Let the Golden Age Begin

Put your hands on the wheel
Let the golden age begin
Let the window down
Feel the moonlight on your skin

Tim Klapdor’s posts have been resonating with me these days, and it’s really nice to have a friend and colleague writing missives from many thousands of miles away that find there way right into your heart. His post “When the Noise is the Signal” did just that, namely highlighting that social media has reached a stage where the noise, rather than the signal, is the point and product. Maren Deepwell references something similar in her post yesterday when reflecting on John Naughton’s idea of the “unsocial web.” The pull quote from that article:

 “In years to come”, writes the FT’s John Burn-Murdoch, “we may well look back on September 2025 as the point at which social media jumped the shark and began rapidly accelerating its transition from the place to be seen (through a flattering Instagram filter), to a gaudy backwater of the internet inhabited by those with nothing better to do.”

It would be welcome to see the current state of big-tech driven social media crumble, the only real loss might be YouTube—but at the same time it would do wonders for my physical media collection.

Anyway, Klapdor is in search of the signal and he’s not alone:

There are still people out there looking for a signal in the noise. And I think the way you find it is the same way it always was: through other people. Not algorithms – algorithms just increase the noise. Through actual human connection, which is what the open web, at its best, always facilitates. What made the early internet genuinely exciting wasn’t the technology – it was the people behind the pages. Individuals with names and lives and ideas, linked together by genuine interest. People as people, not as sound bites and opinions – but thoughts, feelings and contradictions. With pain and sadness, regrets and joy – so much joy, enough to affect you across the wires and tendrils that connect words and minds.

This is right-on for me. This is what I want, and these days I have really felt it on the bava. People seem to be reading, commenting, and just being there. I deeply crave and appreciate that interaction, and the fact it is happening is powerful. It’s reassuring to know there are real people who want to send and receive these missives to engage and reflect meaningfully on our experience at this point in time. That’s why I got into blogging in the first place.

Forever an optimist, maybe we’re on the verge of a new golden age of something else—to be clear it isn’t AI therapy bots. Like Beck’s Sea Change album marking the aftermath of a dissolution of a long-term relationship, maybe that’s what we’re trying to articulate as we recede from a broken infrastructure that has tried to control our habits and interactions for far too long.

If we want the signal, we have to realise that it is carried by the people. That person behind the webpage, with a life as complex as yours, trying to make sense of the same world. That’s the signal we’re actually looking for. And I think we have an innate capacity to tune ourselves to find it, to filter out the rest, if we’re deliberate about it.

Maybe the new Golden Age begins with a simple post that references someone who stirred you. Links do a lot of work online. Throw in a ping or even a trackback and we might have a simple, stable, and scalable solution. I don’t want to create as much as I want to connect, but it turns out the two are always deeply related. Let the Golden Age begin.