Alex Kantrowitz, one of Buzzfeed’s stable of excellent reporters tasked with figuring out how we live with the internet now, tracked down the creator of the retweet button. (Which is obviously a bit clickbaity because a) that’s not how product development really works and b) it’s certainly not how it works at Twitter, where they mostly codified the patterns their users discovered. I digress.) It’s a fine interview and nifty piece of social media history but mostly works as a critique about how the race to build engagement, discovery, and frictionless sharing ended up … well, there’s a reason email newsletters are on the rebound, isn’t there? Alas, none of the proposed solutions offer much hope.

Related: a great thread from Eugene Wei [featuring Taylor Lorenz] on Instagram removing the like.

Also related: not quite a mea culpa from another Twitter alum, Robin Sloan, but certainly a thoughtful and clever meditation on how the medium killed the message.

Since my family left the shroud of northern California, I once again (joyfully, it turns out) contend with seasons. Right now, this means sunscreen, and the anxiety of which one to choose. Physical ‘screen won’t get absorbed into my bloodstream but leaves a ghostly pall. The chemical variant is, well, full of chemicals but so is everything and there’s no evidence that that’s actually bad (yet). For people of color, it’s even more complicated.

“Two points for Quinn!"

Linux is finally abandoning the floppy because the driver maintainers can’t find working hardware. There’s a lulz in here and an iMac joke but then I remember all the data literally rotting away in government basements and on NASA mainframes and I get a bit wistful.

Surprise! Reagan was a racist. It is kinda wild we’re still getting this dirt from Nixon’s old tapes, fifty years later. Of course, now there are no secret tapes, just racist presidential tweets.

Like, I’m assuming everyone, I nodded along to Craig Mod’s ode to fast software. There are some gems in there, a few that I’d once loved and completely forgotten and am thinking of refriending. nvAlt lives!

Monday Note by Frederic Filloux and Jean-Louis Gassée (yes! the Be guy!) is a long-standing publication of essential reading. Filloux turns the assumptions of the past two decades of media decline on their head a bit here: the consumer trends that destroyed the media business. I don’t think he means to be as haranguing as the headline suggests but rather is genuinely trying to suss out what happened in conjunction with the rise of the internet. In short, we moved our subscription spending from newspapers and magazines to Netflix, Apple, and broadband/mobile internet, and all of our monetizable attention to Google and Facebook. The outlook remains particularly grim for local news.

I’ve been following the development of Dark — a programming language, editor, and deployment pipeline (all in one!) — for a while now, mostly because I think Ellen Chisa is super smart. It looks like the launch is mere weeks away.

If you’ve ever tried parsing election or mapping data, you know what an undertaking (read: giant pain in the ass) it is just organizing everything. Maup is a Python package to make it easier to work with redistricting data. The very admirable goal here is to fix gerrymandering with data. This being 2019, I can’t help but wonder how this is going to be weaponized.

Why? Am I doing this? In part, I can’t not play around with the nifty new media thing and Substack seems pretty nifty.

But also because I’ve been thinking about a conversation I had over tea with an internet acquaintance-turned-IRL-meeting (remember that brief window when those were normal and fun?). I quipped that I wasn’t really aware what he’d been up to for a while, that I’d all but disconnected, like Luke Skywalker and the Force. Obviously, not completely disconnected, I work at a tech company, but the internet, especially social media, is not a place I can tolerate right now.

But since that’s where I went to mostly think out loud for the past few decades, something has felt off. So we’ll see where this goes.

Be well and kind.

Jim