On microblogging

I cast big spells. On this website, at least.

But in much of my day-to-day work involves cantrips. Light, quick, easy, low-level spells; situational and effectively instinctual. And I want to do more of that here, too.

Because I just came across this neat online book by Manton Reece on ‘Indie Microblogging’—and it’s re-awakened a stirring in me.

A microblog post is to a regular blog post as a cantrip is to a spell.

I’ll always love and prioritise long-form musing/writing. Big spells. But I’d like to get better at smaller spells.

Because whenever I begin to write to you—whenever I begin to arrange the glyph-symbols (letters) that spell the words that (hopefully) evoke the meaning I seek to convey, I tend to go quite deep.[^ Although it never feels deep enough.] What starts with an intention to simply ‘share a link’[^ As is the case with this post.] will swiftly descend/devolve into a much longer-than-intended musing. Soon I’ll find myself pursuing as many chthonic/cthulonic/tentacular leak-tendrils as I can.[^ I say cthulonic here as a clumsy neologism, inspired by Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. And now for a fantastic excerpt from this wondrous site. ‘According to the cultural and literary scholar Julia Grillmayr, Haraway's Chthulu is not directly named after H.P. Lovecraft's horror creature, but after a Californian spider, Pimoa cthulhu. Analogous to Lovecraft's creatures, the spider carries in its name a reference to the chthonic. Chthonic are earth goddesses or forces of the Earth worshipped by animistic and pantheistic faiths. Haraway writes that she is adjusting “taxonomic spelling”, from cthulhu to chthulu, creating “a name for an otherwise, for an otherwise that was, still is, and might be”: the Chthulucene’.] It fascinates me—and therein lies the peril.

I mean, the musings I share with you are good and wonderful—I delight in them, too. But indulgently loquacious long-form has become all-too-familiar a pattern for me—I need to practice short-form, too.

Reading the microblog book reminded me of this.

The generosity of online books

It also reminded me of the “definitive guide for escaping social media (and joining the indie web).” This then reminded me of other online books I love, such as “Practical Typography” by Matthew Butterick.[^ I own several of Butterick’s fonts, exquisite.] I’ve also long appreciated the hyperblogs by David Chapman—“Metarationality”, “Meaningness”, and “Vividness.” I was actually quite surprised when he moved his writing over to substack. But, pragmatically, it makes sense.

As you know, I still yearn for a web worth belonging to. It still baffles me how so many folk have exited old centralised (web2) platforms because of how enshittified they have become—only to move to a newer (web2.5) centralised platform (substack) that already exhibit some of the same symptoms.

“What are we left with then?” Isabelle Roughol asks in her post We’ve been thinking about Substack all wrong. “A walled garden strategy, a claim to network effects real or imagined, a follow ecosystem, an algorithmic feed, unreliable metrics, the artificial inflation of engagement on new products, the invisibilisation of publisher brands, the capture of the audience relationship, blitzscale growth to satisfy venture capital investors, big promises to early adopters followed by progressive enshittification, controversial moderation decisions... oh wait, it's like every social network ever built.”

Ha! But—having said that, I am now tentatively lukewarming back to an acceptance of the role that centralised platforms play. Even though I still think of them as shopping malls, which despite being one of the last places I would want to ‘hang out’, seems to be where many of my friends are.

And besides—it may well be too many of us have retreated too far into our cozyweb nooks. [^ As I shared in my previous musing.]

Back to the trouble?

I can feel the pull of the network-effects of substack. I love the people I read there; I resent the pull. Or no, maybe that’s not it. I just feel like I’m entering a dungeon. There are so many folks in this dungeon, and they all seem to be having a great time. I want to wave my hands and say “It’s a trap!”—a trap with downlights and too many people—but: I am still also having a relatively okay time.

And when substack recently spoke out in defence of press freedom after a fellow Melbourne-based writer was detained, interrogated, and sent back to Australia by US border agents in response to articles he wrote about anti-genocide protests at Columbia University, I felt glad that the platform seemingly supports independent journalism.

