Dave The Web Guy
I Don't See How This is Any Solution
09/21/2023
As a "solution" this makes zero sense. Yes, it's great that all these people have been given the right to work. But - it's for them to live and work in New York City. So how is anything solved? Even at the good end of the wage scale for a migrant worker they aren't going to be able to afford a rent, food, and transportation.
This problem isn't solved for average Americans let alone immigrants. Affordable living and rent among hard workers punching a clock every single day is a longstanding crisis in its own right.
I'm afraid that the only winners here are going to be those who trade in black market rentals in potential fire tombs who will be the ones to get their hands on any cash these people earn. I don't understand the open fictionalization of success here and the pressure to celebrate it.
By Dave for Personal Blog.
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Gypsy Parlor
09/11/2023
I've been trying to eat out on Sundays as a matter of weekly treat. We've been hitting all the neighborhood restaurants, gradually expanding the circle each week. This week we chowed at the Gypsy Parlor which on top of just having great cuisine looks (to me at least) like a great drinking joint. I def got a pin on it.
By Dave for Personal Blog.
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The Blogging Struggle Is Real
09/10/2023
Omigawwwwd. I have been bored and lethargic lately. I think there have been things to write about but I've been too deflated to bring them up.
This week I chanced to open up my blog's main page and found that the dead man switch kicked in with the dreaded Posting Lull page, which mean that I've been uninspired to post here for like 2 weeks at least.
I've really got to lower the content squelch to pick up and feel motivated to write about stuff, because it isn't like there isn't anything going on. It's just all so seemingly trivial that in the "formula of posting", the result value isn't big enough to actually do it.
And part of the problem, and you know I'm going to keep harping on this, is that those commercial social media platforms keep diffusing the impulse. Why open my blog and make a post when a short quip that guarantees visibility (or at least more of it) to X or Threads, satiates the impulse - right from my phone, right from the palm of my hand, at any time.
This is the challenge though, right? I keep this blog to prove the value and relevance of the craft, and, outside the commercial sphere at that. So I'm not giving up. If I'm not blogging well it means I'm not doing well enough as a writer, a journalist, a thought leader, a thought bleeder -- whatever label you want to put on it.
So! Here is what am doing right now:
Laundry.
By Dave for Personal Blog.
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Understanding the Actual Forces
08/13/2023
I've been consuming a lot of content in the background related to the demise of the "old web." Some of the content I'm coming across reasons in a way that makes sense to me while some of the analysis just doesn't hit the mark.
I'm going to begin presenting some of this compiled content, but before I do, I want to simplify the reasons as I see them. Any commentary I add to my finds will be judged in quality with respect to these.
Here they are:
The Original Web Depended on Desktop Computers
The primary consumption instrument for the web, among pedestrian users, changed. People stopped using personal computers to interface the web and relied on their smartphones instead. Since the "profit web" demands active foot (click) traffic, so went development. The "desktop" web became a secondary presentation and was often left miserable looking in efforts to maintain "responsive design" principles. Any component of a website that aligned with the spirit of curiosity-driven click navigation was presumed "bad design".
Social Media Platforms
Concurrently, social media platforms emerged, eliminating the technical friction involved with online expression. A post that took a click to make was easier than one that took a website to erect and maintain. Social media platforms also offered instant referable engagement to a critical mass audience, even for low quality expressions. Websites, even in the pre social media era, were shots in the dark for engagement. To illustrate, consider that a book sits idle on a library shelf for decades -- its author never knows who reads it. Meanwhile, a writer can dump a bucket of pamphlets from a high window and watch people take (or not take) them for reading. For the publishing masses, the latter is far more gratifying.
Google Monetized the Discovery Process
Major search engines slowly influenced the complete cycle from publishing to consumption by giving discoverability bias to for-profit enterprise publishers. A poor writer's cure for cancer was made to compete against a rich man's snake oil when it came to connecting consumers with information. Money now controls the ease by which information makes it to the searcher. Smaller publishing efforts established over and around the profit drive are less compelled, if capable even, to participate.
