I have to jot down this thought before it’s gone.
I’ve been using RSS feeds for a while. Most of the time I subscribed to tech stuff like HackerNews and Lobsters. A lot of the news are talking about AI, programming languages, hardware, and occasionally some debatable takes from random blogs. While this does cater to my interests, it’s far from perfect. Then I stumbled upon this blog post on HackerNews. In this blog post, he explained how he reflected upon himself and why he stopped following daily news through his RSS feeds. I found this part rather interesting:
One thing I am still interested in is what is happening in my city. For that, I recently discovered a newsletter from Die Zeit called Elbvertiefung. Every weekday at 6 AM, they send a short newsletter about what happened in Hamburg, and sometimes they also recommend a book or a new restaurant or cafe. I start my day by reading it. Since it is in German, it also helps me improve my language skills.
This kind of newsletter is really great if you want to live a slow and calm life. I was thinking to myself, why don’t we take a step further and build a simple world/city/town/whatever that is pleasant to live, then we can push the news through RSS feeds so anyone who subscribe can act like it’s real. The news can be every single day, or thrice a week to inform people what is happening around the (fake) town. The world building should be convincing and the people should feel like they are living in it.
Traditional, linear storytelling (i.e. novels, comic books, anime) and even interactive storytelling (i.e. visual novels, games) are cool, but in the world filled with trash contents, ragebaits, and terrible news all around, why don’t we take advantage and use a small part of the internet to create some sort of (fake) utopia that make use of the technology available at our disposal? This is probably just another storytelling technique, but I thought this might be interesting especially for people who are chronically online like me to indulge in some sort of fiction worlds aside of reading or watching traditional media.
I am not sure if there is anyone who already done something like this, but this could be a fun small creative project. If there are actually anything like this, I would like to subscribe to their feeds.