If you wanna win me over on something, opening a post with an Ursula K. Le Guin quote will most certainly help:
“We're each of us alone, to be sure. What can you do but hold your hand out in the dark?”
Because of all of this, it felt complicated to extract myself from the only place on the Internet that I had managed to make a home of. It felt complicated because the Internet is real life, and it has been a long time since it wasn't. And I suppose, also, because one of big tech's only consistent cultural behaviours throughout the last 25 years has been it's noxious habit of abandoning, abusing, collapsing or co-opting online places in an effort to satisfy the bottomless appetites of their owners.
...an infrastructure co-opted by an untouchable oligopoly of Ivy League computer science graduates is the antithesis of the potential of a free and open Internet.
There is a special restorative power in recasting Your Friends From The Internet into their personhood. Finding that there are still people thinking about hard things, differently. Understanding that the way that we live together online is just the way that we live together. Finding that the bonds are the same in the signals as they are in the flesh. Where the micro is the macro, this is a vital rediscovery that is key to the optimism required to Build Better Things.
This is an industry packed with sensitive, thoughtful, sharp, talented people who still give a shit about how to make things right. It is also an industry with a strange, hilarious and ridiculous history reflective of a wider, and completely absurd, story of Human Computer Interaction.
The work of forever is in the maintenance, and in the nourishment, and not the draw of novelty. Most overwhelming success is repetition; and every time we have to decide to build something better than we built it before, we bring with it a revitalised and precious cargo of experience, care and righteous energy. There is no reason to call for help; the people who know how to help are already here.
URL: https://terminal.ahumanfuture.co/posts/2025-05-06/the-narrow-road-to-the-deep-north/