Not That You Ghosted

A quick programming note: I moved this publication from its previous platform to the open-source, nonprofit-developed Ghost. If I did it right this will be the last time you hear about it, but if my inexpert system administration causes you any difficulties please drop me a line.

I've been trying to part ways with the odious corporations and service providers in my life. Instagram, for instance, was once a fun little time-killer where we traded vacation photos and said things like "Hey you guys look great" or "lol" in exchange for scrolling past the occasional advertisement. Sadly, that business model was deemed unsustainable: our pals and grandmas weren't generating enough content to flood the zone sufficiently. The management could have still hit their metrics if they charged us a few bucks monthly, but instead developed a new model where the customer becomes the product.

We noticed that they were listening to our conversations, and we were annoyed, and then offended when we saw them packaging and commoditizing our laughter. But they also showed us these adorable videos where pit bulls in Halloween costumes play spin the bottle, so we forgot, and all our memberships automatically re-upped themselves in our sleep that night. And now those companies have most of the money in the world, because of the pit bull videos (?) so they bought and ruined all the newspapers. Why, you ask? I guess just because they were there – the same reason why mountain climbers do their thing. Or maybe there just wasn't anything left to buy.

That annoyed us too. The newspapers disappeared and we were like, hey man, I was reading that. So that's when they hit us with the coup de grâce: free shipping. What exactly would we not tolerate for free shipping? We have yet to find the line.

Owning the exsanguinated remains of the media industry proved useful for the new oligarchs. They were able to achieve their long-term political goal: allowing hideous crypto golems to rampage through all of the branches of our various governments, like stunted horses on Viagra and ketamine running through so many hospitals. This came just in time, because the pit bull videos weren't hitting like they used to, and we all forgot that once – when the land was covered by a warm Primeval sea – we had paid for shipping. So to make the lines keep going up they needed to extract all of the resources in the world, like literally draining the lakes and burning the fields where we frolicked as kids, and using that fuel to prop up some truly nasty things, like large language models and concentration camps.

I can't talk about current affairs without sounding hysterical. But if you're even still reading this, maybe you agree that things are frightening right now in a way that seems unique in our lifetimes. It seems like maybe the wheels could actually come off this time. I realize that there have been other times in history when people felt the way I do right now, and that wasn't the end of everything. I’m trying not to obsess about all of this because it makes me miserable and boring, but I’m also convinced that the long, comfy holiday period in which we could ignore all of this is over now. February is a good month to hunker down, focus on our priorities, check in with the girls and the dogs and the parents, and reconsider relationships that aren’t sparking joy, as they say. It feels good to quit things!

I'd love to eschew all the goods and services produced by the reigning American kleptocracy, but some of those memberships are still necessary for dystopian life, so it's a process, and there's plenty of digital methadone out there. Bluesky is fun now, like the good old days of Twitter, though I've never been good at writing for either one. There's an open-source version of Instagram called Pixelfed, but I haven't gotten there yet. And there are several open-source, non-sulfurous newsletter platforms – like this one, and this other one looks nice too, making that other blogging tool as unnecessary as it is intolerable. We can hide out here until the literal vampires atop the food chain turn a rapacious eye in this direction, at least.

Also: some news sources are still functioning, and you should consider subscribing to them! For instance: in happier times Wired Magazine was an industry rag for dildonics salesmen, but now it's been pressed into service as a load-bearing firewall for the republic. And all they want from you is $12/year! At that rate, you can buy gift subscriptions for all your haters, and have enough scratch left over for Flaming Hydra, Hell Gate, Gothamist, and maybe even some newsletters!