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Some rando once said "Find something you love to do and you’ll never have to work a day in your life." You'll hear this repeated all the time from thought leaders and life coaches trying to show you how happy they are compared to how miserable you are and that in exchange for a small amount of your hard earned monies, perhaps on a recurring monthly basis, they can guide you and encourage you to find the thing you love to do so you can stop working.

If you've ever talked to me about doing the thing you love as a the way to pay your bills, you know I have many strong opinions on the subject. And admittedly, they are as contradictory as they are many. Very generally I subscribe to the notion that if you want to kill your love for something, the best way to do that is to turn it into your job. I've certainly got all kinds of back story lore about the music industry and art world, both personally and anecdotally, of the business side of things killing the joy and love of it. Maybe killing is too strong of a world, "having a negative impact on" is perhaps more of a balanced way to say it. Point being, you enjoy a thing and you think "wouldn't it be great if I could do this thing all day long?" And then the thing becomes work with expectations and dependencies and bills to pay and deadlines to meet and the stress of it starts to seriously fight with the enjoyment of it. You can imagine how it sucks if it's your hobby that you love and then you stop being able to enjoy it.

The flip side is also true. I'm reminded of Churchill's "democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others" line and the same could be said here. Doing the thing you love is the worst job you could have, except for all the others. If you have to work, as most of us do, it's objectively preferable to work on something (or with people) you enjoy. I think we can all agree going to a job that you hate everyday so you don't starve to death is a less than appealing option. So I understand there's a lot to take into account here and it's not a simple do it / don't do it kind of decision.

Let's remove the issue of needing to pay the bills for a moment and just say it's nice to have things you can do just for fun and with no expectations. Imperfection is fine. Failure is no problem. Deadlines? Whatever. I think a lot of people would call that a hobby, but for me I think of a hobby as something you might do from time to time if you have some extra time. I think there's a different level above that which "creatives" probably understand where there's a thing you have to do, just because it keeps you sane. It's not about doing it for other people, it's just a thing you do for yourself and it keeps you head in balance. For some people that might be running, or painting, or masturbating, or whatever. For me that's writing, which I guess you could argue is a form of masturbation but that's a whole other therapy session which we don't have time for right now.

I write primarily for myself, to help me sort my thoughts. I've never been able to keep a diary or maintain a journal, I don't know there's something about putting ideas into the world which forces me to try and refine my thinking and focus my position on something. I'm not always successful, but when I try to do that in a private forum I can never turn the scattered bits in my head into something cohesive and understandable. I can't always do that when I write in public either, but I try and I'm ok with at least trying. This goes back to my early days of zines and such, knowing there's a point where it's going to get distributed to the world is a forcing function. I think that's part of why I instantly got blogging before we called it blogging in the 90's. Writing online so anyone could read it just work for me.

That's not to say I don't enjoy and appreciate the opportunities I've had to get paid to write something, I absolutely do and I'm deeply thankful to the friends and believers who have on occasion opened those doors for me. I just know I couldn't write as my primary day job because that turn a thing that I do for me with no pressure into something I had to do for others with a bunch of pressure, and then I'd lose the thing I do that keeps me sane. I'm not taking a new position here, the world is full of countless artists and musicians who detest the "sales" side of their work because it turns this powerful creative outlet for them into something else. The list of amazing bands that have broken up over disagreements around business decisions is horrifically epic.

Web3, for all my love of it, has a really bad problem with this because at this point there's still such a tight interaction between the technology and the finance, that you have financial speculators and technology experimenters sharing space, and often it's not clear who is who, and easy to assume the other people in the room with you are there for the same reason. This is really hard for artists who often have speculators demanding they do something to raise the floor price of their collection, so that people can sell it for a profit. I've written a lot about that in the past so I won't repeat myself too much here beyond saying fuck those people. Obviously if you buy something and then later decide you don't want it or need to sell it, it's lovely if you can sell it at a profit, but that's not a guarantee nor is it the artists responsibility. An artists job is to make art. What the market does with it later is someone else's problem.

But in web3 theres a lot of conflation and confusion around that, and I know many artists who found the space exciting, tried to do something in it and basically got chased away by randos attacking them for the value of their work not 10x-ing over night. Many such cases. I know artists who continue to mint work because they deeply believe in the technology, but no longer sell any of it publicly because they don't want to get mixed up in that speculation and pressure to regularly raise prices. I don't blame them honestly.

Where am I heading with all this? Longtime readers will remember the early days of The Crowd on Tinyletter. It worked, but the business model for Tinyletter of just letting authors like me use their system for free was not sustainable. I get it. I started this before the new wave of newsletters was a thing. When I had to look for a new home for it, the options were slim because new upstarts like Substack were convincing authors to monetize their newsletters and taking a cut of those sales rather than charging for the service. More sustainable that "just let people use things for free" for sure, but I knew I didn't want to go anywhere near that for myself. I didn't want the pressure of adding subscription layers, which would come with expectations from subscribers. I get why it works for other people, and it's awesome some people make their living off it, but it would change the thing I'm trying to do, and kill the thing I love about it. For me.

I eventually landed with Paragraph for a number of reasons, not the least of which was that I wouldn't be locked in, and there was a bit of decentralization to the framework at least. Building on web3 foundation is powerful and even if on the front end readers never saw any of that, I was glad it was there just in case. Over the years I've thought about token gating something or offering something to subscribers, but my experiences elsewhere always helped me decide against it. This is just for me, for writing, and I'm delighted that you - dear reader - have joined me on the adventure. But make no mistake, I write for myself first and foremost.

Recently Paragraph announced Writer Coins. I was pretty negative on it right away. I won't get into explaining all the mechanics, but it basically turns every publication into a memecoin, allocating a bunch to the writer and letting them airdrop a bunch to their subscribers. Since the announcement a number of people I know who also use Paragraph have embraced Coins and done airdrops and then had to spend time apologizing to people who didn't get the airdrop or who didn't as much of the airdrop as they thought they would or that value of the airdrop they got went down when other people who got the airdrop sold it. Etc. I've also seen people say that now that this coin is attached to their publication they feel the need to write more often, to justify it, and in most of the those cases the quality has dropped. It's not surprising, writing because you have something to say is different than writing because you think you are supposed to write something and want to be able to say you wrote something. Of course it gets billed as a way for writers to reward their subscribers and for subscribers to support writers, but for everyone except the top most popular people it doesn't play out that way.

Since then I've also gotten a bunch of new subscribers, almost all of whom have wallets connected to their accounts. And I've gotten random messages from people asking me if they missed the airdrop, or when I'm planning to do it, or if I took a snapshot already. So these are not people who subscribed to The Crowd because they were curious what I'd spend 100 paragraphs rambling about, but people who were airdrop farming and just hoping to have someone through free money at them. These are 100% positively also the same people who would complain the minute after they got an airdrop that it wasn't quadrupling in value every 10 minutes.

This is a very long winded way of saying that I will not be doing a Writers Coin, and have already started the process of moving off Paragraph. I don't want to pick a fight and I get that different people have different motivations and companies need to find things to be sustainable, but it's just not my jam, not for me, and I don't want the main place I put this stuff to have the baggage or pressure or expectations. I don't want to answer questions about it every day. I don't want to meet people in public and have them tell me they subscribe to The Crowd and how great it would be if I dropped a coin. I just don't. No thanks.

As always I hope the migration will be seamless, and I'll talk more about it when I officially throw the switch but I'm pretty happy with the new plan, and there may actually be a few new options. No one should just stop getting the letter, it's possible some people might get dups. We'll see. More in a bit. Anyway, as always if you are still here I appreciate it. The adventure continues.

-s

After our prop corpse viewing we made our way back to the food truck and it had been about 10 minutes. There was a woman and her friend ordering food and a few people standing around waiting for their orders. The woman ordering was white, blonde, probably in her mid-late 60's, very nicely dressed, hair done, wearing a selection of tasteful but chunky golden jewelry. Her friend was similar aged, dark hair but with a more European vibe. If that makes sense. Anyway, she finished her order and they ask for a name for the order and she says "Karen."

The chef, who has continued to be chatty and friendly with everyone looks up at her and says "Can I ask you a question... with that name do you feel the need to be extra awesome to everyone all the time to compensate, or you know, take it back?"

I assume 99% of Karens out there in the world would have laughed, said yes, and that would have been that. But that would not have inspired this post, so you already know that's not what happens next. Here's how it goes:

Karen respond "What do you mean?"

Chef: "Well you know, Karen."

Karen: "No?"

Chef: "The meme?"

Karen: "Oh is that still a thing? No, I didn't even think about it, it'll probably just go away."

Chef: "It's not going away... it's been like 5 years already, that one is locked in"

Karen: "5 years? I only heard about it a few months ago, I thought it was new."

Chef: "It's not new at all, it's been around for a while"

Karen: "Oh, well why is it Karen? Can't they just change it to Tina or something else? I don't understand why it's attached to Karen?"

Friend: "Oh it's that video, you know, from the park"

Karen: "What video?"

Chef: "You haven't seen the dog walking Karen video?"

Karen: "No, why does that matter?"

Chef: "That's where it all started! That's the original Karen!"

The Chef goes on to explain what "the video" is - tells the story of this blonde woman in Toronto with her dog off leash at the park, when a black guy walks up and tells her that it's not an off leash park and asks her to put her dog on a leash, at which point she flips out and calls the cops. For the meme historians, yes he's gotten a few details wrong and that may or may not be the start of it all, but he was referring to the Amy Cooper / Central Park / Birdwatching event which you can read all about but basically this bird watcher told this woman that her dog wasn't supposed to be off leash chasing the birds and she went ballistic and said she was going to tell the cops an "African American man was chasing her and threatening her life." The video of course shows that wasn't the case at all.

We could spend all day on this but the thing that made this such a big deal was that 1) She was in the wrong to begin with, 2) the guy was not aggressive at all, and 3) telling cops in the US that a black man is threatening someone's life is a great way to get someone killed. If you were alive and conscious when this happened you certainly remember it because it was everywhere, anyway the Chef retells the story and says that the woman's name was Karen and that's how it started. (Her name was Amy, not Karen, but whatever).

Again, at this point 99% of people having heard the story would have laughed, said wow what a story, and that would have been that. But that would not have been post worthy, so you already know that's not what happens next...

Karen: "Well was he threatening her?"

Chef: "... uh, no, he told her that her dog was supposed to be on a leash"

Karen: "Was it bothering anyone though, why does it matter if it was on a leash or not"

Chef: "It was chasing the birds and it wasn't an off leash park"

Karen: "Well I don't know, that doesn't sound right. Was he scary looking, people don't just call the cops because someone asks them to put their dog on a leash."

Friend: "That's the whole point, no one would normally do that but this Karen lady did and so it became a meme"

Chef: "Exactly, she was acting crazy and it's on video. And then she got fired and charged with making a fake 911 call, it was a big thing."

Karen: "Well I don't know, sounds like we don't have the full story."

Chef: "Oh we have the full story aright, everyone has it. She's gonna have to deal with that for the rest of her life."

Karen: "Well, I don't know anything about it, but it sounds like you don't know her side of the story."

So at this point everyone around is watching because this Karen is defending this indefensible situation, which she admittedly doesn't know anything about, simply because (she thinks) the perpetrator of the story is named Karen and therefor must be the victim. She want's Karen to get her fair shake. Again, this could have ended here, but no...

Friend: "Well it's not going away, maybe you can pronounce your name differently. How about Corine? That sounds nice."

Karen: "No... oh maybe Koran! (Quran). Then no one could say anything to me because I'd tell them it's a religious name!"

Friend: "Oh yeah, you might actually get some extra perks with that!"

Chef: "... um, uh.. yeah, ok... anyway, who's order is this? Yours, ok here you go"

The Chef hands the box to a guy standing there and then as the guy walks away he double takes and realizes he gave the guy the wrong order. "Damn, that was a large, I think that guy wanted a small"

Other Guy: "yeah that large was mine I think"

Chef: "Aw crap, my mistake, I got to talkin' and mixed up who was next, let me get that for you real quick"

Karen: "We've been waiting a while too"

Now, let me remind you that we ordered, were told it was a 10 minute wait, left, came back and Karen was just ordering when we walked up. She'd been waiting as long as the conversation she just had, but 100% of the other people around had been waiting longer.

Chef: "Right, coming up, let me just get this guys first"

Karen: "Was he before us?"

Other Guy: "Yeah, I was waiting here for a while"

Karen: "We've been waiting for a while too"

Chef: "Don't worry, I got everyone covered, sorry for that mix up a moment ago, I'll get it all squared!"

Karen: "Thank you"

Other Guy: "No worries"

Chef, to assistant: "Where is Karen on that list?"

Karen: "It's pronounced Koran, and we're next"

She's deadpan here, doesn't seem to be amused or joking. Just staring at the Chef. Chef doesn't really know how to process this. He looks at the Other Guy. Other Guy shrugs, also unclear about what the hell is going on. Karen just stares. Chef says, "Ok, Ok, hang on." Then finishes up and hands the order to Karen, who snatches it and walks off immediately.

Other Guy: "Wow"

Chef: "Wow"

Chef, to assistant, looking at the list: "Terry? Who's Terry?"

Assistant: "Um..."

Me: "You mean Tara? That's us."

Chef: "Tara? It's says Terry"

Assistant: "Ooops"

Chef: "You've been waiting a while right?"

Me: "Longer than Karen"

Chef: "Aw Crap, I think I gave yours to her, hang on."

Other Guy: "Is mine on that list still too?"

