Things I Like
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But our truly quirky dimensions are never really grasped by these recommendation algorithms. They have all the dullness of a Demographics 101 curriculum; they sketch our personalities with the crudity of crime-scene chalk-outlines. They’re not wrong about us; but they’re woefully incomplete.
A piece arguing for curating your own feed using RSS and for seeking out the different and unusual on the internet. I'm grateful not only for the feeds I subscribe to, but also to the newsletters which almost always link me to something unexpected, like this piece.
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Ultimately, my Instagram and Pinterest presence did far less to boost sales of my latest book than a single essay I wrote for The New York Times or a single message I sent out to my mailing list. But my publisher’s marketing and publicity team was so busy ordering interns to craft tiny squares of digital clip art for both platforms that they neither leveraged that mailing list nor helped place that essay. I did both on my own. Because for me, succeeding as a writer has had nothing to do with Instagram or Pinterest and everything to do with, well, writing.
There were a lot of different bits that I could've pulled out of this piece to use for the quote, but this is the one I keep coming back to and thinking about since it echoes something I hear others saying a lot: social media is not helping them sell whatever it is they're selling. It doesn't matter if they are trying to get subscriptions to a newsletter, sell knitting patterns they've designed, or sell artwork they're creating. This piece also reminded me a lot of the book The Quiet Before by Gal Beckerman, since the author here points out that social media isn't helping causes as much as we might like to think.
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Of course, the last few months have seen hundreds of thousands of tech workers lose their jobs. Frankly, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the tech industry conducted sweeping, wide-scale layoffs just as they began investing heavily in AI-driven automation. I’m still haunted by the fact that Microsoft announced a $10 billion dollar investment in OpenAI, the research organization behind ChatGPT and DALL-E — and they made that announcement not five days after laying off 10,000 workers. It’s hard not to read that as a signal about the future of work in our industry. About whose work — and whose skill — gets to matter.
I've been seeing a lot of people talking about AI lately, it's hard to avoid it when it feels like the hot topic of the moment. But recently more thoughtful pieces about what this means and how it affects us and how damaging it could be—both in taking away jobs but also in steering us onto wrong paths—and this is definintely one of them. What's been going on with tech layoffs, just as workers were feeling empowered isn't coincidental.
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The story that “artificial intelligence” tells is a smoke screen. But smoke offers only temporary cover. It fades if it isn’t replenished. We have the power to tell different stories, to counter the narrative of “artificial intelligence” with one that is rooted in democracy and equality, in a vision of a living world in which life is not ranked according to perceived value under capitalism but in which care is extended to all. But—and here’s the trick of it—in order to do that we have to let go of the notion that any one of us is worth more than any other.
Another thoughtful piece about AI.
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Seeing these contradictions harmoniously coexist is as comforting as it is challenging. In those moments when everything is too much, these paintings can remind me that understanding isn’t a zero sum game, that it’s possible to reduce a problem to manageable contours without ignoring its finer details, that merely acknowledging those finer details can be a sufficient substitute for actually making sense of them. We don’t have to know it all, and knowing how much we don’t know is its own kind of knowledge and can bring its own kind of peace.
Rob has been writing not only about his own art and process but also about art field trips and the things he's looking at and I've enjoyed all of it oh so much. This is mostly a link to say you should follow his site if you're not already, it's great.
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Much of the reluctance to do what climate change requires comes from the assumption that it means trading abundance for austerity, and trading all our stuff and conveniences for less stuff, less convenience. But what if it meant giving up things we’re well rid of, from deadly emissions to nagging feelings of doom and complicity in destruction? What if the austerity is how we live now — and the abundance could be what is to come?
Solnit has a way of asking the right questions at the right time and this piece is no exception. What if changing our attitude about climate change led to stronger communities working together and, this is key to me, not striving for growth or money but striving for everyone to be fed and secure.
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In that spirit, I’d like to see knitters, perhaps led by Mrs. Obama, next aim their needles at the fashion industry, pushing for the kind of large-scale overhaul here that is beginning in the European Union: an unprecedented series of measures addressing the catastrophic environmental and social impact involved in the making and disposal of our clothing. The goal by 2030 is for all textiles sold in that market to be, among other things, reparable, recyclable, often made from recycled fibers that are free from hazardous chemicals and produced with respect for labor rights.
I just finished Orenstein's book Unraveling and it's great and in this shorter piece she highlights some of what she talks about in the book. As a knitter I find it easy to source yarn that is ethically sourced, from the sheep to the spinning, to the dyers, to the local yarn shops. I wish the same could be said of fabric, since I'm now sewing a lot. I'd love to see more done to regulate and correct the awfulness of the fashion industry.
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I know it can be difficult, with so much choice, to figure out what to focus on. But on top of everything, you can preview most anything before committing. What’s not to like? Build a library, and you can be your own algorithm.
