In any social club, somebody’s got to pay to keep the lights on. With online platforms there is a process of growing a customer base, locking people in to the platform by making it hard to share content outside of the system, and then feeding the users an increasing stream of advertising. This is a process Cory Doctorow calls “enshitification.”

When you’re the product, it turns the interaction into a one-way stream, much like watching TV, where you may feel like you know a celebrity intimately, but they certainly don’t know you. Cornell professor danah boyd notes that “we now live in a world of parasocial media…where individuals keep tabs on the lives and movements of people – like celebrities – who do not know us and feel no pressure to reciprocate.”

This doesn’t mean we are at the mercy of the Zuckerbergs of the world. Glenn Fleishman suggests moving to the “Fediverse” where you “own” your own content and can, somewhat easily, move to a different platform if the one you’re on isn’t managed to your liking.

Another trick for making social media more sociable is to draw on an antique technology (27+ years old) and use RSS, (Real Simple Syndication) to thwart the algorithms and follow the people you care most about.

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ActivityPub Brings Back the Early Days of the Internet

Rewilding the Internet: Bring Back the World Wide Weird

The Social Jeep (2008) Forums promote serious conversations.

But there it is, emblazoned on the side of a concrete structure as you enter: “Respect Slab City.”

There’s a touch of kismet here, for me personally. At our church we have a New Year’s tradition where we pick a random card from a basket. The card is printed with a word to meditate on in the course of the coming year.

The word I picked was “respect.” It’s not a word I would have picked on my own. I think I do a pretty good job at respecting the law, respecting tradition, respecting my neighbors. But now, on a dried-up section of desert land east of the dying Salton Sea, where people live like hermit crabs in broken-down RVs, I’m asked to rethink the word “respect.”

I admit that I felt very mixed on this particular sightseeing trip. I came to ogle the weirdness of it all, but I also didn’t want to disturb people who most likely just want to be left alone.

And I was surprised to find quite a number of signs catering to tourists. “House of Dots,” “Ice Cream Floats,” “Public Library.” Granted, most of these signs are scrawled on splintered plywood, attached to crazy assemblies of fencing material that surround weird collections of campers and dead vehicles. But they suggest something of an economy, something of a civic life even here in the “last free place in America.”

If I’d been a little more comfortable in my own skin, a little less self-conscious about being such a looky-loo, I might have stopped and talked to some of the folks I saw riding a bicycle or scratching at the ground next to a creosote bush. How do you get water out here? Yes, some folks had large plastic reservoirs on their compounds, but still. What about electricity? I saw a couple of generators. One or two solar panels. It didn’t seem like enough to keep a root beer float frosty.

So in the end, I came away with more questions than answers. And more to ponder about the meaning of “respect.”

NEW (March 2026) Influencer Elivs Boy at Into the Sunset just visited Slab City and found big changes. For one thing, the House of Dots is no more.

To learn more about Slab City read Jonah Gercke’s excellent write up on Spin: A Bad Thing Haunts Slab City.

Also on Wild Rye

A Jesus Theme Park on the Way to Joshua Tree

My personal goal for the coming year is to spend a part of every day simply “writing to be writing.” Not writing for blog posts, not writing for publication, not writing to anyone in particular. Just putting my butt in the chair and putting words to paper…or whatever you call it.

For the past couple of years I wanted to increase my writing output. I blocked out time. I set up a writing station.

But instead of churning out the words, I spent most of my time Not-Writing. In fact, judging from my success you might think that I was the founder and CEO of Not-Writing Inc. If they gave a Nobel prize for Not-Wordsmithery, I’d surely be the top contender. My literary oeuvre, while massive in the scope of its poverty, doesn’t even have the Zen-like quality that “Not-Writing” hints at. It’s not procrastination or disinterest. It’s simply garden variety not-doing-the-thing, pursued with passive-aggressive fury.

So here I am at the start of 2026, butt in chair, tapping out words on the keyboard, that aren’t really aimed at you, or at anybody, or at anything in particular. Just tapping to be tapping.

And guess what?

I’m writing.

Happy New Year.

If you were online in the early 1990s you may remember wwwwww.jodi.org. The “home page” looks like a green-screen splash from The Matrix. Click randomly on the screen and you’ll come up with something different…a Nintendo-esque page of flaming samurai or maybe just an empty page with the cryptic message “v1.1 mWAR script” off to one side.

But there’s also the everyday weirdness that makes up our daily existence. Look at Meg Hourihan’s archival site Megnut.com. She posts about her kids, about her woes finding insurance, and about her pets.

There’s nothing earth-shattering here on Megnut. But it’s deeply human and relateable.

Of course there’s the really big question, how do we bring back this weirdness? Hultenius suggests that we need less algorithmic control on the sites we frequent.

