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You Are Not A Gadget - Chapter 3 (Patreon)

Published:
2024-03-17 20:58:43
Imported:
2026-06
Tags:

Content

[Pictured: Dune 2]

--{[|This unravelled into quite the experimental confessional essay|]}--

\\\\\\\\\\\------_______-------///////////

___________________________

On a scale of 1-10, how much do you feel like a person right now? Looking at this. Reading this. Doing this. Do you feel like You?

This is me CJ asking you that who is currently reading this. Is this activity contributing to your sense that you are alive, in the world, as an individual, interacting with culture?

There was a good 30 minute period today (it may have been an hour) in which I was just listening vaguely to various YouTube videos that I didn't care about while scrolling through Reddit. I knew it was useless and I wasn't having a good time. One is tempted to use the productivity calculus to prove this was stupid, rationalizing how I could've been spending this time working on the things that I want to complete. But the weirder thing to me was just watching myself Be a Nonperson, and knowing it didn't feel good, but not stopping.

I did stop eventually. But wow I can sit there on a screen and figure out a way to do nothing, without the help of Tik Tok and Twitter. Without even the help of a good time. What's that about? Does it need fixed? Or do I need to forgive myself for an hour of non-person-ness? 

Is that why you guys watch Love Is Blind?

I kind of wish I didn't have the option to fill that boredom space with juuust enough stimulation to make it.... bearable? Is that the right word?

My phone is dead and I can't find my phone charger. That means I should go to the store today and buy a new phone charger. But the Luddite in me is already whispering in my ear.... why not leave it dead........

Authoritarian Artistry vs. Socialist Servitude

When making my fucking spiderman video, I was struggling with a strange dichotomy. I filmed the thought and then I deleted it. I touched on it again in Subjectivity In Art vid, and I CUT IT OUT AGAIN OUT OF FEAR!

The weird thought is this (don't kill me just listen):

Is bad mainstream made-by-committee mass media a kind of socialist service?

Is the lowest common denominator of taste technically fulfilling a communitarian ethos?

Complain forever about Marvel movies and how obvious and stupid they are, but if millions and millions of people cheer on, isn't there some kind of utilitarian equation being fulfilled? Doesn't one's intuition that the taste of the masses is "bad" suggest some sort of elitist anti-democratic stance that the people are too poorly educated to govern themselves?

I can immediately conjure all the Marxist arguments for individual originality and excellence (I'm reading Jonas Ceika's book about Nietzche and Marx that nails this down perfectly coherently) but I have struggled with this thought from time 2 time. There's a pessimistic Designed By Committee Corporate version of art that we think is bad. It IS bad. McDonalds is popular and easily enjoyable but is... bad? And it's probably the cheapest. It's "poor" food. Bespoke, healthy high Quality products are more expensive, exclusive and are less pragmatic.

You kind of have to be rich to afford Good Taste.

In this way, mass corporate media is the media of the masses. "Good Taste" is a product of privilege and elitism and exclusivity. I can dunk on people for watching Love Is Blind, but in a way this is just me vying for some sort of class superiority, isn't it? Am I just afraid that if I watch 2 episodes of Love Is Blind I will care as much as everyone else, and I won't be cool?

As a challenging interlocutor once confronted me with, in the world of Art I demand complete ownership and control over the whole process so I can ensure Quality, yet in the world of politics I suddenly shift to faith in democracy and collectivism. Why the contradictory spirit, if I am so anti-dualism? 

Since then I have been percolating on the relationship between collectivism and individualism and how to make sense of it.  

Tearing Down Our Statues

"Every authentic example of collective intelligence that I am aware of also shows how that collective intelligence that I am aware of also shows how that collective was guided or inspired by well-meaning individuals. These people focused on the collective and in some cases also corrected for some of the common hive mind failure modes. The balancing of influence between people and collectives is the heart of the design of democracies, scientific communities, and many other long-standing success stories." (p. 56)

In my lifetime I've seen social consciousness consistently split between Stan Culture and Cancel Culture. Y'know how the scientific revolution made it obvious that religion was factually unprovable, yet we couldn't let go of our faith since so much culture and meaning was based on it, so we just repressed the fuck out of that contradiction? I think we feel the same about the value of celebrities, kind of.

Everyone indulges in fandom over individuals they admire. People pay attention to People, and some particular People are very fun to look at. But then we have this constant cycle of disappointment whenever celebrities morally fail. We also seem to kind of WANT them to fail. We get off on addictive sacrilegious YourFaveIsProblematic discourse that directly contradicts our intuitive hero worship, and we seem to regard this cataloguing of sins and desecration of idols as a holy exercise. It brings to mind the Ideology of Violation:

"... we smartest technical people ought to invent ways to attack the innocents, and publicize our results, so that everyone is alerted to the dangers of our superior powers. After all, a clever evil person might come along." (p. 66)

Doesn't this kind of sound like what callout posting is all about? It postures as a public service protecting the public from sinful things, when it itself is kind of the truly sinful thing? Envious fetishistic obsession incarnate for its own sake?

