Category: Mind and Spirit
Spirituality, moods, feelings, and thinking free to live free.
We learned last week that Gregory Gooch — known to the Commentariat and members of TMM and Claire’s Cabal as either gooch or capn — died last May. Gooch was a sweetheart of a guy whose last few years were difficult and impoverished. But if he had any inkling he was headed for an early death, he never said a word about it to any of his online friends. This is something that worries me; that online acquaintances will just disappear. With Gooch, I thought his absence was due only to the fact that he had a poor, and slow,…
I’ve been viewing with dread the power of a handful of Silicon Valleyites to kick anybody they want to kick out of their domain registries, search results, hosting services, and social media platforms. The people being booted may be slime, but most of them are guilty only of having ugly ideas. Expressing ugly ideas is an unavoidable — and protected — aspect of freedom. This sets a terrible precedent “Not censorship because it’s not done by government!” says traditional libertarian dogma. But traditional libertarians never envisioned a handful of the corporately self-righteous having arbitrary power to shut up anyone they…
Last night after an hour of work on the north wall and a hour of Downton Abbey, I realized I should blog something. I began news surfing to add to the trove of linkable pages always waiting in the wings of the browser. I’d barely started into the sort of article that’s normally a grabber (another scurrilous accusation against Assange and Wikileaks) when I realized I wasn’t the teeny tiniest bit interested. Not that I’m finally cured of news junkiedom, mind you. Merely that tonight I didn’t care. It’s summer. It’s waltzing by and I’m either working or thinking about…
“Embrace a post-digital ethos.” I borrowed that phrase from a poster at Claire’s Cabal. The phrase came up in the midst of a wistful discussion about the need to create just enough of an online profile to reassure potential employers while also scrubbing (or avoiding in the first place) a profile that surrenders too much privacy. Participants lamented the increasing need to create a sanitized public facade. One said that while leaving the ‘Net was out of the question, backing away from ‘Net life was imperative. We’ve talked about this before. Many of us are in love with — married…