interrupt the feed
i like to think of reading as a non-linear activity.
we don't really read a cookbook front to back, or open a field guide at page one, reading straight through until the last page. we certainly don't consult the i ching in a linear sequence. we typically enter texts where we need to, follow a thread, leave and come back later, read the marginalia, and skip forwards and backwards. the book really doesn't care what order you read it in, so why should you?
when we are online, somehow, we forget that we don't need to read everything linearly. our habits are tempered by feeds, and we struggle to get off the conveyor belts we have built for ourselves.
feeds assume you will just show up for the latest thing and leave when you've consumed it. always new, always fresh, and we are always behind. the internet has become a dusty basement archive. a feed is a queue to scroll away from content, not to it. we are no longer readers; we are consumers moving through an endless inventory.
borges understood something useful here. in his story the garden of forking paths⇲, he imagined a novel that contains every possible version of itself simultaneously, not a sequence but a structure you move through by choosing. his labyrinths aren't puzzles to solve, they're spaces to inhabit. you don't finish a borges story so much as find a way out of it.
the best parts of the internet work like this. a wiki. a webring. a digital garden. a well-tagged archive where you can enter at any point and wander.
the situationists had a word for this kind of movement: dérive⇲. literally, to drift. you drop the usual reasons for moving through a city: destination, efficiency, routine, and let the environment pull you. you follow what's interesting. you end up somewhere you didn't plan, maybe somewhere new?
a good website or digital space should work the same way. not as a feed pushing content at you. instead, it should be a place you can drift and wander through.
it is true that i use an rss reader. i'm not going to pretend i don't. but i also like to get out there, follow a link somewhere unexpected, lose an afternoon in someone's archive, find an old post that has nothing to do with why i arrived. that's the good stuff.
try it sometime. open something, follow a thread, skip the homepage, read the thing from 2014, click the weird link at the bottom. try to practice a digital dérive and see where you end up.
i've been thinking about what it would mean to write for multiple entry points instead of publication dates. less queue, more like a labyrinth. less of a newspaper, more like a field guide.
the internet doesn't have to be a conveyor belt, it can be a choose your own adventure book. you just have to get used to making your own decisions. strangely, that takes some practice.