Callout snark culture also seems to thirst for some Christ-like celebrity who will never be cancelled. The rare Only Good One. The Messianic Unproblematic Fave. 

I find it so fascinating when people throw around Keanu Reaves as The Only Good Man. It's so revealing. Why are you looking for someone perfect? Why do you crave guilt free celebrity obsession so badly? You've got this inherent motivation to hero worship... and you are so ashamed of that.

It seems almost like an ineffective, disjointed attempt to create a fantasy framework within which you can Be What You Already Are, akin to what Contrapoints wonderfully snatched out of cultural consciousness with her analysis of the ravishment fantasy. 

I can't believe in a world where morality is so opposed to beauty. I'm not sure anyone can coherently. Repressed contradictions in our social and individual psychologies can result in very ugly counterproductive behaviour.

+++++++++==========++++++++++

No Elders, No Culture, Only Justice

The woman who created the YourFaveIsProblematic tumblr blog wrote this fascinating piece for the New York Times called My Year of Grief and Cancellation reflecting on what drove her to this place of obsession and viral moral policing.

"I worry about the next generation of young people around the world growing up with internet-based technology that emphasizes crowd aggregation, as is the current fad. Will they be more likely to succumb to pack dynamics when they come of age?" (p. 64)

Annie Liz wondered in the first thread if Lanier would parse the differences between a "Crowd" and a "Community." I think one of the differences is that a Community has elders. 

"Without an independent press, composed of heroic voices, the collective becomes stupid and unreliable, as has been demonstrated in many historical instances..." (p. 57)

[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}

I'm gonna cite Jordan Peterson now, cause my head is filled with encyclopedic knowledge about him at the moment and it would be dishonest not to admit I got this thought from him:

"there’s an anthropological literature on the formation of elders in traditional societies… who becomes an elder? (insert dunking on marxism) ... They’re the people who others go to spontaneously to ask for council." (11 min mark on Joe Rogan Podcast #1933) 

This struck me so deeply. True collectivism can't just be total anarchic degenerative democracy without any leadership or Signal Processing. Elders are inevitable, and they are Signal Processors. Signal Processing is exactly what MAKES and SUSTAINS the community. 

"Signal processing is a bag of tricks engineers use to tweak flows of information. A common example is the way you can set the treble and bass on an audio signal. If you turn down the treble, you are reducing the amount of energy going into higher frequencies, which are composed of tighter, smaller sound waves. Similarly, if you turn up the bass, you are heightening the biggest, broadest waves of sound. Some of the regulating mechanisms for collectives that have been most successful int he pre-internet world can be understand as being like treble and bass controls." (p. 57)

The crowd can't signal process itself, and someone is always Signal Processing. It just comes down to who is doing that Signal Processing. Spontaneously emerging elders? Democratically elected leaders with a vision? Or is the elite technocrats in search of profit?

That's where I was trying to land with that Spiderman video. Individualistic conviction in your own aesthetic sincerity isn't the end point of art. It's the precondition for nourishing the collective effectively. Without anyone intentionally signal processing the crowd, the crowd is weak to its worst impulses, or exploitative curators claiming to be objective. 

As Martin Scorsese put it in his NY Times Article on Marvel Movies: 

"And if you’re going to tell me that it’s simply a matter of supply and  demand and giving the people what they want, I’m going to disagree. It’s  a chicken-and-egg issue. If people are given only one kind of thing and  endlessly sold only one kind of thing, of course they’re going to want  more of that one kind of thing."

Lanier:

"When people don't become aware of, or fail to take responsibility for, their role, accidents of time and place can determine the outcomes of the standards wars between digital technologies." (p. 68)

--__-__---_-__--__---_-_-____--__--_--

I've had people admire the success of my Patreon community. I've also received messages from members who sorely want to connect even more with each other through something more democratic, like a Discord. The thing is, I know deep down that the community is thriving because I Signal Process the fuck out of it. Introducing "democracy" would entail me cognitively offloading responsibility for the design of that democracy to Discord. In order to keep growing the thing without exploding the thing, there needs to be principles, traditions, rituals, elders, apprenticeships, mentorships, roles, procedures, identities. And how you get all of that is through individuals asynchronously signal processing the crowds desires.  

"When I told Kevin Kelly about this magical confluence of obsessive people, he immediately asked if there was a particular magical person who tended the oud forum. The places that work online always turn out to be the beloved projects of individuals, not the automated aggregations of the cloud. In this case, of course, there is such a magical person, who turns out to be a young Egyptian American oud player in Los Angeles." (p. 72)

We need our curators. We need our artists. We need our elders. Without them, there will be no community. 

