adriau

Many yearn for the “good old days” of the web. We could have those good old days back — or something even better — and if anything, it would be easier now than it ever was.

The first page of Google results are links to pages that have scraped other pages for information from other pages that have been scraped for information. All the sources seem to link back to one another. There is no origin. The photos on the page look weird. The hands are disfigured. There is no image credit.

A billionaire got mad, bought your favourite social media site and ran it into the ground. A different billionaire got mad, bought the magazine site you liked to read on your lunchbreak and shut it down completely. A third billionaire did what they do best, bought the app you use for networking and sold it off for parts.

I had just switched from Google Drive, and instead of making a new email address, I used an ancient Hotmail account that’s been tied to my Xbox account for over a decade. If you had told me I had photos in that email’s cloud storage, I wouldn’t have believed you. I’d swear up and down I never used cloud storage under that email address. Yet, a day after I updated my subscription, an “On this day” memories alert popped up.

I clicked on it — and, oh my, was that a mistake. Microsoft OneDrive wanted me to remember one of the darkest times of my life by shoving photos of an abusive ex in my face — photos I had forgotten existed.

An up close an personal look into why we should be extremely careful when sharing about ourselves online, no matter how shiny an app or network might be.

Music League makes music social in a way that social media algorithms, ironically, do not

• Admitting that “I don’t know” at least once a day will make you a better person.
• If you think someone is normal, you don’t know them very well. Normalcy is a fiction. Your job is to discover their weird genius.
• There should be at least one thing in your life you enjoy despite being no good at it. This is your play time, which will keep you young. Never apologize for it.
• Never accept a work meeting until you’ve seen the agenda and know what decisions need to be made. If no decisions need to be made, skip the meeting.

The internet has become an extractive and fragile monoculture. But we can revitalize it using lessons learned by ecologists.