Flirting With Code

I love Code. But, as with most (all) long-term relationships, we’ve had our rocky patches.

It’s a love language thing. When Code and I first met, it was all “HTML” and “C++” - simple curiosities that drew me in. We fumbled around and learnt a lot about each other in the innocence of our youth. But, as with most (all) youth, we all eventually grow up. I tried to be open about the novelty of “JavaScript” and the spiciness it truly did bring, but the world wasn’t ready for us - browsers couldn’t agree on how to behave when we spoke it, and at first the results were…unpredictable at best, completely broken at worst. The growing pains thankfully got easier once the rest of the world caught up.

They say size doesn’t matter, but truth be told it also came up between Code and me. There was a time when the internet on a cell phone was a quixotic dream. As I was tap taaaaaap tapping a mess of T9 on a flip phone, I just couldn’t see it and rolled my eyes at the suggestion. Wasn’t what we had on a proper computer already enough? Enter BlackBerry and Apple, answering my logistical frustrations with proper keyboard-ing and connectivity, challenging my idea of what a proper computer was altogether. I begrudgingly came around: “should” is a word to be careful with. Lesson learned and, just like screen size, my relationship with Code grew even more dynamic.

Code and I just celebrated our 25th anniversary, and I’m happy to report that we’ve landed in a good place through it all. The change continues to come at us, each trial and tribulation informing what we’re able to do together today.

I suppose that’s the way of things: never truly still, always moving forward into what’s unfolding in the next moment. Cautious optimism balancing healthy skepticism. Learning through experimentation and mistakes. Not walking away, just showing up.

Ideally.

But the world is not ideal. Not all forward progress is a good thing, as much as the tech CEOs may preach it.

Some days, I can’t help but throw my hands up and conclude this whole internet thing is a failed experiment. At its inception, we dreamt of how it would democratize speech, access to knowledge, and connection.

Instead, we got five websites, each one a mall built on top of the ruins of a thousand smaller places. The protocols were open, but the doors that people actually walk through are not. Democratized speech turned out to mean that speech is cheap and attention is dear, and whoever owns the ranking function owns the conversation - a gatekeeper by any other name, only now unaccountable and unnamed. Knowledge is more accessible than any generation could have imagined, which is somehow not the same as it being known; we all have the library, and most of us are reading the same three shelves near the door. And connection…it has a strange arithmetic to it now: more contact, less company. I can talk to anyone on earth and yet it’s hard to find someone to look after the plants.

…annnnnnnnd BREATHE! Touch grass and step back, remembering all the good things that this technology also enables. It’s both, as it always has been.

The failure isn’t total. The small web is still down there under the floorboards - the personal sites, the mailing lists, the medical forum where forty regulars who’ve never met can support each other in their deepest struggles. The thing they built was never a place so much as a set of pipes. What we make of the pipes is on us.

I’ve been frustrated with the state of the world lately, but I’ll contain my rant to the “internet experiment” for the sake of this newsletter. Momentum is headed in several regrettable directions: the rising tide of slop, overnight experts firmly in the first phase of the Dunning-Kruger effect, an overarching malaise of mediocrity. Once upon a time we would sit with a question and ponder - now, the default is to reach for someone else’s answer.

But I suppose frustration isn’t the worst reaction to this, because it stokes the fire to do something about it. Deep within my bones, the poetic anarchy from my early 00s punk phase stirs: a refusal to take it lying down. Or maybe it’s the proverbial lesson that the 17th-century Japanese monk/punk Basho stated when a stranger queried him on what his focus in day-to-day was: “Whatever is needed.”

It’s probably a bit of both. Build the places you want to be in the world, or choose to use the ones you want to see flourish. This applies both physically and digitally.

Back to Code.

I obliterated my WordPress backend at www.davidquiring.com a year ago and have been quietly building a fresh website from scratch since - one feature at a time, no extra cruft. I’ve been writing Code in earnest these past few months to tailor it exactly as I intend it, and it’s now the foundation I dreamt it to be.

Back to anarchy/Basho.

This newsletter is an answer to the slop. No AI correcting all the character out of my writing, offered free and independently without ads, and (hopefully) cultivating a long-term relationship with you. Thanks for being here.

Yadda yadda. Okay - this is a long way of saying that I’ve been neglecting writing here, because I’ve been in a phase of spending my spare cycles writing Code. I’m pivoting back to Prose, so expect more monthly-ish newsletter correspondence going forward. The more I pour into it, the more it fills my cup - another paradox that I’ll leave here for all of us to sit on.

Talk soon,
David