I remain suspicious, but for now: somewhat mollified.

Besides, so many folks[^ Too many!] smarter and wiser than I seem to be okay with it all. Including Carole Cadwalladr—the very person speaking out against ‘the broligarchy.’ The same person who inspired much of the museletter I wrote about ‘a web worth belonging to.’

So... perhaps it’s just me and my purity complex?

My heart still believes in an open, independent web. But I’m also awakening to the realisation that I have some oscillating to do.

Such is the role of us edge dwellers.[^ Not edgelords, no. Well, maybe. But the warm, mysterious and wholesome kind—not kind who ‘studied the blade.’] It is not in my nature to situate myself in the centre; I do my best work in the periphery; the penumbra.[^ I think I just really love saying that word, and all things umbra.] But that’s not to say I can’t occasionally visit the centre.

And perhaps this is true of you too?

Or perhaps it is the flip-side? Mayhaps you could spend more time questing beyond the walled garden, and amidst the wilder forest?

The freshest, darkest & most dubious

There’s a line I have long used when promoting the foxwizard podcast—

Together we shall foray heartily through complexity, ambiguity, paradox and doubt—so as to obtain the freshest, darkest and most dubious fruits of ‘wisdom’ for our combined edification and delight.

The thing is, the freshest, darkest and most dubious fruits of wisdom are rarely mass-produced. Nor are they found in the supermarket. Not the best stuff.

The best stuff is rare, not-yet-popular and thus not-so-easily-found. They haven’t been genetically modified and commodified, yet.

I don’t want to keep banging on about substack whilst I wrest with how to best show up in our knowledge commons. But I shall, for just a little more.

The conundrum and delight that substack presents is that it’s so easy (and ‘free’) to spin up your own, uh, ‘thing’.[^ Don’t-call-it-a-substack.] This means that poets, artists, writers, philosophers, and more—those of us who typically live in the precariat—can now find a home for their thoughts, without the learning curve of the independent web, or the ongoing expense of ghost. And these folks often have the best thoughts. Sometimes, anyway.

Which is vexatious because, as Nolan Yuma writes—

“Substack pays creators to join, offering advances and visibility boosts to big names. The biggest names? Funded. Promoted. Algorithmically elevated. The rest of us? Left to cross-promote and grind while money funnels into the hands of those who already have it as it supposedly ‘trickles down’ to the rest of us. Sound familiar?”

[...]

“Even us most radical egalitarians are human and succumb to the temptation of right-wing-billionaire-piece-of-shit-venture-capitalist-backed platforms as long as it helps our bottom line.”

Speaking of radical egalitarians succumbing, John Anthony and I will likely move the Kindred Spirits podcast episodes to substack. Mostly because: it’s easier? It feels like I am bruising a value of mine here, but I’m also trying to be pragmatic. The world’s messy, and I’ve had purity in obscurity for half a decade now.

My work demands that I attend to wretched web2 platforms—the wax museum of hollowed souls that is LinkedIn, and the intoxicatingly addictive drug that is Instagram. And now, probably, I will also spend a bit more time substack.[^ Just recently I connected in the comments to Gabrielle Feather on substack—a kindred spirit bringing wholesome and much needed insight.] Maybe.

But if I were to recommend fellow questers the sources within which to find the freshest,[^ Freshness is good. When you’ve navigated the noösphere as a wizard, you begin to recognise pattern and echo. But when someone brings something fresh—either novelty or nuance—something awakens in me. It’s enlivening.] darkest[^ Fruits that have ripened in the sun are often darker, and all the richer/sweeter for it.] and most dubious[^ Dubious because it needs to be baffling; at least initially. Genuine ‘thought leadership’ is suspect and counter-intuitive to conventional narratives. If this is not the case—if it has immediate face validity—it is unlikely to be thought leadership. Of course, some overtly heretical ideas will feel resonant and true—even if to the mind they seem wrong. The best provocations embeckon a contending-with.] fruits of ‘wisdom’, it would look something like this:

Find the writers in the wilds. Seek not those with the largest followings, nor the ones who sport growth-hacky vibes, or the metallic twang of the artificially intelligent. Support the independent and emergent writers, poets, and artists. The earnest explorers amongst us. Be guided by your own sense of intuition and taste. Ignore all metrics. Trust in resonance.

