📡 – 2023-06-02
Discover more from 📡 by Mike Rugnetta
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I am guilty of it, of course. Of thinking – at one point – and of telling people (people who hired me to tell them things of this nature) – that one must have social media accounts. I didn’t think (I don’t think?) that every platform was a necessity – the yikyaks the peaches and ellos were more curiosity than not – but to all who asked, I would answer that getting a Twitter account, an Instagram, would be a boon. Local business? Post! Arts org? Post! Artist/Writer/Musician? POST! If they asked “And what about a YouTube?”, the reply: “Sure, why not!” I suppose we might now know why not.
I’ve been struck over the last couple weeks just how many abandoned or deleted Instagram accounts for various people, and businesses I’ve encountered. Surely some have been deactivated, a practice Instagram is famous for engaging in summarily. But I know for sure some have been purposefully axed. Their brethren – long dormant Twitter accounts once run by the same entities, but left inexplicably un-deleted – give credence to the conclusion that these people have decided there was, in fact, and is, in reality, no need for them to POST. Restaurants, insurance providers, music labels, venues, etc…
Social media swallowed the [read: my] world, and now some claw back out of the belly of that particular whale.
There was something totalizing, and really: rather intoxicating, about many attitudes towards social media in the 2010’s … the feelings of possibility and reach and audience and power and potential were very high. It was easy to find people who benefit from the technology, and who could talk convincingly about how you could do the same (in a very limited sense I was, and in some even more limited senses still am one of those people, though my perspective has shifted… perhaps obviously… and my tactics along with it.)It feels now more like the simple act of electing to post is the prelude to one disaster or another for … what return, exactly? The number of people and businesses for whom that question does not have a certain answer is growing, surely. The decline (????? from what heights, one might ask) of Twitter could lead some to question if simply joining a particular platform is a political statement not worth making.
Add to this the fact that alongside it becoming increasingly chaotic, social media has become – counterintuitively – increasingly professionalized. To realize any gain through its use, the management of posting must be some individual’s job and preferably their only job if one is concerned with leveraging social media, as opposed to simply having it. These are like the “Office Weirdos” of legend, who worked at record labels’ A&R departments in the 70’s: employed for having simply experienced the punk, rock, disco, &c scenes – social barometers hired because they exist outside the dominant culture of their workplace; liaisons to larger, and more inscrutable circumstances. The Social Media manager fills this role now in some ways: someone who is brought in from the imagined outside of the internet.
All of which raises the question: why bother? Evidence suggests a burgeoning answer to this question is: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, leading to these abandoned (or perhaps underutilized) digital spaces that occupy some spot between memorial, refuse, abandoned storefront, and testament.
Anyway! Here’s some stuff I liked!
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Out today! 👆 See Pupil Slicer on BC Daily here.
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The Sisterhood of the Stanley Tumbler
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/17/style/stanley-tumbler.html
But a little more than two years ago, in late 2019, Stanley stopped restocking the Quencher on its website. Though still available for purchase elsewhere, “it was not being prioritized from a production and marketing standpoint” by the brand, Mr. Reilly said.
Its return to Stanley’s website in early 2020 is largely owed to three women: Ashlee LeSueur, 42, who lives in Carlsbad, Calif.; Taylor Cannon, 34, who lives in Purchase, N.Y.; and Linley Hutchinson, 36, who lives in Alpine, Utah.
Better Than Reality: What Makes Special Effects Work
https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/special-effects-george-lucas/
What does it mean to say that the special effects in a movie or TV show—forgive me for including “streaming content” under these anachronistic but aesthetically preferable categories—are “bad” or “good”? The question isn’t about whether they’re cool to look at or not; instead, it hints at some objective standards to which practitioners aspire, a “real” realism. But Turnock historicizes our realism, contextualizing its origins in a way that allows for a deep critique of something we tend to take for granted. “There is no transhistorical ultimate realism that effects aesthetics or cinema more broadly are evolving toward,” she explains. “Instead, different industrial and cultural historical contexts mold standards of realism at a given time.”