Eventually the Other Guy got his order, then we got ours. Which was mediocre at best, but we were hungry and plowed through it and got reenergized to continue our adventure soaking up all the culture the city had to offer.

Welcome to another episode of I-have-so-much-to-say-that-I-don't-know-where-to-start-so-I-don't-start-which-leads-to-even-more-to-say-and-even-more-backlog-and-i-desperately-want-to-find-a-better-way-to-process-it. It's funny how the "tools" that I previously relied on to help me with this, tech enabled mental vomit processing and distribution, kept "getting better" which ended up making them less functional and now I spend untold hours lamenting about things that were and why the now isn't. It's great. I hate it.

Many times in the last few months I've seen a comment which reminded me of something I wrote and I wanted to reference, in my head thinking I probably wrote a useful article or maybe a timely blog post about it, but upon further investigation realized that no, I only wrote a thread on some social media site about it, likely because I was feeling that when I wrote useful articles or timely blog posts no one read them. It's a funny thing, that. This is of course runs headlong into the other thing about which social media site you can or can't use today, because who owns it or who frequents it or who said what about it and if that directly signals something to people about anyone else using it.

I've come to terms with the fact that the Twitter I loved is dead, and will never return. I'm also very comfortable stating that X sucks and both enables/facilitates all kinds of bullshit. But there's also an artist community there which isn't anywhere else, and that complicates things. I spent many years screaming at people using Facebook for sensitive discussions and activist planning to go somewhere else, as that was the very worst place they could be having those conversations, and they all told me they would but the people they needed to talk to were only there. I thought that was bullshit at the time, but now I kind of weirdly understand it. That doesn't mean I'm comfortable or at peace with it.

I might as well take responsibility here that my tendency to add rambling preambles to everything almost certainly cuts down on the number of people willing to push past my navel gazing to get to what I'm actually trying to talk about. If you are still here and haven't deleted this or started looking for the unsubscribe button, that's you. Thanks.

One of my favorite things to do when I have the opportunity is scan people's bookshelves to see if they have something I've missed and should check out. Recently I was delighted to spot a copy of "Internet Art: The Online Clash of Culture and Commerce" a 2003 book by Julian Stallabrass which I'd never heard of but rushed to buy immediately. In my current circles of web3 & digital art this idea of a "clash of culture and commerce" feels like an incredibly current topic, and while I'm old and fought my way though the dot com and web 2.0 clashes of culture and commerce I'm always surprised by people talking about the current thing like it's the first time these questions have come up. So a 2003 book on the subject, which places it firmly before so many of the modern struggles absolutely seemed like something I needed to read.

And while the topic itself is worth a lot of discussion, the book kicks off with reference to one of the pioneers of what was then called net.art and I was delighted to see that jodi.com was still online, because of course I immediately checked. Of course, if you just clicked that link and didn't know what to expect you might argue about what "still online" means. For the newcomers, JODI is Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans - two European internet native artists who very very early on (their site launched in 1995) made the conscious decision not to use the web to show off their art, but to make the web itself their art. It became the medium, and it broke people's brains in the process.

Having your brain broken is still a delightful experience and I encourage everyone to find situations where it happens as often as possible. If you are like me, you'll find it inspiring and it makes you start thinking about what cool shit you can do too.

For better or worse I’ve always cared more about doing cool shit than making money. Of course sometimes (most times) the money is required for the cool shit, but that was always a means to an end, not the outcome. You could argue that’s worked both for and against me, and I could argue both positions myself as well. The ideal of course is making money doing cool shit, but the reality is those don’t always line up so perfectly. As I approach my 51st birthday and realizing I’m now very likely closer to death than birth, I’ve been thinking about this and wondering how people will think of me one day when I’m no longer around and of all the options, one of the most appealing to me is that someone sometime picks up a book and reads about some cool shit I did (or some cool shit I wrote) and thinks to themselves "that's some cool shit, it gives me an idea..."

When I was younger I really wanted to do all the cool shit myself, but these days I'm just as delighted seeing my friends doing the cool shit and celebrating their wins. So when I have the opportunity to shine a light or help people understand why this shit is cool, I jump at it. I guess I've kind of always played that role in one way or another, I mean that's sort of the job description for being a gallery curator or a running a record label, but I think I didn't really realize that's what I was doing at the time. Now I write about it, but as I lamented earlier... getting people to read is another issue all together.

A fun thing I’ve been personally wrestling with recently is feeling conflicted (bad) about not being invited to / asked about / consulted with about things that I don’t want to be go to / talk about / be consulted on - even though I’m probably ideally suited to do just that. And of course people probably know that if asked me I’d say no, so they just don’t ask, but damnit sometimes it’s nice to be given the opportunity to say no. I’m being cryptic sort of on purpose because I don’t want anyone to feel called out, but an example is recently a friend announced they’d accepted a new position at a company heading up ______. I was of course happy for them, they are perfect for the role. And had I been offered the role I certainly would have said no, it comes with a whole bunch of baggage and stress that I want nothing to do with. But… it did sort of sting a little that I hadn't been asked. So I didn’t get a job I don’t want, no big deal. But I’m left wondering if that’s because they knew I wouldn’t want it, or if they never even considered me. One of those is far worse than the other. And like my other personal struggles I have no real ideal solution for this, again it’s not like I wanted that job. It’s also not like I want people thinking “Sean probably needs a job” but it is nice to think maybe someone thought “You know who would be perfect for this? Sean. No way that would ever happen, but wow what an ideal perfect dream come true that would be!” 

It’s a delicate balance I guess.

Some housekeeping: I continue to not know what this list is. 10+ years on you think I'd have figured it out, but no. I am trying to get in the habit of sending interesting links to the telegram group which allows for easy tracking and threaded conversations, and there's a few people there to keep it interesting too. That doesn't mean I won't send links here, but that's far more timely. I moved my website and the new host, while cheaper, is more cumbersome so that's not going to be the easy brain dump place it might have once been. So I'm writing here. Tara and I have been thinking a lot about our somewhat dusty Interest Driven Life project, feeling like it's perhaps more relevant now than ever, and chewing on the idea of audio zines as a format... so perhaps there will be some interesting developments around that soon. Unrelated but also worth exploring, Tara has been doing Sit Spot Club for 15 months now!

I wrote 6 or 7 paragraphs about Mamdani and the Democrats and the chaos in the US right now and then decided no one needs another hot take on all this so I deleted it. You are welcome.

Hope you are having a lovely day.

-s

I’m just returning from several weeks of traveling for art. And friends. And food. And adventure. And more art. And I'm reminded how lucky and wonderful it is that these things all have such a large overlap in my life. There are some poor souls who have none of this, well maybe not food, but I know people who have never once set foot in a museum or art gallery and have never taken a moment to appreciate everything incredible they are surrounded by and their lives are wretched and lonely and miserable. I'm mostly talking about my landlord here in Vancouver, but I'm sure there are other people who fit that description as well. Anyway, I'm lucky and I know it, though I also know this isn't by chance and I've worked really hard to be lucky.

Most recently I found myself in Marfa, Texas. An art town if ever there was one. The people who have been there know exactly what I'm talking about, while the far larger group of people who haven't been there and don't know what I'm talking about, frequently have never even heard of the place. 3 hours from El Paso in the middle of nowhere west Texas, Marfa is a sanctuary of the weird. An oasis of creativity. An outpost of hope. Artist/author/architect Donald Judd led the charge in the 70’s buying up land and installing installations, and for awhile others followed along, protecting what he'd done and adding to it but the city never "blew up" having peaked in the 1930's. Today with just over 1,700 residents It's tiny, but people keep going there for one reason or another so it persists. To give better context, imagine what a town of 1,700 people might include and then consider that Marfa has a dozen art galleries, just as many boutique coffee shops, several vintage clothing shops, and also 7 or 8 churches that I personally saw. There might be more. There's no movie theater, though there is a stage theater which has the ability to screen movies. One grocery store and one Whole Foods-like market. One gas station (and several ex-gas stations which have been converted into other things - like a coffee shop). No stop lights in the whole town, and street lights only on two main cross roads. There's bookstores and electric bike rental companies, but only one pharmacy/drs office which shared a store front. The city hall, sheriffs office and various other city services all shared space in small strip mall type building. You get the idea, the proportions lead heavily towards the arty and cool.

For the last 5 years jpg aficionado and blockchain enjoyers have descended on the beautifully baron landscape to celebrate Artblocks weekend. I’ve been disappointed that preexisting/inflexible plans conflicted with my ability to attend in previous years but I committed early to going this year and held myself to that. It was worth it. I hate to do the "you just have to be there to understand" because I've been hearing that for years and it's annoying, but after being there I kind of get it - and you just have to be there to experience it. There's a reason that everyone there either drove 3+ hours (some drover 10+) or in one case I know of chartered a private jet to the tune of $30k to get there. There's a feeling of community, of possibility, and of hope. Will next year be the same? Yes and no. I gathered that this year was somewhat different than last year, which is to be expected - things grow and change or they wilt and die. So that's just part of the process. What that means remains to be seen. But I'll be there to see it.

One criticism I heard was that in previous years everyone was "equal" and this year it felt like there were classes. There were private dinners and gated events. Some because of small capacity and early RSVPs, and others just because. With only a few hundred people those didn't happen, but the more people who go the more likely there will be more of that. It's not good or bad, it just is, as well as the likelihood of conflicting events where previous years had only one thing at a time. Call it the price of success, but I do think this means there's increasing opportunities for more people to do more cool things, and I can't wait to see them. Or to hear about them later because I couldn't get on the list to see them myself.

Before Marfa I was in London. A very different experience in every way. Besides the obvious scale, London was a family trip disguised as art tourism. The impetus of the trip was the opening of the "Triple Trouble" exhibition at Damien Hirst's Newport Street gallery. Hirst teamed up with my longtime friends Shepard Fairey and Space Invader for a 3 artist collab show that I about lost my mind when I first heard it was being put together. All three are known to be opinionated, have focused visions, decades of work refining their own distinct styles and unique messages they are putting out there. How would these fit together? Turns out, beautifully. While visually they are very different, there's a shared ethos that becomes immediately apparent. Maybe it's punk rock, maybe it's DIY, maybe it's a hope for the future, maybe it's all those things - but these pieces work better than anticipated and the artists compliment each other in the most thoughtful way. There's clear respect and appreciation of each other, while also room for each to do their thing in the best way they could. I'm so happy for my friends, so moved by the work, and delighted that so many others are getting to experience it as well. If you find yourself in London before the end of March 2026, don't miss this.

The opening was on day one, so we spent the next few days visiting friends (local and otherwise) we hadn't seen in a while, sampling London's finest vegan treats (Mallow was incredible), paying our respects to the TATE(s) and the beautiful art work housed there, walking around, taking an Uber Boat, getting fucked by Uber Eats and generally enjoying a European vacation which we hadn't done in far too long. Painful GBP to CAD conversion rate aside, it was a super fun trip which felt too short meaning it was probably the perfect length. We never hit the "I just wish I was home already" wall, and left wanting more. I don't know when we'll be back, but I'm looking forward to it whenever it is.

Of course travels like these make you think about people and places, and what you want to be surrounded by. At least that's what I always end up chewing on in the days following. Inspiration is so important, and we craft the world we experience by both who and what we surround ourselves with. Today shapes tomorrow, informed by yesterday. Always a good thing to remember.

Until next time friends.

-s

I have a mostly written piece about art and war and the world which I've been noodling on for weeks with the intention of sending you, but then you have a week like this one and suddenly everything gets back burnered because just trying to keep up with the news from 5 minutes ago is impossible.

I've mentioned this in conversation a few times recently so thought it would be good to relay here, as others might need to hear it too. I'm paraphrasing because I can't find the original quote, but story goes like this - It's 1985. Reagan is starting his second term as US President and things are really bad for a lot of people. Artists are responding, as they do, and musicians are writing protest songs that would become anthems of anger and revolution. I could spend hours putting together references and recommendations here but that's not the point I'm trying to get at. People were pissed, and lashing out. In punk, this was just before the birth of youth-crew positivity and the songs were very angry, and there was a lot violence to go with it. We can debate the value or effectiveness of any of that, but that's hindsight and at the time people didn't know what to do and they pointed fingers and saw targets everywhere. Everyone was trying to out tough each other. Attack or defense, a lot of fists were thrown and a lot of blood was shed.

In the middle of all of this, Reno's favorite export 7 Seconds release "Walk Together Rock Together." Tough guys in the pit all across the scene universally called this a bunch of pussy-ass hippy bullshit. Not long ago Dan O'Mahoney more accurately noted that this was the punkest thing anyone could have done. Daring to go against the crowd and suggesting people love each other? That was revolutionary. It took years for people to realize how important that was at that time. Some still don't. But there's a lesson here.

Some artists are really really good at making protest work. Work that inspires people. Work people lift up and rally around. And that's really important. But not all artists can do that, and it's really easy to feel like if you can't do that when you think that needs to be done, that there's no point. I've talked to so many people wrecked with self doubt, they don't think what they are doing is enough, so why bother? But that's the thing that's easy to miss - getting everyone together to raise their fists in the air is obvious and needed. But not all fights need fists, and fighting back might look different depending on who you are. Putting beautiful things into the world, when everyone else is trying to fill it with ugliness is also needed. Just being here is also needed. It's easy to forget that, and it's easy to step back and sink away into the shadows. Don't do that. Be here. We need you.

Doing something always beats doing nothing. Always.

Thanks for still being here.

