Inspired by some reactions to a recent post about exploration and widening one’s repertoire that suggested that some that bothered to comment—more than the tinge of guilt suffered over scrolling past a picture of someone’s cute dog and not upvoting—expressed that they had forgotten how to internet, the lessons advise one to take stock, make note of behaviours, intentional or otherwise, and has actually homework in form of following a daisy-chain of external links as far away as they will carry one, researching the commonplace—some artefact from one’s own room—until one finds a fact so unexpected that one is compelled to share, preferably in an essay format, long-read, delving into forums and into specific archived file types and pocket the results. The assignment we found most resonant was the reminder to use inspect element—not just to try to lift some coding ideas which usually nets nothing as there’s so many overlays and dependencies to negotiate (recursively represented)—and just mashing all the keys to see what’s there and break or remix it as a local copy. Before AI slop served fake news, this was how the sausage was made but is moreover a prompt that the web was never meant to be a black-box and one was never meant to scratch under the surface and in general whose interactions were siloed by commercial platforms.
synchronoptica
one year ago: movie title drops (with synchronopticæ), the Onion to purchase Infowars plus the Polish-German border
twelve years ago: Wiesbaden’s Südfriedhof
thirteen years ago: an inexact science
fifteen years ago: advances in 3D printing