Local norms matter too much for global governance of the social internet to make sense; the flattening of global diversity to fit the norms and interests of any given American techno-culture—corporate or otherwise—is both a baldly colonial aspiration and one we should scorn for the same reason that we leave the idea of effective, monolithic, planetary-scale government—benevolent or otherwise—to underbaked science fiction. Home rule and genuine resilience both require the existence of many places, many of them at least partially interconnected. Decades down the road, I think the notion that a pack of mostly-American mega-corporations could ever have stood in for the complexities of governing a new layer of global public life, with all the opportunities and dangers it brings, will be obviously laughable. I think it already is.

I’ve seen other bloggers advocate for no email apps, and I’ve heard an apocryphal story of educational YouTuber CGP Grey using parental controls on an iPhone to remove Safari entirely, and I don’t freaking get it. Combined with not a single mention in the above articles about installing your password manager of choice, I’m left to think that none of these bloggers have been in a situation where your phone is the only tool on hand.

Post: atheist youtubers are overdosing on deep rock galactic pussy me: not true Post: bunnies and cats are learning how to write in new language called US american cuneiform me: thats right

i have seen many people spill their guts on-line, and i did so myself until, at last, i began to see that i had commodified myself. commodification means that you turn something into a product which has a money-value. in the nineteenth century, commodities were made in factories, which karl marx called “the means of production.” capitalists were people who owned the means of production, and the commodities were made by workers who were mostly exploited. i created my interior thoughts as a means of production for the corporation that owned the board i was posting to, and that commodity was being sold to other commodity/consumer entities as entertainment. that means that i sold my soul like a tennis shoe and i derived no profit from the sale of my soul. people who post frequently on boards appear to know that they are factory equipment and tennis shoes, and sometimes trade sends and email about how their contributions are not appreciated by management.

Contemporary cycling is all about spandex and personal bests. The bicycle designer Grant Petersen has amassed an ardent following by urging people to get comfortable bikes, and go easy. (Rivendell) > These days, some mainstream bikes incorporate electronics requiring batteries and firmware: shifters that change gears at the press of a button, or power meters that collect data on a rider’s output. “So many basic things are being teched out of existence,” Petersen said. He saw this as a function of business incentives: electronics break or need replacement; an upgrade is always around the corner. Petersen’s objections are practical but also philosophical. As bikes become higher-tech, riders lose skills and agency. “A lot of sports have been watered down,” Yvon Chouinard, the founder of Patagonia, told me. “People are bicycling, but they have a motor. And people are climbing, but they’re climbing indoors. They’re riding big waves, but they’re being pulled in by Jet Skis. Yet there are a few people that are bucking the trend.” > Rivendell’s employees object to descriptions of the company’s following as cultlike. “The other stuff is the cult,” Keating told me. “Putting the suit on, and going as fast as possible, and using the bars like this”—we were sitting at a table, and he hunched over his coffee cup, as if to protect it. “That’s the culty stuff, right? We’re just making nice bikes for regular people.” > About halfway through the ride, I came to a fork in the road. I didn’t know which path the others had taken, and I stood for a while, appreciating the shade of the oak trees, the quiet, the bandanna crisping around my neck. I tried to channel an essay of Petersen’s, written in 2002, on what he calls “underbiking”: taking a bike somewhere it isn’t obviously built to go. “Riding an UB changes how you look at any terrain,” he wrote. “You ride where it lets you ride, walk when it wants you to, and rely more on your growing skills than on the latest technology.” This struck me as a harmonic way of moving through the world > We dismounted in the parking lot. The sun returned to being unforgiving. I had no idea what time it was or how long we’d been out. I wanted to do the whole thing again. I looked at my phone: texts from the babysitter, calendar alerts, a moldering heap of e-mails. “Don’t you just feel like a kid again?” Leto asked, as he and Petersen began disassembling the bikes and loading them into the car. I knew what he meant. But I felt, instead, a very adult sense of longing—as if I had just glimpsed, at a deeply inconvenient time, a new and appealing way to live. > There was something romantic about the Rivendells. They made the other bikes on the road look mean.