Imperfect

birthing internet stars

Inspired by the Folkmoss' I was gonna post something but then I got scared.

I see posts escaping containment like seeds swept away by the wind. They yearn to be planted in fertile soil elsewhere, such that they grow into strong plants repeating the cycle. Novelty from your thoughts leaving your inner circle can be the breath of fresh air you needed. How can your welcoming of travelers from elsewhere in your physical dealings inform your digital mindsets and behaviors? Curate your presence such that you make the most of visibility at your doorstep.

Sometimes, I imagine ideal online trajectories going the way of Katamari Damacy. Here's how its Wikipedia article summarizes it:

The game's plot concerns a diminutive prince on a mission to rebuild stars, constellations, and the Moon, which were inadvertently destroyed by his father, the King of All Cosmos. This is achieved by rolling a magical, highly adhesive ball called a katamari around various locations, collecting increasingly larger objects, ranging from thumbtacks to human beings to mountains, until the ball has grown large enough to become a star.

Why wouldn't you want your Internet to become a bright star illuminating the night sky? It's only as big as what sticks to it through its travels. Entities on the ground wouldn't be able to decipher its origins with their naked eyes. Yet, they would bask in its glory and appreciate it all the same. Thinking back to how copyright speedruns decay, could it be due time to eschew ownership when it comes to art?

The Folkmoss says:

But I guess that's the internet for ya, it goes places and it takes stuff you put in it and it may not belong to you anymore.

It makes me think about all the old gifs and pixel art stuff from the early internet that's just spread around the web and nobody really knows who created it. Sure, some of it can be traced back to their creators, but a lot more is simply alive on the internet, all by itself, creator be damned. They're a part of this biome we call the internet, like someone's grafting experiment that gave us bell peppers, now present in everyone's kitchens around the world.

So much grafting takes place around us whether by reviving the nostalgic artifacts above, remixing modern memes, or generating content via AI. Every technological development we appreciate or take for granted has been innovated with help from prior inventions. Producers and consumers alike have such lossy understandings of how combinatorial, and often unacknowledged, actors are within any global supply chain. Instead of worrying about who owns intangibles, can we focus on how healthy their pervasiveness is? Can we do our best to help them shine bright as far into the future as possible?

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