Intro
Well, it looks like we’re taking a break from winter over this side of the world. Today the weather was 16 degrees and it seems to be staying that way for the rest of the week. But there is also heavy wind, which is never good news for me.
Greetings from Sangarius. Hope you’re all doing well.
Mission Control
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- Feeling a bit stuck and slowed down. The goal for this week is to push things around to gain some momentum.
- Working on the details of a new project which I hope it to become something long term.
- Have to put some time aside to handle some of the missing parts and pieces for Tuhaf Studio to make sure it’s ready for my upcoming plans and ideas.
From Last Week
- Back in 2022, I put together a simple website inspired by an online conversation. Now I turned it into a much better designed and useful futures tool called Bright Futures Generator. It’s part futures provocateur part parody of “keynote futurists”.
Check my Now page if you want to see what I’m up to in a more detailed way.
The Right to Enjoy the Game
I stopped following football around high school mainly because of the fan culture and the fanaticism. Being dedicated to a team and always siding with that seemed meaningless and something that sucked all the fun out of the sport. And since the whole culture around it is based on that fan mentality, only option I saw was stop following it completely.
Since then I’m mainly a basketball guy, specifically NBA. Of course part of it is based on my personal taste and thinking that it’s a lot more fun but also I was able to stay away from all that fan mindset — following a league based in another country also helps with that too. I’m also trying to keep up with Euroleague as well but making sure I’m staying as far away from that mindset as possible.
I’m sure you’re all wondering why I’m talking about sports and where all this is going. All of these came from two articles I’ve read recently. One from Zoe Scaman, titled “The Right to be Wrong” and the second one is Paul Graham Raven’s “yes, and” reply “the right to refuse”. I highly recommend reading both of those.
Reading both made me think about why we’re dealing with this problem and how it became so serious that it pushes people into silence or exhaustion. Which are both quite familiar feelings for me and one of the main reasons why I’m barely on places like Twitter, Mastodon, Bluesky etc. these days. And that feeling is also very similar to the one that drove me away from football as well.
Because the problem comes from the fact that people are treating everything like a football fanatic, choosing one side and shutting down their brain to put it kindly. What people call discourse on the internet is not about actually having a discussion but winning the game against the other team. We already know platforms and algorithms play a part in this but this is also the easiest way out of many things. Why bother thinking about all the complexities and the messy parts of the world when you can act like it’s a football game and just root for your team? And why talk about any of that when all you care is to make your numbers go up?
This is why I prefer to focus on people who want to enjoy the sport itself than the ones who just care about their team. Because those are the ones who don’t shy away from complexities of the world, asking questions, being wrong or refusing things. Those are the ones who can actually create better things, things we really need.
(This is also why we’re seeing more and more interest and talk about dark forests and similar trends. But I’m going to leave that for another time.)
Song of the Week
Writing with this album playing in the background.
Reading Log
“Yet Tooze has come to embrace in medias res both as “a very succinct summation of the challenge that I’m particularly interested in” and as a simple but profound description of the basic human situation. In his view, there is no escaping the middle of things: every one of us is born, lives and dies in a rushing flow of events that precedes us and will outlast us.”
The crisis whisperer: how Adam Tooze makes sense of our bewildering age
“And the people sending gotchas, writing snarky poems, keeping score of who got what wrong – they’re not just being annoying. They’re making it harder for anyone to think in public. They’re taxing curiosity. And the people who pay that tax aren’t the shameless ones – it’s the ones who actually give a shit, who might’ve followed a thread somewhere useful if they hadn’t decided it wasn’t worth the risk.”
The Right to Be Wrong. – Zoe Scaman
“There should indeed be a right to be wrong, just as there should be a right to hold individuals and industries alike accountable for patterns of being wrong—a right to nay-say, a right to refuse. These rights are mutually necessary and complementary; a world that had either one without the other would be broken beyond repair.”
the right to refuse – Paul Graham Raven
Outro
I know the theme for this week may sound like I’ll end up going completely off-grid but don’t worry, I don’t have any plans to go anywhere. But we all need to figure out how to create spaces for us to do what we really want without worrying about those things — or at least have enough defenses against it.
Take care and I’ll see you around!
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