There is a specific, modern anxiety that is difficult to name. It is not the dread of a specific event, but a low-grade, constant hum of disconnection. It’s the feeling of living in a world that is eerily frictionless, a world that reflects your own thoughts back at you with placid, unwavering agreement. It is the anxiety of a consensus of one; the quiet, digital loneliness of being the only person in your own universe.
When I decided to launch my newest online publication — David Boles Bells — I knew I wanted a logo that included a Kettlebell. Unfortunately, I am not a great digital artist, and so my first stop to find some design help was Adobe Stock. I found this logo that I really loved. I purchased a license, and then discovered I had no idea how to edit the image in Adobe Illustrator to personalize the logo to BolesBells.com. I did a little research to see if I could locate the artist who originally designed the logo I purchased to see if I could hire that artist to design a whole new logo for Boles Bells.
It isn’t often you can take a trip through a wormhole, and survive, tumbling back in time, from whence you began, and then arrive back in the future from which there is no escape; and so I have described my recent journey tripping through the online archives of — The Scotia Register — a village newspaper that was published weekly, on Thursdays, in Scotia, Nebraska (population 291) from 1895 to 2003. Paging back through The Scotia Register archives was like being watched and recorded, from afar, years ago, with the perspective, and perception, of the now.
It’s tax season! Beware the Ides of February! Yesterday, Janna and I were disappointed to learn someone filed a tax return in our name. We discovered this identity theft when we diligently filed our 2015 taxes online via TurboTax and quickly learned our returns had not only been rejected by the IRS, but also by the New York and New Jersey tax offices! I later learned if the Feds reject your return, the States, in turn, will automatically reject your return, too. That’s good there’s some sort of communal, emergency, trigger that is in place for this homegrown brand of unsophisticated, commonplace, thievery.
Continue reading → Beware the Ides of February: Your Identity Has Been Stolen!
Living and working on the internet provides many interesting and resistive conundrums. You want to share information, and learn things, and try to propagate knowledge forward with some semblance of permanency and purpose; but there are always — The Others — also online, who appear to live to thwart any attempt at compulsive fact collecting. Sure, we all know the Comments Troll — but there are other ugly demons that abound, just waiting to leap at you and waste all your time.
Continue reading → The Internet Others and the Art of Never Not Always Responding
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