As I stayed up late last night, rapidly refreshing the news about the minority-elected president of a broken country and his attempt to perpetuate his regime by blocking the peaceful transfer of power, I realised that my relationship with the internet is broken.
I was using Facebook and Twitter like an addict, frequently refreshing, looking for opportunities to drop hot takes, seeing what reactions I got. It’s not healthy, and it’s not helpful. Such “engagement”, even though it breaks democracy and society, is exactly what these companies need and the opposite of what I need.
This is also somewhat motivated by the recent explosion of “cancel culture”, which I think is poorly handled by both sides of the debate. It’s exhausting to constantly be barraged with opinions on whether some person deserves my opprobrium for what they said about tin openers, and whether they should be allowed on the internet. Society and the people in it didn’t develop to have a single, global conversation, and that conversation is not high quality.
I’m going to take a break. I’m not deleting my accounts because, as the late Sean Connery was once told, never say “Never Again”, but I’m logging out and removing the apps. I still want to hear from people, talk to people, and be on the internet, including publicly. But my public presentation on the internet will be much more intentional, and my conversations will be more conversational, and limited.
Where to find me.
Well, here, obviously. This is my “opinions on general things” site. As you can see, there’s not much here yet. That’s because if you stop to think whether something’s worth saying to the whole planet, the answer is probably no.
I write and record podcasts where I try to help people make high-quality software faster and easier. Those are both at sicpers.info. I also co-write De Programmatica Ipsum, a monthly magazine on software and the people who make it, with Adrian.
Steven Baker and I stream our journey to become Amiga programmers over at Dos Amigans.
I used to run Left in Warwick, a socialist book club for people in Warwickshire. That didn’t survive lockdown and the move to online meetings, but I’m interested in starting it back up so if you’re interested, please send me an email (see below).
Where to be us.
For Amiga things, I tend to lurk on the English Amiga Board and the AROS Exec forum. I’m also on AmigaBill’s and Vampire’s Discord servers.
The other parts of my social life don’t really have good online identities, except perhaps the social media sites, so get in contact if there’s a good forum, IRC channel, matrix server, or whatever I should check in with.
How to talk 1:1.
You can send me email! You can also find me on most of the messaging things: FB Messenger, WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, FaceTime. If you don’t know my identity on one of those things, start by sending me email.