I’m back after a short break off-island. The break was well-deserved and needed and was something I had been looking forward to for months. I was away for around ten days, with just over two of them taken up with travel and waiting for connections. I’m back home now and returning to a regular routine, picking up where I left off.

It’s funny that nothing can be left to wait too long when you’re in your usual work context. Everything needs to be finished in the given timeframes discussed and agreed upon, but when you’re away —either on holiday or due to illness or similar— everything can wait, and there’s no urgency. As soon as you step back, everything suddenly becomes urgent again. This sense of urgency is completely fabricated, with no actual grounding in reality or the bigger picture of your life’s priorities. I’m glad I tuned out.

As I’d previously written, I loaded up on the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Radio 4 series and listened to fifteen or so episodes of this brilliant series.

Once I’d arrived at my destination, I pretty much switched off the Internet, only keeping up to date with a few bits and bobs of news. I almost entirely ignored my emails and other requests on my time that were not directly related to being on holiday. People talk of a “digital detox”, but this was absolutely nothing of the kind. It was simply taking back control of my time and doing what I wanted when I wanted.

Spending a lot of time on two transatlantic flights, both over 8 hours each, allowed me to read and mark up a couple of papers I’d had in the queue for a while. As I mentioned previously, I printed them out and used my workhorse fountain pen to mark up my notes in the margins directly on the paper. It’s probably a result of my generation, but I find it easier to make meaningful notes like this rather than the several digital note-taking methods I’ve tried.

The notes I collected are slowly being turned into digital notes and stored in a large database that I keep for purposes of research, thinking, and writing. I use DEVONthink as I find it fits my way of thinking and provides me with a powerful search and related-item discovery that other systems don’t. This is going to take a little time, and some of the notes will get expanded and turned into articles or other longer-form writing.

During my time away, an election in the US concluded, and then there was a sudden exodus from Twitter. The social media product that seems to have been the main beneficiary of this is Bluesky. I’d opened a Bluesky account early on and it had been a relative ghost town until a week or so ago.

When I write here, I automatically cross-post to Bluesky for no other reason than that I can. I’m currently reevaluating my media diet and online presence, and although I haven’t made any decisions yet, I’m likely to step back from time online and privilege meaningful time with books and other preoccupations. To that end, I might stop cross-posting altogether and only use this blog and my main blog (my professional look at things) as my main presence online. More thought is needed.

One thing that I seem to think is that I like things when they’re niche, manageable and different from the norm. I generally start to dislike things when they become big and ‘too’ popular. Bluesky is verging on that, and although I think I’ll stay for now, I’ll not post much.

One more note on Bluesky. Many who have come onto the website have remarked on its “nice” and “enjoyable” nature, something that was lost with Twitter several years ago. Whilst this is true for the moment, popularity and population size are about to change that forever. The scum, the cranks, and the fascists will arrive shortly. And whilst the moderation tools are pretty good on the site, they won’t be able to cope with the influx and the sheer scale of the problem, and we’ll be back to square one.

Social media will never be and can never be a truly “nice” place for communication and human interaction. The reason? Sheer scale. Once you pass a certain size, desensitisation and inherent reduction in empathy automatically install themselves, making interactions tokenised data exchanges. This dehumanisation means meaningful exchange and communication are a rarity, not the norm.

We will understand this one day, but I fear it will be too late.

25 November 2024 — French West Indies