This is a reply to article “The Millennial Internet Is Dead, and Politicians Killed It. “Social media use is declining, and what’s left has shifted from conversation to passive scrolling.” I got around to reading my paper copy of it this morning.
\nThe article is a nice summary of the last 20 years of social media and how we got to the current morass of politicization, centralization, and deadness online. I have some perspective from a little further back of events that set the stage for the early social media era. I was on the even-more free-wheeling USENET in the 80s and worked at CompuServe (and later AOL) when section 230 was passed. The USENET “alt.” newsgroups could be created by anybody and were used for everything from serious academic, political and social discussions, to a distribution mechanism for “questionable” content, to criticism of Start Trek characters (“alt.ensign.wesley.die.die.die”). It was all there.
\nThere was recognition in the 90s, even at the congressional level, that the online world and the Internet had to be allowed to grow, and that we’d all be better off if it was left alone for a while. Section 230 was “hands off” to allow free expression online. The moratorium on taxation was legal acknowledgment that the Internet needed space to grow economically. Those were forward looking admissions that many important things in life, economics and society happen outside government and politics and need space to grow. We could use more of that today. Those allowed (for better or worse) companies such as AOL, eBay, Amazon, Google, Facebook to exist. Where would we have been during the pandemic without Amazon? Love it or hate it, where would we be today without Google? The 90s were an interesting time for freedom. The iron curtain had just fallen. The Internet was new. New visions of free communication and economic independence (crypto currencies) were ascendent. In my mind, those are all good. I’m not sure how we go there now, post social media “death”, post pandemic, post “fake news” as we are moving into a world of age (identity) verification “for the children” that will further dampen free expression. “Controllers always gonna control” I guess. But even the disillusionment shows the flip side of the coin. It shows that people want freedom. And as long as that is true, there is hope. Bring on the next disruption. Now, let’s see, where is my printing press?
\n", "date_published": "2026-11-02T04:59:25-05:00", "url": "https://curious.port111.com/2026/11/02/who-killed-social-media.html", "tags": ["history","offline","journal"] }, { "id": "http://eludom.micro.blog/2026/10/29/moving-from-how-to-what.html", "title": "Moving from \"How?\" to \"What?\"", "content_html": "I made my living for 15 years by telling computers exactly how to do things, step-by-step. That was called “programming”. Yesterday “I” rewrote my backup script. I had written it the “old school” way, relying on fairly detailed knowledge of bash scripting, which is notoriously full of pitfalls and irregularities that bite you. I went several rounds with “the AIs” and re-wrote it, ground up. I told it what I wanted it to do and got a clean, full featured, well commented script with error checking, logging and documented usage. Poof. I had tried to have it clean up my original script, and it did OK, but there was too much confusion there. Starting over with “what” and not “how” was the right call. I did carefully review the generated script before turning it loose on my files, watched the first few runs closely and manually verified that the right files were indeed backed up.
\nI think this is the shape of a lot of the AI interaction to come. Gone are the days where it makes sense for a lot of people to memorize DEC10 assembler, learn BLISS, be able to quote chapter and verse from “K&R C” or the Perl “camel book”. To be sure, there are still many compulsive, detail-oriented people in the world (me) who were and are good at that sort of thing, but there are growing areas where we no longer have to focus that human talent. In my personal life, I’m trying to pivot to find more productive ways to apply that obsessive focus and good memory for minutiae. “Let’s see, how do I pass variables in FORTRAN-77 common blocks again?…”
\nEarly in my career, people called what we did a “Small Matter Of Programming” (SMOP).\nThis usually came from people who did not have the chops to do the focused, detail-oriented work we specialized in. We knew that getting the “how” right was not small. But now with AI becoming much better at some of the “how”, it’s looking like the “SMOP” charge is becoming more real than we like to admit. Maybe now we will be able to free up more of the world’s creative talent to work at a higher level, thinking up the important “what” questions and leaving more of “how” to the machines that are better at it, while we continue to move ever onward in the quest to learn more of what it means to be human.
\nAll this from a broken bash script? Are there “what” questions you’ve been putting off because you were not sure you knew enough “how”?
\n", "date_published": "2026-10-29T07:34:53-05:00", "url": "https://curious.port111.com/2026/10/29/moving-from-how-to-what.html", "tags": ["AI","journal"] }, { "id": "http://eludom.micro.blog/2026/10/22/not-knowing.html", "title": "Not Knowing", "content_html": "Not knowing something you can know is OK.
\nYour brain is at best a small cache of all human knowledge. It’s OK to wonder. It’s OK to not know something. I’m not arguing for wilful ignorance per se, but simply noting that its OK to admit our own finitude and to accept it. Maybe I know enough? Maybe I don’t need to know? Maybe it’s not really that important. Maybe I need to ponder or sleep on it and let my brain build the odd connections that only a human brain can.
\nMaybe there’s something better to do with my time than to fire off one more google search or AI query.
\n", "date_published": "2026-10-22T10:32:35-05:00", "url": "https://curious.port111.com/2026/10/22/not-knowing.html", "tags": ["life","offline","journal"] } ] }