Why make Hemlock?

earplugs vs megahorns, silence cures violence

I’ve been living on a different internet for a few hours now. Some news sites are desolate wastelands, others are merely bereft of the dissonance. I’ve been living inside my own curated filter bubble, created by Hemlock.

A decade ago, I started on Hemlock after seeing guitar god Gary Holt wear a ‘Kill the Kardashians’ shirt at a Slayer concert. It was rough and janky, but it had 5 users! It was subsequently redone with AI and re-released once my elder statesman threatened to end a civilization 2-3x older then the Judeo-Christian god.

I’m angry, and I’m tired of listening to not only that blowhard, but every loudmouth with an opinion and a mouthpiece on the internet. Not only that, but I don’t want to even KNOW THEY EXIST, I want comments removed about them, if you have an opinion about them, good or bad, I don’t want to hear it.

Before DOGE, there were Doge’s, the rulers of classical Venice, Italy. One of them, Marino Faliero attempted a coup, and was subsequently REMOVED FROM HISTORY. In the Venetian Palace, I saw the black shroud over where his portrait should hung, which left an indelible impression greater then any cathedral. Notoriety is not enough, it only feeds the beast, absence is the only real cure.

When I was growing up, the news was a constant information source in my house. In a world without easy information access ( pre-internet ), news was available and very influential. The power of news to drive what people thought about led me to get schooled in Journalism ( also because no decent Computer Science program would accept me ).

Journalism supports democracy, in that is supposed to act as the information hub between the public and the government. Informing us about their decisions and informing them about our needs. This was in the era of when news aimed ( never achieved ) at objectivity, of being free of editorial bias.

A rank cry away from our modern ‘choose-your-bias’ media outlets amplified by social media algorithms reinforcing the filter bubble, where you aren’t even exposed to an opposing viewpoint unless the outrage machine has forced it into your feeds.

Hemlock solves none of these systemic, social-fabric destroying issues. All it does is protect your mental space from the actors in the outrage machine. There is nothing actionable you can do with the information. Geopolitics are out of your hands, markets move on the information before you can finish reading the headline. All it does is create anxiety and fear wrapped in a veneer of novelty and emotional salience.

Hemlock is an antidote to the symptoms modern media.