collapse now and avoid the feed for 75 days

collaborative platforms have always been my center in understanding a utopian vision of the emerging web where people would want to freely associate themselves with labels like “netizen” or similar. link digging, and forging those links, is what has always given the web structure, yet it’s an undeniably outmoded way to describe a web where we now shove single page software applications into a browser. what began as an idle fascination for me, clicking for another random wikipedia article in my school’s computer lab when no one was looking, now lives as a bookmarklet in my browser. wikipedia is a rabbit hole representing not so much a totality of human knowledge, given its editor demographics, but a concentration of accumulated effort in that pursuit. each article is an opportunity to scratch into the surface, and the agency of clicking through a waterfall of hyperlinks has always allowed me to reorient how it feels to browse, rather than consume, the web. after taking punches in the face with geysers of outrage and pornography on the commercial web, fused into one, wikipedia is an ocean that has so far kept rhythm as a retreat, broken only by the chimes announcing when the tide is moving in and out. the doomscrolling, here, is still only a novelty.

wikipedia is especially idealistic about itself as a resource for open knowledge, and it deserves that prestige if for nothing else than its active longevity and stability. wikidata and the rest of the projects under the wikimedia foundation are crown jewels to this discipline, but the health of platforms like them has always been at risk, especially when they rely mostly on donation funding. the pressures to sustain are even more threatening for any organization that now has to play defense against an increasingly hostile commercial web. no one can make money grooming the article about kmart realism, or expanding the stub about voicer-kun. career research can now only be found in repackaging the sweated-over neutral tone about unusually shaped vegetables for a youtube essay interrupted by adsense breaks. the prestige as an editor diminishes even more quickly as you fall down into niche databases and fan wikis for audiences of obsessives, editing lyrics pages and character bios. any notoriety that does come with being an editor now makes you a soft target for shadow governments running influence campaigns, unless you are lucky enough to be on the take yourself. professional rules trolls and snot-nosed congressional interns, once your greatest known adversaries, have fallen behind the noise curtain of server farm bots, trained to overwhelm in deluges of sludge or to run up your hosting bill. the honest editors left, then, as the ones cleaning up typos and making impassioned pleas over infoboxes, are performing the hobby tunneling of our teledildonics era. they just want to feel that they can make a dent in something.

plumbing the esoteric has never expected thanks or kudos. even knowing our digital ephemera is destined to feed the beasts, abandoning collaborative efforts seems out of the question when they are done for an open web that already belongs to some accessible commons. this is not so much a defeatism about becoming training data for large models, for me, as a recognition that the web does not need us to continue building more walls and moats, and that a commons continues to enrich more than one or two executives. teaching the machine, when that was limited strictly to search engines and flickr mashups, remains as much a part of the meditation to editing collaborative platforms, and this sort of digital mantra on spreading knowledge freely and accessibly is what still allows the charity to feel whole to me. this perspective may admittedly be as outmoded as the open web itself, now that we are a few monopolies and walled gardens wiser, but it’s a perspective I am unwilling to forfeit entirely when it’s the active counter to a doomer acceptance that the web, as a total, may already dead. the context collapse and the pulverized, unattributed slop now replacing wikipedia snippets at the top of search results is, of course, absolutely regrettable, among the myriad of concerns already at play with chatbots, and becomes even more distasteful when chopping up the sweat of creatives that bestow their works with a soul beyond that of encyclopedias and databases. the trees being planted today on platforms like wikipedia, though, one aspires to hope, will primarily benefit humans as shade to read under before they become pulped by bots.

