Showing posts with label Scrimshaw. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Scrimshaw. Show all posts

Tuesday, April 04, 2023

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 By the time you finish calculating the metaphor, so massive and abstract so as to be meaningless, it’s out of date.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. 

Saturday, July 02, 2022

Canada Day Part Deux

Here, I think, is the last and best word on the Convoy, from Scrimshaw tonight:  Scrimshaw writes:
...Convoy 2.0 was neither small enough to be safely ignored nor big enough to constitute a true populist movement, and this is where the Conservative Party, and the broader conservative movement, is stuck.
... the broader conservative movement is hanging together by a thread right now, and the Convoy is but the latest example of it. 
This is not a populist uprising designed to take power back from a tyrannical leader, it’s a fascist attempt to depose a Prime Minister they don’t like that has been normalized – by the press, by Bergen, by Poilievre, and by the press once again – as a movement for “freedom” and over vague shit. It’s a disgrace that it’s being reported this way, but let’s be clear about what this movement really is. It’s antithetical to actual, small c conservatism, because it is about a violation of our most sacred freedom – the freedom to be represented by the government of our choice.
And, of course, The Beaverton: Meanwhile, this is what its all about: Speaking of Canada Day: