flâneur

Michelle Gan

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on the atlas — 16

highlights — 16

  • Try moving towards whatever seems interesting, or through whatever seems significantly boring. Save pages into your bookmarks for later exploration. Save links into a personal webpage that others can access, to facilitate their exploration. Don’t worry too much about whether something is useful or not. Just wander around. Try to get lost. Picture each site as another room in some large, seemingly infinite space. Appreciate the richness of what is out there. If my specific techniques don’t seem relevant to you, then invent your own techniques. The idea is to work against the psychogeographical …
    On the psychogeography of cities and the internet
  • For the vast majority of users, computers are not apprehended through their mechanics but through their interfaces.
    On the psychogeography of cities and the internet
  • People were trying to represent the Internet spatially and graphically. Then of course it was a complete disappointment when you would finally be able to get online and discover that it looks like a folder structure, and these pages – they were not very spectacular.
    On the psychogeography of cities and the internet
  • Is not the internet like a huge city? The obvious analogy here would be to the ways that “closed garden” platforms like Tumblr, Facebook, and Twitter have severely delimited the psychogeography of the internet. Are our daily routines not as pathetic, if not moreso, than those of Debord’s Parisian student? We log on to the same two or three websites, we scroll down, and in the same light blue columns we watch the world pass us by in a confined and monotonous procession. Where is the wonder, the exploration? The internet is larger than any one metropolis, but browsing it today feels like walking…
    On the psychogeography of cities and the internet
  • I will stay here for a while and have fun,
    Gmail
  • Michelle is AWESOME!!!!
    Gmail
  • The task that generative A.I. has been most successful at is lowering our expectations, both of the things we read and of ourselves when we write anything for others to read. It is a fundamentally dehumanizing technology because it treats us as less than what we are: creators and apprehenders of meaning. It reduces the amount of intention in the world.
    Why A.I. Isn’t Going to Make Art | The New Yorker
  • Do what you’re scared of alongside the anxious feeling instead of shoving it down or rejecting it. Meet yourself where you’re at. Approach the part of you that is fearful, pick it up gently, put it on your shoulders, then do the thing. Show them (you) that: hey, this isn’t so bad!
    on being ready - by Isabel - Mind Mine
  • We’re not guaranteed as writers to influence anyone or to be remembered by anyone, but as people—as friends, family, community members—we almost certainly are. I feel much more certain that it’s possible and necessary to leave a mark in this way.
    12 Questions for Jia Tolentino - by Gordon Glasgow
  • But reporting, researching an essay, writing criticism, it feels the same to me inside: it’s just trying to get clearer and closer to the center of something.
    12 Questions for Jia Tolentino - by Gordon Glasgow
  • I guess romantic love has something to do with the near-impossibility of meeting someone who you truly don’t get sick of, and the fact that someone can know you well enough to make you cry in any way from the intensity of that knowledge.
    12 Questions for Jia Tolentino - by Gordon Glasgow
  • Of course our pasts, our heritage, our family histories, matter enormously. I don’t think you can look at what’s happening in Gaza and not believe that, not believe in some form of generational trauma, which is about a million times too weak of a term to describe what the infants being born in Gaza will carry with them as they grow up—if they get to—without limbs, without any living relatives, without psychic or actual homes. Generational trauma is the reason the genocide is justified by Zionists, and also the profound moral foundation of the Jewish-led movements for permanent ceasefire and ju…
    12 Questions for Jia Tolentino - by Gordon Glasgow
  • I don’t know if I can get anywhere from hatred; it’s rigid, not good for us, not funny, not fun.
    12 Questions for Jia Tolentino - by Gordon Glasgow
  • The smartphone is soul-eradicating, personality-destroying, an inescapable reframing of every moment of waking life as a transaction within a market, it encourages us all to be huge fucking losers, it’s an individual poisonous mushroom cloud of surveillance and monetization pluming above us at all times, etc. There is nothing I actively like about my smartphone.
    12 Questions for Jia Tolentino - by Gordon Glasgow
  • I think that a writer, a novelist, must be emotionally naive, emotionally in touch, embodying a firm yet melancholic desire for life and all the pleasure in curiosity that stems from life, which is also love, general and genuine love of the most sincere form; this is the cloying truth
    12 Questions for Jia Tolentino - by Gordon Glasgow
  • Writing is cathartic depletion, an open inquiry towards new forms of internal and external knowledge—a practice of being alert to the world—and I didn’t understand the extent to which raising kids would be that too.
    12 Questions for Jia Tolentino - by Gordon Glasgow