The Time Between Thoughts
Back in 2006 there was a movie starring Adam Sandler, Kate Beckinsale and Christopher Walken called Click.
It may have been dismissed as a typically shallow Adam Sandler movie, but there was a kernel of depth to it.
On fast forward
Have you ever arrived at work remembering nothing of how you got there? If you are still young you may not have had this happen to you yet, but after a decade or two you may start to glaze over at the routine. Your body takes over and deposits you where you need to go without you giving it a second thought.
I have done this a lot. I may not have been equipped with the Click remote, but I’ve unwittingly fast-forwarded through a lot of my life. I am rapidly heading towards the half-century without fully grasping how I got here.
Watched: Click 🍿
I have always played it safe. I have been in the same career since leaving school and can do most of what I need to do on autopilot. I’m fine with that, I think.
Perhaps work should be safe and routine. It frees up your time and headspace after you have clocked off to define your own life.
The trouble is, even now, I still have no idea what that is supposed to look like.
Grazing
At the moment, the part of me that wants to be a nerd is at odds with the part of me that recoils in horror at the LLM scam and wants nothing to do with it.
I was struck by a letter that popped up on Mastodon from a guy named Chad Whitacre who worked in tech, only to walk away from it completely to embrace a life offline.
You can read that here: https://openpath.quest/2026/i-am-retiring-from-tech-to-live-offline/
Whilst I don’t work in tech, it has in one way or another been a big part of my personal life since the dial-up era. The wonder I once felt when reading the tech news is long gone and now I am only looking for the catch. What privacy must I give up for this minor improvement?
It seems to be little more than a collection of ever-more-elaborate scams and grifts, backed up by shoddily made hardware that was designed to fail, paired with software with a built-in expiration date.
The Dead Internet
What isn’t helping with the feelings of ennui is the troubling statistic from Cloudflare that over half of internet traffic is now bots.
It would be tempting to throw in the towel at this stage, leave the bots to their internet while we meat-bags go back to the physical realm. Truth be told, I’ve started to imagine what that would look like.
Thankfully I’ve spent the past couple of years buying CDs and Blu-ray movies. I also have a shelf full of books I could be reading, but I don’t think I’m ready to give up just yet.
I think we need a new protocol. A digital space out of reach of the machines. Somewhere we can write without fear of having our efforts scraped and regurgitated back to us for yet another monthly fee.
The Gemini Protocol perhaps?
