Library which has a large swath of (author approved) zines, including the recently added Against Fascism (pdf). Topical! I look to what local game designer and writer Mathew Kumar is doing at exp. zine, writing and publishing consistently about games. Even a book! (Full disclaimer: I am bad at subscribing to Patreons and buying physical goods. Sorry Mathew.) It’s slower, more deliberate, free from the constant need for novelty that exists online.
Zines seem to be everywhere. Or I’m searching them out more.
Dark.properties : Can we be more by doing less? There’s a lot of privilege in this article: being able to buy a large property and create a residency for people. Still, some of the lessons gleaned from the participants have been put together into a, you guessed it, zine (pdf). I appreciate the idea of a “decelerator.”
Despite my anxiety that all we had to offer was some alone time in a cabin, our first round of Decelerator residents deeply valued the experience. In fact, multiple participants said that their residencies here were life-changing. Just by creating a defined container for restful visioning in a calm, supportive, and distraction-free setting, participants were having profound experiences. It became clear how unusual it is to have time away from day-to-day life and work—time that is, instead, simply open for what feels important and good, be that journaling, meditating, reading, walking, sleeping, brainstorming, or even giving yourself time to process intense feelings like anxiety, loneliness, or grief.
I’ve worked with the web for 25 years and almost everything I’ve created in that time has been deleted. Much of it was time sensitive, urgent, required overtime, and launched with a lot of stress. Entire companies depended on a product’s delivery! Little of it is remembered. Constant acceleration for… nothing.
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In the year 2025 I’ve been thinking about mortality. A lot. I nod my head to developer manifestos like pastagang’s Let Code Die:
If you are sensitive to mortality, you can think of this concept as ‘let it float down the river’. Be an observer, take an interest, but don’t form unhealthy attachments where they aren’t necessary.
All my stuff is deleted and, yes, it is freeing to detach from that code debt; maintaining a code base for years, let alone decades, is time consuming and unrewarding. It’s probably why I never joined “product.” Hindsight is a powerful tool that lets you rewrite the same patterns better every time. Iterating on the same code for years can often introduce subtle bugs. In some ways, this line of thinking applies to life. It is freeing to detach from physical objects, especially the consumerist ones, and their demands. Their upkeep drains you. I have less stuff than I did 15 years ago. I should have less still.
“Swedish death cleaning” has been bubbling in the zeitgeist. It’s Marie Kondo-style decluttering except done by depressed Europeans. Instead of ridding your home of anything that doesn’t “spark joy” you get rid of the junk that you don’t want your next of kin to deal with when you’re dead. The Globe and Mail personal essay section recently had someone write about this: Cleaning after my mother’s death taught me about what can’t be replaced (archived):
After she died, I found myself thinking constantly about what’s left behind, and who decides what matters.
We are told to make things easier for the people who survive us. We are told to pare down, throw out, erase our own ephemera so the living can carry on unburdened.
But maybe a burden is not always a bad thing.
In the year 2025 I’ve been thinking about mortality. Some of it is due to a lack of resolution with my father’s death: we didn’t part well, and I’ve been coming to terms with that and my failures therein. Alas, the greater shadow over me is that I have been denied resolution. Without dwelling on it, conflicts, spurred by my mother’s death, ebbed and flowed until I was a mere invite at his funeral.
What mark on the world was left by that man’s passing? Just the ones I carry in me.
For the longest time I thought I’d be the last to bear my father’s name. He was a lonely child, a sole survivor of twins, and I was the only son who was persistently introverted and depressed. At times in my life I thought that lineage would end with a deliberate act. Now that I am older and have a child I am embarrassed that my son continues that name.
Perhaps I’m doomed to the same asshole fate as my father, destined to repeat the same mistakes. I have a lot of his miserable character in me. Whether I fail or not, I hope my son’s left with something he treasures and loves and wishes for not to be forgotten. When I’m gone I hope he has memories and experiences he will cherish, that something will persist. From my father nothing was passed on. Nothing besides resentment.
Threads is so fascinating to me because in that wave of post-twitter services that sprung up some Meta engineer managed to create something that is outstandingly horrible yet equally bland at the same time. For a service with supposed hundreds of millions of users it has somehow managed to achieve negative cultural cachet. It’s an impressive amount of mediocrity.
