8 Comments
Nov 21, 2022Liked by Antonia Malchik

(four days later) This revamping everything electronic definitely slows me down. Yeah, so I pilled the trigger and got an iPad (I am undecided on the merits of ios v. Android) which let me use the chat - don't think they've got the implementation quite right yet but it works. Feel free to use it or not, I'm game either way.

elm

i'm not sure making comments in the app is that great

Expand full comment
Nov 18, 2022·edited Nov 18, 2022

Speaking of social media platforms, with the imminent collapse of Twitter many great writers and researchers are frantically importing some of their more substantive threads from over the years to another platform (or even creating impromptu Substacks to preserve them) before the whole thing goes down. Whatever you think of social media, Twitter in particular was a really wonderful resource for all kinds of discussions and insights that never made it into published papers or official stuff anywhere else. The toxicity and other problematic dynamics will obviously not be missed (but eventually be reproduced elsewhere); in the meantime it's sort of a minor tragedy to lose all those great threads, dialogues, anecdotes from hundreds of thousands of people. It's like having an enormous library suddenly burn down and losing everything inside, except it's a library for short-form posts. I'm not aware of anything like this having happened before in history, digitally speaking. There are other social costs as well: lots of key advocacy and real-time crisis response took place there and no other platform is currently equipped to do this nearly as efficiently.

Not that it's healthy to have a hoarding attitude toward information or verbal material, of course, but I think there's an instinctive need many of us have to hold onto records of our meaningful conversations, ideas and philosophical reflections, spontaneous observations; in short, one key dimension of our shared memories and knowledge. It made me think more about this less material aspect of ownership: archival memory (both shared and individual), recorded knowledge, the trivial infrastructure of our social communications. Along with the museums, memorials and historical archives. The latter are more like the commons, but the former is at the mercy of the whims of one narcissistic billionaire.

Anyway, I came across an updated fleshed-out version of that Twitter thread on land ownership I shared recently (now in a blog), so thought I would post it here:

https://helensreflectionsblog.wordpress.com/2022/11/18/property-ownership-and-the-twitter-conundrum/

Expand full comment

Frankly, I don’t think I can handle any more chat features or social media, but I’ll be reading you faithfully.

Expand full comment
Nov 17, 2022Liked by Antonia Malchik

I'm on android so I can't use the chat.. Hope it's coming soon, as a right now I'm haft way through reading "The man who broke out of Auschwitz to warn the world; the Escape Artist, by Jonathan Freedland," also started reading "A Walking Life" , I started walking late as well, almost at 2 years old,😅😅. and reading some others as well... Thank you for your talent and knowledge, always a pleasure.

Expand full comment