I don't listen to a lot of music, but this is the way I feel about my RSS feed and what we I consume via streaming services. I'm rarely persuaded by the algorithms of the services and usually end up seeking things out in my own peculiar way.
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But in many instances, the real source of concern at these companies comes down to boneheaded decisions made by CEOs — whether it's Mark Zuckerberg at the company formerly known as Facebook, who authorized a hiring binge over the pandemic and invested billions of dollars into his metaverse folly before having to cut 11,000 jobs, or Tobi Lütke at Shopify, who laid off 1,000 people based on a bet on the future of e-commerce that "didn't pay off."
I've watched the increasing number of layoffs and really wondered who it is the executives are trying to make happy. Layoffs cost a lot and they usually don't help in the ways that we think, in fact, they usually hurt a company and the workers left behind, for quite some time after it happens. And yet, and yet they are happening a lot right now. It seems this isn't about what's best for the company but maybe about what's best for the investors, or possibly it's a show for the investors. Either way, it's quite sad.
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But each invitation to be entertained reinforces an impulse: to seek diversion whenever possible, to avoid tedium at all costs, to privilege the dramatized version of events over the actual one. To live in the metaverse is to expect that life should play out as it does on our screens. And the stakes are anything but trivial. In the metaverse, it is not shocking but entirely fitting that a game-show host and Twitter personality would become president of the United States.
Some really interesting threads and connections here between writers I've read and their thoughts on entertainment and what's going on now. If everything is supposed to be entertainment how do we tell what's really going on?
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But I’m sure another part of the annoyance stems from a desire not to reflect too hard on what I think Cope is saying, which is that if you’re waiting for some outside authority to give their stamp of approval to what you’re doing with your life – if you’re telling yourself things will only be truly OK once they’ve done so – then you’ll be waiting a long time. And even if they were to give it, it wouldn’t be worth getting.
I've read this several times since it arrived in my inbox last Thursday and it's resonating with me so much because ever since I started doing the things I wanted to do, regardless of what some of the people in my life thought about that, I've been so much happier. It's meant, at times, not telling some folks all about my life because explaining my decisions can be exhausting. It's also meant not keeping up certain relationships at times, but that's part of figuring it all out, what's important and what matters the most.
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In other words, constantly running through the long list of things you want to get done or that you feel “should” be doing—because you’ve fully embraced #nodaysoff #hustle culture, or because you literally cannot miss work without losing the income you need to survive—is not the same as meaningfully resting, even if you’re sitting down or wearing your pajamas. “It does you very little good to be in bed while your mind is racing,” Conlon says.
So many times when people take needed rest they are categorized as lazy. We aren't supposed to rest in our culture and in many ways we learn this from early ages. But rest is vital. Being bored and letting all of you rest—mind and body—is necessary. Maybe some day we can accept that and find ways to make it possible for everyone to get the rest they need.
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God does the wrath thing a lot in the Old Testament, punishing humans who would challenge divine authority. It makes sense to read the story of Babel in that light. But having lived through the past couple decades of the internet, I believe the story carries a different lesson. I’m an atheist, so take this theory with a grain of salt, or maybe even a pillar: God wasn’t keeping us out of heaven, smiting us for our arrogance. God was protecting us from ourselves.
I've seen this linked by several people I follow via RSS and I don't disagree that Twitter going down in flames is a good thing in many ways. But I do wonder at the promotion of another, seemingly at this moment better, social media site (Mastodon). Because the thing I've been thinking about a lot is if it's really good for us to be posting so much, scrolling through time lines, and generally participating in these types of things at all, even the open source, federated, (supposedly) better ones. I'm not sure the answer to figuring out that Twitter (or Instagram or Facebook or Tik Tok or, or, or) is awful is to do the same thing on a different site.
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But I’m convinced that a lack of faith in the work itself—or, worse, the recognition that the work is doing harm—is at least as much a contributing factor. Likely even more so. Tech companies haven’t spent decades building up grand stories of how they are changing the world for the better for no reason. And I suspect the rapid evaporation of any credibility to those tales will be a bigger disruption than any of them have planned for.
Mandy hits the nail on the head here. I fell out of love with tech the moment I realized how much utter bullshit was going around and how often that was what the company I worked for was selling. It's why I preferred working in media in a way, much more obvious what you're selling and what the value is even as imperfect as it is.
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The first reason for this is that forgetting is a filter. When something you read resonates with you sufficiently for you to recall it without effort, that means something; it means it connects with your ideas and experiences in some relevant way. Replace that natural process with a more conscious, willpower-based system for retaining information, and you risk losing the benefits of that filter.
I've started reading more slowly and a few years ago I dropped a lot of the underlining and highlighting and just read books. Occassionally I dog ear a corner of a page for something, but not too often. And if I'm still thinking about something I read a few weeks or months or years later, that's how I know it's meaningful. That's what's led me to reread, to see why I keep thinking about certain stories and concepts.