That is going to require big systemic change on sites like Facebook and Tik-Tok. What can we do in the meantime? Maybe…bring back the blogroll

SEE ALSO

Where Would We Even Start?

Why Social Media Isn’t Social

Just like a forest that has been clear-cut and replanted with a single species, the internet is quickly depleting itself of life and vitality. The walled gardens of Facebook, Twitter, and Google each act to isolate users, starving them of interaction across the global network.

What’s the solution? Farrell and Berjon look toward antitrust laws to break up these big, exclusive platforms. Cory Doctorow sees the answer in interoperability – let Facebook users share posts with Twitter, Mastodon, and Bluesky.

I’m not holding my breath for either of these solutions coming to pass any time soon. But we need to do something to build good, living, spaces online.

For my part, I’m just going to take one tiny step of getting this blog up and running again.

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For a really good study on how diverse ecosystems promote life and growth, read Finding the Mother Tree by Suzanne Simard.

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Bring Back the World Wide Weird

VISITOR: ‘Cause this century, the accomplishments of artists and scientists outshone the accomplishments of politicians and governments.

The rest of ensemble, including Albert Einstein, Pablo Picasso, and a bartender named Freddy, have no idea what the visitor is talking about. The year is 1911 and they have no idea that Archduke Ferdinand is about to be assassinated, plunging the world into some 40 to 50 years of turmoil.

In her post A Lighthouse for Dark Times Maria Popova suggests that society is constantly prone to upheaval and turbulence as it changes from one state to another. These can be positive transformations in the end, but the period of time during the transformation is chaotic and unpleasant.

She sees art as the stabilizing force around which unstable fragments of society will crystalize into a new structure. She says:

This is the elemental speaking: It is during phase transition — when the temperature and pressure of a system go beyond what the system can withstand and matter changes from one state to another — that the system is most pliant, most possible. This chaos of particles that liquefies solids and vaporizes liquids is just the creative force by which the new order of a more stable structure finds itself. The world would not exist without these discomposing transitions, during which everything seems to be falling apart and entropy seems to have the last word. And yet here it is, solid beneath our living feet — feet that carry value systems, systems of sanity, just as vulnerable to the upheavals of phase transition yet just as resilient, saved too by the irrepressible creative force that makes order, makes beauty, makes a new and stronger structure of possibility out of the chaos of such times.

Popova cites Hermann Hesse, whose work was done during the upheaval of two World Wars:

Every age, every culture, every custom and tradition has its own character, its own weakness and its own strength, its beauties and ugliness; accepts certain sufferings as matters of course, puts up patiently with certain evils. Human life is reduced to real suffering, to hell, only when two ages, two cultures and religions overlap. A man of the Classical Age who had to live in medieval times would suffocate miserably just as a savage does in the midst of our civilization. Now there are times when a whole generation is caught in this way between two ages, two modes of life, with the consequence that it loses all power to understand itself and has no standard, no security, no simple acquiescence.

E.M. Forster felt that a work of art was the only artifact that has true integrity and internal harmony because it is free of the practical demands that are put on other objects such as tools. I disagree with this somewhat, because nature faces its own constraints and practical limitations, yet it has perhaps the truest internal harmony.

SEE ALSO

There are strong overtones of thermodynamics in Maria Popova’s observations, calling to mind Ilya Prigogine quote about the power of “small islands of coherence”.

When a system is far from equilibrium, small islands of coherence have the capacity to shift the entire system.

This quotation, attributed to the Belgian physical chemist Ilya Prigogine, gives me hope that small groups of people working together may be able to shift our chaotic politics into something better.

But is it realistic, or useful, to apply the principles of thermodynamics to the much more macro world of human societies?

Prigogine, who won the Nobel Prize for his work on dissipative structures, complex systems, and irreversibility, began his career because he was interested in the way chemical processes in the brain affected our thoughts and behaviors. He saw a relationship between physics and psychology.

What he discovered in his studies was that while chemical solutions can be heated and cooled without altering their fundamental properties, under certain conditions the properties could not be reversed. For example, heating a fluid from the bottom can create cellular patterns that are unpredictable and cannot be reproduced identically upon cooling and reheating.

This phenomenon is known as Rayleigh–Bénard convection. Similar patterns that result from various chemical processes were also noted by Allan Turing, and have been called Turing patterns. Both examples demonstrate the presence of emergent properties within inorganic structures. These properties follow the same patterns of emergence that are seen in living systems.

This idea of emergent properties and self-organization are what make Prigogine’s observations relevant to the human circus we all live in.

These “small islands of coherence”, by which Prigogine meant small crystalline structures around which larger cellular patterns form, have a lot in common with Christopher Alexander’s concept of “living centers” in architecture that follow definite morphogenetic patterns. Prigogine’s work supports Alexander’s premise that properties of life can be seen non-living things ranging from gothic cathedrals to crystalline structures in minerals.

