Silent Internet
Silent Internet
This Is A Tribute To Silent Spring And How To Do Nothing
Another Sunday, Another Naive Weekly - Observations From The Internet Wilderness.
When was the last time you put your phone on silent? Have you already set a screentime limit? Do you sleep with flight mode on? Or maybe the phone in the other room? How many notifications have you muted? Have you blocked someone?
I am spending a significant amount of time thinking about how to protect myself from the noisy world of technology and the internet. I often feel bombarded online. I feel overwhelmed with information, notifications, and interactions. I believe this is one of the reasons why I’ve been searching back to my childhood memories of roaming the forest. The outside seems like an alternative reality, a silent retreat.
But if you expect silence when you take a walk in the forest or along the beach, then you’ll be immensely disappointed. If the wind blows, the trees will be shrieking, the waves roaring. If the wind is silent, you’ll be hearing birds whistling, and invisible animals moving. The outside is not silent, yet the noise rarely feels overwhelming. Rather it feels comforting.
And so I have been thinking this week, as Ana and I have been spending a few days outside of the city, that maybe I should not be so obsessed about making the internet and technology silent. Maybe I should rather just focus on finding better noise online.
Roadside Flowers
The State of the Information Highway
Emerson is 11 years old and only communicates with her friends and family using letters. Recently she wrote a letter to Doug, the local mailman, thanking him for his service. Doug shared it with his supervisor, and within days the story escalated beyond imagination.
Lumi Barron spent her quarantine training a squirrel to eat from a miniature tea set.
Write your own message using the newly launched InMemory font, made up of old-internet GIFs.
Relationship Reddit is the best Reddit. If you don’t have the patience for Reddit, this Twitter account is your shortcut.
Copy and paste in AR. It sounds simple — and looks even more simple as Cyril Diagne copy his office plant into photoshop.
Internet Blackhole
Keeping It Light This Week With Two Short Videos
I promise you, you’ll not guess the company behind this advertisement.
Isn’t it wonderful with a Boston Dynamics robot being deployed in Singapore to remind citizens of keeping distance?
Understory
Rich Nutrients For Your Passive Consumption
Everyone’s favourite technology couple, Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst just launched a podcast called The Interdependence. The first episode is a passionate criticism of neoliberalism and tech solutionism featuring Evgeny Morozov. Worth a listen, especially if you are interested in media, curation, and tech criticism.
I’m always impressed when I receive a newsletter from Future Crunch. Angus Hervey and Tane Hunter manage to cover science and technology without falling into blinded optimism or intellectual criticism.
Readers Club
I’ve been wanting to start an interview series for Naive Weekly for a very long time. Rather than talking with the usual suspect, I realized that I’m actually much more curious about all of you reading along. Many of you I already know, and therefore I know the wonderful worlds you breathe. I hope the interview series can become a way for your worlds to connect.
The very first interview is with Ana. Ana is my girlfriend and this week it was her birthday. Before I knew Ana, I fell in love with her photographs. Through her lens, she captures moments I’d rarely notice, and she does so, without reducing the richness of the life she documents. Her photos might be static, but each of them feels more like an invitation to write a story.
I’m very grateful to be sharing my days and life with Ana and to share her uncommon rhythm with you in this short interview. The very first Naive Weekly Interview.
Where do you go to get lost?
It’s not a place where I consciously go, but I always get lost when browsing my archives. It usually happens when I need to look for a specific file that I end up looking at photographs, digital or analog, from different times and places for hours.
How do you think about time?
My mind is usually stuck somewhere between the recent past and the present, rarely in the future. I often mentally replay scenarios and wonder how they could have developed differently, try to reconstruct spaces, and to remember how something felt and why there was a certain reaction to it. It is probably the reason why I feel a strong need to document things.
What would you be doing if given financial stability and three months space?
Visit my family and explore my home country, re-visit places that are especially dear to me, take photos of everyone I love, hug everyone I love, bake bread, collect and dry plants, send letters to the people I miss, paint sheets of paper with watercolours, cut them into shapes and arrange them, look at the water, listen to the waves.
What emotion is lost online?
I think emotions get easily lost in translation online. We might be using the same emoji palette, but how do I know that we interpret them the same way? Why is it that some of the words that I read bring me down until the author explains that they were only meant ironically? And how can I make sure that someone is not feeling quite indifferent when they type how funny they find the pigeon who stole the mayo that I just posted?
Naive Weekly
Hi, I’m Kristoffer and you have just read Naive Weekly - Observations From The Internet Wilderness.
My 17th paying subscriber became my dad. Thank you very much dad.
Last week this newsletter was sent to 546 subscribers. Seventeen people are crazy enough to chip in every month/year to support me making time to write this newsletter: Nikolaj, Ditte, Antal, Søren, Dries, Sarper, Thomas, Mikkel, Aydo, Lukas, Hans, Csongor, Ida Marie, Yinka, Stine & Angela!
Photograph by Ana Santl and you can still Buy My Notebook.
<3
Kristoffer