The Page Isn’t Dead, Your Attention Is Under Siege

Every few years we are invited to attend the same funeral. Someone declares that nobody reads anymore, that the printed page is finished, that books are an aging technology destined to become a museum object while the living culture migrates to earbuds and short video. It is a tempting story because it flatters our sense that we are witnessing a clean break with the past, a decisive turn of the wheel.

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The Curated Self as the New Delusion

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.

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Boles.xyz, Post.News and Pixelfed Are the New Social Media

I finally took steps to distance myself from three moldy, overdead, social media services. I deactivated my verified Facebook business page with 17,000 followers. I also deactivated my Instagram account. I made my verified, 47,000 follower, Twitter account, private. I let go of those social media services because all three have lost the common touch. They’re run by robots, mastered by intentional cruelty, subjected to bad human policy decisions, bothered by awful automation and, in one case, a sort of madman rules the nest. Today, none of those ideations of those social media services are what they were when they started, and I made the decision to no longer be a part of the “creative community”  that makes content for those services just so mega media can sell advertising off our hard work. Enough!



Continue reading → Boles.xyz, Post.News and Pixelfed Are the New Social Media