And so, if I am to contend with web2 and web2.5 platforms, it will only be tentatively. My heart lives in the wilds of the open web.

Warmening up the dark forest

In the fantastic essay Against The Dark Forest, Erin Kissane makes a case that we don’t abandon the social web. This has informed a large part of my grapplings.

“The social internet should be a forest—not The Dark Forest, but something much more like a real one: Interconnected from the densely mycelial underground to light-filtering overstory but also offering infinite niches and multi-scale zones of sheltered exchange and play. Deeply human in the way that real forests are the result of human and other-than-human collaboration running back into unrecorded time. Balanced, neither extracting too much from its component organisms nor pretending that a pantomime of a return to a pristine and ungoverned state will solve any problems at all. (Predation is inevitable in any system, but a working ecosystem starves out the ones who overfeed and provides cover for growth and for the long, continuous experiment of evolutionary change.)

The obstacles to these life-sustaining internet forests are fundamentally the same forces that threaten the real forests and our whole living world: unbounded extraction; unaccountable leadership; societal refusal to take on the responsibilities of governing our increasingly complex commons, instead of burying them deeper and deeper in pretenses to action.

I no longer think that it's possible to mount an effective defense of the physical world—and of each other, in our fleshy vulnerability—without unfucking our networks. I find this both terrifying and clarifying.”

Terrifying and clarifying, indeed.

Further, Erin writes—

“The public social internet is worth designing and governing in a way that demonstrates less than total amnesia about the history of human civilizations and the ways we’ve learned to be together without killing each other. For people with the ability and willingness to work on network problems, the real choice isn't between staying on the wasteland surfaces of the internet and going underground, but between making safer and better places for human sociability and not doing that.”

I hope to do just that. This seems to be congruent with co-creating a world more curious and kind.

Entangled & complicit

And so, here we are, entangled, confused, and right in the thick of it. I realise just now that I am, once again, circling around the exact same themes I wrote of just three months ago. Am I this boring and predictable?

Previously, I wrote:

“I have to sit with myself a little longer in order to figure out how best to play this. I am, after all, still a mercenary wizard. Complicit yet conflicted. I need to be visible and ‘top of mind’ for folks seeking my services. I need to make hay where the sun shines. Which means: I still need my web2 (and web2.5) presence. Seemingly.”

In The Ritual of Becoming[^ You’ve heard me say this before, but we are closer now. After half a dozen years as a semi-static ‘online program’, The Ritual of Becoming will soon™️ become revitalised into something more animate that lives here, on foxwizard.com] I have a module on “Patterns of Incongruence”, which is a concept that a daily practice of journaling also helps to surface. The module asks: “Where have you matured beyond the stories you otherwise hold? And: what would a close friend (who knows you very well and has your best interests at heart) say about all of this? What are you pretending to not know?”

These are some of my favourite questions—but I am not used to having them flipped back unto myself.

So, uh—well, reader! You get to witness the inner grapplings of this wizard in his own quest amidst the liminal. Most shapeshifters don’t like being caught in the act of shapeshifting, mid-animorph. Not me, it would seem!

Sometimes I wonder what I am doing. Sharing honest musings when I could be offering sagely and semi-sanctimonious advice, like I used to.

It seems like most folk love an intellectual spanking, and that so many people want to be told what to do. Hence perhaps why so many folks seem to speak in the style of aphorism and advice. Now, I love me a good aphorism. Advice? Not so much.

But the thing is: I value it when folks share their complex grapplings. I love it when folk are in the midst of figuring. And I like those that keep a microblog.

Given my preferences—ought this not be something I exemplify, too?

Let’s see. Thank you for joining me on this meander once more. We’ll do the same again come next season (in three months hence).