Because I have the correct opinions and the right thoughts, I was under the impression that I needed to guard myself constantly against the scourge of nostalgia - the past as a drug, a place that never existed. Except I know perfectly well that it was better. I pay the health care bills for more than thirty people, and that hasn't gotten better.  I've taken a flight.  I used to be able get my children's medicine on time.  Who, precisely, does this abjuration of nostalgia serve? Well, it serves capital. It serves the forces stripmining our society. It's vitally important that we not remember. And so "good people" tell themselves holographically complex lies, because they're so good that being robbed joyfully is core to their identity.

This is Cory Doctorow's philosophy of enshittification, which enunciates a kind of life cycle for companies, which in the current era we may think of as "services," but it's broader than that.  The web was once more useful. I'm not budging on this. I was complaining about Google online once, I had the temerity to, and somebody told me that the reason it works that way is so they can make money. Yeah, no fucking shit. If it had worked this way in the beginning, though it would never have become this Google because we wouldn't have tolerated it. Sometimes, these market actors form actual cartels. But enshittification has well and truly set in, and so most people have no practical choice but to choose something else just as bad. Call it a shadow cartel, organically modeled as its inverse; "you must be this shitty to ride this ride."

Monopoly power in advertising has placed amoral and Darwinian pressures on media, so that concepts like trust or utility have burned away in the atmosphere - and all that's left when it hits the surface is a mottled, black glass slug of engagement. If you want to understand why our media looks this way, imagine that truth was irrelevant and there was good money to be made detonating our society's sensemaking apparatus.

I'll be over at Mork's place this afternoon getting wild and being goofy, and these fully streamed goofs will be available at 1:30pm PST. Because we tend to stream PSVR2 we had to find a way to let both of our voices stream through the PS5 - it requires deep levels of nornish artifice, great works of cable-weaving, but now we're both audible which we think is going to be a boon for stream where we are both talking.

(CW)TB out.