Month: March 2026

Anti-Social Media

What is the Autoclast?

The Autoclast is not a car blog. It’s a portmanteau of “Autocrat” and “Iconoclast”; in a perfect world, a spiritual descendant of “The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table”.

I rarely do social media anymore; I won’t say what I do, but I will say the ones that come up most often, I no longer use. I feel they’re just garbage, nothing but ads and political spam, and on some platforms, quite a bit worse.

When I want to share something with friends and families, I use my website. Some things – most things – are public, but some are not.

When I think about the development of social media, I think of the development of media in the past, and how often it has been advertising-based. Newspapers, magazines, radio, television: Here is some entertainment, perhaps here is some news, and alongside all of the are some ads. These days, even if you pay for access to a streaming service, you’re still likely to get ads.

Traditionally, advertising was brokered by intermediaries. With social media, anyone can create an account and start spewing ads. They can join online forums and participate anonymously or via automated bots. The barrier to entry is so low, anyone can pump a message to thousands of people easily.

There’s a notion that lowering barriers to entry allows more voices, a positioning of democracy over gated access. However, the volume of messages, coupled with some people being clever with algorithmic manipulation, makes the experience worse. There are countless pages, sites, channels, and other means of distribution that no one can be equipped to understand deeply.

All of that is before we get into shortform swipable formats that have emerged lately.

Hence, my anti-social media. A website I control, which I can use to share with family and friends.

Return from Japan

It starts with a QR code; when you travel to Japan, you register your trip and personal information online and receive a QR code that you can save, print, or screenshot for later. When you enter the country, you present that QR code along with your passport, and that’s it: you’re in.

There are additional rules for medications, and if you don’t have the QR code handy, you can fill out paperwork on the spot, but it takes time.

David and I returned from Japan less than a week ago, and since then I’ve traveled quite a bit for work; I won’t be home until the end of March. A week ago as I write this…adjusting for time zones…we were asleep in Tokyo and preparing for our penultimate day (well, pre-penultimate day, but we’ll get to that).

This was my second trip to Japan and David’s first; it was more complicated than my last trip, and we had the kinds of complications that arise from complicated trips: weather delays, missed buses, multiple transfers by train, and a touch of illness on both our parts. However, it was a good trip, one that took me to places in Japan I’d wanted to see, gave David a chance to ski in Japan, and served as a bit of a romantic getaway, long overdue.

It will take me a while to go through the photos, and write the pages, and organize my thoughts. Even now my head swims at the breadth of our trip: a week in the northern island of Hokkaido seems like a different trip than our time in Miyajima, Kyoto, and Tokyo.

We traveled a lot in-country. We took trains, planes, and buses between cities; I rented a car in Hokkaido; there was a short ferry ride to Miyajima. We took the Shinkansen (bullet train) a couple of times. We ascended and descended mountains via ropeway (cable cars). We covered a lot of ground on foot.

After a week in Hokkaido, split between a few days in Sapporo and a few more in Furano, we flew south to Hiroshima and stayed on the small island of Miyajima. We had an afternoon in Hiroshima and then stayed in Kyoto for a few days with day trips to Kobe, Osaka, and Amanohashidate. We ended with a couple of days in Tokyo.

Of course we met up with Tamu: Taichi Tamura, our guitarist family friend who performed in Osaka.

Our flight back was delayed by bad weather in New York, forcing us to stay one more night in Tokyo near the airport. This put is a day behind returning to work, but ultimately worked out: we arrived at JFK Tuesday morning.

So that’s that trip. There will be more to come.