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@ Jacob Goff
2025-04-04 15:40:10
I am not an engineer by trade. I took my math classes for college credit as early as I could in high school. I signed up for a bachelor of arts in college and basically didn't touch STEM for the rest of my formal education. Seminary (incomplete) and Law School (JD) didn't go deep into any of the sciences -- I think I struggled through an "accounting for lawyers" class.
The dumb thing is that in middle school and early high school I was obsessed with tinkering with mechanical things. I rebuilt a go-kart, tinkered with my computer, built skateboard ramps. High school came, I got obsessed with chasing girls and listening to emo music, and that culminated in a foggy pursuit of journalism, linguistics, ministry and/or academia in my post-graduate adventures. Also, algebra came to me really easily. I loved cramming the day before a test in middle school and embarrassing the other A students who had to work hard to keep those grades up.
I obviously see now how dangerous that pattern can be to sustaining motivation and discipline in the long-time preference aspects of life. I was motivated by the idea of "getting one over" on the authoritarian educators in my life -- they said that the only way to succeed is to do my homework and study, but I wanted them to know that *I was different*. And I think I was different from a lot of other people around me, but I aimed my agency in the wrong direction. The rebellion became the end for me, instead of being the means to an end of meaningful learning. Rebel against the system so you can escape into a self-sovereign, high-agency existence.
At the risk of over-stuffing the analogy, perhaps that point brings me to decentralized social media environments. Facebook is like my school teachers, there are tasks laid out for me nudging me to behave a certain way. My grades are analogized by my reach that Facebook will give and take away. I run a few Facebook pages and I am constantly irritated by the annoying UI. Constantly changing, adding shit that I cannot imagine anyone asking for and taking away the shit that you refer to everyday. Just this past week I noticed that I have to click into a post on Meta business sweet in order to see how many shares it has. This used to be on the page as I scrolled through all of my content. There is literally just a blank white space where it used to say: 54 shares.
My thought goes to, this is somehow punishing me for my reach. Although Zuckerberg has pledged his allegiance to the new age of "free speech" and given his finger to the government-meddling that he fanned to flame over the last ten or fifteen years, I still think Facebook wants to nudge users away from certain things and towards other things. Libertarians have railed against the "nanny-state" but it is harder to understand how we also give up our sovereignty to centralized social media companies: the Nanny-Feed.
This must die. The unbundling of facebook is a weird time that feels like the detangling of digital society. Life without widespread Craigslist adoption is somewhat more annoying. I used to scroll Craigslist all the time for stuff. I went to Los Angeles for a few months in 2012 and used it to buy some things and hear about auditions for different projects, a few of which panned out for me. There was something about having some separation from the site that I went to specifically to network with co-workers and communicate with old friends that I liked. I don't want my social media identity locked on one site, especially a site that is subservient to a boardroom. I also like the inconvenience of hopping over to a different app to handle my marketplace experiences.
A lot of this needs to be thought through a lot more, because attempting to untangle the beast that is "meta" (still Facebook to me) requires a lot more insight than I have as I type this out. I'm mostly just nostalgic and emotional and remembering a different time in my life.