Going Postal: A psychoanalytic reading of social media and the death drive
NOTE: From 2020
It’s not that the accounts of people like Harris are illegitimate—the social industry was designed as a behavioralist casino; it relates to us, even constitutes us, as addicts, “users” whose natural state is devoted attention to the object of our addiction. But such techno-determinism renders all of us passive objects, our very brain chemistry at the mercy of a small handful of Harvard dorks with admin privileges. Are we really captive to our devices in quite so direct or helpless away? Seymour doesn’t buy it, and worries that just-so stories about addiction are disempowering and limiting. “To reduce experience to chemistry”—those dreaded dopamine feedback loops—“is to bypass what is essential to it: its meaning,” he writes. His rejection of determinism isn’t a recourse to personal responsibility, but a warning: regulation will not cure us, and reform won’t save us. If we live in a “horror story, the horror must partly lie in the user.”
The middle-class takeover: Music is less of a meritocracy than ever before
Clearly, a deep-rooted class issue is at the heart of the music industry. Of course, there have been acclaimed working-class musicians, such as Adele, who have risen to prominence in recent years, but the statistics prove that such success stories don’t happen daily. So, why is there such a class disparity in the music industry? When Love Island star Molly-Mae Hague made the tone-deaf comment that we all have the same 24 hours in a day, she epitomised the classist attitudes rife in the creative industry and the myth of meritocracy. Privileged individuals will never understand the common struggle for working-class people to balance work with other needs, such as studying, childcare, rest, socialising and pursuing hobbies. When your main priority has to be earning a living, channelling time and money into a creative endeavour is often a risky decision in such a cutthroat, discriminatory industry.
Node by Node: Red Hook’s mesh network survived Hurricane Sandy. Today, it’s in limbo.
https://www.theverge.com/c/features/23700677/wifi-mesh-network-disaster-hurricane-sandy-brooklyn
Schloss and others at RHI saw a mesh network as a community-building tool. When people connected to the Wi-Fi, he realized, they could start on a landing page that promoted the digital stewards’ radio stories — as well as other updates about local events and workshops. Red Hook even had an unusual advantage: a small, independent internet service provider called Brooklyn Fiber, which agreed to support the mesh network’s internet connection.
So Schloss reached out to the Open Technology Institute, an internet access initiative from the progressive think tank New America that had worked on a similar mesh network project in Detroit. The institute connected him with Alyx Baldwin, a graduate student at the time in Parsons’ Design and Technology program who was writing a thesis on mesh networks. In December 2011, the pair set up Red Hook WiFi’s very first test node at RHI.
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If you dig this 👆, make sure to check out Ned Rush’s More Kicks Than Friends microfestival on June 17.
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MyHouse.wad: https://www.doomworld.com/forum/topic/134292-myhousewad/
Last August I lost a good childhood friend of mine and took it pretty hard. When I was visiting my hometown for his funeral, I connected with his parents who shared with me some of his old belongings. Among them was a copy of an old map of his backed up on a 3.5” floppy from high school. Thomas and I were into amateur Doom mapping in the early 00s but I had never seen this map of his prior to uncovering it on one of the old floppy discs. As a way of paying tribute to him and all the great memories we had together, I took the plunge and installed Doom Builder in order to polish up his map and add a few modern amenities just for convenience sake.
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Over the last bunch of years working in audio I’ve amassed a giant library of sound effects, including a few hundred sounds I’ve made and recorded myself. It seems silly to keep all of them all to myself, so I’ve started sharing them with patrons.
The first batch is 60 sounds, and as I have time to process older recordings, and gather new stuff, this library will grow. 🎧+ patrons can access the sounds via link on this post.The final episode in
’s Precious Cargo series went up last Friday. Hear the thrilling conclusion here, and wherever else you listen to pods! Bijan did an amazing job with this miniseries, and made something really cinematic – he also ran a 3 session game in … 3 sessions! Which, for anyone who plays TTRGPS, knows is a herculean feat.
The entire of the Fun City crew will return later this month in a special, Return to Float City miniseries in celebration of Stillfleet’s successful CRB Kickstarter, and their upcoming QADIDA kickstarter.
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That’s all I got! Stay safe out there on the many internets – if you had a good time reading this here newsletter … and look … you did make it all the way down the bottom, didn’t you? … consider tellin’yer’pals’about’it, woudn’t’yeh?
Of course, in the case of some platforms, this was always explicit.
📡 – 2023-06-02
This edition is dense with goodness. I really love your brief retrospective on posting and I cannot wait to read that BookForum piece. How many of my college peers were drafted by small businesses into managing their companies' social media accounts just because they were younger than their bosses? I'm glad I narrowly escaped that trajectory in my editing career.