Sunday, October 17, 2021

Kombinat! Closing Time

This will be quick. Just a quick moment in Internet time... time, ti ti tim e. puff, oof, pow pow.

And I loved you when our love was blessed, And I love you now that there's nothing left but sorrow and a sense of overtime, overtime, overtime...

Time keeps on slipping, slipping, slipping...

All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players; They have their exits and their entrances And one in their time play many parts...first, .... And then the blogger

Out, out, brief candle! a poor blogger, that struts and frets his hour upon a stage, And then is heard no more. 

It's a tale told by a blogger. You know the rest.

In 2004 I had an idea while looking at what's happening with blogging, but I could not articulate it, and I still can not articulate it after 17 years? I know, I must be stupid, or was I born this way? or grew up this way? 

I named that thing I did not understand: Kombinat!, Conversation Disposal Machine, a human constructed machinery to harvest all the conversations humans have with each other and turn it into profit, but as a byproduct they would dispose of conversations

In essence Conversations in the end became the Waste, unless you could engage more people in the conversation to keep squeezing the profit. 

The conversations did not have to keep getting better, or smarter, or lead towards solving real world problems. The machine only wanted humans to engage endlessly with conversations as conversations that lead to nowhere. It did not matter what the conversations were about, it didn't matter if the same conversation was happening over and over in a loop, it only mattered that people were engaged, talking, chatting, typing, visiting, scrolling, being there, their eyes glued on, for as long as possible. 

Because the Conversation Disposal Machine used it as a raw material to create profit from engagement and not from having meaningful conversations. 

The value was not in Conversations, conversations were a mere byproduct, a raw material from which to make profit and turn it to waste.

For a transactional person it was probably clearly visible what was happening with social media, but for the poets, artists, sensitive people, seeing the world with their hearts it was invisible. It was invisible to me. 

I could not understand why humans would create such a Conversation Disposal Machine like Facebook... well, it does not matter now. I give up. They won, and the place got wrecked, and I just don't care what happens next. Looks life freedom, but it feels like death. It's something in between, I guess... It's Closing Time.

Kombinat Manifesto is No More. It's now a Conversation Disposal Machine at High Operational Excellence.

Go hug someone you love ! 

If you don't have someone you love, find someone to love unconditionally. 

Trust me, it's worth it. 

Peekaboo! Peekaboo! I see you! I love you!

10 comments:

Social Director of the Internet said...

Marek!!!!!

Tom Matrullo said...

You might rightly decry the machine, Marek, but your conversation has been missed.

Social Director of the Internet said...

So much.

fpaynter said...

Peekaboo! So good to see you and hear that voice of yours, Marek.

Unknown said...

I want the conversation again.

Right now it seems to be on Facebook, one of the two monsters that ate blogging. (The other was Twitter. I have 25k "followers" there. It ain't the same. A parking space has about the same number of followers and a similar ratio of engagement.) This is worse than sad. It's a cancer in which we are all cells. (Yes, I'm on Facebook too.)

It freaks me out that I haven't missed you, Marek. Just like I haven't missed so many other friends I enjoyed co-blogging with, back in the decade. (See the blogroll for my old blog, still on life support, here: http://weblog.searls.com/)

That's social media for ya. The world's biggest irony machine.

I believe this fail is not just Facebook's, though. They're also the world's largest red herring. Misdirection on a global scale.

It's the Web's. I wrote about that here: https://blogs.harvard.edu/doc/2021/08/15/beyond-the-web/

If you want to talk about that, we have a space for it: a salon series at the Ostrom Workshop at Indiana University, near where we now live, to try building a better world up from a locality.

This series is online, open and free. Here was our first one: https://events.iu.edu/ostromworkshop/event/264653-ostrom-salon-series-beyond-the-web

We have more coming up. They are not on this calendar yet https://events.iu.edu/ostromworkshop/all but will be tomorrow, hopefully.

If you want to know more, or just talk in text (or hell, live on phones) write me: first name at last name dot com.

Love to you all.

Unknown said...

Google/Blogger told me I was me, then called me "unknown." Nice.

I'm Doc. Sorry about that.

And now it wants me to say I'm not a robot, and my verification has expired.

I'm a person, Google. You're the fucking robot.

Doc out.

jonhusband said...

Tanks. Ciao.

AKMA said...

Still hanging around. Still in love. Still miss you all.

Christopher Locke said...

Marek indeed. peekaboo!

Social Director of the Internet said...

Marek. Important updates. Post above. ❤️❤️‍🩹