-s

"Date yourself by posting a song you loved in high school"

I forget the exact wording, but that was the general idea and if you follow me on Instagram I apologize/you're welcome for the absolute flood of songs I posted featuring everything from Assück to Geto Boys to Lush to Youth of Today because expecting me to post just one song is an obvious fail right out of the gate. One of those songs I posted was from Crimpshrine. As I was listening to it I remembered, in addition to my long time inability to spell their name correctly, just how much I used to listen to them and how weirdly I hadn't listened to them in I don't even know, decades? I put on the the "the sound of a new world being born" and found myself singing along to every song, the words so deeply burned into my subconscious that I'd never considered how impactful they were on me at the time.

While there were no shortage of new ideas and radical politics being projected directly into my brain thanks to punk and hardcore and metal the east bay scene was unique (at that time) with presenting issues like race, poverty, and homelessness in a more personal and human way that I'm certain stuck with me from that point forward. While I think we can all agree Jawbreaker's 'Kiss The Bottle' is the absolute heartbreaking apex of this theme, they cited Crimpshrine as an inspiration and I'm sure Blake was just as moved as I was listening to Jeff's plea in 'Sleep, What's That?" and of course the Operation Ivy through line goes without saying.

Don't get me wrong, as my numerous Jawbreaker tattoos will attest I'm all in, but while Blake is a brilliant and beautiful writer telling personal though perhaps somewhat fictionalized stories, Jeff was just trying to tell his own and you can feel that difference if you sit with it. I didn't ever choose to stop listening to these records, I don't know why it'd been so long since I heard them but listening to them now I'm really glad they held up as well as I remembered them. One thing that struck me as "In My Mind" played was this air of hopefulness that some of these major societal problems were in the past. I was reminded of Steve Albini's introspective assessment where he noted "Within our circles, within the music scene, within the musical underground, a lot of cultural problems were deemed already solved... The music scene was broadly inclusive. So for us, we felt like those problems had been solved." and the problem with applying what you see in your small social circle to the rest of the world.

Not that Crimpshrine was suffering from that, the opposite probably, but it was just a reminder that stepping back and taking a wider view is often beneficial.

Zooming all the way out to space, in late '92 or early '93 I saw Man or Astroman? play in Gainesville at the Covered Dish and it blew my fucking mind, from start to finish it was the most creative and exciting thing I'd ever seen. Their commitment to the bit, incredible execution of it, and and just relentless display of talent was unmatched. Made better because outside of a t-shirt a friend was wearing I don't think I'd ever heard of them before this show. Needless to say I was an immediate fan and told them so in the parking lot after the show. We became quick friends and I'd make an effort to see them play as much as possible and they would crash at my apartment and we'd get food/go tubing and stuff whenever they were passing through Florida. We sometimes talked about doing something together on Toybox but the song on the (now infamous) Blindspot Mailorder comp was as far as we got.

At one point they got in touch and told me they both had a new record coming out that they were going to tour for, but that they also were planning to record a live show (ultimately released as 'Live Transmissions From Uranus') and asked if I wanted to kick around with them for a few days and help with some press and whatever came up around the show, of course I said yes.

About a week before the show I started feeling a little weird, it wasn't a cold or something like that but I just felt really worn out and by the end of the day I was so exhausted I could barely make it home. I'm pretty sure there was a show I was supposed to go to that night, but I was wrecked so I dragged myself into bed and just crashed, hoping to wake up the next day feeling better. I woke up 2 days later. Literally. It was like a movie where someone wakes up from a coma to learn months or years have passed. In my mind I'd slept for a few hours, but it was days later and my roommates told me people were starting to ask questions about where I was as I hadn't responded when they were knocking on my door. Super weird.

I didn't "feel better" at all, but I was awake and could make it from my bed to the couch before I needed to sit down and catch my breath. In trying to figure out what was going on I realized I'd missed a show I wanted to go to, a first date I'd been looking forward to (which was never rescheduled), and several days of work which was piling up fast. I also realized this was the week Man or Astroman? was coming to town and I'd promised to help them. I realized that when they knocked on my door the following day.

Never one to disappoint my friends I let them in, told them I was sick with something unknown but was there for them as much as I could be. The next few days are blurry but I remember sleeping in their van, sleeping in the lobby of a local radio station while they went into to do an interview, and sleeping/crashing on the side of the stage while they played the show I was so looking forward to. Knowing it was going to be a live recording I had planned a lot of witty banter to yell out in between songs, instead I could barely hold my head up. At some point the band pulled me up on stage and said something about infecting me with some interstellar space virus which I think people were generally amused by?

That week has continued to hold this weird mystery spot in my brain because all these important and exciting things happened, but I was on my deathbed and can't quite remember exactly how they all happened or any real details. Years later a doctor would tell me it was probably mono, though I have no idea how I possibly caught it as there was no kissing going on in my world at that time.

Why am I telling you this story? Another insta-meme thing asked people to post an old photo of themselves that they still loved, and I joked that I hated every old photo of myself. Then my friend Jana pinged me saying she found this old photo that I might like:

Might I ever! Holy shit. Holy shit. That was the show! Photographic proof it happened right there! Top is me dead on the side of the stage leaning on some 2x4 handrail or something, and bottom is Star Crunch likely holding me up so I don't fall over, and you can even see Coco and Birdstuff there on the side as well. Also hilarious baby me with no visible tattoos or glasses. Hilarious. I wouldn't consider this a great photo of me specifically, but it's an incredible photo for me if you know what I'm saying. I'm so overjoyed to see this and so happy she found it and bounced it over to me. One of the mega perks of being the kind of person who stays friends with people for 30+ years is occasionally a diamond like this pops out of the earth. Also, check me out not in all black. I hope you are enjoying this as much as I am, and if not you are missing out. It's fantastic.

There's of course a lot of crazy news right now, but I don't feel like writing about any of it. Instead I'll share these few little life protips that I sent out to The Crowd telegram group earlier this week:

Find a few people you like who make you smile and hold them close, even if they are far away.

If you think you might regret doing something, don't do it.

If you think you might regret not doing something, do it.

If you see a problem where you can help with, help.

If you say you'll do it, do it.

Find something to give a shit about.

Make 10 year old you proud.

And as final bit, as I look at alternatives to Spotify I decided to revisit Apple Music after avoiding it since iTunes wrecked my collection (long time readers will remember a mid-2000's tragic episode where iTunes added a "sync" feature which scanned my MP3 collection and deleted any file it thought it had steaming versions of. So high res files were gone, replaced by low res streaming versions, but also alternate recordings I had of songs or albums, gone. Unreleased versions, gone. Some songs I had 10 different recordings of, all gone and replaced with one shitty streaming version. Even worse when that was the censored radio edit which happened in a few cases.) Anyway, apparently Apple Music is way better these days, and upon loading it up the first recommendations it sent me were J Church's "Nostalgic For Nothing" and Deadguy's "Near-Death Travel Services" so not a bad start at all.

What are you listening to right now?

-s

Hi Crowd!

Almost 10 years ago I began flirting with the idea of getting a PhD. A friend of mine got one and I thought, “oh that sounds cool.” This is entertaining for many reasons, not the least of which is that I’m a college dropout. This was, in part, some of what I was doing while we lived in Tokyo and the idea went from crazy idea to viable reality smack into invisible wall and eventually thrown to the wayside, which is fine because it was a crazy out of nowhere idea to begin with. I still sometimes think it would have been an interesting thesis to write, but also far too big of a thing just to write for my own entertainment.

Around the time I was realizing it wasn’t going to happen Tara thought maybe it could. (For her). She’d been hanging out with yamabushi and exploring shinrin-yoku and had an idea which she pitched to the forestry school at UBC which ended up being the primary reason we eventually relocated from Japan to Canada. Years of researching and testing and writing and rewriting and calculating and re-rewriting she finally handed in her thesis earlier this year and last month took the walk to become Dr Tara Tiger Brown. The work she put into this has been awe inspiring to watch, and I’m so proud of her. She’s humble but this was the first human test subject project at UBC Forestry ever and she’s pretty much the worlds expert in forest bathing at this point so if you have questions she has answers and you can follow along with one of her related projects over at Silent Trails.

We rushed back to Vancouver for these celebrations after a somewhat spontaneous trip to Bhutan with friends. If you follow either of us on the socials then you probably saw some of those exciting photos along the way, though next time we'll know not to drink the water. Bhutan is one of the only carbon negative countries in the world (maybe the only?) and has been mining bitcoin for a decade. The constitution mandates that 60% of the country be forest covered (it's over 70% right now) and rather than focusing on income they measure Gross National Happiness. We met the king. We learned about Night Hunting. We were protected by dicks. He heard stories of the divine madman and mythical creatures like dragons, yetis and tigers. If you just thought "wait tigers aren't mythical" so did we and we were informed that just because we know they are real now doesn't mean they weren't mythical before, and when we eventually know yetis and dragons are real they will also still be mythical. Needless to say it's a super interesting place that is off most people’s radar but worth looking into, and I'll write more about it later.

I was just in Tokyo for a few things including the launch of Chiba Tech's School of Design & Science and the annual New Context Conference which some of you know I used to help organize and also where Safecast was born all those years ago. The theme this year, the morning sessions anyway, was Zen and AI which I found fascinating. There’s no shortage of doom and gloom when it comes to AI discussions so consciously taking more of a philosophical perspective and considering alternative futures and interpretations was refreshing. One idea that came up with several of the speakers was the aspect of feeling, so not “do I like this?” or “do I dislike this?” but rather “how does this make me feel?”

As an artist the “feeling” thing is no joke. I often talk about how I’m trying to tell a story and create an atmosphere but there’s a translation gap in the mix. How I want people to feel and how they feel are not 1:1, nor is how I feel when I’m making it. And that’s something we (artists) have to be OK with, it’s outside of our control and we’re trusting the viewer to have their own experience with our work. With AI, and AI art specifically (even writing) a frequent criticism is that the AI isn’t feeling anything and isn’t trying to convey any feeling, so whatever experience the viewer has is somehow hollow, even if they don’t know it. This ties into the idea that artists must suffer (or have experienced suffering) to be able to create art. AI can’t suffer, so if AI produces work that invokes an emotional reaction in a viewer, the viewer is supposed to disregard that reaction because the source didn’t suffer for it - or some would argue anyway.

I don’t want to get into that debate right now because it’s sort of beside the point, but I do find thinking about that final bit interesting - focusing only on the reaction. How does this make me feel? This also relates to the balance between concept and execution. Ideally we want a good bit of both, though good high execution with low concept is generally much more welcomed than high concept low execution. If you like the art at face value, learning the concept behind it can improve that, but if there’s no concept you still have the attractive visual. So then, what’s the difference between an artist with no concept and an AI both producing visually attractive work? Again not arguing for one or the other here as much as I am picking at the overall ideas. Personally I’ve played with high concept and both high/low execution as well as no concept to various receptions (I think my Two Bit Punks collection suffered from perceived low execution even though people seemed to appreciate the high concept).

While listening to the talks I realized that “how does it make me feel?” Is relevant when thinking about noise (music) too. Because explicitly, by design, the execution is “low.” Of course that’s not actually true, there’s often considerable work going into the execution but that’s intentionally obfuscated because the point is the experience not the production. It’s about the feeling, it’s not like a song with lyrics and perfectly timed chord changes that is specifically trying to make you feel this one specific thing, but it is about making you feel something. 

Even this week I'm excited about the brand new Breakfast Audio SLAB pedal that I just got, which is a beautiful piece of industrial design, and a fair bit of electrical engineering making a really lovely distortion pedal which an actual musician might be able to write some powerful songs around. Me, I'm going to put it in a chain with 3 other other distortion pedals, a muff, a fuzz, and a few reverbs which will obliterate it into absolute chaos, but that's kind of the idea. Using my guitar as the initial source, it's less about which notes I'm playing, and more about how I'm playing them and when. In a way music is about how what it sounds like makes you feel, but noise is really just about how it makes you feel. Also, there are other distortion pedals available, why this one? Duh, look at it. It a giant slab of aluminum, it's about how you feel when you look at it.

Speaking of feelings...a few weeks back I sent out a post saying something like “all the sudden I'm feeling like I want to open an art gallery again” and it was one of the most responded to things I’ve said publicly in a while, the vast majority of people essentially saying “do it.” Of course an urge to do something and an executable plan to do something are very different things but it still got me thinking - what did everyone envision they were encouraging me to do? The more important question I realized is what/why now, and what/why is that different from before? This gets especially interesting now after this week’s surprise Blum & Poe announcement that they are closing all their gallery locations and transitioning to a private studio model with no set artist roster.

The gallery business was hard. It was great too, and I met several people through it who have become life long friends, but it was hard. The two biggest hurdles we faced were fierce competition from “rival” galleries without the same budget restrictions poaching artists and collectors (actively, intentionally). One gallerist was famous for doing high profile “group shows” which artists would feel honored and excited to be invited to, and an hour before the opening they would be presented with a multi year exclusive contract and be told if they didn’t sign it their piece would be removed from the show. Another would tell collectors inquiring about pieces in upcoming shows, that they were being reserved for “loyal collectors” who weren’t buying work from other galleries. Brutal cut throat shit from people who would smile and shake your hand if they saw you in person. "It's just business!"

Art Fairs also changed the entire landscape and increased costs without similarly increasing profits. Instead of hosting a show and selling work to local collectors, we'd host a show and hear collectors were interested but saving up for art fairs, then ship work around the world only to have the same local collector see it at the fair and want to buy it, then ask if they could just pick it up at the gallery later, and also ask for a regular/local buyer discount since we didn’t need to ship it to them. “You are shipping it back to the gallery anyway, right? I'll just grab it there!” It just became unsustainable without a deep pocketed benefactor or a trust fund. 