Late Stage Capitalism
Our corporatocracy forever struggles to refine the human spirit of curiosity and intellectual culture. It needs to draw out the component of human intellectualism and mentality that keeps business and commerce the defining ruling force in all matters, and, it needs to keep people consuming and "dumb." Keeping people from using the same conduits they might use to marvel over and multiply the franchise of the Kardashians, to also connect with alternate economic or human and social development theories, fuels a deep bias towards all digital enterprise philosophies that perfect this refinement. Targeting conduits of wildcard exposure and discoverability that an open web encourages means that big tech companies that can "read the will of its rulers" limit the full power of their own offerings, effectively doing so. As a result they are rewarded by being allowed to stay large and in control. By relatable contrast, in more open totalitarian states like China, certain behaviors tied to loss of population control are simply countered by forms of direct oppression. What all of this means is that displacing the uncontrolled wild west web with a big tech one is an imperative matter of order.
By Dave for Personal Blog.
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Social Media Exposes Disdain For Consumerism
08/02/2023
I get it, but, why hasn't anyone sued the TV networks for the past 50 years for this? Why haven't they sued advertising agencies, producers of pop culture, 7th Avenue New York, celebrities, or for that matter the developers of the internet and the original world wide web?
People and conduits have been impacting mental health and "disrupting education" forever. And they have all been tuning and tweaking their tactics for maximum influence.
People didn't dislike consumerism until it became social media I guess.
By Dave for Personal Blog.
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Playing Follow the Leader, When the Leader Is I
07/29/2023
Well that didn't last long.
It's not that following my loud declaration that I wold not use social media for "reach", I recant that specific element, but it's pretty clear to me just two or so weeks after doing so, that there's simply no fun or point to the craft if you're not spreading your stuff like a weed wherever you can.
So, I am going to have to turn that dial back a little on my complete abandonment of social media and "continue analyzing the landscape".
I think the blog should increase its luminance, yes, and maybe that understanding will be a key positive takeaway from the Twitter shipwreck that spawned all this contemplation in the first place. But blogs and personal websites like this also have a duty to inject themselves into the broader digital conversation, wherever that is happening.
Twitter's morphing into something more akin to a closed service has definitely fragmented online conversation (not an accident I suspect, the status quo or the "Illuminati" or "UFOs", however you choose to define the mysterious powers-that-be, was terrified by a unified public square, in my theory of demise), and everything I said before about the independent publishing platform is truer for it.
But for me at least, in the capacity of a show, which I've always considered the online version of myself, I can't isolate my stuff which otherwise disappears into the nether when suddenly I croak and GoDaddy realizes that the recurring charges for the hosting are failing.
Especially when it comes to my personal blog. Understand that my voice in IRL matters is very much squelched day to day. I've grown keen over the course of my lifetime that people are kind of afraid to just "let this fucker talk." For me, it's about slogging through naked filibustering and diversionary obfuscating tactics just about every minute of my waking life. And maybe 20 percent of the time or so I would actually agree with people for wanting to stick a cork in me. It's this freaking Mars in Gemini I've got.
Putting it more eloquently though, I am not free or brave enough to spout off in certain circles even when it would be the more just thing to do. And while my online voice doesn't replace my guarded sentiments, it does serve as an omnipresent warning to everyone that my acquiescence is a frail matter of reason, when not an outright bypass outlet.
Like any writer, I consider my big mouth, my writing and my publishing, one of the few inherent powers of my nature, that I posses. Despite my quip about GoDaddy above, I'm likely to find a way to keep doing it beyond the grave (kind of like this guy but probably with a little more focus, and, oh yeah, without the apparent criminal insanity - I mean what a pretty crazy story). It would be cool to figure out a way, 'specially with all this AI business now.
My good audience, for better or for worse, I am meant to ooze through the gears of online conversation and must continue doing so as a matter of personal therapy, positive - or at least benign - narcissism, and to be feel "free".
My New Online World Order
So, with that all being brain-dumped, I'm going to try something a little closer to what they call "content syndication" in the blogging world. This is just a fancy way of saying that I do something like post here first, then and only then, echo through various social media channels as I see fit. Or at the very least, make sure that whatever order that I do it (because sometimes platform attribute drives the lead), that I do it with synchronicity with this platform ultimately being the dependable reference hub. This blog is what you want to follow if nothing else.
I've revised my follow information section to reflect this, accordingly, and yes, you'll be hearing from me on Twitter, Threads, Instagram, Facebook, yada yada. Oddly enough though I've canceled my Mastodon subscription because all this proved even more to me that it's a (correct-in-principle) blogging platform that I already happen to have here with this Battle Blog. If this platform fell through though, I'd sign back up and point my domain(s) there. Redundant in my case, it's perfect for anyone else looking for that independent resilient voice online.
By Dave for Personal Blog.
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