Seph News for Dolo
Last week I took a long screen fast, as strict as a junkie like me could stomach: 90 minutes in the morning for personal computing and otherwise, radio silence. No Twitter, no Substack methadone, not even the Signal groupchat, nerve center of my social life.
I've since come to the conclusion that I must change my relationship to the internet or perish having only lived as a shadow, sleepwalking along in an anxious, overstimulated dream.
I don't know how other recovering addicts think about the psychodynamics of their addictions, but for me it is like a massive steam engine, a kind of guaranteed intensity, that flows in the direction of the nearest pleasure-dispenser. One by one, as the outflows that most crippled my life were shut down, the steam has been left with only the internet and its endless betickling to escape to.
Like a cigarette, a visit to the notification-teat is a kind of 'abort' button, a way to tap out from the narrow track of reality. And while Signal did not make me broke, smelly, or phlegmatic, it was worse in that it shredded my attention span. I can feel the residue of the scroll on me now, as I cook dinner or walk the dogs. A frantic sense I'm leaving money on the table, need to get back and see what's further down the feed. It's terrible. A cigarette, at least, is a kind of deep breathing exercise.
Anyway, I noticed the light coming through the trees last week, sat bored on the couch and stared at the walls. Something loosened, and I felt an old power return.
Abstinence is not an option. So, instead of chain-smoking quips to the insular spread of my groupchat for 12 hours a day, I'll try routing new and wonderful friends to my inbox via some blog posts. Then, maybe I'll invite them to my groupchat, where I now appear for a 30 minute window every 24 hours.
I read a post about the IndieWeb last week—a vision of a decentralized kind of personal website social media—and have rebuilt my personal site, Seph News, according to its specifications. New writing will be published there and syndicated on my Substack, per the dictates of the indies.
My web presence has been full of false starts and pivots over the years. If you're here for my sundowned edtech experiments, or because you enjoyed Merge Lane, my visual novel, expect some different stuff. I am indeed still edteching and working on a new visual novel now, and do intend to speak on them.
But I dug up my five year old posts from the old Seph News during the rebuild, and was pleased to see I enjoyed that rambling autofiction—lonely and a little tweaked out, rebuilding my life, talking to myself as I road tripped and learned to code. The posts got no engagement and I folded, thinking it was all a failure. But looking back now, after six years inside the screen, I kinda miss this dude.
Some updates:
In a hilarious twist of fate—the internet gods offering earthly delights on my way out the door—I found out Rolling Stone had written about my visual novel in their recent piece about Vibe Camp. I am Jeff, or perhaps Joe. Neither the writer nor the copy editor have decided yet.
I can feel the eye of Sauron on me now, aware they are talking about my work on Twitter. But like Matt Damon in Homer's great epic poem, I have tied myself to the mast, and will not hack into my Cold Turkey website blocker to go see.
Looking for a gift for a non-technical family member? This spring I taught a course on agentic AI for Davidson College's edX extension. I stand by it as among the most useful no-code zero-to-hero how-to-Claude courses on the market today. We start with the basics, cover speech-to-text and the 'flipped interaction' model in prompting, and work our way through MCP Connectors up to designing our own skill plugins for reusable work.
Oh, and I was on the Friendly City podcast to talk about AI in the spring. Host Mark Chepel lets us discuss some pretty weedy topics—simulators theory, adversarial poetry, RSI, and my dreams of an 'Alignment New Deal.' Check it out!