Feeding the Beast
Daily Ramble
I broke down and ranted on Facebook yesterday. You may even be reading this as a direct result of my offending your sensibilities. Great to have you here, if so.
What did I rant about? How disgusted I felt flipping through the Facebook feed for five minutes. It’s just not a substitute for human connection, no matter how easily we convince ourselves otherwise. One friend asked if I’d watched The Social Dilemma, and in large part, she was right. My revulsion to Facebook preceded the documentary but deepened after. It’s part of a larger internal theme as I push away from the “free” internet that hoovers up my data to capture my attention better and sell me products. It’s a dirty trade made behind the darkness of ToS, Terms of Service — those pesky disclaimers that everyone ignores, scrolls, and clicks accept.
So why am I still on Facebook? Good question. While I can get on with my life without Facebook, there are odd times where, due to its social networking effects, there’s simply no other way to find an old contact. It’s like the dive bar on the corner that I sobered up and left but have to pop my head into from time to time to shake someone’s hand stuck inside on a stool. More complexly, I don’t know how to share this daily rag with friends and family without posting it on Facebook. It’s the TV screen at the dive bar that all eyes are glued to.
How do I choose to interact with it? By giving that bloody beast as little of myself as I possibly can. That means no pictures, no personal posts, no videos, and sure as heck no info on where I live. I want their algos to get gummed up on jack squat so the creepy ads can’t hear my thoughts. I can tell it’s working because almost no one sees my singular, consistent interaction with Facebook: a link to this newsletter. Facebook doesn’t like me. But the feeling is mutual. I’m not too fond of it either.
What’s the alternative? Stop chewing on convenience and form groups you care about. Hot dogs at gas stations are convenient, but I don’t eat them, and I doubt you do either. You don’t need to prioritize convenience online either. My favorite way to stay in touch is through Signal — a privacy-focused messaging app for individual and group chat. Using it, I know I’m not selling myself to an advertising agency. The groups are small, and I feel my friendships instead of jousting with wrapping paper cutouts. The hippies were right about television in their day, but it applies equally to Facebook in ours: turn on, tune in, and drop out. It’s a better world outside of Facebook dopamine hits.
And if you want to find me on Signal, reach out. I’m not a hermit.
Favorite Thing on the Interwebs Today
Does anyone else feel uneasy looking at this building?
Bitcoin Price Prediction
Yesterday: $47.2k - $55k
Today: $51k - $60k
Tomorrow: $51k - $60k
Bitcoin’s price is floating in space at the moment. It has pushed directly to $55k, the top of the predicted price range, to end yesterday’s session. Then the price began bouncing between $53k and $56k. At the moment, the price looks to be consolidating under resistance. But it’s quite a difficult thing to say and not worth taking a new position here. Either we break through and head up for a retest of the current all-time high at $58k, or momentum stalls, and we potentially drop as low as $51k in the next 24 hours. While it would be nice to have the price rocket up to a new all-time high here, my preference would be that we pull back, find more buyers, then push up. Why? Because the quicker we leave this region, the less support it has in the future. TL;DR I anticipate being range-bound between $51k and $60k through tomorrow, but make no mistake, the rocket is going to take the price to a new high before long.
Bitcoin Ed Bite
A: Bitcoin’s energy consumption is a problem that needs to be stopped.
Q: Is Bitcoin’s energy usage really a problem?
Thanks for reading,
Kent
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