> I don’t want to lose the experience of reading a book I’d never heard of but found on a stoop, or rereading a book even if it doesn’t count toward an annual goal. I don’t want every book I read to be a mappable point in the fated conception of me and what other things I might like (to buy).

Somewhat OT but this is maybe my biggest gripe with digital game stores as well. It’s anathema to what I look for when reading as well as playing. Alas on Nintendo Switch at least there are still physical games to be found and not everything is a damn metric by now.. (“82.2% of players have this achievement”).

> Prettier than Goodreads, it repeats the strange effects of reading for pleasure in an age of digital surveillance, while claiming that it isn’t.

The cat has been out of the bag for a while now. We have amplified the baked in (and notoriously unchecked) in/voluntary surveillance aspects of our modern information systems by continually trying to map them to well proven social concepts. The result being the sheer pervasiveness of this post privacy world, now also clearly affecting the people who were and are still claiming to not having “anything to hide”.

Amplified and scaled up functions of this (“surveillance / software at scale eating the world”) partially at play now everywhere with much increased and lamented acts of the performative, loss of substance and depth, loss of connection, etc.

I’m of course trying not to think of a pink elephant nor any potential upvotes at all right now…

Maybe going increasingly / pragmatically “organic” is a good way forward (backward)? Ironically that’s one of the very few things Elon Musk has helped me with so far as I have only really started to question / lose interest in “social media” in general since his strange quest for the destruction of Twitter.

Hyperbolic edit: maybe that was Elon’s plan all along (!?)