Surfing the Smallweb IV
This post is part four of the Surfing the Smallweb series.
ReedyBear's Blog
This blog's theme is amazing! The post is embedded in a book (on desktop), and instead of scrolling up and down, you press buttons to flip through the pages, or embedded on piece of tattered parchment (on mobile). The header, the navigation pane, and even the site's leathery background are all a pleasure to look at, and the author is generous enough to openly share the theme for other bloggers. Typically I prefer that a site's themes and decorations just stay out of the way and fade into the background, but when the aesthetics are done this well, it makes me want to stick around just to interact with it. (Also, on desktop, the cursor is a panda!)
There is no dearth of content to enjoy with it, though, as this site has a pretty sizeable backlog of blog posts. For a good starting place, here is a brief yet thoughtful explanation of why ReedyBear takes issue with capitalism even when its implementation appears a net-positive for society. When the material conditions of billions of humans are so abjectly awful, it's easy to focus solely on how capitalism fails on a practical level. This article touches on why it would be insufficient even if all eight billion of us were more or less comfortable.
NORMALIZE DESTROYING THE CAREERS OF RAPISTS AND ABUSERS | Deerhoof.Website
In stark contrast, this article is kind of a difficult read because the background is a bright cyan, and the text is stylized to be all-caps.
I expected from the title that this article would essentially serve as an argument in favor of Cancel Culture, or at least the part of it which prescribes that bad people should be ostracized to the point of destitution, and are thereby prohibited from ever reforming themselves and contributing to society. This was, however, a hasty judgement on my part, and Deerhoof actually expresses the opposite:
i’m all for personal forgiveness when someone owns up to their mistake. even rapists and murderers. but there is no way that this person should be allowed to continue along their path to power. NORMALIZE DESTROYING THE CAREERS OF RAPISTS AND MURDERERS. it is not an example of “decorum” to allow such people to pursue positions of trust and power over other people’s lives.
It is honestly sort of baffling that this distinction is reserved for the final paragraph of the article, as it reads more like both a thesis statement and a disclaimer against judgements like the one I'd entered with.
Regardless, as this quote demonstrates, the argument Deerhoof makes is that evil people should not be elevated to positions of great power and influence over society and politics, because their demonstrable wickedness ought to disqualify them from the ability to inflict great suffering upon everyone else.
it’s hard to believe, but there are americans alive today who actually remember when america was against genocides and mass rapes. today, both parties see a genocide/mass rape and immediately try to figure out how they can worsen it. fast track it. make money off it. how did our leaders become so depraved? partly because we dispensed no consequences. we assume that someone stealing diapers from walmart obviously has bad intentions, but pretend that someone committing genocide is just a tragic victim of the system they actually are being paid to control.
With a cogent focus on economics, war, and technology, this article provides a nice overview of one of the ways the world has been set aflame, in case you needed another reminder. There is, however, a paragraph about television which seems rather out of place:
romcoms and sitcoms model a certain behavior. somebody fails to communicate their actual feelings, there’s some misunderstanding, hijinks ensue. perhaps in the minds of the entertainers making romcoms and sitcoms, the whole moral of the story is to know your feelings, don’t hide them, and don’t try to trick people into loving you. but if that was actually the behavior they showed onscreen, no hijinks would ensue. the romcom or sitcom would fail in the marketplace.
I'm not really sure why this bit is included. The idea that a narrative imparts a lesson to the audience by showing a cautionary tale of what may otherwise befall them is not aberrant nor objectionable. Plus, a digression about televised sitcoms seems a little temporally displaced shortly after a paragraph about AI and its interactions with government.
Aside from that, this is a decently incisive article.
Gatekeepers Are Dead, Long Live The Gatekeepers | BiteofanApple by Brian Schrader
This is a succinct article discussing the role of traditional media gatekeepers, such as publishing houses (for books) and personal recommendations from popular influencers (for YouTube), in a world beset by AI slop. Allowing gatekeepers to restrict access to the eyeballs of consumers ordinarily strikes me as a failure of our economy and culture, but Schrader makes a compelling case in its favor:
Yet in this new age, where attention is a scarce resource compared with the glut of content to consume it, we have found ourselves bereft of those who can wade through the cruft and the noise and surface real wisdom.
In short: I seek gatekeepers, not to surface diamonds in the rough, but to hold back the oncoming tide.
This is an intriguing framing of the place we've found ourselves in, where both gatekeeping and AI slop appear as evils which more or less play in opposition to each other; the promise of AI is to "democratize" the creation of media, but all it does is make the gatekeepers' role more valuable. (Perhaps, then, these evils are not so opposed after all, but are attuned to the same goal!)
This is a thought-provoking article that is well worth a read.