Robin Sloan thinking out loud, poking at a few things around Fraidycat, blogs, the web we miss, Halt and Catch Fire (😍), Joanne McNeil’s new book Lurking, Ellis, and cooking. I’m including it here for the quote below, which I think is an interesting insight. We still have all the tools for the old web, maybe it’s the new presence, this new “mass” that changes things. I’m currently watching Mandalorian and we watched Star Wars VII and VIII recently, so perhaps I can too easily see Facebook, Google, and masses of trolls as this presence, as a looming “Empire” but still, something to ponder.
We didn’t lose anything. Here I am, reading blog posts, getting fired up, typing into a text file that will shortly become a web page. It could be the year 2000. […]
No. I think it’s something else, and “what do I miss” is the wrong question, because the feeling isn’t an absence, but a presence. (It took me a while to figure this out.) One thing Halt and Catch Fire and Lurking have in common, one powerful vibe that binds them, is the depiction of an internet before Google or Facebook. An internet that is all archipelago, no mainland. An internet where you can still get lost.