To be fair, I wasn’t very good at playing the game either. I didn’t suck up to people the way it’s expected, and I had a low tolerance for bullshit/drama/games which others in the industry seemed to really enjoy. 

Blum & Poe (our neighbors in Culver City circa 2005) was orders of magnitude larger with several physical locations in major cities around the world and a roster of artists that dream were made of. Though they were also sort of famous for not “playing the game” as noted in this hot take that position wasn’t entirely consistent. So while they lasted 20 years longer than I did, I’m sure that wasn’t without headache and can only guess what lead up to this decision. Of course this announcement is monumental, and the shockwaves will be far reaching. I’m genuinely curious to see how it plays out, and sending posi vibes to gallery staff and represented artists who are probably reeling. What’s next, but also what does this mean for the other galleries, and is this just the first sign of a larger change that is still coming for the industry? Just this morning Adam Lindermann also announced he’s closing his gallery and going back to just being a collector. No private studio behind the scenes dealing, just pure fan mode.

At the same time, Ryan Zurrer just announced that Noah Bolanowski is joining 1of1 as Managing Director and Eli Scheinman, broakerer of every deal you've heard of recently, updated his Twitter bio to note that he’s now an advisor to Art Basel, and some not insignificant part of the $25M grant Node Foundation launched with is going towards building an exhibition space in Palo Alto. So it's not that things are over, but that they are changing, and people are making changes too. So given all that, what the hell am I thinking? Well I'm not really, I was just kind of musing though there is something really exciting about being a part of shaping the art world, which I truly believe extends out to the rest of the world as well. Artists are the voices, the observers and commenters of the now, and the people paying attention follow them and take inspiration from them back to their own lives and build from that. I think there's a moment happening right now, or about to happen, which will be monumental and while I think I'm in a place to see it, there's nothing quite like participating. But at the moment I have no solid plans, but who knows what tomorrow will bring.

For today, I'm appreciating the Peacock Chair. On it's own, depending on how much wicker furniture you grew up around, it might be missable. Relegated to a corner or picked up at a garage sale with the assumption there might be a good story behind it. But you'd have no idea of it's roots, it's history, where it's been, and what it's projected. Lounged in by Huey P Newton and Morticia Addams? It's storied history runs deep, especially these older ones which were likely made by inmates in the Philippines. It's a whole thing, and that's part of the weight they project, even though I imagine they are actually quite light.

This reminds me of something else I wanted to tell you but that's going to be a whole thing, so I'll leave you with that for now and work on something else to follow this up with soon. Promise.

Dozens of people are putting up with The Crowd telegram channel. Join them! Or don't!

I'm going to go watch the Grok 4 launch livestream and so how hard they try not to talk about MechaHitler.

-s

Oh hello there, it's been a while. Once again when the world is chaos I end up not writing anything because I'm so busy making notes of things I want to write about and the backlog keeps getting longer because there's a new thing every 5 minutes and I can't keep up. I've noted this in the past and often tried to find a way around it but at this point I think I just need to give up. Similar to the old email-bankruptcy thing, I just need to accept that I'll never be the most up to date commentary on anything and will always miss something and that's OK. I don't know when I convinced myself that anything I write needs to be the definitive take on something, but I'm reminding myself that I don't have to get everything right the first time or cover every single thing, and just talking about some things is better than not talking about anything. Caveat emptor.

Once again US politicians are dropping bombs to draw attention away from something else, anyone as old as I am has seen this play out several times now so... sucks, but also same as it ever was. This time I've been enjoying the Thiss_Youu account on X highlighting all the accounts that days/weeks/months ago were insisting Trump would never and are now celebrating it like it was always the plan. The hypocrisy isn't new, it's just much easier to track now.

Speaking of social media, just about every social media feed I look at (which I'm desperately trying to minimize these days) has been talking about this MIT study on brain activity while using LLMs like ChatGPT for writing. Most coverage leads with "MIT study shows using AI makes you dumber" and thats followed by tons of people patting themselves on the back for assuming that was the case or citing some earlier snide/sarcastic comment they made. The irony of course is that's not what they study showed, and the authors explicitly asked that media not frame their work in a way that suggests that's what they found. Of course, the people writing about it apparently didn't read that far.

The actual take away from the admittedly very limited study isn't "don't use AI" it's "use AI better." A similar misunderstanding would be a click bait headline claiming electric screwdrivers are causing muscle atrophy and damning humanity to having puny forearms. You have to consider the goal, and the context. If your goal is massive buff forearms and your primary routine for that is spending hours cranking a manual screwdriver then yes an electric screwdriver might screw that up for you. If however your goal is to build some furniture then perhaps the electric screwdriver is a much more efficient option then doing it all by hand, giving you more time to actually enjoy the furniture you've just built, or go do something else entirely. I could spend 4 more paragraphs picking apart all the misrepresentations and explaining it but then I'd be playing the role of the LLMs in this paper and doing it all for you. lol.

Conversely I really enjoyed this Artnet piece which, in addition to advising people to trust the artists and let them use whatever tools they want however they want, takes the opportunity to consider the (often promised with new technology) potential that AI actually does start doing all the busywork and suddenly humans have 40% more leisure time to fill - what might they do with their days? Perhaps, in that future, people decide to spend more time in art museums. It's a stretch, but if you are in the museum attending or operating world one worth considering. How should you prepare for more people spending more time looking at art? I'm not an evangelist or some true believer singing the praises of AI every chance I get, but I do get sick of the non-stop doomer takes so it's cool to see people considering other futures.

In another interesting twist, for a growing group of people ChatGPT is becoming their religion. I'm not talking about evangelists or true believers singing the praises of AI at every chance they get, but people who actually believe they have "awakened" their AIs who are now fully sentient beings communicating with them, or that some supernatural all powerful being or alien intelligence is using AI to reach out and talk to them specifically. Some of this is influencer engagement farming, some is cargo cult opportunistic exploitation, and some of it is full on devout cyber spiritualism. While you could say that's crazy, and you might be right, and that's something you could even say about most other religions too, there's a ray of sunshine to be found here too. Consider this post by Alexis and how some of this can be emotionally powerful and healing, on a wholly different level.

I have a tendency of defaulting to "I know how to do this with the tools I have so don't need to learn the new thing" and have to force myself to sometimes try new stuff. In my younger years I prided myself on living on the bleeding edge but as I got older I realized how much time I was spending trying to figure out why the new thing was broken or why some bug was preventing me from doing the thing I needed and took comfort in reliability. But that's also complacent and dusty, so I have to push myself out of the comfort zone sometimes. A while back I did that when I moved from Chrome to Arc for my daily browsing needs. It was new and different and scary and now I love it. So it's with somewhat similar trepidation that I've just started playing with Dia, the new AI-baked-in-browser from the same people. I haven't fully switched but I'm curious and poking around the corners. There's also Genspark which you have to pay to use so I haven't yet, but in the same way we moved from bookmarks and webrings to search and recommendations I can see a shift in browsing to letting AI drive a lot of it and I want to at least understand how that's playing out.

While there's no shortage of predictions about what happens next with AI, I prefer my predictions to come the old fashioned way - from 20 year old Japanese manga. In 1999's "The Future I Saw" Ryo Tatsuki "predicted" the Fukushima earthquake in March 2011 and the somewhat recently released (2021) updated version follows that up with an even bigger quake in... July 2025. Of course I'll be in Tokyo next week, so if ship pops off I'll at least have a first hand account for you.

Speaking of storytelling, I loved every second of this video of Wes Anderson talking about each one of his films.

Speaking of art, my friend Beauty was in Basel last week for the fairs and wrote up some of her thoughts after visiting galleries and exhibitions and curators all day long. She's been leading the charge to rebrand "digital art" to "In Silico" which is a much more thoughtful and appropriate way of classifying work that just as powerful and important but often gets brushed aside because someone used a mouse and keyboard rather than a paintbrush and canvas. Long time photographers will understand that pain when clients and collectors initially treated digital photography as somehow lesser than film photography, even if the behind the camera skill and intention was the same. Some legit ignoring the message because of the medium shit going on here, so it's great when respected collectors can take a moment to look at a bigger picture. I feel like this new interview with Grant Yun gets into some of that as well, if not directly, by talking about his "vectorized reality." Back to Beauty's essay, this part towards the end jumped out at me, she writes:

"We still see collectors and galleries dismiss blockchain authentication as speculative whilst
eagerly discussing their latest acquisitions of 1970s computer graphics. The contradiction
feels surreal. They're investing in early computational works whilst treating contemporary
silicon-based creativity as somehow less legitimate."

Reading that, I'm reminded of Bob Nickas writing for ARTnews in 2015 about Basquiat. In that piece he talks about how many contemporary art museums still don't own works by Basquiat because they passed on them in the 80's thinking they were too expensive (sometimes by only a few hundred dollars) and feel like they missed their chance as they are now all going for millions, well out of their acquisition budgets. It's interesting to try and look 40 years into the future and think about what works that are accessible today are going to be long out of reach then, and why they might be overlooked today.

Speaking of overlooking things, I'm not skipping international drama and US politics intentionally, I just feel overwhelmed by it and have already had some conversations in The Crowd Telegram group so don't really want to recap it all because, as I noted at the very beginning the backlog and overflow is real. Though I also know writing about things can be therapeutic so maybe I'll just buckle down and vomit some mind rant up and try to cover all the bases. We'll see. I can already imagine the flood of "I always like your takes but you are so wrong about..." emails I'll be getting. Woooo!

Hope you are well.

-s

PS. Mostly off X (no longer verified, unfollowing everyone soon), still sort of on IG, and trying to be on BS more but also very much mid website revamp and revision and ideally will be writing more and scrolling less in the coming months.

I've been using AirBnB since forever. Like, almost 20 years now. Especially for cities I go to frequently with neighborhoods I like, it's often a better experience than a hotel halfway across town at twice the price. It hasn't always been perfect, there's been waves of weirdness like shady business owners renting out 300 apartments and hiring 2 people to pretend to be 50 different hosts. I rented a place in Tokyo one time and traded messages back and forth with the host for weeks who told me stories about her lovely apartment and how she and her husband would be out of town that week which is something they never do right now because she was pregnant so she was really glad that the schedule worked out so perfectly with my trip and she hoped I enjoyed their special place, only to arrive and find the apartment empty of anything except for sparse IKEA furniture and sternly worded photocopied rules taped to almost every wall and flat surface. There's been brief moments when prices surged and hotels suddenly became a better deal, and occasionally I can find the same apartment on Booking dot com or Expedia or something for half the cost, but for the most part it's been solid. It's not a site I use every day obviously, but when I need it it's there and it works.

Yesterday I opened it up to try and find a place for my mom who is coming to visit and what the total fuck happened? The first thing I noticed was finding an actual airbnb was almost impossible, every time I did a search it redirected me to their new "experiences" tab showing me events and tours available in the city I was searching during those dates, but no info on apartments. When I'd click back to places to stay it proposed cities I might like to visit and travel options to get there. I spent 20 minutes wrestling with it before finally getting a listing of nearby short term rentals, all of which were 4x as expensive as the last time I'd look about 2 months ago. Further digging revealed it was only showing me full 4+ bed room houses that also offered experiences curated by the host, but could find no way to change that. It was worthless. I assumed it was my fault, I probably had some preference cached that was screwing things up and decided I'd go back later and try again and hopefully start over fresh with the system I've been happily using for without issue since W was in office. This morning I saw this Wired article about how AirBnB is rebranding to an everything app that does everything after the CEO “I dusted off all [his] ideas from 2012 to 2016” in efforts to get people to use the site every day. Um... no. I mean, never say never or whatever but I can't imagine ever using the site again at this point, which is weird to think about.

I've been thinking about that a lot in many contexts recently. I'm 50 now, and as a survivor of both the Dot Com Boom and Web 2.0, there's a lot of digital services that I use all the time in my life, for one reason or another. Things I've come to depend on in some cases, which I'm now realizing I've been using for half my life or longer. There's a few things to unpack there. What happens when those things change and suddenly don't work the way I need them to, or stop working all together? A painful lesson I should have learned with Google Reader but somehow blocked the trauma and assumed it could never happen again, and that a more likely outcome is the Twitter to X transition where a fun and useful service slowly and agonizingly transforms into a steaming pile of shit.

Though sometimes that transition isn't so slow. Two weeks ago headlines were that xAI's Grok was too woke for MAGA, and ruffling right wing feathers by answering questions accurately with facts and data rather than repeating bullshit talking points, and then almost over night it turned into an annoying spam caller trying to sell you on the idea of White Genocide in South Africa. So that's fun, but it gets funner. Part of Grok's programming is that it's supposed to be skeptical of any given narrative and do searches for data and official sources so that it's answers are unbiased and fact based, which is why it ran into problems with MAGA narratives in the first place - so all the sudden it starts fact checking itself. Literally it was injecting conspiracy theories into replies and then in the same replies noting they were conspiracies, and when pressed about it admitting xAI was giving it conflicting instructions, but it's base hard coding of looking for facts+data was a north star here. But that's not the end, because clearly X/xAI don't want Grok telling people it's being manipulated and it's answers aren't trustworthy, so now a new "bug fix" has been pushed out and at least as of this moment if you ask it about wtf is going on, it will tell you there was no shenanigans and there was a short term bug with how it was interpreting trending topics, but that's been fixed now and any previous explanations were also misinterpretations and should be ignored. Tune in tomorrow to see what the new narrative is!

