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Chris Coffman's avatar

Wow--fascinating and powerful essay. I’ll be thinking about Justin Hall and your reflections on him for days. This is a provocative challenge: “Your taboo secret depths are also present in millions of others. And the day-to-day mundanities of your life might feel sacred to someone else, either now or in the unimaginable future.”

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James Taylor Foreman's avatar

This makes me think about the necessary chaos at the margins of every system. Just before I read this essay, I read Henrik Karlson‘s essay about how blogs are search queries for people that are interesting. And then he mentioned how he tells his daughter that the Internet is like this alien life that we don’t know much about and we don’t know how it works, but we can wave our hands and click certain buttons, and cat videos show up or porn shows up.

And I think about how all systems need “marginal land” of wilderness in chaos, in order to keep the mainstay of the farm healthy.

And it makes me wonder where people like you and I fit in the mythical landscape of this Internet creature that we are trying to interact with. We’re trying to find an archetype, without having to think so hard about it. Justin, for example, knew where he stood and he knew it energies to draw on, in order to keep his place in the mythological landscape alive. And he knew when he was losing that because it was affecting his relationships in his normal life.

That’s what my mind was working on as I got to the section of your essay about how to balance privacy and reach. I’m less likely to graph it out and try to plot where I want to be, but I can use this is a short hand to figure out what energies this world is giving to me and how did lean more into those energies, especially if it’s where I want to go.

And yes, reading about Justin did make a dent on my psyche and make me wonder how I want to approach this whole world, so thank you for putting the story together

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