Nobody:

Nobody at all:

Here’s the sequel to my 2013 banger: How to make a personal internet time capsule with your browser.

I was curious how much has changed since then. I was fresh out of grad school, living in San Francisco and beginning part I of my freelance career. A lot of that alphabet were web 2.0 hey-day gems like Facebook, Zipcar, Yelp, Reddit, and Google Voice.

Now it’s…a lot more boring adult things, and less social media.

A

is for the new Civic Tech Field Guide app, which lives at app.civictech.guide. I check it a lot, mostly to make sure it’s not broken.

B

is for Betterhelp, which therapists describe as “the Walmart of therapy”.

C

is for the Civic Tech Field Guide homepage

D

is for docs.new, the fastest way to start a fresh Google Doc.

E

is for Expensify, for work expense reports. I can feel myself getting older in real-time.

F

is for Feedly, the RSS reader that I started using when Google killed Reader. They have a strange obsession with cybersecurity industry news upsells, but at least I can read the Verge in light mode.

G

is for Gmail. Some things haven’t changed since 2013. Except I’m not posting a screenshot of my inbox on the internet.

H

is for my personal Google Sheet where I track how to pay for things, mostly within the sprawling and usually broken Portuguese service ecosystem.

I

is for IFTTT, a home & work automation platform.

J

is for Juntos Podemos, an example of a digital participation platform. I don’t go to it a lot, I think J is just an under-used letter.

K

is for Google Keep, Android’s answer to Apple Notes app. I’m not posting a screenshot of that to the internet, either.

L

is for LinkedIn. This is embarrassing.

M

is for this site, mattstempeck.com. This one sure makes me look vain! But I also consult it to remember my work history when applying to things.

N

is for Notion, where my fiscal sponsor Superbloom manages things. I kind of hate it.

O

is for OLX, which is Portuguese’s Craigslist, if every listing got 11 views.

P

is for Google Photos. My parents didn’t buy me enough film as a kid, and now I take it out on cloud storage / my social followers.

Q

is for nothing.

R

is for Google Recorder. The auto-transcription is handy, if surprisingly bad. Good for recording speeches or weird dreams while still half asleep. Reddit lives on my phone now.

S

is for Softr, the no-code platform I use to build app.civictech.guide. It’s pretty good.

T

is for Google Translate, which I generally rely on to survive after 4ish years in Germany and 4ish years in Portugal.

U

is for Upwork, where I sometimes have a virtual assistant.

V

is for Virgin Atlantic. I really don’t go there much at all.

W

is for Wave, which I used for my LLC bookkeeping / payroll. This is so boring.

X

is for…dead Twitter. We all had a good laugh about how Elon drove the company into the ground and burned billions of dollars of value, but I think it was an intentional strategy to salt the grounds where progressive discussion and culture change often initiated. I only use it to autopost work things on our brand account. RIP.

Y

is for YouTube. I started paying for ad-free YouTube recently and it’s a reflection on the state of the internet that watching longform YouTube videos now feels like the equivalent of reading a novel, compared to TikTok / Reels.

Z

is for Zapier, another automation platform. It’s pretty handy when it’s not broken.