Paul Watson’s notes, replies, likes &c.

There are many reasons to be skeptical about big websites that encourage artists to use their services. But the implicit deal, don’t create anything too suggestive really does stink.

Today, the pace that new content is flung at us means that, without substantial willpower or intentionality, we’re so busy consuming we don’t have time to think.

Screened in 2018 as part of a night celebrating 'Gothic' in art, literature and, of course, music this is a compilation of archive BBC performances from many of the stalwarts of the goth scene - Siouxsie and The Banshees, Bauhaus, The Cure, Depeche Mode, Killing Joke, The Sisters of Mercy, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - as well as a couple of later entrants - PJ Harvey, Marilyn Manson.

This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of Ursula Le Guin’s SF novel The Dispossessed is still by far the best account of an anarchist society, warts and all. It won both the Hugo and Nebula awards but, more importantly, it secured a place in the heart of many anarchists and even if its author denied she was anarchist, she expressed the ideal well. So well, in fact, its publication should be discussed and a few claims made about it refuted.

It’s also empowering for regular people to be able to publish where anyone might be able to read our words: the open web. Gatekeepers like editorial boards and publishers can no longer stop those they disagree with from reaching an audience. For most time periods, archaeologists and historians can only *dream* of having access to writing by regular people, when only the words of the wealthy were recorded, to understand cultures of the past.

If we build a new community on Bluesky, how likely is it to die? How could it be saved? What are its extinction events, and how can they be mitigated?

And our society is fucked up enough to deserve the vocal, even vulgar expression of our dissatisfaction — because I think what’s disgusting is not “profanity,” but allowing schoolchildren to go hungry and razing encampments to make homeless people invisible again.

That’s because indieweb.org is not a presciption or a cookbook or an exercise plan. It doesn’t tell you how to “be IndieWeb”. It’s a collective memory of experiments, some successful and some not, from a group of experimenters that has changed greatly over time.

The purpose of school is not to teach children kindness, or the love of animals or how to play together nicely. The purpose of school is to teach children how to make money (almost always for somebody else).

Bubblegum dystopia perfectly captures the vibrant yet achingly vacuous aesthetic (after all, bubblegum is totally ineffective as form of consumption) that dominates our media and popular culture, reflecting the contradictions and catastrophes inherent in capitalism. In our bubblegum dystopia, the surface is endlessly appealing, even as we’re totally aware it conceals our demise and sells the end of the world back to us.

The noting of ‘mythogeography’ and Crab & Bee’s definition of the demonic (from the very first issue of Undefined Boundary) in these last two essays is personally gratifying, but, more importantly, a sign of just how much these individual endeavours are part of a web of investigation and discussion that Undefined Boundary now facilitates.

Defining themselves as “Normal” also made everything that wasn’t like them “political”. And then they told us not to talk about politics and whined about politics in art (🤔 those people don’t know much about art or art history… turns out lots of people who make art, today and in the past, are queer or otherwise outside the lines of “Normalcy” and often politically opinionated).

This post isn’t about rewilding the web or building out new infrastructure to compete with big tech, but how we, as members and participants of the independent web, can help rebuild the connections that made the web diverse and fun to surf again.

Was it all a nightmare from which we're waking up?

Narrator voice: they were not, in fact, waking up

Yes, the neoliberal order is ultimately the cause of this dynamic, but not simply because of the disruptive effects of the market. The root problem is that neoliberalism has effectively eliminated the left wing of the political spectrum, meaning that the only apparent challenge to the system as it stands comes from the right. In other words, the political problem under neoliberalism is political, not narrowly economic.

It's like a dark forest that seems eerily devoid of human life – all the living creatures are hidden beneath the ground or up in trees. If they reveal themselves, they risk being attacked by automated predators.

Humans who want to engage in informal, unoptimised, personal interactions have to hide in closed spaces like invite-only Slack channels, Discord groups, email newsletters, small-scale blogs, and digital gardens . Or make themselves illegible and algorithmically incoherent in public venues.

I suspect the lack of this kind of societal support and stability drives a lot of conservative politics, because without them, people are scared and exhausted. Even the wealthy have become an overworked class in constant competition to help their kids get ahead (or at least not fall behind). The vibes for everyday Americans, rich and poor, are bad.

And up in the hills, I rediscovered blogs, because those are totally still a thing, and they’re great! There are mountains of awesome blogs out there these days. The list of subscriptions in my RSS reader is getting longer all the time, and I love reading all of them.

There is something decidedly hauntological about all of this. The way in which a phantasmal and retrospective political and cultural movement has choked the life out of the pro-European futures articulated in the political and musical ground zero of post-punk (Empires and Dance, Europe After the Rain, Europa and the Pirate Twins); an insistence that the only way forward is a ghoulish simulacrum of Britain’s finest hour. It’s hard not to see echoes of Fisher’s assertion in Capitalist Realism that the only way forwards is backwards.

This linkdump is algorithm-free, hand-rolled and made with love. And yes, you might discover some sort of theme in this collection…