Well fair reader, if you are still there, I'm sunsetting this little outpost on the internet. It's a funny feeling to look back on it and reflect on when there was an expectation that social media would lead to more voices having more conversations, before hashtags were weaponized and/or commercialized.
I miss the free flowing days of early web 2.0, when I saw places all over the world on Flickr and polished my own skills as a photographer learning to use a digital camera. I miss websites like Wonkette and Gawker and blogs like The Toast. Twitter is permanently broken--at one time you could actually use it to find out news in real time but not anymore.
I'm a little sad about how fast the experiment went downhill, and how the battleground for free speech that is meaningful and thoughtful simply became a petrie dish of mayhem. And guess what, in the "we've learned nothing" category all cautions that might have been observed are being tossed jubilantly out virtual windows as the idea that "artificial intelligence" is going to be The Next Big Thing.
Sure, the Internet isn't all bad. Many publicly accessible databases, easy access to maps, still some free sites where creative people might plant a digital flag and have their work noticed. I remember the days when searching another library's catalog was through a clunky green type on black screen telnet protocol. Now I can search worldcat whenever I like. (Yes, that's a lot, you can even search the BnF catalog and the Met's collection, etc).
But all good things must come to a close. Even now, I'm going through the hundreds of photos in my first flickr account, deciding which ones will stay with me in a printed version in a little book I'm making for myself. It has taken a while to even start going through this archive as the upload process back in the day prompted meta data and made it easy to create albums. All the memories back to 2009, when I first fell in love with California farmers' markets, photos of my precious soul dog, Joe, and joyful pictures of marrying my love, Dan. Memories of trips, photos of beautiful places...I'm lucky to have such a collection to review.
I'm finding satisfaction in the curation now. It is very easy in the part of the world I live in simply to amass and collect and never sort or organize, although given the number of how to books on organizing and palaces such as Container Store you'd we'd all have it together by now.
I guess that's my overall feeling about the internet--I thought we'd recover from the "move fast and break things" mentality that made a select set very wealthy. Then again, I don't understand how institutions like Goldman Sachs and Wells Fargo still exist after lengthy lawsuits against their practices, much less the growth of virulent racism and restrictions on women's freedom of reproductive autonomy.
So, I'm closing up shop for now, and obviously writing myself the permission slip to do so. I'll leave this little outpost up as a digital remnant 'til someone at the big G realizes there are still a lot of old blogs taking up file storage.
If you need to cheer up a little, listen to Johnny Cash's version of We'll Meet Again. Here's a verse to close out this entry, and possibly this blog:
"We'll meet again
Don't know where
Don't know when
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