Okay, this gets a bit complicated, but: in a privately-circulated PDF essay by a comrade, I find myself quoted, a thing I said in a private online space we both shared access to at one time. I think I wrote this a few years ago. It came back and smacked me in the face.

Brief conversation in a sekrit room with m1k3y about useful, low signal, relatively calm comms… I kind of want to think about that some more. Sort of like gardening your own network. I like being able to send that “alive and out of bed” signal to friends and comrades. Which is probably just another approximation of that early-internet experience of seeing instant messenger statuses light and the morning Twitter post, seeing them happen in waves as timezones woke up across the world… But, as I generally pursue a small clutch of notions around post-attention, people going private, secret networks. withdrawal from general-broadcast-social et al… as m1k3y said, there becomes value in us, scattered in the various global cells of our selected monasteries and compounds, checking to see if we’re all alive each morning, and what the sky looks like…

This may lead me to start a post-attention chain, what with the recent application of Cixin Liu’s “Dark Forest” metaphor to people removing themselves from the public internet streams.

But, honestly, I sometimes think that all I ever wanted from the social internet was Sky Net. Seeing if we’re all alive every morning, and what the sky looks like where you are.