Zooming out to the macro world of human behavior, we see that psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi used thermodynamics to describe that natural state of the human mind, a disordered state of consciousness that he called “psychic entropy.” Here again, small islands such as goals, rules, and challenges can bring a disordered system into equilibrium.

Widening the lens further, we can see small islands of coherence in the clubs, associations, churches, and synagogues that people belong to. Sociologist Robert Putnam made the argument in his book Bowling Alone that participation in small groups helps strengthen social bonds and improves civic life. These ideas are well-presented in the documentary Join or Die, which shows how group activities can bring the society as a whole to a higher degree of order and equilibrium.

So maybe, as we watch our society edging towards chaos, the answer is to seek out a small island that we can strengthen. Or to put it another way, Think Gobally, Act Locally

SEE ALSO

Maria Popova believes that one of the most powerful “islands of coherence” is art.

Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and then go do that. Because what the world needs is people who come alive.
— Dr. Howard Thurman

Also on Wild Rye

This year’s theme: Awakening

I left Red Rock Canyon with a comfortable 40% charge and Apple CarPlay steered me to Brady’s Market to get my charge up to 65%. The gas station and convenience store, described in some reviews as looking like the opening scene in a horror movie, are permanently closed. But there are two brand-new ChargePoint DC fast chargers on the site, and both were available.

I charged to 70% and went on my way, discovering that you can’t believe everything you read when it comes to ghost towns. Robber’s Roost, a convenience store with some vaguely historical buildings, wasn’t open yet.

Golden Cactus Ghost Town was a little better, though not the “small yet beautifully preserved little town” that the article promised. It’s a roadside attraction built, I’m guessing, twenty or thirty years ago. It was locked up when I visited and Google lists it as “permanently closed.”

Next stop was Silver City Ghost Town near Lake Isabella. This also is not a “perfectly preserved old west town” but a re-creation built from decaying buildings relocated from Whiskey Flats and other California mining towns. I was greeted by Shawn, who was running the souvenir shop and gave me an honest rundown of the place. It’s worth the price of a latte to take a stroll around the place and take in the weird contents of the buildings.

The 60 mile drive from Mojave to Bodfish and then to Bakersfield left me at about 40% charge. CarPlay steered me to an Electrify America charging station and found it fully occupied by two Rivians, an Ioniq 5, and a Bolt. This meant a twenty minute wait and having to negotiate with a driver who arrived after me but thought he was next in line. But 350 kWh charging is worth waiting for, particularly because I didn’t want to drive all over Bakersfield looking for a slower charger that also might be occupied by the time I got there.

My Take-Away

All-in-all CarPlay did a great job of monitoring my charge level and giving me plenty of margin so that I could make some side trips when something caught my eye. The charging stops were a good way to break up a long drive, giving me time to post to Instagram and do a little writing. I never once felt like I was going to run low on charge.

But it is a hassle to arrive at a charging station and find it fully booked. This could be improved if (1) you could easily see each vehicle’s charging status from a distance, and (2) you could line up behind a car that’s charging the way you do at a gas station.

• California City

• Burro Schmidt’s Tunnel

• Red Rock Canyon State Park

I was starting with a nearly full battery charge. Apple CarPlay, linked to the computer in my Ford F-150 Lightning, inserted a charging stop at an Electrify America charger in Mojave.

Learning #1: CarPlay Estimates “As-Is” not “What-If”

The thing that worried me a little was that the map indicated I would have a 30% charge by the time I got to Burro Schmidt’s Tunnel. I knew this would include 14 miles of off-road driving. I also knew that mountain driving eats up range like you can’t believe (you get some of that range back when you go down the mountain.)

What I didn’t realize until my first charging stop was CarPlay estimates battery level based on current state of charge.

In other words, my map was showing what my battery level would be if I DIDN’T stop to charge in Mojave.

After I charged back to 90% my map showed that I’d have 65% battery level when I got to the tunnel.

Learning #2: Roll with the Punches

I reached Mojave with better than 50% battery level. I’d been on the road for a couple of hours, in some pretty heavy Los Angeles traffic at the start, so it was a fine place to stop.

But when I reached the Electrify America charging station, it was completely shut down. There was a crew installing solar panels over the chargers.

There was only ONE OTHER fast charger in Mojave, and if that wasn’t available I was maybe going to have to rethink my plans and head out to Lancaster. This will get better when I have a Tesla adapter in August.

Because I didn’t want to erase my CarPlay settings to look for a charger I switched to the Ford navigation, which is how I found the ChargePoint at Denny’s. I plugged in, walked down the street to Starbucks for a quick stretch and an iced chai latte.

All said, yes it was a little unpredictable but overall it wasn’t stress inducing and it all worked out fine.

You just have to roll with the situation as you find it.