My Garden's Boundaries Are the Horizon
And My Mind's Boundaries Are Your Replies.
Another Sunday, Another Naive Weekly - Observations From The Internet Wilderness.
Exploration was the metaphors used when the world got connected to the web. Netscape helped us navigate. Internet Explorer encouraged us to explore. And Safari told us to surf.
Earth, globe, space, and world were popular words for Internet companies back then. The Internet was not a place. Rather the Internet was like the universe; always expanding and we were the explorers.
Today it sometimes feels as if we forgot how to explore. We join closed groups on social media. We chat with friends on private channels. We get answers to our questions using efficient search engines. And we do most of it from the comfort of dedicated applications.
Facebook wants to create online living rooms. Twitter to become the digital version of the town square. We use words like group, club, and community, to promise us belonging and a safe place on the Internet. The Internet is no longer the universe, the Internet is a place and we are the tenants.
VISUALLY PLEASING
The future of long distance hospitality.
This is part of the project I’ve been doing over the last year on the future of mobility. I’m excited to be able to reveal the full scope.
READER INTERVIEW
Anne Levy sits with a perfectly calm posture. Mastering her body language and the words she uses, our first conversation still remains with me. Anne works with strategy and brand communication at Andreas Murkudis and as a freelance consultant with A Greater Few. She is a dancer, life observer, and a collector of beautiful objects and words.
K: Where do you go to get lost?
Anne: As a former dancer, mainly in dancing... the beautiful thing about dancing is that it’s not always about making sense, but about gestures that create a sphere. It’s about creating my individual space, which is limited to the immediate localization of the body and whose perception of meaning we cannot communicate in everyday life. It creates a sense of proximity that allows me to connect to my environment and myself.
K: What would you be doing if given financial stability and three months space?
Anne: That's a beautiful utopia - I would execute a project that I have been thinking about for quite a while now: Creating a pro bono consulting hub for single mothers in Germany that want to found their own business. The political situation is tough for single mothers, and they are extremely disadvantaged - many do not have the opportunity to earn even enough to sustain. The hub would help to develop business models for them so that they could have an additional income, based on their talents and needs.
K: What emotion is lost online?
Anne: If you look through websites and self-descriptions of the intellectual breed on the internet, many describe something at ' ...the intersection of' which already annoyed me back when I was working in academic discourses. The first time writing in a web forum (exchanging about Live Action Role Playing Games - haha) around 2002, I tried to understand the missing moment, the things that are ungoogleable.
For me, this has to do with a gesture and the space that is between feelings and emotions. I miss this on the internet.... because it can be sometimes sharper than anything else in digital areas and yet get defined by an upright infinity of the unequal images and words especially on social places such as Instagram, Twitter and TikTok.
K: What was one rabbit hole you recently fell into?
Anne: TikTok - if you ask me, it's impossible to get out again once you started to scroll. I am not sure yet if it is a wonderland in which I would like to be an Alice.
K: What is your most frequently used emoji?
Anne: 🤸♀️(Woman Cartwheeling)
K: What would be your fictional dream job title?
Anne: Leatherman multi-tool in Chief (matte black)
K: Who are your spiritual mothers and fathers?
Anne: So many... recently, I am somewhere negotiating between Jean-Luc Nancy, Lacan and Daniel versus Babylon - yes, I bring on an old testament prophet here. Lacan is a logical thinking tool for me. For me he is like a severe mom, the technique he developed can be applied to many things in order to find a solution or provide the hint to a path. Still, his thinking does not work alone, at least not for me. Jean-Luc Nancy is the connecter - he always finds a way to gently attach things and ideas, creating meaning and dimensions. The story of Daniel is a bit of an underdog-one, but what’s captivating is his absolute refusal to be defined by others or following the peer-group pressure and faithfulness - all kind of things that are not so common these days. Combined, they are my dream parents, and if I don't know what to do, I turn in their directions...
ROADSIDE FLOWERS
Experience how it feels to have dyslexia.
Join this text only social network.
INTERNET STORIES
OpenAi's GPT-3 May Be the Biggest Thing Since Bitcoin
An article about an artificial intelligence written by an artificial intelligence. Given the attention the reveal of GPT-3 got last weekend, it is not a surprise that someone used the tool to write an article about itself. However, it is still mind bending what is possible and demands us to improve our biases.
Resilience, resilience, resilience
2020 might become the first year in awhile where I am not curating any public talks. In case that should change, I’d love to explore the topic of how to distribute resilience. In this short post my Internet friend Peter Bihr gives a good explanation why it is time to talk about resilience instead of efficiency and growth.
INTERNETMEZZO
Japanese media literacy training.
Indiehunt: WaldenPond
It is hard not to love Walden Pond. It is a printed zine of articles you have discovered. Sent to you every month. It made me wonder why there is not a text version of the mixtape? Or maybe that is the newsletter.
“Walden Pond is a little paper zine that comes once a month in the mail. It’s full of a selection of the articles you’ve saved to Pocket, so you know that you’re interested in everything inside. Each issue has over an hour of reading, the battery will never run out, it’s clear in bright sunlight and has a low-latency pen interface (or pencil).”
BEST OF…
The reviews of the Haribo Sugar Free Classic Gummi Bears are the best of Amazon reviews.
Naive Weekly
Hi, I’m Kristoffer and you have just read Naive Weekly - Observations from the Internet Wilderness.
Last week this newsletter was sent to 613 people. Twenty-seven people are crazy enough to chip in every month/year to support me making time to write this newsletter: Nikolaj, Lars, Ditte, Jakob, Antal, Cecilie, Søren, Dries, Tina, Gautier, Sarper, Maarten, Mystery, Joshua, Thomas, Mikkel, Aydo, Lukas, Hans, Vibe Johanne, Csongor, Dad, Ida Marie, Yinka, Stine, Troels & Angela!
Photograph by Ana Santl.
<3
Kristoffer