The Internet Was Good for Me
The internet I grew up with gave me friendship, knowledge, and a conspiracy theory. I still can't turn that gratitude into a verdict on what it became.
Latest
Link: Can You Hum It?
I Hate The Way We Talk Online — Jason Toney
Jason Toney asked a simple question on Threads: without googling, do you know the top songs in your favorite genre right now? Could you hum one? No agenda, no side to pick. What he got back was defensiveness, conspiracy theories about the charts, and people bragging about how far their taste sits from anything popular. The post widens from there into "main character" mentality and algorithm-speak, and ends with a plea I'll happily co-sign: "Have something real to say? Write a blog."
Rudeness online is nothing new, but nobody in those replies seemed to consider that Toney was asking because he wanted to know. When winning is the goal, a sincere question is read as a setup, as bait, the first move in an argument nobody agreed to have.
I don't know what it costs a culture when asking becomes suspicious. But we're clearly running the experiment online.
The First Feed
In 1792, America designed its first information network around an idea: that the system should inform citizens instead of watching them. In modern times, we've been running the experiment in reverse.
Link: The Lost Joy of Music Piracy
An oral history of What.CD, the illegal free-music site with stricter standards than most legal businesses. The pirates ran the tightest ship on the Internet.
Link: Reading Blind
Uncovered.ink — Judge a Book by Its Writing
Try this out. It gives you a single page of a real book. No cover, no title, no author, no genre label, no star average, no "readers also enjoyed." Just the prose. You read the opening, decide whether you'd keep going, and swipe up for the next one. The pages that catch you go on a shelf. There's no account to make and nothing to buy.
It's worth noticing how much apparatus we've bolted onto the simple act of choosing a book. The cover art, the jacket blurb from a more famous writer, the fifteen-second BookTok clip, the four-and-a-half stars from ninety thousand strangers, the store table it was stacked on, the algorithm that surfaced it. Every one of those was added to help answer "is this any good?" without reading a sentence of the actual book.
That's the part of book discovery Uncovered tries to fix. It removes all the marketing, and everything you are told how to feel about the book before you even crack it open. After enough years inside the recommendation economy, I'm not fully sure I could tell the difference between a book I love and a book I was effectively sold. Uncovered is a low-stakes way to find out, which is probably why it's a little addictive.