“I can be very passive, I can be pretty agressive. But I’m never passive-aggressive.” — yours truly
“Poets claim that we recapture for a moment the self that we were long ago when we enter some house or garden in which we used to live in our youth. But these are most hazardous pilgrimages, which end as often in disappointment as in success. It is in ourselves that we should rather seek to find those fixed places, contemporaneous with different years.” — Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time
Existence precedes Essence
Sartre argued that a central proposition of Existentialism is that existence precedes essence, which means that the most important consideration for individuals is that they are individuals—independently acting and responsible, conscious beings (“existence”)—rather than what labels, roles, stereotypes, definitions, or other preconceived categories the individuals fit (“essence”). Wiki Existentialism
Truth always rests with the minority … because the minority is generally formed by those who really have an opinion, while the strength of a majority is illusory, formed by the gangs who have no opinion. –Kierkegaard
Yellow
Everybody’s wearing yellow
The sun doesn’t come here anymore
High Life (from Claire Denis)
One of all time favorite filmmakers. Another masterpiece: Beau Travail (full film)
Writing Trip on the Trans Siberian
https://www.seat61.com/Trans-Siberian.htm
A lifelong dream journey of endless snow. This is happening.
Slow Down
Slow down with the sun
Hold on we’re still young
And I’m thinking of leaving town
Broken looking for love
And you’re making everything hard
How wrong could I be
I’m not that good at following my heart
And I disappoint so easily
The sun went down tonight
And you’re thinking of leaving town
And I’m broken looking for love
You’re making everything hard
Slow down with the sun
Hold on we’re still young
Why this is
Why this is, a sort of manifesto.
Because I’m tired of feeding a meaningless validation based system.
Tired of being at the mercy of Silicon Valley’s business models. Tired of being turned into a product for profit. To anticipate whats the next big thing, what platform will be. I’m just me. As an artist, the tid bits produced are like a window to my soul- my expression, thoughts, opinions- that I won’t give away as a marketing commodity to social media platforms, in exchange for “exposure”. How is this an exchange when constantly prompted to pay for more “exposure”? If you don’t pay (with literal money, figurative “prostitution” or by spending time on the social media platform), you simply aren’t being exposed.
This is an all-in-one Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, [insert hot new social media platform here]. With no likes, thumbs, or even comments enabled. No one may ever come across this free floating atom, but is it any worse than people mindlessly scrolling through feeds looking for funny memes?
We happen to have a gigantic and free www canvas. It once used to be wild, and belong to the people, not corporations. Before social media and platforms started pissing contests to earn its biggest share and rule over it. Lets take it back.
I spend time exploring rabbit holes on the web. I love falling into them and getting lost not knowing where I will resurface from. With new ideas, thoughts and discoveries. I’m thankful for this technology we have been handed in our generation. For someone who loves connecting the dots, to follow signs, it is like chocolate. When I come across a compelling artist, blog or idea, I bookmark it and check back frequently. Its like a chaotic brain map in constant expansion.
That was the role played by library before the web. Then taken over by such medias as radio and TV. But in all of these cases, there was a curated selection made between you and what you could access. What is precious and invaluable about the free web, is the quasi non existence of a curation system. Once you’ve replaced Google with other search engine such as Duck Duck Go of course, we can tele transport into someone else’s world rid of predetermined algorithms. Open Source like WordPress here, allowing anyone to express and contribute to it.
As a music artist, I will extend this thought into the (lack of or) benefits of record labels curation system as well.
But to cut it short, the free web as libraries, don’t aim at “degrading our humanity”. Social Media by design, do.
If you stumble upon this blog, you may or may not enjoy it. I don’t need to know. I love you all, not for reading me, but just for being. Fellow human, maybe our paths would cross one day, we’d have a drink.
Subversion
“The business models of Silicon Valley are controlling our lives and the price of it all is dehumanization. We eagerly signed up for what they were selling, but soon realized that in doing so, we were accidentally degrading our humanity. We can’t let it subvert our human urge to build meaningful and satisfying life. The problem isn’t the technology per say, but the way so many people engage with these tools.”
— Cal Newport, Digital Minimalism
The tables turned
The tables turned
People hurt people
Hate neither side
Love will Decide
Peace out