I don’t know how to be on the computer anymore. That is, I don’t know how to be online anymore. Which is to say, I don’t know how to go on the computer and put my thoughts online anymore.
I know that whatever I write, wherever I write it, will be scraped and ingested and incorporated into a dataset without my explicit consent, and a turn of phrase that I once loved and took time out of my limited human life to create and share with you, my beloved reader, could be shat out into another email that hopes to find you well, constructed by some fucking asshole using an LLM.
What are we supposed to do in a world like that? Sentences generated through probability, trite and tired. A mechanical reply emailed to a mechanical reply… back and forth… forever.
Have you ever typed a phrase that you invented into the Google search bar and gotten 0 hits? Just for a moment, you can feel like Shakespeare. You have potentially contributed something new to the human race.
I don’t know how to be on the computer anymore. Now I have emails that I haven’t replied to for years.
I don’t know how I will ever overcome this.
Email used to be for contacting people I love. Today it is for the incessant braying of brands.
If I owe you an email, I’m sorry. I love you and I’m so sorry.
But when I see another 10% off email from some brand that I’ve unsubscribed to over and over and over again bold and sitting in my inbox, among so many others like it, I shut my laptop and just give up on whatever is happening online.
If I owe you an email, let’s talk on the phone instead. I will laugh and take joy in hearing your real, human voice and you in turn will laugh and take joy in hearing mine. Together we will share the things that delight us and no one will try to sell us anything.
I mean it. If I owe you an email, call me.
Nothing has made me believe in the soul more than seeing the things created by an AI.
Something happened to the internet when Twitter died. For me, the disintegration was some sort of fever dream. I had COVID at the time, and memories of the facts remain hazy. Did someone really carry a sink into a building? Did the engineers really get fired based on lines of code written? Did everyone really figure out federation while my brain burned? Inconclusive.
When the fever passed, over a decade’s worth of thriving communities was gone.
Mastodon is not the same as Twitter and Bluesky is not the same and Instagram is not the same and I’m not ever going to join Treads so that is also not the same and Discord is something else entirely.
Twitter was unique.
If you liked someone’s posts on Twitter, nine times out of ten, you would like them even more in real life.
It was cool to go to tweetups and see that the people you interacted with everyday online really were so nice in person!
Just an incredible achievement! A free website where you could joke with your pocket friends from all over the world by sharing the dumbest thoughts possible. And it was fun!
Somehow the people on that website helped me through a career transition. We helped each other during natural disasters in Japan. I checked on people who were having a hard time. In turn, people checked on me. It was a website, but it had real human moments.
Maybe that’s all we can hope for on a website—real human moments.
tl;dr
I don’t know how to go on the computer and put my thoughts online anymore if the interactions are going to become sentences generated through probability… back and forth… forever.
Works of Genius 
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