Paul Watson’s notes, replies, likes &c.
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Paul Watson liked Rebuilding The Web
This post isn’t about rewilding the web or building out new infrastructure to compete with big tech, but how we, as members and participants of the independent web, can help rebuild the connections that made the web diverse and fun to surf again.
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Paul Watson liked First Britain (even though caveats apply), now France
Was it all a nightmare from which we're waking up?
Narrator voice: they were not, in fact, waking up
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Paul Watson liked Why this keeps happening: On neoliberalism and the right-wing reaction
Yes, the neoliberal order is ultimately the cause of this dynamic, but not simply because of the disruptive effects of the market. The root problem is that neoliberalism has effectively eliminated the left wing of the political spectrum, meaning that the only apparent challenge to the system as it stands comes from the right. In other words, the political problem under neoliberalism is political, not narrowly economic.
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Paul Watson liked The Expanding Dark Forest and Generative AI
It's like a dark forest that seems eerily devoid of human life – all the living creatures are hidden beneath the ground or up in trees. If they reveal themselves, they risk being attacked by automated predators.
Humans who want to engage in informal, unoptimised, personal interactions have to hide in closed spaces like invite-only Slack channels, Discord groups, email newsletters, small-scale blogs, and digital gardens . Or make themselves illegible and algorithmically incoherent in public venues.
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Paul Watson liked A better dream
I suspect the lack of this kind of societal support and stability drives a lot of conservative politics, because without them, people are scared and exhausted. Even the wealthy have become an overworked class in constant competition to help their kids get ahead (or at least not fall behind). The vibes for everyday Americans, rich and poor, are bad.
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Paul Watson liked Creating My Own Little Online Garden of Tranquility
And up in the hills, I rediscovered blogs, because those are totally still a thing, and they’re great! There are mountains of awesome blogs out there these days. The list of subscriptions in my RSS reader is getting longer all the time, and I love reading all of them.
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Paul Watson liked High on Hauntology: Brexit
There is something decidedly hauntological about all of this. The way in which a phantasmal and retrospective political and cultural movement has choked the life out of the pro-European futures articulated in the political and musical ground zero of post-punk (Empires and Dance, Europe After the Rain, Europa and the Pirate Twins); an insistence that the only way forward is a ghoulish simulacrum of Britain’s finest hour. It’s hard not to see echoes of Fisher’s assertion in Capitalist Realism that the only way forwards is backwards.
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Paul Watson liked Sunday Linkdump-a-gogo
This linkdump is algorithm-free, hand-rolled and made with love. And yes, you might discover some sort of theme in this collection…
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Paul Watson liked Perplexity AI is susceptible to prompt injection
So after Robb pointed out that Perplexity AI wasn’t using the correct User Agent I had a thought about how else you could prevent your pages from at least being summarised.
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Paul Watson replied to
Thanks for the mention, Joe!
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Paul Watson liked Generative AI is for the idea guys
Generative AI is like the ultimate idea guy’s idea! Imagine… if all they needed to create a business, software or art was their great idea, and a computer. No need to engage (or pay) any of those annoying makers who keep talking about limitations, scope, standards, artistic integrity etc. etc.
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Paul Watson replied to
James, one option is a Tag Cloud (as popular in the early-2000s) - for example, mine: The Artist’s Notebook: Blogposts by Tag
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Paul Watson liked This green and growing earth
Every year, on the first Monday of May, the people of Hastings parade a man made of leaves through the streets of their town. The leaf-man spins and dances all day, wearing a crown of flowers and followed by his drummers and musicians. The people all wear green. They put garlands of leaves and flowers in their hair. Eventually, the leaf-man is taken to the top of a hill overlooking the sea, where he is slaughtered in front of the townsfolk. This ritual is a piece of hoary old seasonal magic, rooted deep in the green fields of England, and it’s been going on for a very long time. Longer than I’ve been alive, in fact. It dates back all the way to 1983.
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Paul Watson liked How I display blockquotes
This got me thinking that I should document some of the design patterns on my blog, noting how they work and why I have designed things in the way that they are. Herein begins a new series on that topic, starting with blockquotes.
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Paul Watson liked We Need To Rewild The Internet
The internet’s 2010s, its boom years, may have been the first glorious harvest that exhausted a one-time bonanza of diversity. The complex web of human interactions that thrived on the internet’s initial technological diversity is now corralled into globe-spanning data-extraction engines making huge fortunes for a tiny few.
Our online spaces are not ecosystems, though tech firms love that word. They’re plantations; highly concentrated and controlled environments, closer kin to the industrial farming of the cattle feedlot or battery chicken farms that madden the creatures trapped within.
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New blog post called About my studio.
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Paul Watson liked How we feel about what we consume
It’s possible that we as individuals read too much into what we like, that we invest too much of our identity into corporate properties or even art by individuals, and that part of the harm we feel on discovery of harm is associative: that by enjoying something made by someone who did bad things, some of that badness must rub off on us.
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Paul Watson liked begin to remake who we are and how we live
begin to remake who we are and how we live
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Paul Watson liked I want to be human for the first time
It is true that I am a sucker for goth-flavoured radical left hot takes on pretty much any subject, but I think it works particulary well in Greenaway's book as it is an outlook well-placed to grapple with how utopia necessarily needs to walk hand in hand with the bleakness of our current plight. Because utopian thinking is not about escapism, it is not naive and it is not blind to how bad things actually are. It is the other interlocutor in dialectical opposition to the abyss we're on the precipice of and without it, we'd be lost.
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Paul Watson liked A radical British politics rooted in nature is spreading – and the establishment doesn’t like it
Moreover, the kind of activism that mixes a deep affinity with the landscape with a hardened political edge is more visible than ever. The two things have an obvious symbiotic relationship: the worse environmental destruction gets, the more precious nature seems and the louder people get.