State of the Mikester

I still remember my first political post on the internet. I’m gonna say it was 2004, I know for sure it was on MySpace. Not the main feed (whatever they called it) but where you could post, I think they were called bulletins, on your actual page. The text is long gone, but the gist was that I was so disturbed by the images of people falling from the Twin Towers, that I couldn’t say silent while GWB used their memory to justify legislation like the Patriot Act and war crimes in Iraq.

And so it began.

Those years saw the first expansions of the surveillance state on the internet, and we fought hard over the years to stop it. But we could only slow it down, and today the enshittification of just plain old capitalism plus the stifling presence of propaganda bots and manufactured ignorance has turned a once exciting frontier into a hellscape of conspiracies, rage bait, and overt bigotry.

That’s what’s motivating me to really lean in to my fascination with technology and take responsibility for the march of time that stop for no one. There is no way to prevent the future of the digital age from arriving, the only choice we have is to place ourselves at the forefront of discourse about what it should look like, or mistake negligence for resistance and opt out of that discourse altogether.

If we do that, the techbros win by default. Not on my watch.

So that’s where I’m at right now politically. I want to speak directly to not just “the state” but “the techbro industrial complex” and their dark gothic technofash wet dream of a digital boot stomping a human face, forever.

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Socially, that means I’m shifting my presence online away from social media silos toward my personal website at mikeshipley.com (where you’re presumably reading this now) – although I may expand / move to a different domain as well as rebranding my public figure page on Facebook from “Mike Shipley” to “Mikester”.

On that, I’m increasingly uncomfortable with using my family name. The more I heal from childhood abuse the more I understand the role my inner child has played in latching on to “Mikester” (my legacy screen name from the Friendster era) which I’ve been using both on- and offline since then and long ago became a real life nickname. Most of my irl friends call me Mikester, and it’s been that way for a while.

So “Mike Shipley” is tied to abuse through the family name. “Mikester” isn’t. But rebranding efforts are a bit of a slog, and should seldom be done, never impulsively and only for good reason. I do think that’s a good reason, but so far I haven’t pulled the trigger on it. I think somewhere deep inside me though, that decision was made in my subconscious long ago.

So as I grow into my home on the indieweb, that change will likely come through sometime in the next few months.

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I’m seriously considering leaving Phoenix. I’ve started noticing how much better I feel from simple interactions in the few progressive majority areas of town, and I realize that living in a deep red state may be stifling my spirit in ways I can’t fully understand without escaping it.

I’ve always comforted myself by saying that “it’s a very wild west type of red” and that’s true enough. It’s not the religious conservatism of a deep southern state; it’s the get-off-my-lawn individualism of a frontier state, and that would suit me well if it came with a strong commitment to inclusivity and neighborliness, but it doesn’t. The most common example of that kind of thinking comes from conservatism, which means a lot of the uglier baggage comes along with it, and that’s something you can feel, even if it rarely shows its face.

Just because I’m not being targeted with slurs in public and death threats, doesn’t mean the coldness isn’t slowly freezing me out. So when I think about my tendency toward solitude, I start to wonder if maybe it’s not so much that I prefer to be alone (although I do enjoy it) but that I choose it by default because there’s nothing particularly enjoyable about mixing with a general public that doesn’t care if I live or die. And I notice this in blue areas of town, where there’s a warmth of voice and kindness that is noticeable.

I think if I lived in a city or state that was like that everywhere, I might be a lot more active in the community than I am now. And something about that sounds really exciting.

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Professionally, I’m doing a boot.dev course in back end programming, learning Python and TypeScript which is really exciting for me. I wonder why I didn’t learn this long ago, but there’s no use gazing to the past in regret. I’m learning it now, and it’s a really exciting time for that, with so many coding tools adopting AI that puts things within reach in way they might not have been before.

I think it’s important to understand what you’re looking at when you use an AI tool, so being able to read and write code, but also not averse to letting it do the heavy lifting, feels like a good middle ground. There’s a lot of fear in the air right now, AI tools are taking away our agency or whatever, but I think they’re giving us more of it.

I’ve always imagined what a sort of “mutual aid” app would look like – an app to enable a sharing economy. Is such a thing possible? I wouldn’t even know how to explain it to a team, nor would I have the resources to assemble one, but I can experiment with it myself and if I can come up with a workable enough prototype, I can release it into the open source wild and see what the community does with it.

What if we could share things, tag them and enter them in the app like a giant library, and have a drone network to move them where they are needed? I think that would be amazing, and it could challenge exploiters like Amazon in convenience and availability.

Anyway, I’m just dreaming out loud now and who knows where all this will take me?

I think I’m going to get some things at the store now, hope you enjoyed reading this update.

Have a great week!!

<3 Mikester