The emotions of life online

newpublic.substack.com

Robin Sloan:

Obviously, no one does this, I recognize this is a very niche endeavor, but the art and craft of maintaining a homepage, with some of your writing and a page that’s about you and whatever else over time, of course always includes addition and deletion, just like a garden — you’re snipping the dead blooms. I do this a lot. I’ll see something really old on my site, and I go, “you know what, I don’t like this anymore,” and I will delete it.

But that’s care. Both adding things and deleting things. Basically the sense of looking at something and saying, “is this good? Is this right? Can I make it better? What does this need right now?” Those are all expressions of care. And I think both the relentless abandonment of stuff that doesn’t have a billion users by tech companies, and the relentless accretion of garbage on the blockchain, I think they’re both kind of the antithesis, honestly, of care.

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This is a commonplace post — a link to something I've read and found worth keeping, named after the commonplace book tradition of collecting passages and references.

~0.016g CO2 Indie web
Jason Heppler
Jason A. Heppler
Environmental & Digital Historian
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Tack & Ink

Occasional writing on the American West, agricultural history, and political culture.