Finding the Lighthouse

It is part of human nature to bitch about how good things used to be. A long, long time ago, in inter­net years, a mod­er­ate­ly well known (for the time) blog­ger wrote a post about how good the inter­net used to be — and how being weird and strange­ly top­i­cal was part of the beau­ty of brows­ing the pre-con­tent-man­aged web. The exam­ple he used was find­ing a web­site about light­hous­es, and — car­ing nowt about light­hous­es but being drawn in by the pas­sion of the web­mas­ter just the same.

There’s too much con­tent now, and for­mats have changed wild­ly, but you can still find light­house-like con­tent if you quar­an­tine your­self from the con­tent farms and thresh enough bram­bles in the deep dark woods. For me that has been pod­casts most­ly, and Spo­ti­fy algo­rithms for music pep­pered with, of all things, a cou­ple of actu­al mag­a­zine sub­scrip­tions. No com­ments, no yelling, and some actu­al space to find inter­est­ing opin­ions if you peel back enough lay­ers of the onion.