Obscurity

"Surely obscurity is the only fundamental form of security that exists..." (p. 67)

Okay. Thanks for wandering with me through that wood. I haven't encoded these thoughts into an essay or anything because they still feel sensitive and raw. The only reason I can share these kind of experimental thoughts is because of the culture I know exists on this Patreon. If this were a viral Tik Tok, just imagine the reaction chains. Imagine if I started replying to the replies to the Tik Tok. You can't THINK out there. 

"If you start out by being fake, you'll eventually have to put in twice the effort to undo the illusion if anything good is to come of it."  (p. 52)

We call it democracy and freedom and discourse, but it's signal processed with so much noise and so little culture it makes me feel like I don't want to interact with the world at all. 

I am grateful for you all providing the space for me to try to make useful things and think useful thoughts. It's been really difficult but really meaningful and I'm starting to feel like I'm getting somewhere.

by the way can you believe this fucking prophecy from 2010 it fucked me up

Okay. This all just poured out of me and now I need to go to the store and buy a new charger.

Let me know what you all thought of Chapter 3. 

Individualism & Collectivism Below

Files

Comments

Daniel Shaul

I got my libby hold back so now I cannot use page numbers, lest I confuse all those who read... {{{{{{{}}}}}}} I want to respond as well to CJ's rating scale. I am new to the book club, so I will situate myself in a state of 5: I am in graduate school and spending my days mostly doing reading. I sort of state in later in my comment, but I think only when I use my knowledge for human-ends so I feel human doing it. I will feel that taste of humanness more when I learn what it means to make things real. This is contributing to my sense of aliveness, but I would argue not in the reading itself, but rather the act of writing with the intent to engage in conversation. I feel more alive hitting "Send" than in the act of writing my notes, and perhaps this is telling on my sense of humanness. [[[[[[[[[]]]]]]]] ““A moral imperative” that all the world’s books would soon become effectively “one book” - One of the more recent popular psychology terms that has come out of Dan Siegel is Integration, in which we are able to take separate components/functions of our brain and tie them together, to work in tandem. The idea of a “one book” model of technological totalism fails to note that the words and knowledge inside a book is not in itself the value, but the ways in which it is filtered and utilized by people. To have one book would not be an ultimate synthesis of information, but rather a cesspool of indiscriminate linguistic terror, a blackhole of knowledge that would suck every reader in without any sensibility to return with. The internet, and AI as it exists, cannot integrate information, only pluck discrete parts and put them together. In other words, the internet is not a pragmatic form of knowledge keeping, but a erratic information display store: it cannot put it together, only show off. - We need individual authors, because integration cannot occur in a vacuum. I cannot comprehend knowledge without its source, or else my mind shall become shrouded in peril: can any thing come from anywhere? How does this metal box know what I need to know? Does it know I cannot handle it all at once, that I must chew and not gorge, lest I fucking die? “…people are encouraged by the economics of free content, crowd dynamics, and lord aggregators to serve up fragments instead of considered whole expressions or arguments” - While watching Norman Finkelstein speak on Lex Fridman’s podcast, one of his critiques of Destiny’s politics was his utilization of information in fragments: Destiny does not read wholistic books with multiple components or views, but pieces of information that can be woven together to make a point detached from its source (“It’s true, I don’t spend my nights on Wikipedia. I read books”;”Between us who have read maybe 10,000 books on the topic and you’ve read two Wikipedia entries…”). Finkelstein’s complaint that Destiny does not read books, that he isn’t concerned with the entire picture of what he is saying, rings true of the internet as it is now. We look and love out of context: listen to albums out of order or in chunks, watch movie clips before watching the film next to Subway Surfers, read quotes before we read a piece of writing, follow a summary rather than work to summarize our own reading. I think the internet has conditioned us to skip past the meaning-making and get to the gratification, that we are less concerned with the acquisition of knowledge than the feeling of acquiring it, and I have to believe there is an important difference. I do not believe it is WRONG to pull things out of context, but it is dangerous to LIVE with everything out of context. “…What is thought to be a new super intelligence that is emerging on a global basis on the net…” - Like Rio Romero yelling “Nothing New”, I cannot help but argue that we aren’t particularly smarter than our counterparts in the past; certainly we know a lot, but we do much less in that regard. The fall of trades and craft as a collective practice, the vast variety of scientific fields: we are getting more specific but less powerful in a way. We are more literate and reading more, but what is it we read? How do we use what we read? Reading is supposed to fuel life, but I think I tend to hide away from life through reading. I am building up my knowledge to avoid facing the shame of having few practical abilities. I struggle with the idea of technological advancement equating to technological superiority, as we often do much less for much less; build cheaper homes we know will crumble sooner, create cheaper tools that will break earlier, all intentionally so for consumption. I think the idea of a super intelligence is the same: we are going to suck in unstable information, be left unsatisfied, return to suck in even more, making consumption meet more consumption, in the same enshittifcation