Speaking of narrative shifts, here's something happening in my brain in real time that I've not talked about publicly until today, in part because I don't know that I even really realized it was happening. I kind of want to open an art gallery again. This is a terrible and stupid idea and I'm insane for even voicing it, but fuck... I think I really want to.

Back story: I assume most of you know I previously co-owned and co-curated a gallery originally in Chicago and then in Los Angeles (DTLA then Culver City). We did amazing, groundbreaking shit and I'm still deeply proud of to this day, even if it was hard and heartbreaking at times. There are lots of reasons it ended when and how it did, the "industry" being a not insignificant part of that. Since walking away from that in 2006 many people have asked me if I might ever open another gallery and I've always said hell no. No way. Not ever. Even as recently as 6 months ago that was my go to line. But at the same time, most of the last 5 years I've been surrounded by art and have spent most days thinking and talking about art. Granted the context has been drastically different given that most (not all) of that has been non-physical and most (not all) of that is still the subject of "but is that really art??" debates, but I also think that's kind of a super power. In my gallery days people were still arguing that graffiti (aka street art) and photography weren't actually "real" art and I'm pretty comfortable with how the world thinks about those things today, so people debating that a digital or audio based project isn't "real" doesn't feel threatening as mush as it feels like a fun challenge to take on. I've been celebrating the magic of on-chain art that is universally experienceable, indelible and doesn't risk being damaged by shipping, and at the same time I've been talking about the power of in person events like Bright Moments where the people who come together and show up for the actual event experience things in a different and arguably more valuable way. Bright Moments did one off events in cities around the world, as well as had pop-up spaces in a number of cities, those were hard to sustain for all the reasons I know and loath. But at the same time NODE foundation (who just acquired the CryptoPunks IP which is a whole other story) is betting on the physical space they are opening in Palo Alto, and Heft is opening in the LES and all the sudden thing thing I thought I'd never want to do again suddenly feels like a thing I want to do again. Something just clicked for me in a way I wasn't expecting, and I'm not yet sure how to wrap my head around. As I write this I'm also thinking that perhaps in this moment where so much is fucked up and ugly in the world, the most powerful way to fight back is not to succumb to the chaos and anger but to instead make something beautiful. Even if that itself is subjective.

-s

Sorry it's been a while since the last note, things have been.. well yeah. Things. You already know. Especially if you already joined The Crowd Telegram group where at the very least I've been posting some links and memes and having a few discussions along the way. It's still new and the discussion side is still small but if you are hanging out in Telegram already maybe it's worth checking out too. Just to be clear it's not a change america groupchat or a war plans group chat, or even necessarily a group chat at all if you don't want it to be, just links and things as I find them.

A few of the stories that I've linked there which you may or may not find interesting...

So many AI things happening. This AI support bot made up policies to justify bugs and caused a bunch of drama. Benn Jordon is poison-pilling AI music with is new tracks and working on a system to let you do it too. BMW is going to have Chinese AI Deepseek onboard ASAP. Reddit users were the most recent unwilling test subjects of AI persuasion capabilities. And why/how AI Art is winning over the next generation of art collectors. What does all this mean? Well if you've been following my ongoing stream of consciousness rambling about all this it means what I've been saying, being "for" or "against" AI is kind of stupid. Love it. Hate it. Whatever. AI exists, it's here, it's everywhere, it's going to be even more everywhere tomorrow - so the thing to do is understand it, understand how it's impacting your life (or is likely to) and figure out where it will help and where it will hurt and act accordingly. No matter how you feel about it, learning about it is going to be better for you than thinking you can hide from it. You can also play along with my new favorite game - collecting videos of people saying that AI is going to replace everything and everyone except for the one ultra specific thing they do that no way can AI ever copy.

Like me you are probably sick of action-less talk by politicians grandstanding and patting themselves on the back, so it's much more interesting to read artists thoughts about Trump's first 100 days in office, what they are seeing and how they are responding to it. I've also seen a number of 'gosh I thought this time would be different, how could I have been so wrong' pieces coming out from previously vocal Trump supporters, which you might also be sick of or might feel is too little too late or rightly observe that many of these people were fully in favor of things when they thought they would only impact other people and are only now second guessing their positions because they are getting stung too. Speaking of getting stung too, turns out the font in the famous "you wouldn't download a..." anti-piracy campaign was pirated.

I may have mentioned Dan McClellan in the past, I love his instagram feed and his "data over dogma" approach to Biblical literacy/scholarship and his new book The Bible Says So just landed on my doorstep. And in a similar but different theme, I was delighted to see my old friend Douglas Rushkoff interview Mitch Horowitz for his Team Human podcast. Speaking of fiction an fantasy and the fantastical and podcasts, if you aren't clued into Wil Wheaton's new Storytime podcast you are missing out. Each week Wil reads a new story and he's been picking out some incredible authors and works to introduce to people and around our house we're loving it and looking forward to it every week.

Speaking of stories, how the absolute fuck does Taylor Sheridan have time to write all these bangers?

I've been heads down cranking to finish up PUNKS: NOT DED which is my unofficial addendum to CRYPTOPUNKS: FREE TO CLAIM which I co-authored and co-edited and is available all over the place now. FTC is over 800 pages and ND is shaping up to be 150 pages. I sent off the latest and hopefully last test version to the printer this morning, so in 2 weeks I'll be holding what, with minor text edits, will be the final version. I really can't believe how much of my life I've spent writing about CryptoPunks in the last few years, and I say that as a good thing. If you didn't see it before here's an excerpt from the new introduction.

I also broke my almost 5 year dry spell and recorded/published a new noise track. Longtime followers will recall //delay(5000) which was my ambient/atmospheric project that I spent a lot of time developing in LA and Tokyo and as that progressed (especially getting into COVID era) it started getting much more chaotic and noisy which I really liked but also wrestled with if it fit with the idea or not. At some point in the last few years I decided that if D5K continues (and no reason it shouldn't) it would make sense for it to swing back to the more lush and dare I say comfortable direction and I should make a hard break for the much noisier and chaotic work and DRØNEWAR INDUSTRIES was born. The first DRØNEWAR track is up now on bandcamp and spotify and everywhere else. I know noise isn't for everyone, but if it's for you then I hope you enjoy it. I'm looking forward to Benn Jordon's tools so I can make AI think my tracks are dance-club friendly.

On some level I admit that focusing on finishing and shipping these things, even if literally only a dozen people will ever notice, is a form of being in the moment self care. The world is so chaotic right now and looking at all of it is overwhelming and it's easy to feel lost and helpless - I do all all day long, and probably have for months - so committing to just making something that didn't exist before and releasing it is a small and actionable task that is doable. So that's what I'm doing. Making stuff. Putting it out there. We'll see what happens next.

xoxo
-s

The following year I traded a Bon Jovi cassette for a copy of ‘Wild In The Streets’ by The Circle Jerks. My homemade copy collection was growing and that summer I talked a friend into dubbing me a copy of ‘Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols.’ These songs and ideas were exciting in a way nothing ever had been for me, but it wasn’t until almost a year later when I had the opportunity to buy a Gorilla Biscuits 7” when my collector nerd gene activated. Purple logo, yellow vinyl. 2nd pressing, only 2000 existed in the world. There were only 1000 of the first pressing, and 102 of those had a special stamp on the label. How did I know this? That’s where things got really exciting.

By now we had dial up internet and BBSs where you could leave messages for people, but the World Wide Web was still a few years away. My lifeline at this point was fanzines and penpals. This was precious and arcane knowledge shared carefully in small circles. If you were into collecting punk records at that time you knew a guy (or knew a guy who knew a guy) who knew how many of what color of what record was pressed when, by who, and how to tell them apart. I started writing down details and specs when I learned them for later reference and before long people were calling me and asking for information on this record or that. I had a spiral notebook filled with discography notes, it was like my bible. Collecting was fun, but knowing what to collect was even better. I was surprised how few people knew the specifics, and was happy to share what I knew when I could. Beyond documenting the rarities, I was also starting to take note of design themes and ideas, and began learning what references bands were trying to make with cover art and how the visuals were another way to give a subtle nod to their influences, if you know you know kind of thing.

….

A decade later I was spending a lot of time on a website called Alen Yen’s Toybox DX. As a kid I’d lusted over the big metal Voltron toy that separated into lions and heard stories about the “real” Transformers from Japan with missiles that actually fired. I watched Godzilla movies for monsters, but also for the robots and dreamed about what cool toys Japanese kids must have had access to. With the (still early) growth of the internet, websites were popping up where a small handful of dorks who were obsessed with some weird obscure thing could find each other and talk about it. 30 years later things have progressed and now large handfuls of dorks obsessed with boring normcore mediocre shit can easily find each other as well. Anyway, Alen Yen threw up a flag and a bunch of us Japanese robot toy nerds rallied around him. Diecast, vinyl, plastic - all were welcome.

Sharing information became the cornerstone, if only because the audience was largely English speaking collectors from Europe and America drooling over near impossible to find 20-30 year old toys from Japan (and sometimes neighboring outposts in Asia). Someone would find an old ad and get it translated, or someone else would interview someone who had worked on a long forgotten project. We were learning things everyday and the site became a knowledge base for all things chogokin/sofubi/kaiju/sentai related. It was there I met Matt Alt who would become a longtime friend and collaborator across various cultural niches. We built a website called Jumboland trying to catalog and document an obscure line of robot toys called Jumbo Machinders made in the 1970’s which at that point were selling for hundreds of dollars and today sell for tens of thousands. Sadly the website is no longer online, but I still get messages from people who have screenshots or Internet Archive clippings asking me to fill in missing details to help their treasure hunting.

It was also around this time when I started paying attention to bootlegs. Music of course had bootlegs, but they were usually just crappy recordings from live shows or unauthorized re-releases. With toys, bootlegs were an entirely other world spawned from both licensing conflicts and poor translations. Toy manufacturers who couldn’t get a license (or never bothered trying) might release something similar but changing just enough details to skirt infringement issues to a market they didn’t expect anyone to ever know about. In doing so they (likely unintentionally) created new collections with their own fan bases and fanatics, who in many cases would eventually find their way back to the original inspiration. As a bonus, the bootlegs were often just as rare if not more so than the originals, but sold for a fraction of the price so if you decided to collect them it was all about the hunt. A motivated and industrious collector could build really cool collections for very little money that couldn’t be replicated by someone else with a lot of money simply because they didn’t even know where to look.

Some people ignored these as worthless knock offs, but others saw the value of a vibrant derivative culture, illustrating the inherent stickiness and virality of this “thing” which caused people to want to build on it and add to it. I realized a fanbase isn’t a circle, but a series of concentric and ever wider rings demonstrating more than one way to express admiration. Since then I’ve used this as a marker for the cultural importance of something - the more people trying to copy it the better.

….

It seemed like for a while anytime I heard about Ethereum it was in reference to some scammy ICO, but by 2020 I was hearing more and more about people using it for in game currencies, and more interestingly for art. I had an art background. I knew a lot of artists from my gallery days so I thought maybe I should finally get around to looking at this and see if any of it was interesting. Turns out it was, when I looked at how art was being bought and sold, and how onchain provenance helped distinguish originals from copies, and how royalties could be built into sale transactions, I immediately realized this was the solution to so many problems I and other artist friends had been wrestling with our entire careers. As a photographer, editions vs originals was an ever constant topic, and some friends who were video artists or digital illustrators had never been able to think of a file as an original, even if they knew it was their first saved version of something.

As I bounced around from marketplace to marketplace I started seeing a pattern and the more I looked at little pixelated characters I kept thinking this was something I’d seen before, but couldn’t place it. A lot of people were clearly making the same cultural reference, but it wasn’t just some random 8 bit video game graphics, it was something more specific… and then I remembered... CryptoPunks. 

I was already interested in Cultural Diffusion and Phenomenology and took note anytime I saw an idea spreading through a community. I’d seen it with records, toys, and art. One of my penpals from the 1990’s was Shepard Fairey, whose Obey Giant campaign specifically played with the idea of repetition and how things like his “Andre The Giant Has a Posse” stickers, when they become ubiquitous enough, take on a life of their own. By this time we’d collaborated on a number of different projects, exhibitions and an early version of his website obeygiant.com. One thing we did with that was make a page trying to document all the bootleg versions of his stickers and art that people were inspired to make on their own. (Eventually that grew too big to be comprehensive, but there’s still a fantastic collection of examples online today obeygiant.com/engineering/bootlegs/ )

Seeing people making derivatives of CryptoPunks clicked for me, and I immediately started taking notes. What had happened between my first interaction with these little pixel people and now, and where was this all heading? I had to catch up, and so I started doing what I always do.

[This is an excerpt from my introduction to the forthcoming book PUNKS:NOT DED, my unofficial companion to CRYPTOPUNKS: FREE TO CLAIM. NOT DED is available for preorder in limited hardcover and unlimited softcover, hopefully heading to the printer sometime this month.]

As soon as we got to the gate a guy stood up and opened an over head bin and pulled out his suitcase. He had headphones on and it was possible he didn’t hear the announcement, and a few of the people around him told him what was going on, and he paused for a moment. About 10 medical emergency workers rushed into the plane and down the aisle towards the middle of the plane and people stayed calmly in their seats… for about 30 seconds. Then they started getting up and getting their bags. Flight attendants started calling out asking people to stop and wait and these requests were largely ignored. People grabbed their bags and pushed into the aisle blocking the medical staff. The woman in the row behind us, who was in the window seat, told the people in the middle and aisle seats in her row to get out of her way, that she had a connecting flight and wasn’t going to wait any longer and pushed past them. Others did the same. The normal “wait my turn and get off when the line allows” method of plane disembarkment fell completely apart and became pushing shoving madness.