depending on who you ask, wikipedia is already dead, or a two year timeline away from total collapse that is either already in motion or just on the precipice. more than the usual institutional rot, this is the sort of perpetual doomsday that I find seems to totally govern many of our attitudes now, as local echoes of climate commitments that we continue to blow past. when apocalypse always seems to abort at the last hour, it’s hard to not feel like you, as a bystander, are also holding your breath for a resolution that gets on with it already. a chatbot is either taking your job tomorrow, or is already forecasted to in 2030. the tiktok rapture has been put off for another 75 days. the tariffs are now on clearance after our adversaries saluted the american flag long enough to buy back 30 days (call that de minimis). the bureaucrats must surrender themselves by this friday, or maybe it was this monday. actually, check back with us on that one later. every rain of hellfire is always on a rush order until its deadline is, conveniently, deferred. the imprecision at this point has become another part of our dance with hyperinformation that allows the ridiculousness of it all to continue maturing. some will use this as an excuse to lull themselves under the cover of nothing ever happening, as if we can’t peer off stage to see the absurdity happening just behind the curtain at the direction of a CEO. it’s how thiel has always wanted it.

the totality of the current moment is, already, more than can reasonably be processed by even a well functioning press. when a neuralink intern can tangle COBOL spaghetti at the federal treasury unsupervised, the damage is probably irrevocable before any court has a chance to respond or a journalist begins to catch wind of it. the norms meant to contain it with stays or appeals are, already, unenforceable tutting. nothing ever happens, under this framework, would be preferable even to the elites, and wall street is already nostalgic for the idea. the irony is that protest, the lever we supposedly can pull on to say we don’t want teenagers yanking out server cables, is tolerated beyond the era of free speech zones and the occupy movement precisely because it is considered ineffectual and easily disrupted, and the median voter is disenfranchised from caring until gas prices go up. until then, everything that flows downstream will largely be under the direction of what a discord cabal of zoomer blackhats feels like tearing into this week. the collapse will ultimately only be catabolic, to preserve whatever status quo is left for their keepers.

we still have choices under the circumstances: collapse now, and avoid the rush. the blast radius of the explosions may be localized for now, or sent offshore to shield us from asking about the damage, but it is probably naive to expect we will be able to exempt ourselves from the fallout as the dysfunction accelerates. information collapse is much a component of this collapse as the dissolution of global supply chains. literacy about the political apparatus now, unfortunately, demands that you be plugged in to the churn of socials to some degree. bluesky and a very few stalwart outlets like WIRED seem to be the only ones appreciating the severity of the moment, and are shining light where most of our press appears unwilling or unable to. finding the balance in engaging with the outrage is not nuance that hydrates well on social media, however. those of us peering in are being asked to control administering our own poison while scrolling, as if we can absorb only enough of the drip feed to let the outrage result in action, or more optimistically, cat ears. collapse, under these pressures, doesn’t have to mean putting your head in the sand and retreating to a cabin in the woods. tilling collaborative platforms, or touching grass on the indie web where the voices and perspectives are more human, is as much of a comfortable ease into accepting where your agency can be most felt. they are, at the very least, more palatable alternatives to start with when being asked to swallow the world while it’s on fire.

untangling entries on vocaDB has been where I’ve found some of this meditation for the past few months. there is very little sense that this work has maximizing benefit or legacy to anyone other than those with a completionist idea of collecting discographies and trivia, and yet it provides a focused flow in my routine that runs along with other creative outlets, reaffirming a link between content and creator that is, so often, absent in an endless scroll. one of the more pleasant surprises recently, and the one that felt like most rewarded scrubbing through multiple releases, was discovering that kinoue has his own shoegaze take on the impending doom of the world, as I feel the ringing guitars of shoegaze so often do texture. almost every year since 2020, and most recently going into 2025, kinoue has revisited this track professing that the world will almost certainly end tomorrow, but that for today, he is able to continue on living. jumping between each year’s arrangement, the instrumentation and mix polishing into different evolutions, it is difficult not to feel that the lyrics here have melted into texture as well now that they have been repeated ad nauseam, a diminishing of the ego that felt allowed to make an apocalyptic claim to begin with. the improvement and the confidence being demonstrated in kinoue’s discovery of a more experienced sound now speaks more resolutely than the unchanged lyrics it continues to be paired with. he has stared at the sky long enough to know it is falling, but gazing at his shoes is where he has, in this moment, most made a dent.

the world didn’t end today. it tends not to most days. perhaps, it could tomorrow. I’ll let you know what my almanac says after I get done tilling the j-core artists on discogs.

It seems like tomorrow, the world will end.
Today, just like any other day, I live on.