Hi Crowd!
Things have been a bit scattered recently, by design or just unfortunate timing it seems like one can barely digest the chaos of the day before being presented with the next wave of complications. This manifests in many ways, doom scrolling and retreating into known comfort zones among them. I don't know that I have either a solution or a useful processing method, though certainly find myself hunting for one almost daily. My list of things I want to write to you about continues to grow and I realize at this point I can never accomplish it all in one shot and my only hope is diving in and starting to chip away at it.
One question a lot of people have asked me recently is wtf are we supposed to do about social media. It's a valid question, without a good answer. At a top down level, replacing a problem with the exact same thing painted a different color doesn't solve anything, it just sort of pushes the problem down the road. We clearly knew the problem with centralized for-profit social media platforms almost 20 years ago and rather than move to decentralized options where we control our own data and social graph, we keep jumping from one centralized system to another because it's easy. I don't know that enough people care enough to do anything else, but the problem we have right now isn't new or unexpected. That's not an I told you so, though of course I did, because I'm mostly right there with you in all of this.
A lot of people are very concerned about Xwitter or as I've been calling it recently Q-Elon central. I moved out of the US before the first Trump administration and when people started getting stopped at the border and being ordered by CBP officers to login to their social media accounts for inspection I decided that I didn't want to have to try and explain a bad joke or midnight rant to some schmuck with a fake badge and deleted all my history. At the time I set up a recurring "delete everything older than 30 days" system but that has long since stopped working and I got lazy. I recently found CYD which offers a similar service, free to delete all your old tweets/posts and a small price if you want it to also unfollow everyone. I mention this only because if you are planning to "leave" the site, if you just delete your account someone else can grab your username and pretend to be you, and if you just walk away from it all that data is sitting there waiting to be harvested by any number of API crawling AI bots, so if that site is in your rearview this is a good way to burn the bridge behind you. I'm not as anti-AI as a lot of people I know, but I've seen enough dystopian sci-fi films to know that homegrown AI with no rails in the hands of a guy like Musk ends badly every single time. For everyone. Regardless of if you are on his site or not.
Bluesky continues to be an alternative that I hope is promising, largely because of the backend ATprotocol which powers alternative front ends like Skeets, and forthcoming TikTok (skylight) and Instagram (flashes) replacements built on the same open protocol. I also really like Rodeo as an Instagram replacement because lets face it, Zuckerbook/Meta is no better and probably worse in ways we don't even know yet. I struggle with this as you all know because I'm old and lonely and am bad at staying in touch with my friends, but also as I cross a half a century of wandering around this floating rock I find disconnecting and just reading books and reorganizing guitar pedal chains all day to be increasingly more appealing. Sadly that doesn't pay the bills and I'm no where near rich enough to envision that as a realistic lifestyle at this point, though I do try to cram it in during spare moments and downtime.
It's funny, in my teens I never thought I'd see my 20's. In my 20's I thought I'd magically figured it all out and would be in music for the rest of my life. In my 30's I'd really for real this time figured it all out and getting away from music was the best thing I'd ever done and would obviously now be spending the rest of my life in technology and at any moment would sell a company and never have to worry about how to pay a bill again in my life. In my 40's I realized I had not figured anything at all out, and just had a bunch of interesting / unique experiences and perspectives that maybe if I was lucky I could apply to other things and be helpful somehow. And here I am now, with no real idea how anything is going to play out next or how to classify it, but finding some solace again in music. And at least the memes continue to be entertaining.
I have a few friends who have recently started newsletters with paid subscriptions and are now making a decent living from which is super cool to see in these weird and unpredictable times. I'm also reminded of the one time I tried to explore such a thing and had 3 people sign up for it, 2 of which were family members, so that wasn't as sustainable. Because I'm sure emotion isn't conveyed well in this kind of text format I assure you I'm literally laughing out loud as I type that. Not just lol'ing, the real thing.
Unrelated, I do have some books available right now, for anyone interested...
Photobook: Unfinished Projects (shipping now)
Photobook: SBXX (preorders)
Cryptopunks: NOT DEAD (preorders: softcover / limited hardcover)
*self published and unofficial companion to FREE TO CLAIM which I co-edited/authored
In addition to the social media question a lot of people have been asking me about Canada. Many different things about Canada, not the least of which is how do Canadians feel about Americans right now? While I obviously can't speak for all the Canadians or even some of the Canadians, I can tell you what I've seen and heard first hand here in Vancouver and you can decide how widely to apply that - it's not good. When I moved to Canada almost 5 years ago I was kind of shocked at how negatively Americans were discussed, generally, especially as an American I'd always experienced Canadians being thought of quite positively. But there was a general distrust and dislike, which to some extent could be written off as simple cultural friction (assumptions of rudeness, etc) but the recent tariff's and comments from Trump and co has really cranked that dial up to 11. People are pissed, and it doesn't feel like the kind of anger which goes away with the next news cycle. It's more like previously there was an annoying neighbor who played music too loud and had a messy yard but was generally harmless so everyone just put up with, vs now that neighbor has started building bombs in his garage and picking fights and the whole neighborhood is having emergency meetings about how to get this guy evicted/arrested/ejected and making lists of tough friends they can call for back up if it goes too far and they need to go crack some skulls. Not saying Canada thinks it can beat up the US, but I do think Hockey players are way tougher than Football players, and while the US/Canadian border has never been fun to cross, feels like it's going to get a lot worse faster than anyone expects it to.
I sent out some other links to the Crowd Telegram group earlier which I'm going to make an effort to do more often, if only to help myself keep track of them better, so if you want a sneak peak on things that might make it into this letter feel free to join that channel. This is a pretty interesting AI News mapping tool showing how different stories of the moment are connected to each other. And as news of the moment seems to be about a lot of government websites and data suddenly disappearing, the newly set up GovWaybackMachine is pretty helpful. Things are happening really fast and it's unclear how many of them are legal, or if that even matters, but this tracker can at least help you see which lawsuits have been filed by who over which objection, and how that might play out.
OK, it's date night and I've successfully checked a few items off the shit to write about list, please to enjoy and I'll write more soon I promise. xoxo
-s
