We’re nine days into 2025, and it’s already full of exhausting levels of controversy before we’ve even had a turnover in power in my home country of the United States. We’ve seen resignations of world leaders, wars continuing and getting worse and worse (you know where), the owner of Twitter continuing his tirade of lunacy and demonstrating why the billionaire class is not to be revered, California ablaze with a horrendous and large wildfire, right wing thinktanks developing plans to out and attack Wikipedia editors as any fascist-friendly organization would do, Meta rolling out and rolling back GenAI profiles on its platforms, and, just yesterday, the same Meta announcing sweeping changes to its moderation policies that, in a charitable reading, encourage hate-based harassment and abuse of vulnerable populations, promotion and support for disinformation, and other problems, all of which are so profound that people are talking about a mass exodus from the platform to…somewhere. It’s that last thing that brings me back to the blog today. Since the takeover at Twitter, social networks have been in a state of chaos. Platforms have risen and fallen — or only risen so much — and nothing I would call stability has formed. Years ago, I (and many others far more popular than me) remarked that we’ve ceded the territory of self-owned or small-scale third party spaces for massive third party platforms where we have minimal to no control or say and which can be stripped away in a tech-scale heartbeat. By putting all our ducks into a bin of unstable chaos, we’re also expending our time and energy on something that won’t last, requiring us to expend more time and energy finding alternatives, rebuilding communities, and then repeating the process again. In the present environment, that’s impossible to ignore.1 This is all rather reductive, but this post is not the place to talk about all the ways that social networks have impacted control over our own spaces and narratives. Another time, perhaps. I similarly don’t have space to talk about the fact that some of the platforms we currently have, however functional they may be, have placed many of us in a moral quagmire, as in the case of Meta’s recent moderation changes. Another time… ↩
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England: The Country With a History Face
Reading Time
There is something absolutely magical about visiting another
country, especially a country like England. At least, I think so. But why?
On my descent into Gatwick, I thought about that question, and this is
the best I could come up with:
is a country that wears its history on its face. To someone like myself, who has lived in
various parts of the United
States where colonial history is not
explicitly present (i.e., there aren’t a whole bunch of forts and “old towns”
on the West Coast).[1] But what does it mean for a nation to wear
its history on its face? Traveling to England is like
traveling through hundreds of years of history compressed into one space. It is impossible to look at England without
being able to see the ancient, the old, the modern, and the contemporary all
comingled in the same space. Perhaps
this does not fascinate the British, but it certainly grabs my attention every
time I visit (just as it captures me now as I sit in the airport).[2]
random speculation). England really
is magical, mystical, bewildering, wondrous, and all manner of other delicious
descriptors one might use. But it’s
because of the history, I think, that so many tourists are drawn here. That history is a kind of magic of its own,
filled with myths, legends, exciting stories, architecture, characters, and
literature. It’s a place where you
always feel like there’s something grand to learn about the very place you’re
standing on. Something happened here,
perhaps something insignificant within the endless stream of historical time,
but something exciting nonetheless.
to England
(though my first foray into the southern half of the island). I’m jetlagged. I’m tired.
I’m unclean. But I’m amazed by
the wonder around me. Is this just the
journey of the tourist? Or is there
something truly magical about England
or equally ancient places that inspire such emotions?
what countries or places have you visited that seemed to wear its
history on its face? Let me know in the
comments so I can make a list of places to see with my girlfriend…
say old, I mean by degrees of hundreds of years. Much of California was settled fairly late in
American history. But there is also
something to be said about living in
these places that demystifies the historical experience. I love the Old West – the mines, frontier
towns, the Gold Rush sites, etc. – but I have lived in that space for so long
that it doesn’t hold the allure it once did.
this post while I was sitting in Gatwick
International Airport
while waiting for my train.
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