first blog post. yipee!

 wat's up people. welcome to offline vibes! u may be thinking to urself: how can there be a BLOG which is ONLINE that is called (and thus presumably based around) OFFLINE vibes?

good question. to be honest, i'm not entirely sure! it just seemed like a good name. more than anything, it's like the sort of art where u just create something that looks nice and there is probably meaning in the story or reasons behind why u think it looks nice, but on a realistic level u just think it looks nice.

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anyway i just wanted to write about what's going on in my life and what im thinking about. i quit social media pretty much cold turkey a couple of months ago, and since then i've overall felt much better but i do think i miss the sort of broad online interaction that social networks give you. at the same time, i've always found myself nostalgic for the era of the internet when blogs and forums were a thing instead. i think the increased anonymity and "avatar"-ness of it all was way more compelling; maybe this is a view that is partially influenced by "old school" internet/techy types [1] but at the same time i think it's also just based on my experiences on something more like that form of internet.

the nice thing about blogging and forums imo was that it put basically everybody in a position where it was expected for u to just make random friends. because most everyone was represented by an avatar which was much more detached from oneself than the social media ones we use today, i think it made more sense to just talk to strangers and things like that. games like WoW, for instance, got big because people at the time didn't necessarily game with IRL friends. u would just sort of meet people online by coincidence and make friends, much like ppl do today in real life.

fwiw, that thing sort of does still happen in some circles i'm sure. to return to the WoW example, i've noticed that the "classic WoW" community (being a group that's obviously going to share the same sort of positive thoughts on "older school" internet vibes) seem to be much more friendly overall than players in the main game. at the same time, the community has a lot of toxicity too (which tbh, is also a big part of old internet; i don't miss it per se, but it was definitely part of the internet and i can't rly imagine things without the toxicity as well). but i think people are much more social overall.

if u think about it though, this really mirrors what's happening IRL too i think. the broader trend that i would say has been happening more and more often with people w phones, social media, n stuff, is that we're creating rly rly small circles (like cheerios) of "actual friends" and much much larger circles of "ppl ur friendly with." This is like exactly the facebook vibe!~! [2]

i think i'm starting to get more conscious specifically of the latter part after having lived in bay area and worked in tech/entrepreneurship for about 1.25 yrs now. u can very much sense the culture war between older and younger devs, and even if it's really unpronounced now (bc the older ones are basically donezo [3]), i do think echoes of that battle played out irl. linking back to my first bit, that declaration of internet independence or w/e guy totally was pwned by zuck in the end. and in some sense, that really sums up a lot of internet history.

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well there u go. the first post of "OFFLINE VIBES." thank u for reading and i hope u enjoyed! stay tune for future posts about whatever i am thinking about at the moment.

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[1] (like the guy who wrote this shit [link] or jared lanier, e.g.)

[2] "How much was the direction of the internet influenced by the perspective of nineteen-, twenty-, twenty-one-year-old well-off white boys?" Ezra Callahan, in this (link) N. yorker profile of zuck, orig. in Valley of Genius (Adam Fisher)

[3] might be wholly the subject of another post