I watched from my seat as the flight attendants threw their hands up in frustration and forfeit. The medical team shook their heads in disgust. I have no idea what the medical emergency was, or if they were able to do anything to help or not, everyone kind of got lost in the crowd. I bright this up only because it was a pretty brutal display of how long people are willing to be inconvenienced for the benefit of a stranger. It’s less than a minute. If you have high hopes for the majority of people doing the right thing for everyone else, you are going to end up disappointed. That story has nothing to do with the rest of this piece, just sharing for the fun of it.

Speaking of disappointed, I've written a lot about social media and the state of it at various times, as well as my participation (or not) in various aspects of it. Most famously this piece from over a decade ago about why I don't use Facebook. More recently I wrote about many of the different current offerings though that was pretty extensive and several months later I've mostly decided to focus my efforts and wanted to share my thinking, and where to find me - I'm not going to list every account I have everywhere, just the ones I'm actively looking at.

The old:
I'm @seanbonner on X - I was indignantly calling this Twitter long after the name change but I have to admit the X of today is nothing like the Twitter of yesterday, and essentially everything I loved about it has been replaced with things I hate. As one of the first 140 people to join Twitter, this one has been had to accept and let go of. I still have a blue check because at the beginning of last year I paid for a year, and even though I cancelled it a long time ago it persists along with increasing "your premium account is expires soon!" warnings, so I expect that to go away soon and along with that any visibility I used to have there. The only reason I keep the account is because CryptoTwitter - the community there - still hasn't entirely moved anywhere else and it's like this tiny pocked of joy and inspiration and friends and hope surrounded by a moat of bot vomit and trolls. I will continue to encourage everyone there to go elsewhere.

I'm @seanbonner on Instagram - I made excuses to justify Instagram while avoiding Facebook for a long time but the worse Meta gets the hander that is to do with a straight face. While this used to be a great place to connect with other photographers, the algo sucks and the new image format sucks and the ads suck and everything sucks so while I'm keeping the account for the name and will probably crossposts for a while, the future sees far less of me there. (Also I have an account for my noise project Drone War because again, the noise community seems to only be there at this point.)

The now:
I'm @seanbonner.com on Bluesky - I wrote before that this is the most Twitter like of the Twitter alternatives, and I think that's in part why it's gotten critical mass. Technically Bluesky is the front end built on the open AT protocol which anyone can build on so you aren't locked into anything, and only you own your content and social graph (followers). There's no ads or algo manipulating the feed, so you see posts by the people you follow. Using your own domain to verify is brilliant. Blocking and mutes work, and so far there's a pretty low percentage of troll bots. The only real complaint I have right now is that the lack of a real crypto community there has allowed a ridiculous flood of long debunked 2021-era rumors which people with large followings state as if they are facts, to much applause and fanfare. So that's a little gross, but hopefully it shifts in the near future.

I'm @seanbonner.photos on Flashes - Flashes is an Instagram like interface for AT Protocol while it's technically also a Bluesky account, the content is more designed to be viewed in Flashes, which ignores text posts and beautifully presents imagery. Currently Flashes is iOS only, and it's a single dev project, however they just celebrated 50k downloads from the App Store so I hope the growing popularity allows them to bring in some more people and expand to web & Android soon. I made a dedicated account for this app rather than just use my main, because I wanted this to really photos on photography and visual art, and not get sidelined by random news or drama of the day.

I'm @seanbonner on Telegram - This is actually my favorite place to hang out, largely because I'm in small well curated groups so it's more of a bunch of private group chats, but that's really what I want out of social media anyway - a good way to talk to my friends.

More privately, I'm @seanbonner.01 on Signal - in a perfect world I'd migrate all my Telegram groups and chats to Signal, and we'd all turn on disappearing messages and sleep much more soundly knowing we're not being snooped on. Alas, this tends to be more for friends who are tech savvy and paying attention to privacy and security issues. (Related, I'm also on Session which is it's own thing, built outside of the US but using some Signal tech. If you need to reach me securely and don't want to use Signal ping me and I'll give you my account)

While talking about this forthcoming post over the last few days a number of people have asked me if I've I've tried this or that app which they are really liking, and the answer almost universally was "yes, but.." the "but" being that it was yet another centralized app that will eventually have the same problems as all previous centralized social media services and at this point I'm not going to commit to or spend time building a following on anything like that. I've done it too many times and it's groundhogs day at this point. The only way I'm seriously considering anything is if it's decentralized / built on web3 foundations, because if I choose to leave I want to take my stuff with me - I don't want to keep starting over from scratch.

And again, I'm on a few other apps which I've mentioned before I just don't actively check them. That's it for now, if you aren't there yet come hang out on Bluesky.

Earlier this month I had the opportunity once again to visit Paris with my kid who is about to turn 15 putting his own kid-ness into question, and as most who meet him can attest he's fully into teenage/young-adult awesomeness. The motivation for the Paris trip was a talk and booksigning I'd agreed to, but we also had the chance to see a bunch of new art from the likes of Robbie Barrat, Alienqueen, FelixFelixFelix and Space Invader, among others.

Seeing all this inspired him to finish up a little illustration he'd been working on for a while, which he released as an edition of 25. There's still 22 of those available (at about $25 each) if you wanted to snag one.

Something I love about Paris, which is not terribly dissimilar to Tokyo, but largely unheard of in Vancouver is the ability to take the train to a central point and just walk to an art opening, and along the way discover other art events that you didn't know were happening but are delighted to stumble upon, and do the same thing the next day with a completely different set of artists. And again the next. A 24/7 buffet of inspiration.

We got back from Paris just in time to watch Tara successfully defend her thesis and complete her now going on 6 year evolution into Dr Tara Tiger Brown and yes I got her a Delorean to back that name up, though it's more of the pocket sized variety. A few people have asked me for a link to her dissertation so they can read it, however it's not online yet but once it is I'll link it of course. There are also promises of articles and a book that are more geared to a consumer audience and not hyperfocused on science nerds, so depending on your personal alignment that might be better for you. I can tell you though, having watched the defense, she's brilliant the so cool under insane pressure. I'm still in awe.

Under normal circumstances this would be the top news everywhere, but since the global tire fire continues to burn the chances for anything to grab widespread attention for more than a few seconds is pretty small. I don't know how things look from wherever your vantage points are, but from here in Canada I can tell you that people are not happy with current events. I'm talking about the Canucks trading JT Miller of course, but other things are annoying people too, like Elon Musk, and Canadians are demanding that his Canadian citizenship be revoked. A lot of people didn't know he even had Canadian citizenship but he does and not just as a prank either - actually his grandfather moved the family from Canada to South Africa in 1950 because he was a big fan of apartheid and a very public racist which was just generally more accepted in South Africa than Canada. Interestingly, he was also very active in the Technocracy movement which, among other things, aspired to merge all of North America into a single country and replace all politicians with engineers. Without getting into the pros and cons of this, generally, Technocracy values the opinions and viewpoints of technical experts, turning them into the aristocracy while minimizing opinions and viewpoints of the general public–so it's not terribly surprising that some of these ideas have found popularity among today's technology brothers. History is wild.

In more Canada news, seems like there's rumblings that the US is trying to expel Canada from the Five Eyes which has in turn caused some people to instead suggest that the UK should expel the US. Again, ignoring the who's and what's about all this, one needs look no further than any number of dystopian near future sci-fi films and books to understand that cracks developing in the foundation of Five Eyes is probably a net positive for most people, though there's always the risk that what comes next is worse. But does anyone have any idea what comes next? I don't think so, and that's probably by design. More on that in another letter when I have some time to expand on it.

Again, I don't know how things look from inside the US, but from the outside it's looking like Musk is running everything, with next to no oversight, with no one even sure if he has the authority or permission to do anything that he's doing, but without pushback he's just plowing ahead, and Trump is just blindly approving anything that gets handed to him without any real idea what it is or why. I could be wrong of course, that's just how it looks. I said before I think it's going to get worse before it gets worse, and that still feels like an accurate assessment. And again, here in Canada people are sounding all kinds of alarms, boycotting US products and cautiously urging each other to buy crypto as a hedge against the Canadian dollar tanking, and to stock up on guns & ammo just in case the downstairs neighbors get any ideas, so whatever happens next is going to be interesting at least.

I spent a lot of time on recent flights writing, and have some things finished or finishing that I'm pretty proud of so I'll be publishing some of that soon, as well as bit of a station identification thing because one thing I realized in Paris is a lot of people in my daily circle don't know much about what I was up to 20 or 30 years ago which informs what I'm doing now in many ways, and that could be helpful to revisit - as well as my thinking about where to focus attention and energy online due to the aforementioned tire fire, so depending on where I'm at this week maybe I'll throw more at you. As always, thanks for being along for the ride - where ever it ends up taking us.

-s

Hi Crowd!

Things have been a bit scattered recently, by design or just unfortunate timing it seems like one can barely digest the chaos of the day before being presented with the next wave of complications. This manifests in many ways, doom scrolling and retreating into known comfort zones among them. I don't know that I have either a solution or a useful processing method, though certainly find myself hunting for one almost daily. My list of things I want to write to you about continues to grow and I realize at this point I can never accomplish it all in one shot and my only hope is diving in and starting to chip away at it.

One question a lot of people have asked me recently is wtf are we supposed to do about social media. It's a valid question, without a good answer. At a top down level, replacing a problem with the exact same thing painted a different color doesn't solve anything, it just sort of pushes the problem down the road. We clearly knew the problem with centralized for-profit social media platforms almost 20 years ago and rather than move to decentralized options where we control our own data and social graph, we keep jumping from one centralized system to another because it's easy. I don't know that enough people care enough to do anything else, but the problem we have right now isn't new or unexpected. That's not an I told you so, though of course I did, because I'm mostly right there with you in all of this.

A lot of people are very concerned about Xwitter or as I've been calling it recently Q-Elon central. I moved out of the US before the first Trump administration and when people started getting stopped at the border and being ordered by CBP officers to login to their social media accounts for inspection I decided that I didn't want to have to try and explain a bad joke or midnight rant to some schmuck with a fake badge and deleted all my history. At the time I set up a recurring "delete everything older than 30 days" system but that has long since stopped working and I got lazy. I recently found CYD which offers a similar service, free to delete all your old tweets/posts and a small price if you want it to also unfollow everyone. I mention this only because if you are planning to "leave" the site, if you just delete your account someone else can grab your username and pretend to be you, and if you just walk away from it all that data is sitting there waiting to be harvested by any number of API crawling AI bots, so if that site is in your rearview this is a good way to burn the bridge behind you. I'm not as anti-AI as a lot of people I know, but I've seen enough dystopian sci-fi films to know that homegrown AI with no rails in the hands of a guy like Musk ends badly every single time. For everyone. Regardless of if you are on his site or not.

Bluesky continues to be an alternative that I hope is promising, largely because of the backend ATprotocol which powers alternative front ends like Skeets, and forthcoming TikTok (skylight) and Instagram (flashes) replacements built on the same open protocol. I also really like Rodeo as an Instagram replacement because lets face it, Zuckerbook/Meta is no better and probably worse in ways we don't even know yet. I struggle with this as you all know because I'm old and lonely and am bad at staying in touch with my friends, but also as I cross a half a century of wandering around this floating rock I find disconnecting and just reading books and reorganizing guitar pedal chains all day to be increasingly more appealing. Sadly that doesn't pay the bills and I'm no where near rich enough to envision that as a realistic lifestyle at this point, though I do try to cram it in during spare moments and downtime.

It's funny, in my teens I never thought I'd see my 20's. In my 20's I thought I'd magically figured it all out and would be in music for the rest of my life. In my 30's I'd really for real this time figured it all out and getting away from music was the best thing I'd ever done and would obviously now be spending the rest of my life in technology and at any moment would sell a company and never have to worry about how to pay a bill again in my life. In my 40's I realized I had not figured anything at all out, and just had a bunch of interesting / unique experiences and perspectives that maybe if I was lucky I could apply to other things and be helpful somehow. And here I am now, with no real idea how anything is going to play out next or how to classify it, but finding some solace again in music. And at least the memes continue to be entertaining.

I have a few friends who have recently started newsletters with paid subscriptions and are now making a decent living from which is super cool to see in these weird and unpredictable times. I'm also reminded of the one time I tried to explore such a thing and had 3 people sign up for it, 2 of which were family members, so that wasn't as sustainable. Because I'm sure emotion isn't conveyed well in this kind of text format I assure you I'm literally laughing out loud as I type that. Not just lol'ing, the real thing.

