Mitch's Blog

Meta simply does not give a shit anymore. Facebook spent most of the 2010s absorbing, and destroying, not just local journalism in the US, but the very infrastructure of how information is transmitted across the country. And they have clearly lost interest in maintaining that. Users, of course, have no where else to go, so they’re still relying on it to coordinate things like hurricane disaster relief. But the feeds are now — and seemingly forever will be — clogged with AI junk. Because you cannot be a useful civic resource and also give your users a near-unlimited ability to generate things that are not real. And I don’t think Meta are stupid enough to not know this. But like their own users, they have decided that it doesn’t matter what’s real, only what feels real enough to share.

— Ryan Broderick

mitchellaneous.net, aka Mitch’s Other Blog, is where I’m posting memes, vintage ads and photos, and other found media. I don’t imagine many people will bookmark mitchellaneous.net and return to it. It exists primarily as a publishing platform to share posts to a newsletter and several social media services, powered by Micro.blog, the great service that hosts both this blog and that one.

I’m thinking of changing the domain of this blog as well, to mitchipedia.org. It’s now mitchw.blog, of course, but I soured on that domain a while ago. One reason is because “MitchW” isn’t one of the names I use in life. I use “Mitch” or “Mitch Wagner.” People who knew me when I was a child call me “Mitchell.”

Also, I love blogging but I don’t like the word “blog.”

On the other hand, is “mitchipedia” too cute?

I own mitchwagner.com, and formerly blogged there, but I decided a few years ago to put a slight distance between my professional identity, which is tied to that name (my real name) and the stuff I post here. Now mitchwagner.com is just a placeholder site.

Another option would be to give this blog a domain tied to a catchy name, like Daring Fireball or Scripting News or Pluralistic. But all the names I could think of seemed to be either too bombastic or too cute. And so many of the good domains are taken now.

Here’s a profile of Dave, by John Naughton at The Guardian: The blogosphere is in full bloom. The rest of the internet has wilted.

Dave’s blog, Scripting News, is one of my favorite blogs, and it’s the blog I’ve been reading daily for longest.

Naughton:

“Some people were born to play country music,” [Winer] wrote at one stage. “I was born to blog. At the beginning of blogging I thought everyone would be a blogger. I was wrong. Most people don’t have the impulse to say what they think.” Dave was the exact opposite. He was (and remains) articulate and forthright. His formidable record as a tech innovator meant that he couldn’t be written off as a crank. The fact that he was financially secure meant that he didn’t have to suck up to anyone: he could speak his mind. And he did. So from the moment he launched Scripting News in October 1994 he was a distinctive presence on the web.

Matt Stoller: “Apolitical basketball legend Michael Jordan filed an antitrust suit last week against NASCAR. Whatever happens in this next election, the antitrust revolution is unstoppable."

Hamilton Nolan: “Run a Left Wing Democratic Primary Candidate in 2028. No Matter What. Stopping the party’s rightward drift means having a real primary.”

The scariest possible outcome of the 2024 presidential contest is a Trump victory. The second scariest outcome, however, is a scenario in which center-right, anti-Trump voters pour into the Democratic Party and elect Kamala Harris and then proceed to pull the Democratic Party to the right.

Nolan makes these points:

#NeverTrump Republicans like the Cheneys are supporting Harris and may stick around in the Democratic party after 2024, pulling the party to the right.

Joe Biden’s leftward swing was due to pressure from Sanders, his allies, and their supporters. The Democratic Party became afraid of the Left.

But now Harris is afraid of Trump, his supporters and conservatives.

Primaries are the right time to challenge party leadership and force change in direction.

Regarding Dave Winer’s @davew@mastodon.social assertion that journalists should view people writing on the Internet as sources, rather than their competitors: I had this ongoing argument with a friend and colleague who was a very traditional journalist — he later went on to work for the New York Times and then Bloomberg. This was in the 2000s, when blogging was hot, and I was pro-blogging while he was a blogging skeptic.

I eventually stopped arguing with him when I realized that good-faith bloggers criticizing journalists were angry at journalists for not acting like journalists should. It’s fine for random people on the Internet to say random things, but journalists should be reporting what’s actually happening, not just repeating the random things that random people say on the Internet.

Dave also discusses WordPress’s potential as an infrastructure for the social web: “… underneath the cluttered user interface is a strong foundation that you could build any kind of writing software on.” The cluttered interface eventually drove me away from WordPress, and I now describe it as an Internet publishing and commerce platform that incidentally does a mediocre job of supporting blogging.

On this morning’s walk, I saw my first Trump signs of the season. There were many campaign signs for both parties, including one house with many Harris/Walz signs, topped by a Harris/Walz flag on a flagpole, which I have not seen before.

Directly across the street was a house with a lot of Trump/Vance signs. That’s gotta be awkward.

I found myself this weekend thinking of a friend, sadly deceased for a few years, who frequently told fantastic stories, usually about his sexual exploits. After a time, I began to wonder if my friend was fabulating. After more time, I decided I didn’t care — his stories were great.

I started thinking about my friend yesterday after reading this obituary of Jay J. Armes, a flamboyant private investigator with hooks for hands, accused of lying about many aspects of his colorful life history.

Margaret Atwood was advised to just find a good man. Her response: ‘You’re an idiot.’ An enjoyable, fast Q&A with Atwood on bad advice, good advice, envy, sorrow and a premonition that came true.

This is one hell of a lead sentence:

Jay J. Armes, a flamboyant private investigator who lived on an estate with miniature Tibetan horses, traveled in a bulletproof Cadillac limousine with rotating license plates and had steel hooks for hands, including one fitted to fire a .22 caliber revolver, died on Sept. 18 in El Paso.

— Jay J. Armes, Private Eye With a Superhero Story, Dies at 92, by Michael S. Rosenwald at the New York Times