Discover Top Posts Tagged with #teh interwebs

Hey, real talk: where are you all gonna start posting stuff if Tumblr becomes completely unbearable? Is there anywhere with a similar “multimedia scrapbook” feel? I’m not planning on leaving just yet, but I want to have a backup plan and I’d miss interacting with a lot of y’all if I (or you) left. (Which reminds me: if you want to, send me your email address so we can still talk. And/or a mailing address! I like sending postcards. No guarantees I’ll send one in any kind of timely fashion though, haha.)

#rustbeltjessie #tumblr bullshit #teh interwebs

#LOL #teh interwebs #twitter #elon musk

Am I ultimately overwriting myself? Is my writing actually now contributing to the data universe that may ultimately make my own “unique” mind, and the writing that reveals it to be so, obsolete? I don’t worry about being put out of a job; I worry about being put out of an identity, because it is through my writing that I have investigated and represented my experiences, and thereby actualized my self. If I had known the internet would one day have the capacity to distort and then fully consume this personal synthesis, I would never have given the internet even one piece of me. Paying attention to the world in the way that only I do—with a particular calibration of constancy, a particular sensitivity, and according to and in pursuit of particular aesthetics—has made me the writer that I am, which is inextricably Möbiused into the person that I am, with all her simple animal desires for companionship or opals, convoluted renunciations of femininity notwithstanding. But paying attention to me, which is what the internet does continuously, with almost no boundaries, may someday make the internet the writer that I am, too. I asked ChatGPT who I am, and it replied, “As an AI language model, I don’t have access to your personal information or identity. Only you can truly answer the question of who you are.” A reassuring punt, for now, unless you consider that surely the internet has noticed that most of us are not that adept at answering that question, despite thousands of years of literature and philosophy and art.

Merritt Tierce, from “You Have a New Memory” (Slate, April 2023)

#quotations #merritt tiece #slate #teh interwebs #surveillance #ai #read this whole piece i am begging you