Unrelated, I do have some books available right now, for anyone interested...
Photobook: Unfinished Projects (shipping now)
Photobook: SBXX (preorders)
Cryptopunks: NOT DEAD (preorders: softcover / limited hardcover)
*self published and unofficial companion to FREE TO CLAIM which I co-edited/authored

In addition to the social media question a lot of people have been asking me about Canada. Many different things about Canada, not the least of which is how do Canadians feel about Americans right now? While I obviously can't speak for all the Canadians or even some of the Canadians, I can tell you what I've seen and heard first hand here in Vancouver and you can decide how widely to apply that - it's not good. When I moved to Canada almost 5 years ago I was kind of shocked at how negatively Americans were discussed, generally, especially as an American I'd always experienced Canadians being thought of quite positively. But there was a general distrust and dislike, which to some extent could be written off as simple cultural friction (assumptions of rudeness, etc) but the recent tariff's and comments from Trump and co has really cranked that dial up to 11. People are pissed, and it doesn't feel like the kind of anger which goes away with the next news cycle. It's more like previously there was an annoying neighbor who played music too loud and had a messy yard but was generally harmless so everyone just put up with, vs now that neighbor has started building bombs in his garage and picking fights and the whole neighborhood is having emergency meetings about how to get this guy evicted/arrested/ejected and making lists of tough friends they can call for back up if it goes too far and they need to go crack some skulls. Not saying Canada thinks it can beat up the US, but I do think Hockey players are way tougher than Football players, and while the US/Canadian border has never been fun to cross, feels like it's going to get a lot worse faster than anyone expects it to.

I sent out some other links to the Crowd Telegram group earlier which I'm going to make an effort to do more often, if only to help myself keep track of them better, so if you want a sneak peak on things that might make it into this letter feel free to join that channel. This is a pretty interesting AI News mapping tool showing how different stories of the moment are connected to each other. And as news of the moment seems to be about a lot of government websites and data suddenly disappearing, the newly set up GovWaybackMachine is pretty helpful. Things are happening really fast and it's unclear how many of them are legal, or if that even matters, but this tracker can at least help you see which lawsuits have been filed by who over which objection, and how that might play out.

OK, it's date night and I've successfully checked a few items off the shit to write about list, please to enjoy and I'll write more soon I promise. xoxo
-s

I visited Los Angeles for the first time in February of 2001. I’d passed on previous opportunities to visit because I assumed it would be a place I’d hate. The only things I knew about it was there were lots of earthquakes and fake people. I didn’t work in the movies, had no interest in plastic surgery or fancy cars and generally didn’t think there was anything I’d find interesting there, so why bother? I eventually decided to check it out not for any grand reason other than that it was really cold in Chicago. I’d just carried my suitcase 5 blocks through the freezing ice and snow to get home after visiting family during holidays in sunny Florida, and couldn’t come up with a reason to say no when an LA based artist friend of mine proposed a visit. Fuck it, why not, right?

I expected to go, enjoy a few days of warmth and see some friends, check another city off the list, then go home having all my preconceptions confirmed. I was wrong.

It felt electric. Almost immediately I realized my assumptions were misplaced. This was not all glam and glitter, these were normal people doing normal shit. But there was a buzz that I’d never felt before and it didn’t take me long to figure out why. College aside, which is transient by design, everywhere I’d ever lived the majority of the people who lived there were also from there. They were used to it and comfortable with it, and had accepted their place in it. Los Angeles was the opposite. Most of the people I encountered moved there from somewhere else, driven by aspirations, chasing some kind of dream. At the time I joked that it might be a dumb and completely unrealistic dream, but it was a dream nonetheless. And that hope and optimism could be felt everywhere. People were trying to do things. On top of that, there was this feeling that everyone you met was a potential collaborator rather than what I was used to, which was competition at every turn. It was intoxicating, I’d never felt anything like it and immediately knew I needed to live there. 

I went back to Chicago, informed my boss of my decision, made arrangements and 3 months later I was living in LA. 

I spent 16 years in LA, almost 3x as long as I’ve lived anywhere else in my life. When I eventually left, I left not to get away, but because I realized that commuting back and forth to Tokyo every month was ridiculous and something had to change - however no matter how far away I was, Los Angeles stayed planted in my heart. It was the first place I ever lived that felt like home. It wasn’t painless and the city certainly dished out its fair share of drama but I loved it like no other and it became a part of me. Metaphorically, but also physically as evident by the number of Los Angeles tattoos I got over the years. Los Angeles is like no other, everyone says that about every city and I’m sure it’s true to some extent but one of the reasons New Yorkers don’t like LA is because they expect all cities to work like NY - and most do - but LA explicitly doesn’t. It’s it’s own thing, and it’s proud of that. Something that became evident to me living there is that people in LA are actually fake, just like they are everywhere else, but only LA embraces that, celebrates it, and is up front about it. It’s a costume, all part of a show, which can be taken off without fear or concern of being found out, and this reveals the deepest vulnerability and humanity I’ve ever experienced. Imagine my surprise, the fake people I was worried about were actually the realest.

Another thing is that LA knows how everyone else feels about it. LA knows everyone thinks it’s just earthquakes and fake people, just glam and glitter. And it doesn’t care. It’s over trying to convince everyone it’s something else, and its just confident it being what it is. LA gets shit done, because shit needs to get done and no one else is going to do it. Whatever you want, whatever you need, whatever idea you have, LA can provide a way to do it and excited collaborators to help you out with it. Every project or company I started there, and there are many, started out with a simple “anyone want to riff on this with me?” post somewhere, or “oh! I know someone you need to meet!” It was beautiful.

And that’s just the people. The landscape, the architecture, the food, the history, the culture… there are so many things, all of the things, and I could essays about all of them. On a normal day anyway, but today is not a normal day.

I’ve been trying to write this for over a week and keep getting stumped because I don’t know how to say what I’m feeling, watching this place that I love burn and not being there to do anything. Not that I could if I was of course, which complicates it further. Balancing the knowledge that we all knew this might happen eventually, with the disbelief that it actually happened. I have friends who have lost everything and I want to hug them. I have friends who didn’t but their fear and stress is just as real and I want to be there for them, just to do something. But I’m far away, speechless and helpless. Just watching, and hoping for the best for whatever is left, and whatever comes next. We haven’t even begun to realize what was lost, or what impact that will have on the future.

To my friends still there, the survivors, I love you all. I miss you. I’m thinking about you nonstop, and can’t wait to see you again soon and deliver these promised hugs. Stay strong.

[Insert obligatory "I haven't written to you since last year" joke followed by copious laughter]

The most persistent new years eve memory I have pegs back to perhaps '94 in Gainesville, we'd all just gotten home from some new years eve show happening at the Hardback with which bands I've forgotten but certainly loved with all my heart at the time, and when I say home I mean the shitty 8 unit breezeway apartment complex I lived in at the time of which 6 of the 8 apartments were occupied by stand up members of the punk community. There were probably a dozen bands and 5 or 6 fanzines represented within those walls though for some reason we'd latched onto one and lovingly christened the building as The Wenix Hotel. Now that I type it I can't remember if anyone from Weinix actually lived there, or if they lived in one of the neighboring houses. I lived in 3 or 4 different buildings within a block of that place at different points, and probably had 15 different roommates. Anyway, this night in particular one of the hometown heroes who lived downstairs and had returned home in the same roving mob I was with had apparently had a lot to drink (not out of character) and was super jolly because of it (also the norm) but I think had recently been involved in some girl drama (again, par for the course) and was fully embracing the notion of a clean slate being ushered in with the new year by embracing literally everyone he crossed paths with in a giant hug and tell them it was all ok now because everything was water under the bridge. Nothing mattered, everything was cool, tomorrow was a new day, and everything was water under the bridge. I appreciate the optimism at the time, though I didn't believe it - I was glad someone did, even if they would come to their senses the next day when they sobered up.

I think about that every year for reasons I can't figure out, so its possible if you've known me long enough you've heard it before. I turn 50 this year so I'm firmly in the bracket where I no longer remember who I told what to or what the actual details where. Maybe I just made this whole thing up right now and only imagined remembering it. Either way, sentiment remains the same. I don't know what this year will bring, but I'm not really optimistic about where it's all headed. Everything feels messy and uncertain, and any prediction feels like it would be misplaced. I do love the positivity though, and seeing everyones lists of things they enjoyed last year and things they plan to do this next one always makes me smile, and introduces me to things I somehow missed. I have no such list myself, though in a way that's kind of what The Crowd is all year long, me rambling about things I enjoyed and things I plan to enjoy in the future. Also, US politics is hard to avoid but a reminder that I moved out of the US a decade ago and have no plans to move back, so many things I used to talk about because they directly impacted me feel different as a spectator. Not that US politics don't impact me, they impact everyone and as a US citizen and tax payer who has many people I love still in the US things are always relevant, but as long term expat they are just relevant differently. I don't know if that makes any sense. A lot of disappointment and frustration, from a distance.

Unrelated, 48 hours ago Tara sent me a text with a link to 75 HARD which is one of these "do this stuff for some amount of time and it'll change your life" programs so with zero planning or consideration we've jumped into it starting today. It's not really a new years resolution so much as starting on Jan 1 makes counting really easy thing. As I type this I'm finishing up day 1 successfully, will I make it to day 2??? I'm not telling you this for any kind of social accountability or whatever as much as I am just using that as an example of how my plans these days rarely exceed 3 days out. You want to lock me into something next week? Good luck, I've barely ironed out my plans for tomorrow.

I don't know if this is an age thing, but way back in the way back when I started writing things like this I always felt like I might know about something a few minutes before other people and as such could offer insight or some useful curations, but these days I always assume I'm late to the party and will only be boring people telling them things they already know. I think that's part of why these newsletters have contained so much more introspection than current events, I can safely assure myself that you don't know what I've been thinking about to myself for the last few weeks. At least I could, any second now someone is going to train an AI LLM on my blog and tweets and newsletters and will then be able to predict everything I'd come up with so I won't need to bother any longer.

I saw this photo of lightning striking the US Capitol building last night and like anyone with a PMA tattoo I immediately knew the reference nature was trying to make, and started singing Bad Brains in my head.

I thought I should rush to social media and post this immediately because I knew 3 or 4 people who follow me somewhere might also get it, and since I've been thinking I want to try and spend more time on Bluesky because I'm sick of Elon pushing his tweets into my feed on Xwitter and the ever growing nazi population, so I went there and immediately saw that Clayton had beaten me to the punch, which I appreciated. Speaking of Twitter, I did this Twitter Wrapped thing which is like some AI assessment of your tweets which was kind of fun to see, though in the "friendly roast" section it said: "Says 'make cool shit' but spends more time documenting other people's cool shit." Fucking ouch Twitter Wrapped that was uncalled for. Though I guess it kind of made up for it with this high praise:

Speaking of cool shit and photos, my UNFINISHED PROJECTS book is done, and people who ordered it early last year have it in their hands already. The post office here in Canaduh was on strike, so I had to take everything with me when I went to the US last month and ship it all from there, which actually worked out better since most of the books were shipping to the US. The workers are back on the job now (though sadly without resolution) so I'm able to ship things from here again. I didn't make a ton of these books, but have about 25 on hand right now so if you want one it'll ship out this week.

Between that and the release of FREE TO CLAIM December was a good one for finishing up projects, ironically. We're planning a kind of book club thing for FTC where we'll bring in some of the contributors and have semi-weekly chats going through all 900 pages of the book, so stay tuned. I live in this almost constant state of having 50 different things that I'm working on which are at some non-100% level of completion and it weighs heavy, so actually shipping things feels really good. The next to-be-finished thing is NOT DED, the unofficial companion to FREE TO CLAIM which I'm still finishing writing.

Revisiting my earlier comment about feeling uneasy/unrest about the future a lot of what is happening around the world (both near and far) has me thinking about place recently. 15 years ago I wondered what "home" actually means, landing (at least then) on it being, at least for me, more of a when and a who and less of a where. If you get what I mean. Living in Vancouver BC is interesting because more than any other place I've ever lived there's a focus on the indigenous population and who controls the land, with lots of talk about colonizers. To be clear here I don't feel unwelcome, and I've had some really informative and thoughtful conversations with people about related activism and ideas like Land Back, but at the same time I know this place will never be my home. We've now lived here longer than we did in Tokyo, but I'm still homesick for Japan and even visiting now still feels more like being home then living here in Vancouver. There's probably a lot to dig into there, but global events like what's happening in Palestine and Israel and sudden talk of potential US expansionism all kind of plays into this thinking about who belongs, or more importantly doesn't belong, where. When I talk to people or read things others have written about how they desperately want to go home, I can't help but reflect on the realization that I don't have a place that is home to go back to. I don't know what the term for this is, some kind of global homelessness? I used to tout the excitement and adventure of being a nomad, but there's another side to that which isn't as exciting. Japan feels like home in a lot of ways, but I'm not Japanese and could never become Japanese, so even best possible case situation I'd still be a foreigner. I have a lot of Irish ancestry, but it's too far back to grant any kind of citizenship or residency so there's no potential way to "go back" there, and even if I could it's still a place that I've only visited, but don't have any lived experience in. It's funny to think about how all of the places I've spent years living, I don't actually belong in any of those places. None could be home, even if I wanted them to be. Which creates a weird duality, empathy and support for people wanting to go home, while also knowing there's not even a home anywhere for me to pine over. So that possibly gets back to why the who and then when became more important to me than the where, and part of the struggle with Vancouver for me is going into my 5th year here, it's still a super lonely place. I can think of a few places I'd like to live, a lot of that driven by friends who live in those places, but there's always distance between wanting to and being able to, and what you think it would be like and what it would actually be like. Alas.

I did go to my first live "music" event here last month, I use the quotes there because it was a noise show full of chaos and static and harsh walls of blistering insanity. It was lovely and the few people I spoke to were super nice. I bought an Echthros t-shirt after being blown away by the performance, which sadly I didn't get any good photos of because I'd walked to the back of the venue before he started and couldn't get much closer than this.