Ello. weheartit. Mlkshk. filepile. cohost. Clover. Delicious. Reader. Buzz. 500px. Flickr. Etc etc etc etc etc etc etc.
Related Links
sigh. Speaking of Instagram, kids are on that old school 2010s Instagram nostalgia: The return of the ‘OG Instagram’ aesthetic | Dazed
There was something cosy about OG Instagram, where you could see hyperlocal narratives, environments and relationships. What people are missing is intimacy; they are like, ‘Who are all these thousands of random people, and why am I shouting into a void?’
You know what else was hyperlocal and tied to human experiences? Weblogs. Just dial that back farther to the early 2000s.
The Geological Sublime (Harpers)
How are we, who plant our corn in spring, who live with four-year election cycles and thirty-year mortgages—how are we to position ourselves in relation to the inhuman forces that have been shaping the earth for four and a half billion years and now seem to be accelerating? How, in short, shall we approach the climate crisis when the needed sense of proportion can be baffled by floods of geological time?
Listen to this
Oli XL’s Rogue Intruder, Soul Enhancer has been on heavy rotation. It’s one of my favourite albums from the tail end of the 2010s. Doing the math, its summer 2019 release is further from today than 2030. Fuck.
In some ways Oli XL reminds me a lot of early Burial. On the surface they are very different, a decade apart in genre and influence, yet if you think about their cut and paste approach to constructing melancholic soundscapes around samples and syncopated beats they’re structurally similar. The bandcamp page for Rogue Intruder, Soul Enhancer says “386 uncleared samples, twisted and patchworked into emotions (132 songs, 53 video games, 14 movies, 187 misc. found clips).” Burial doesn’t list sample counts though I’m sure his albums are not far off.
The song “Clumsy”, with its pitch shifted nod to Beck’s “Loser”, gets all the attention, though “Mimetic”, at this moment, is my favourite. It’s almost a perfect introduction to Oli XL: a long intro that slowly builds on itself, a clip of a voice mail message followed by a very deep sigh, the beat emerges, followed by the very particular chipmunk-esque vocal melodies.
There’s little out there that sounds like it. An alien transmission broadcast from another galaxy, and the alien broadcasting it is gen z. And listened to “Hollaback Girl.”
After Rogue Intruder, Soul Enhancer Oli XL signed with Warp Records, released a single four years ago, and then basically disappeared into the aether. Until this month. Two weeks ago Oli XL dropped this: https://soundcloud.com/oli_xl/drop (sign a deal, biiiiig mistake) and then today a music box tune hinting at something coming this Monday. Hopefully a new album.
“The entire album is 100 percent samples. I’ve been really into having the melodies feel as though they accidentally form via seemingly unrelated sounds,” he exclaims. Each track embraces a new sonic texture, darting between experimental interludes, bass-heavy rhythms and orchestrated jazz fusion phrases.
Memes To An End: Oli XL’s Anxious Electronica | The Quietus
Alienating work becomes almost a way of legitimising the artist’s pain: if it is abstract enough, discussion of an artist’s pain avoids making listeners cringe and becomes seemingly worthwhile. However, this self-indulgent attitude also says ‘you’ll never understand me unless you’re like me, and unless you’re like me you’re not worth my time.’ Like the CDs that Oval scratched up to make early glitch music from, the self-isolating world of internet-based avant-garde electronica has quickly become repetitive.
This is why music like Rogue Introducer, Soul Enhancer is so welcome. By no means is it a happy record, nevertheless Oli XL is not afraid to have some fun. From the first track, ‘Cygnostik,’ with its jovial stuttering synth that seems to come straight out of an Oval track and its stop-start syncopated drum patterns, Oli XL establishes this LP as a space where playfulness is permitted – even recommended. His grand-master’s palette of synths and processed samples feels more inspired by the warm world of deep house and ambient music than the stark sounds of avant-garde electronica. His vocals make a conscious effort towards melody and catchiness – notably on ‘Mimetic’ – and they’re mostly processed to the point where they’re almost comical, the voice of a small animated chipmunk, autotuned and roboticised. Under all of this, punchy and clubby UK garage-inspired drums skip along in unconventional broken patterns, going nowhere fast.
Signing off, sometimes.