Our lake of dreams and wishes

The Future Is Like Pie #50

Author

Lisa Maria Marquis
January 24, 2025

❝

The offices of seers we consulted in the South
sometimes had chickens. The vestibules
were swimming with the poor—
bobbing, drowning, in our lake
of dreams and wishes.
Tell me everything
you want to do while there’s still time.
Keep in touch.

—Kate Greenstreet, “2 of Swords”

I’m listening, as I type this, to something called Vintage Radio Obscura. It’s a website that my friend Bill introduced me to earlier this week, and it’s essentially what it sounds like—a radio streaming obscure, twentieth-century music from around the world. I’ve heard lofi jazz from Suriname, heavy blues from Tehran, experimental electronica from the Netherlands, and something labeled French Algerian Balearic ambient psych fusion. I can’t get enough of this stream.

It dovetails nicely with my recent enthusiasm for old, terrible movies. I’m obsessed, it seems, with older media, anything with texture, as I’ve put it before—anything, really, made before algorithms dictated our art, our availability, our access. It’s not nostalgia, exactly—it’s not the media of my childhood that I want—but there is a longing for the past, free from digital rot.

Like many folks, I’m trying to determine how online I want to be, now, anymore. For the first time in thirty years, the benefits of being connected are starting to be outweighed by the costs. The surveillance, the misinformation, the AI slop, the enshittification, the corporate fascism, the end of content moderation—it’s dangerous to be online.

I left Facebook a few years ago, then Twitter. Now I’m trying to leave Instagram—I’ve been complaining about the hostile user experience there for a while, but now there’s an added urgency to respond to Meta’s policies by withdrawing participation, withholding attention and data.

But, frustratingly, it’s not just a matter of switching platforms, or replacing a wronghearted app with one yet to be corrupted. Leaving Instagram means leaving behind old friends, distant family, strangers I’ve come to care for, people to whom I have no other digital connection. The moment I step away from that account, I lose them.

To stay connected, it seems we have to stay connected.

Everyone I know seems to be talking about connection right now—seeking it out offline, meeting more neighbors, touching more grass—while the internet that’s offered real, life-giving connections for three decades slips out of our grasp. We’re disconnecting to connect, connecting to disconnect; it’s increasingly hard to know where to go. Online or off, I’m heartbroken and I’m scared. None of this is about deleting one more app. It’s about accumulating grief.

Going offline is good. Diversifying our access points, our resources, our platforms—all good, all necessary. They’re small, individual actions in the face of systemic destruction, but what else can we do? So I’m looking for ways to minimize my engagement, block more ads, use more privacy-focused tools. I’m keeping my eyes open for hints of the old internet, the self-made web, the homebrews, the cultural preservationists, the weird hidden corners and wikis and forums. The points of genuine human interaction. I’m listening for obscura.

Now for some deeply thematic links.

“Bad shape”

Erin Kissane consistently has the most incisive thinking about online (and offline) community and making the internet a more humane place. Her most recent post is a sharp and crucial critique of the illusion of content moderation at scale:

All of which is to say that yes, Zuckerberg is a terrible chump and Musk is a grotesque quasi-Rasputin, and that does matter, but the boards they stand on have been rotten the whole time. Centralized corporate governance of global mega-platforms was always a goofy idea, and we should have given up on it years ago.

“Take Back Your Digital Footprint”

If you’re interested in clawing back a little of your online privacy, Janet Vertesi has created an excellent series of how-tos. Her site’s a trove a resources, but she’s also been using the month of January to post one step per day, on topics like leaving Gmail, getting a VPN, and managing passwords:

For many of us, the events of the past few months have finally shone a light on the dangers of the personal data economy. It was never just about privacy. It was about the harvesting of human interactions to fuel something bigger. Massive corporations with imperial-style power. Founders turned CEO's turned oligarchs. Political power over what people in a democracy see, hear, and believe in their hearts to be true…Now more than ever, it's time to fight back.

“The Collapse of Self-Worth in the Digital Age”

Love this essay from Thea Lim about the way our actions are quantified and commodified online. The essay’s framing is focused on the challenges of being a working writer and the way the attention economy requires mining your soul for content, but, well, tell me that’s not true for most of us now:

What we hardly talk about is how we’ve reorganized not just industrial activity but any activity to be capturable by computer, a radical expansion of what can be mined. […] Even engaging with art—say, encountering some uncanny reflection of yourself in a novel, or having a transformative epiphany from listening, on repeat, to the way that singer’s voice breaks over the bridge—can be spat out as a figure, on Goodreads or your Spotify year in review. […] Acts of pure leisure—photographing a sidewalk cat with a camera app or watching a video on how to make a curry—are transmuted into data to grade how well the app or the creators’ deliverables are delivering. If we’re not being tallied, we affect the tally of others. We are all data workers.

“Casual viewing”

Will Tavlin’s brilliantly researched history of Netflix and their hell-bent directive to produce drivel will make you want to cancel your subscription, if you haven’t already:

One tag among Netflix’s thirty-six thousand microgenres offers a suitable name for this kind of dreck: “casual viewing.” Usually reserved for breezy network sitcoms, reality television, and nature documentaries, the category describes much of Netflix’s film catalog — movies that go down best when you’re not paying attention, or as the Hollywood Reporter recently described Atlas, a 2024 sci-fi film starring Jennifer Lopez, “another Netflix movie made to half-watch while doing laundry.” A high-gloss product that dissolves into air. Tide Pod cinema.

Throwback read

whoops 

Technically this isn’t a throwback read, because, much to my surprise, I didn’t actually share it in an earlier newsletter. (I just spent twenty minutes scouring my archives, confused as hell, and it turns out I shared it in an essay I wrote on tumblr, in 2017, about the Star Trek: The Original Series episode “Patterns of Force.” Feel free to read my thoughts on Star Trek’s failure to meaningfully interrogate Nazism. Doesn’t that sound fun!)

At any rate, here’s what I wanted to share (for no reason, no reason at all!): an essay from a 1941 issue of Harper’s called “Who Goes Nazi?” by Dorothy Thompson, about what kind of person is attracted to fascism and why:

Kind, good, happy, gentlemanly, secure people never go Nazi. They may be the gentle philosopher whose name is in the Blue Book, or Bill from City College to whom democracy gave a chance to design airplanes—you’ll never make Nazis out of them. But the frustrated and humiliated intellectual, the rich and scared speculator, the spoiled son, the labor tyrant, the fellow who has achieved success by smelling out the wind of success—they would all go Nazi in a crisis.

January’s cause

Let’s stay on theme and give some money to the Internet Archive. Like everything else good right now, they’re coming under attack, and they really are one of the most critical organizations preserving the internet and fighting against misinformation and disinformation.

Stay weird, stay safe, friends.