halos

Today, I am overwriting and deleting the history of my last social media account with a script. It will take hours, but it's mental weight worth shedding. Speaking only for myself, it feels there's little to be gained on the web's dominant social platforms. Conversations often turn hostile, misinformation abounds, and the standard privacy policies are more or less sales pitches, only you're the product and the pitch is designed to make you anxious and confused. These systems have been a part of my life for roughly the last ten years to various extents, beginning, say, with the Web 2.0 movement. While they may pervade society (see: the president of the US), I can at least dig a moat around myself.

Two quotes from French statesmen: one from the eighteenth century, one from the nineteenth century, both in Benjamin's “New Theses K” essay.

From Anne Robert Jacques Turgot (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Robert_Jacques_Turgot)

Before we have learned to deal with things in a given position, it has already changed several times. Thus, we always find out too late about what has happened. And therefore it can be said that politics is obliged to foresee the present.

and from Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numa_Denis_Fustel_de_Coulanges)

If you want to relive an epoch, forget that you know what happened after it.

The task is redemption. To butcher some Chaucer: the attempt is hard and the craft takes so long to learn.