Substack Roundup: "Don't Panic"

Before the news became completely dominated by the Orange Turd being hauled into court, I saw some interesting substack columns that are worth sharing.

First, Justin Ling asks us to consider how big is the Internet now, and he says its time to figure out how to recreate it in a more human scale.

The internet is big.

The internet is a really big thing.

If a week’s worth of Youtube videos were put on film reel, laid end-to-end, it would wrap around the world, I don’t know, at least twice. All of the words that get written on Tumblr in a day, if printed out, would fill all the world’s Olympic-sized swimming pools, probably. If you committed all of ChatGPT’s responses to hard drives, it would fill every floor of the Empire State Building, I guess.

We used to love thinking about the internet in these arbitrary physical terms — how many football fields, how many Libraries of Congress — but this is all impossible now. By the time you finish calculating the metaphor, so massive and abstract so as to be meaningless, it’s out of date.

....If the old internet was a series of small outposts in the middle of a barren wasteland, the current internet is a series of giant sprawling mega-malls, then perhaps the next internet is a medium-density city, with strip malls and apartment blocks, marked by plenty of wayfinding and readable maps.

This reminds me so much of The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy:  

So maybe its time to start writing "Don't Panic" in large friendly letters, isn't it.