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Inspired by: On digital relationships, by Manu Around 2010 I met someone named Yineli on Last.fm through commenting on each others’ profiles. We had very similar music tastes, and she introduced me to Blue Foundation and Portishead. Eventually we moved off talking on Last.fm, and decided to share MP3s in a shared DropBox folder. Once every month or so for about a year we would add some MP3s in a folder, along with a text file with a message to the other about the music we were sharing. ...

Lizards.com People used to use the internet to explore. I used to go on StumbleUpon for hours when I was little, or hop around different pages on Wikipedia. I think the desire to surf the web explains Depths of Wikipedia. When I was maybe six years old, we had a computer room that was a small nook that had a small window overlooking our back yard. It could have been an attic if it was unfinished but it was this cute little place with a desk that wrapped around two of the walls and bookshelf built into the walls. It was really small with vaulted ceilings. Definitely my favorite room of that house. ...

I had a really strange experience when I got on the train a while back. Everyone was on their phone. I don’t mean most people were on their phones, I mean everyone was on their phone. I feel like writing about this at all is beating a dead horse because intuitively everyone seems to know that we’re not using phones in a healthy way. But damn, this seems like it’s getting really bad, right? ...

I’ve seen some people write about their journey learning to code. I thought I’d do the same for myself here. Childhood When I was growing up I had access to a computer from around age 6 I think? It was the family computer, some beige tower with a big CRT monitor. For a while it didn’t have internet access, but I loved poking around in the settings. Growing up I also had Legos, and my parents got me a Lego Mindstorms set. It came with a computer program that you could use to create programs with a visual programming UI and load them onto the device to control the motors, sensors, etc. ...

I’ve been very interested in the idea of digital identity lately. I’ve been experimenting with what this looks like for myself, and I’d like to capture some ideas I have about what this means more broadly. Consider two axes: digital vs material, and identity vs society. My claims are that (1) our current condition blurs each of these lines and (2) their connection is both important and unexplored. Namely: Digital and material society are so intertwined that the fully material is insufficient to describe society more broadly. Our connection to other people (in both small/local/personal and large/global/impersonal) is sufficiently initiated/mediated/sustained by technology that identity itself has a digital component. If we consider our connections to other people as core to who we are, we should start thinking about what the digital component of those connections means for our identity, digital and otherwise. Given that our digital identities are real and important, we should ask: What are they? To answer this, I would ask: ...

I’m thinking about Digital Gardens and alternate forms of social networks lately. I’ve found a couple interesting places (be they blogs, digital gardens, or other digital spaces) I’ve found on the WWW: Gwern.net nLab Manu 32-Bit Cafe Notes ‒ Szymon Kaliski|Szymon Kaliski The Yesterweb The Missing Premise sadgrl.online Tom Critchlow the museum of alexandra The Intersect Robb Knight Scaruffi Teresa Watts