peoples' true natures/intentions make more sense when you remove "because money" from the equation
but it's hard to see through it when your own life revolves around "because money"
“But why would you do that if you can’t make any money from it?”
It’s so difficult to overcome this tendency to dismiss ideas because they don’t lead to income, especially if you aren’t financially secure/have years of savings in the bank.
I propose "incentivize" be a 2026 front runner for curse word. It's just a gross concept these days.
Turns out when you live that life there’s a lot of people out there who do the same. It’s easy to forget there is a completely offline world if you’re online all the time. I spend most of my time with them. In fact I’m about to go out to lunch with four people (age range 29-55) who are similarly offline. We arranged lunch over the phone.
I’d go as far as saying that the online world, past essentials, is actually the minority.
Going offline is returning to normality.
I'm generally introverted but somehow prefer phone calls over the alternatives. I don't want to play the "lets discuss where to have lunch over the next two days, waiting for the person to reply / remember to reply" game many people using IM seems to like to play.
Instead, we do a two minute call, hear each other's voice, say everything that needs to be said, save the rest for when we meet. Done and done, then move on with the rest of life.
I don't see it as intrusive at all, even though again I'm introverted, instead I see it as something personal and efficient. Yes, it forces both of us to take time to talk to the other person, I don't necessarily see this as something negative, either way.
Of course your opinion is valid, but I feel like you're only talking about calls with people that are close friends, which is a tiny minority of calls I get.
In any case, the people I chat with tend to respond in minutes, not days, so I don't have any anxiety about the conversation going on for a long time when we were trying to arrange something simple.
I don’t mind if it’s something urgent or you need an answer now. Or just want to do small talk (very close friends). But if it could be a message, just send one.
In it he talks about staying in the game, keeping strong voices advocating for good and positive change, and how stepping back, while a valid protection mechanism concedes the victory to whatever it is that's exhausting us.
You could code, go and run an Alpaca Farm for 10 years, give that up and probably within 6 months of study be ready to work as a coder again.
If I look around me today, I see stuff that sucks. I see a glint of the next evolution - mostly small, independent, human-centred (perhaps AI supported). It's tiny right now, but there's a good chance that the specific future I'm thinking about is already here just not evenly distributed yet.
And it's natural to not want to try and build that, and instead just accept that [waves hands] all this is a sucky mess, and it's burning us out, and you go fix it, because I'm out.
But the best way to fix this is to roll up your sleeves and fix it. Maybe going and writing a religion zine is part of that, maybe it isn't. Maybe going and becoming a farmer fixes it, but it almost certainly doesn't.
We need more talented people building the future they want to see, not running away from the one they're being handed by a roomful of billionaire morons (who consider themselves geniuses).
Take it back. We've done it before. It's not easy, but the journey is where the stories are.
> I see a glint of the next evolution - mostly small, independent, human-centred (perhaps AI supported). It's tiny right now, but there's a good chance that the specific future I'm thinking about is already here just not evenly distributed yet.
This. AI has helped me realize some really engrossing and satisfying coding projects I may have otherwise not done. The flip side is that they wouldn't have worked if business-as-usual / do-same-but-faster-with-AI was imposed upon me.
Use of AI can be highly personal and symbiotic, just as it can also be dehumanizing and parasitic.
I look forward to new ways of working both individually and structurally that yet may emerge, and it will require creative elbow grease to materialize.
I also empathize with, and support, those that feel the experience has shifted beyond something they care about, enjoy, or want to participate in. As I'm sure we all do, I have very good friends who lead very different lives from me. AI can be seen negatively as a wedge, or perhaps more positively as a tech/pasttime/activity that we yield in unique ways, making (keeping!) unique in the process.
That's just nonsense. They sucked at only one thing: they couldn't extract money from users on an industrial scale. I'll take "suck" UX over modern social/ad-driven crap any time of the day.
Protocols going to keep on trucking regardless of whether Twitter, IG, Facebook go up/down/sideways.
Sure, I will still use internet and AI professionally, because they are paying me to do it, but it will be just a tool.
Still, it works for me. I use the things I make and I just don't really share them any more, and that's enough for me. I don't feel like throwing the baby out with the bathwater and quitting "the Internet".
Personally I’m betting that we will see a major comeback in local radio and print media, as global network effects regress local with collective trust.
If you look you can even find research arriving at the conclusion that non-anonymous posts tend to be more toxic.