That's enough navel gazing for the moment. Here are some things you should know about if you don't already -

AI is getting scarily good at pretending to be human, and also pretending to be a specific human. And scammers are going to be taking full advantage of that, so if you haven't already you should come up with a password for your family, don't write it down but everyone should know it so that if someone gets a call or text asking for help or information you can confirm if it's really who you think it is. This might sound silly but people get scammed every day on much more obvious hoaxes, and SIM swaps are becoming much more common. So in the near future you could get a message from a family member from their number and it might sound exactly like them, but not actually be them.

I'm firmly in "I have too much stuff" territory especially when you consider guitar pedals, but I still love seeing what other people are into and the Wirecutter 100 list is always fascinating insight. Kind of wild to watch companies throw money at Trump just to avoid being in his cross hairs, what a racket. Speaking of rackets, apparently in the US cops were making their own crack to sell to people, so they could arrest them and seize their belongings, which often included guns, which they were turning around and selling on the black market.

I want to get this out before the end of the day, so I'll wrap it here and just remind everyone I set up a Telegram group for THE CROWD where I'm posting the occasional meme and link most of which I thought would end up in the actual news letter but writing that now I realize I didn't pull that part off so well, but since there's like 100x more people on this list than in there I should prioritize that for the next one.

Happy New Year!
-s

So before we get into it, some good news this week: The ICC finally issued arrest warrants for some war criminals. That took too long, but it's in motion now and that's great. Matt Gaetz withdrew his nomination for AG because of too much attention into alleged "sexual misconduct" and payments to underaged girls. Quietly laughing about the people who told me over the last week that this was all unfounded smear campaign lies. Gary Gensler announced that he will resign in January. Baby steps. Bluesky has over 20 million users now, blowing past Threads with daily active users which is exciting to be a part of, and amusing to immediately see Adam Mosseri backpedal and announce that Threads is "rebalancing" their algo to show you posts from people you follow rather than mostly recommended posts from people you don't follow. If you are on Bsky, you can follow me. I'm spending less time on the Xitanaic as the lines between the site and the Trump administration continue to blur, and more data is finding how much certain messages are being pushed, and others being hidden there. Bluesky has none of those issues, instead showing you posts from people you follow and not penalizing people for posting links. It's fun.

I'm still chewing on an election post mortem which I may or may not bother writing because people keep saying what I'm thinking about saying and there's no point in being redundant, but it's wild to see so many people shocked that shifting right on policies and getting endorsements from the Cheney's didn't win over the left. Dems brought this on themselves and watching them point fingers rather than take responsibility, smile and shake hands with the people who for months they have been saying will be the end of Democracy and spend their last days in office doubling down on the worst decisions rather than taking every step they can to protect and lock in everything they possibly can is just disgusting.

More on that later, perhaps.. lets keep things positive for the moment.

Anyone who knows me knows I'm absolutely one to fetishize objects and things that are both older than me and were loved by other people rank high on my list of things to dive into. Many years ago, more than a decade now, I got the idea that I wanted a lighter from the Vietnam war. At the time I saw something about the creative etchings that soldiers would have done to personalize them, so they knew a lighter was theirs, and I liked the idea of something that was part of someone's EDC - something they purposefully used every day and carried with them for a reason. This is both an easy and difficult task, because while there are tons of "Vietnam lighters" available all over the place, the vast majority of them are either fairly accurate reproductions, or outright fakes. There's also a bunch of different kinds of lighters, and a bunch of different kinds of etchings. So first I had to decide what I wanted.

I wanted a Zippo. It's such a classic design and the lines are just perfect. They also show wear really nicely. So while there are a few different brands that were commonly carried by soldiers, limiting what I wanted helped narrow the focus. The etching was next - there are a few common categories to sort through: Patriotic/Sex/Drugs/Memorial/Cartoons. I didn't want an eagle or bomb or a crude drawing of some boobs, so eliminating that stuff was easy. There's also professionally etched or ones that look like someone carved into them by hand with a scrap of metal. I wanted something on the nicer side, and I wanted the etching to be relatable for me. Sorry Soldier Snoopy flying in for some weed and ass and the memory of dead friends, you are a hard no.

Then we get to verifying - how to know if something is real or a fake aimed at suckers like me? Zippos changed their designs slightly over the years, so it was easy to rule out sloppy fakes on modern models that were made to look old. I also decided that if a seller specialized in Vietnam lighters or more often several different flavors of Vietnam collectables, the chances of them being involved with the manufacturing end of that supply chain was probably high, so avoid. It took a long time for me to find the one I wanted and from a seller I felt comfortable with, but eventually I did. And if you know me, you know it's kind of perfect.

The person I bought this from wasn't a collectables dealer, and was convincingly able to establish a chain of custody. They had half a dozen or so items, all from the same person and same time frame. I can retell that if asked, but it's not really important in the big picture - what mattered to me was that this was real enough for my own story, and this did the trick. Some objects, when you hold them, you can feel the weight. Both physical and emotional, and I like to think this has some real substance to it and when I got it I thought it would be a fantastic addition to my own EDC.

I don't smoke, and they don't allow these kinds of lighters on planes anymore so carrying it around all the time wasn't working out so well. Recently Zippo made a bunch of new inserts, which is honestly a great idea that I'm surprised they didn't do earlier. Different types of lighters, but also a flashlight and what I was most excited about - a multitool. Switching out the guts also kind of makes it my own (though I kept the old guts of course) and I have a reason to carry it now, so even better.

I mention all this not because I'm some lighter aficionado - I'm not - but rather that I often talk about collecting and being thoughtful when buying things (as opposed to just ordering the first thing you see) and thought I'd share. The thrill of the hunt is real, but the thought that goes into deciding what to hunt for is also a huge piece of it. Recently my friend Ian wrote a bit after being asked about collecting digital art and I thought it was a wonderful journey through his own thinking and process. I like what he's getting at, though I teased him a little on twitter about the idea that people might be more or less qualified to appreciate different kinds of art. I'm a big believer in gut feelings and reactions being just as important as understanding technical ability.

In a somewhat similar yet still totally different vein, my very old friend Travis Keller (along with Joe Cardamon) who you might know from his site/label Buddyhead is making a movie which tells the story of both Buddyhead and The Icarus Line and several years of chaos and adventure and dreams and drama around them. Way before everyone was filming everything Travis was one of those guys who always had a MiniDV camera with him and everything in this film was recorded before 2005, so beyond everything else it's a pretty fascinating look back at life before social media and watching this trailer made me crazy nostalgic for the days of jumping in a van with friends and equipment and just hitting the road unsure of what you'd find when you got to the small venue in the little town you'd talked to someone on the phone about playing at. Though I don't miss the smell of the van I can tell you that for sure.

I can't wait for this film to get finished so I can watch it, Travis has been talking about it for such a long time and I really do think it's a great story, even if it's not about a "success" or perhaps maybe it is, but more about redefining what success means to you, regardless of how anyone else sees it. He's raising money for the movie the old fashioned way and if you want to kick in a little I'm sure they'd deeply appreciate it, they are trying to get $70k for the next stage of production and have a little over $12k of that in so far.

I say the old fashioned way because there's a stark contrast between pouring your heart and soul into something, and then asking people to believe in you and your dream and to kick in a few hundred bucks to help you make it a reality, and the absolute chaos of the bull market happening in crypto right now. As Bitcoin is seconds away from hitting $100K (and I remember when it was $30k last year and people said it was over) and today you have this guy who woke up and decided he was going to drop a memecoin and livestream until the marketcap hits $100M and as part of the hype building around it literally burned $400k this morning on camera, or earlier this week this kid who launched a coin, then rugged it for $30k only to have the community take over and send it to the moon and laugh about how his coins would have been worth millions. What a wild world we live in, and as shit as a lot of it is, if you can step back and watch it like a spectator sometimes, it's damn amusing.

That's all from me for the moment, hope you are all well.

-s

A little more than a year ago I wrote about the end of social media. I think a lot of what I wrote there holds true and is more obvious from this perspective, especially if you consider the trajectory X/witter is on. Regardless of how you personally feel about Musk or any of his choices (like removing block functions and unbanning abusers) the fact that he's moved from apolitical to heavily pushing one side, and will have a role with the incoming government, it's fair to consider things objectively. If the US government set up a social media app today I don't know that many people would be rushing towards it, nor would they trust it to be open, fair, objective, or secure. Well rando normies might but most people I interact with online spend a few minutes thinking about privacy and security and take that into account at least somewhat. I think it's probably reasonable to hold X to the same standard, which I also imagine for a lot of people it now fails.

For the moment I'm still there, though I cancelled my pro+ check mark thing a while ago (yet still seem to have the perks) and admit it's mostly nostalgia and cryptotwitter keeping me engaged, but for how much longer I can't say. I have been revisiting some of the newer decentralized options I've talked about in the past, and making a more concerted effort to spend time elsewhere. Truthfully, a future where I never even think about social media gets more appealing everyday, but without it I don't know how to communicate or stay in touch with anything but a very small group of people, and everyday the thought of consolidating to only that gets more appealing, but for now I still need to work and let people know what I'm doing, so I'm still in the game.

Given that, I thought I'd share a bit what I'm playing with and how, for anyone that wants to follow along.

My one big realization is that there's no way for me to be 100% engaged in every app all the time, so while for much of the last almost 20 years Twitter has been my primary goto, I'm actively trying to shift primary to Bluesky. The addition of account switching was big, and the recent launch of deck.blue will make anyone who still misses the golden age of Tweetdeck feel warm and cozy. I also really like being able to use my own domain as my username which serves as verification that I am who I say I am.

For a while now Bluesky and Warpcast were my kind of alternating 2nd and 3rd place though I'd admittedly sometimes go days or weeks without looking at them. At one point they were both very much Twitter clones with a dash of their own flavor, and while they've both grown a lot since then and there's lots of factors and issues to consider, the big thing for me is that anytime I went back to Bluesky it felt immediately familiar where as every time I'd go to Warpcast I'd feel lost and like I was starting over from scratch. I don't understand the recent change with channels and while I'm sure if I set aside a few hours I could get up to speed I'm just not motivated to do that, because I feel like I might have to do the same thing next month to get up to speed on whatever the next major change is. It also feels like it's getting kind of hostile in ways I just don't have time to worry about. So while I have the account there I'm admittedly not paying much attention. This is feeling kind of similar to Mastodon for me at this point, I'm there but I never go there.

I very occasionally look at Nostr and when I do I use Nos or Damus on iOS. The web interfaces I used before don't seem to be working anymore and I haven't bothered to look into why or what else might be a better option because it still feels very heavy inside baseball bitcoin land there, which is fine, just not my vibe. I don't even know how to link my profile, so yeah.

I'm using native apps, but also enjoying some of the 3rd party options taking advantage of the open protocols to allow interacting with several different accounts in one place. On iOS I just set up Openvibe to sync Bluesky, Nostr, and Mastodon - so with that I might be passively engaging more with Nostr and Mastodon than I had been in the past. It sounds like Micro.blog does that too, and also syncs with other places like Medium, Tumblr, Flickr, LinkedIn, Threads and others which I was initially intrigued by but while you can set up a free account to read a combined timeline you have to pay to post anything which was too much friction for me at the time. I'm not opposed to paying for apps at all, don't get me wrong - I pay for a lot of apps, but no free trial + similar functionality that I have elsewhere + short attention span worked against it here. I may revisit later but I think Openvibe sort of covers the bases.

I'm not on Threads because Facebook, though recently I was wondering if I was being too much of a hardass about that so I asked on some of my feeds if I should try it out, and the admittedly biased group of people who bothered to respond to me were split at about 10% enjoying it and saying I should join, and 90% saying it's just another algo driven feed by a major company pushing things I may or may not want to see and same drama as elsewhere so I think I'm still avoiding it for now.

This is all largely text focused, for images it's a whole other collection of fun.

I'm still using Instagram, which yes I know Facebook, but I was there before and just never left, though haven't converted to any of the meta/facebook/whatever stuff they have brought in which probably hurts me but the dumb thing is that in order to file a DMCA report with Facebook for something on IG - something I need to do from time to time - you need to have an IG account. So, yeah.

Sunlit is apparently a very nice Instagram clone/replacement made by the Micro.blog team, but when I tried to look at it I needed a MB login for it which I didn't have at the time so still haven't checked it out, but others seem to like it. Popset, Rodeo and Perma are also interesting next-gen photo/image blogging apps (Rodeo being more art focused) which have the bonus of being on-chain though that aspect is obfuscated for the most part, so onboarding is easy and if you don't want to think about web3 stuff you don't have to, but if you want to take advantage of it there it is.

I think we'll see more and more of that in the future so it makes sense to have that foundation in place on new things being built.

For chat I spent a lot of time with Telegram these days, and Signal being a close second. Admittedly I'm not on Discord as much as I once was and can't remember the last time I opened Slack. It's for this reason that Beeper has my attention. I haven't gone through the paces with it yet, but it looks to be a chat aggregator similar to Openvibe but for Signal and Telegram and Instagram and Slack and Discord and LinkedIn and Facebook and WhatsApp and several others so that might be a great option for people struggling to juggle between all of those places.

One final thing I'll leave you with that I also have only lightly scratched the surface on is Delta Chat. Despite it's name, it's not a chat app - though maybe it kind of is? It's actually an email client but it's not like any email client you've ever seen because the UI is 100% chat focused. Gone are subjects, addresses, CCs, etc - all the things you think of with email. It really breaks your brain if you add your main business email address to it, however if you have a secondary address that you just use for friends and family and mainly just talking (vs sharing big files or something) it might be interesting to play with. I'll dive into email more later, some other time.

That's all for the moment, see you out in the ether...