Before we get started: if you’re in London then I’m doing a live performance of a new semi-improvised AI-adjacent work called Sparring Partners this Tuesday (21st November) at Iklectik, from 7.30pm. It’s free but you need to register for a ticket!
Why have I emailed you
- Literal scope (why have I emailed you)
There’s absolutely nothing in this item that is groundbreaking or even all that interesting, it’s more or less simply a very dry justification for my shifting online habits that I’m writing for myself. How I relate to the internet is changing, in terms of how I situate myself against it and the other people using it, and I don’t seem to be alone in this. For me this shift has been happening gradually for a year or two, but as a macro trend it’s been going on longer, as Ian Bogost (of Unit Operations fame) infamously laid out around this time last year in The Atlantic / (Non-paywalled version). If you didn’t catch it back then, I’d recommend reading it now. It’s not without its critics, and how much you agree may depend on how rose-tinted the lenses with which you view of the old internet are; Rob Horning for example claims that the “golden age” of the internet is mischaracterised and social platforms were always a cynical commercially-driven endeavour. While that’s certainly true and we shouldn’t valorise Web 1.0 tech companies simply for being quaint, I do suspect that Horning’s lack of nostalgia here maybe belies a past in which he didn’t participate in deeply earnest online communities the way I did on Facebook or Taylor Lorenz did on Tumblr.
Regardless, the salient point is that posting is so over, and while we still see a degree of posting across Instagram, X and even Tiktok, what I’d call the classical era of posting is in decline, and this shifting relationship to how we create, consume and distribute content is thanks to the collapse of the singular context. I’ve really been enjoying this journey out of the rituals but I hadn’t been able to articulate where I’d come from and where I was going to until I recently found this great clip from from later which nails it (and criminally has only 1k views!):
HOW THE WEB IS CHANGING – YouTube / Invidious version
To summarise: sandwiched between what we could imagine as the Dark forest of the big social networks: "the mainstream web that we all know, the one that's largely an economy of surveillance capitalism, it's Instagram, it's Twitter, it's the internet we all get anxiety about"
and the Cozy web of private networks and group chats: "it's all the stuff that actually makes communities cohere more and more / the richest online activity"
are the Digital gardens: "at the intersection of a notebook and a blog, where digital gardeners share seeds of thoughts to be cultivated in public"(source)
I think we can broaden what counts as a digital garden a little1, but that’s where I’ve found myself recently, and I imagine you have too.
So, this is why I’m emailing you: because I’m only investing in spaces that empower us to meaningfully and independently engage with the content and each other.
Email is appealing to me, not for any nostalgia or anemoia (I’m not that old) but because it leaves how you’d like to digest this information entirely up to you, if you’d even choose to engage with it at all. Read it on your phone or your laptop, copy/paste it to your notes app, pass it on, edit it, delete it: you have your own independent and interopable copy of this text and it’s not locked to any platform or vendor2. Platforms like Tiktok, X or Instagram are frustrating when we want to talk because their goal is primarily just to keep us on the platform.
Imagine if I instead posted this email to Instagram: All the text would need to be embedded into fixed-resolution images or placed in an extremely lengthy image caption, and I couldn’t link to anything (like sources or further reading) outside of instagram. Sharing it outside of Instagram or finding more information would be really difficult because you can’t copy or paste any text. Plus there’s no certainty when I post that you or anyone else would ever see it, and obviously if Meta goes down or deletes my account, it would vanish. There are hacks around some of these problems, and inevitably we use them, but there’s no denying that these platforms are hostile to helping us communicate well in favour of better returns for their shareholders, and our inability to communicate effectively, clearly and with full context is extremely harmful.
Of course, these platforms are often used not because they’re good at communication, but because they hold so much potential for extremely wide distribution. I don’t have anything to say that counters that, because it’s true! Nothing except Tiktok3 or YouTube will get you upwards of a billion views. Platforms like Substack or Patreon or anything on the Fediverse aim to fill this space a bit, and that’s great, but I’m not writing these emails to develop a following4. I’m just writing so we can talk to each other.
So, this is why I’m emailing you!!!!!!!!!!
Have a good weekend! Feel free to reply, reply all, or share. I’ll also echo anything from here on grpahicdeisgn.com.
from Nathan
- For example I’d potentially include a platform like BeReal, at least in its current form. It’s not private, cozy web but through its rise and fall it’s bucked the legacy social media trend by simply not having any design to allow it to rise and rise: intentionally limited engagement, and little capacity to develop a following. Rob Horning, of course, disagrees. One day I will stop following his substack. ↩︎
- You’re probably reading this via a Google or Amazon data server, but you could (if you really wanted) have your own totally independent email server, or you could use a secure email service, the point I’m making is that email affords a lot of independent control to users like us. ↩︎
- This is the most viewed Tiktok in the world and teaches us that a lot of people don’t understand mirrors or image compositing. ↩︎
- Signposting my hypocrisy: I’m crossposting to grpahicdeisgn.com, hosted on my own federated server space with Activitypub integration, which is just an extremely dull way of saying it’s published using a set of standards that means it’s compatible with any other software and any vendor. If they wanted to, any app like Instagram or Threads or Reddit could let you view these posts in your feed. I’m doing this just for fun and prove a concept to be honest, it’s not that deep! Don’t follow me! ↩︎