Digital chimney smoke?

Daniel Boone is quoted (via Hubert Humphrey) as saying

when he could see the smoke from another chimney, felt himself too crowded and moved further out into the wilderness.

Mark Twain said

Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.

I was on email as early as 1980 on a DEC20. I was on Usenet news when it was the digital frontier and on the Internet in the mid-80s, 10 years or so before the Web. I helped bring America online working at CompuServe before America Online existed. I quit Facebook in the run-up to the 2016 election as it got too political and now I find that my main digital platform (Twitter) is home to the daily, um, ?sophisms? of the President who spawned the political rhetoric I fled.

Is it time to move on? Time to find another avant-guard tech hole to clime into? Thanks to the Internet there are infinitely more options than just the dial-up BBS systems of the early 80s.

I was a little sad to loose contact with all the elementary school friends that Facebook enabled me to reconnect with after 40 years (OK, not really) and I would be sad too loose touch with the zany #ClassicsTwitter crowd (aeneasgoogling apud elysium I’m looking at you) that tweets in Latin.

Where to go? Maybe just pick up stakes, head west and see where I find myself?


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