Open internet, open me

A note to everyone out there who, like me, misses the internet, and especially the World Wide Web.

Open internet, open me

Some of you reading this will be, like me, old enough to remember the world before our lives were saturated by internet-connected gadgets: phones, tablets, watches, desktop computers, laptop computers, along with more and more household appliances and other mundane objects. I remember when the so-called “internet of things” (“IoT”) was first being talked about: “Your refrigerator will be connected to the internet!” Then came the “quantified self,” where we decided that we should turn our bodies into productivity and efficiency machines, churning out data to be crunched, fretted over, and optimized with still another subscription app. And don’t get me started on broligarch-run (anti)social media, marketing, and advertising and what that has done to us individually and as a society.

There is a reason that young people born into this world as so-called digital natives are feeling and embracing a nostalgia for quieter, more analog times, even though they’ve never lived in that reality themselves. To be clear, it isn’t about making anything great again, because that idea, as it is playing out in our national headlines and dominant politics, is grounded in and fueled by denial, delusion, racism, xenophobia, homophobia, sexism and more.

The nostalgia that I’m feeling and witnessing in more and more people is not a desire to go back to an earlier time, but rather a hope for meaningful progress where we learn from the mess we’ve created and commit to co-creating something that works far better for everyone. And when I say everyone, that includes the planet and the creatures we share it with.

That’s what I’m up to with the Literary Flâneur: I want to double down on staying curious and open to what the world and humanity might come up with next, one encounter, conversation and experience at a time, and leave my assumptions, prejudices, and biases in the first wastebasket I pass. At the same time, I’m going to hold firmly to my values, morals, and ethics. It is absolutely possible to do both and I’m going to make a practice of it.

This might seem like an odd first post for this new, old-school blog, but I can’t imagine starting with anything else. I hope you’ll stay tuned and join me on this wandering exploration.