Category: Nine Bells

Came across that term in a Creative Boom article in July, which is when I’m writing this note. The full phrase is “a post-AI, post-search and post-social world.” Are we post-AI yet? I feel like what’s arrived so far is mostly empty promises. Post-social (media)? Well, yeah, but most people don’t see it that way yet. They even think TikTok is social media, and it’s not – it has no social graph, its algo is basically souped-up TiVo, it’s television with a comments section.

Sometimes I think old-style public access cable television ate the planet and nobody noticed.

But post-search. That feels right. Search has been crippled for a while now. Search being a fundamental function of the web, even saying the word “post-search” feels weird and worrying. Is that where we all are now? Hoping the “AI” “search” answer at the top of Google results is right?

I just found out that Searchblog is still running – https://battellemedia.com/ .

As I write this, I’m trying to clear the back of my office. It’s a small room, and it has a weird L shape to it. Because it’s small and a weird shape and of no use to anyone else, it’s the room I adopted as my office when we moved in, more than thirty years ago. Thirty years of people dumping shit in this room at Xmas because nobody (but me) would see it. Clearing it out is like digging through the geological strata of our time in this house. Here’s her broken watch from twenty years ago. There’s a painting by my daughter she did for me when she was two and I immediately stuck to the office wall. There’s the promo sheet for the comics series I did before she was born. There’s a whole life in this stupid little room.

I paste things into my notebooks. Tonight, a note from Dan Catt, a photo of the Bee Pioneer, a car crash, a new watch, the cover of a book. When the notebooks are filled, they go in a storage box.

Tonight, I think about my daughter finding these boxes when I’m gone and she has to clear the house. All my scribbles, notes to self, half-ideas, frustrations and speculations and tabulations, and snapshots of the days after she moved away, more than ten years ago as I write this.

At some point, I suppose we all start imagining the future in terms of the past.

Every genre is now microfractured into dozens of subgenres, which in turn fracture and shed off more. This is an extremely online thing, and so I’ve let a lot of it pass me by in the past several years. Because Bandcamp isn’t algo driven, the only new stuff it shows me is by artists and labels I’ve already bought from. I’m now reaching the point where I’m feeling a bit hemmed in and everything is sounding a little the same. I feel like I should pick one genre and drill down through every odd associated hashtag until I reach some imagined pelagic zone where all the frantic subdivision is happening in the abyssal dark.