Hush. Shush. Give it a rest. Put a cork in it. Dummy up. Don’t speak. Shut your trap. Pipe down. Can it. Hold your tongue. Keep mum. Put a sock in it. Button your lip. Stop speaking. Take the fifth. Cut the chatter. In short, STFU. Listen … and don’t take this the wrong way … but your constant talking is imperiling democracy, ruining the world, and pretty much driving everyone crazy. Ian Bogost in The Atlantic: People Aren’t Meant to Talk This Much. “A lot is wrong with the internet, but much of it boils down to this one problem: We are all constantly talking to one another. Take that in every sense. Before online tools, we talked less frequently, and with fewer people. The average person had a handful of conversations a day, and the biggest group she spoke in front of was maybe a wedding reception or a company meeting, a few hundred people at most. Maybe her statement would be recorded, but there were few mechanisms for it to be amplified and spread around the world, far beyond its original context … It’s long past time to question a fundamental premise of online life: What if people shouldn’t be able to say so much, and to so many, so often?” (No comment.)

+ Ironically, Ian Bogost had more to say this week. And this one is also worth a read: The Metaverse Is Bad. “CEOs in tech know that billions of people still live much of their life beyond computer screens. Those people buy automobiles and grow herb gardens. They copulate and blow autumn leaves … If only the public could be persuaded to abandon atoms for bits, the material for the symbolic, then people would have to lease virtualized renditions of all the things that haven’t yet been pulled online.” (Once my wife reads this excerpt, she’ll know why I was so open to the idea of clearing the backyard this weekend…)