hunger we grovel to for clothes, furniture, and technology. “The mere possibility of there being something ineffable about personhood is what drives many technologists to reject the notion of quality” - Internet Technology, as I understand it, is innately flattening: it is linear, binary, and measurable. It cannot exist in three dimensions, and when we try to train it for a three-dimensional existence, it often struggles to make sense of even the most simple of movements. To view the world through the lens of computer programing is to trap oneself to binary function, and people cannot exist in a binary, or else we would suffer in a realm of hypervigilant, black and white, psychic terror, waiting for the right input to produce the right output, and being horrified when we do it “Wrong”. “If you start out by being fake, you’ll eventually have to put in twice the effort to undo the illusion if anything good is to come of it” - To make the internet beneficial to a real person, and to feel like you are making a human connection, is a fascinatingly made harder on social media. It is strangely good at presenting the idea of people, but fails in profound ways to connect them. For me, and I imagine for many of those here, the way in which we connected to people online was not through the pathways given by social media: a DM out of the blue, a strange thread on a forum that goes perhaps too long, a piece of art you followed all the way to off the internet. Social media at its best dares us to leave it, dares us to make the digital connection a real one. - Lanier’s references to dating apps are interesting here, because he is noting how having the a “pseudo-noosphere” on those in a certain category as single employs choice paralysis, and thus renders previously actionable information unmanageable. We are humans, and irrelevant of what we were “meant” to be able to do, we cannot manage to make an authentic and self-assured choice in the face of so many options. We have to turn a previously human act online into a quantifiable experience: logic out or logic through the material. It’s how we go from long book reviews to 5 star ratings: we are attempting to synthesize previous rich bodies of insight into a single unified glimpse for decision making, which is WAY too reductive. John Green’s the Anthropocene Reviewed is popping up for me again. "Peer pressure is the great power behind adolescent behavior, goes the reasoning, and adolescent choices become life choices” - One of my professors at graduate school argued this in detail: the extensive surveillance of social media has transformed children to be more risk adversed compared to those before in the US, and has allowed them to be monitored more frequently by parents (this is a theory at best, not yet fully substantiated). In order for teens to have a social life, they have to keep up with social media, and only unless they all buy out at once can that end. The kids aren’t free, and they are losing the ability to develop themselves as people at a young age. We see online how smart, capable, and talented kids can be, but we also find them shrinking themselves to the performance structure of the platforms they are on, and that isn’t conducive to real life or to identity development. This prospect was already emergent in millennials dreading adulthood, but I think generation by generation is trying to run away faster from the looming dominance social media has on their very development. But also… they can’t really run from it: they went to school online, they talked to their friends online, they learn online, they capture their life online, they have no where to go outside, and for a pandemics worth of time, they likely were UNABLE to go elsewhere. A child offline is a child horribly unprepared for the world they are going to live in. I worry about the kids, in part because I was one of them, and I think Lanier’s point here actually needs to be emphasized more: I don’t even think social media is in itself the problem, but that it has become ingrain in adolescent socialization to the point that it isn’t a choice, but a fixture. ““Wisdom of the crowds”… average of the guesses turns out to be generally more reliable than any one person’s estimate” - This actually may have a statistical basis, as statistics does follow the logic that if you get a large enough sample, you will get a “normal curve” of data that reliability the same. The hope is that eventually, enough people will reveal the “truth” or correct answer. However, reliable doesn’t mean valid: the crowd could all be horribly wrong, but completely consistent (reliable) on the wrong weight with each other. It doesn’t reveal the truth, but the average human perception of the truth, and those aren’t the same, just experienced similarly. This happens a lot online where we all write a similar take, but that take is horribly off-kilter: it seems we are on track when looking around, but we are all getting it wrong and not knowing it. If there is a single information mistake on a twitter article, mass hallucinations of things that did not occur might appear now, facts that we shouldn’t have looked at. We cannot cancel out our wrongness, only skew ourselves to be wrong collectively. “I suspect that these kids of adjustments will eventually evolve into an approximate mirror of democracy as it was before the internet arrived” - I think the near-invisibility of moderation on the internet is interesting. From the beginning of chat rooms, there were people there to manage them, and wikipedia is often the same. One of the most human components of the internet is unseen and unregarded by those that benefit it: the human moderators making the internet safe and manageable as best they can. I think about wikipedia moderators I have met, who are some of the most fascinatingly intelligent people I have ever known. I can’t help but imagine what has not happened because of moderation, and the all the ways we know moderation has failed, play into each other. Similar to CJ's suggestion of Elders, moderators online are the people that reign in a crowd, who can make chaos turn into movement in a particular direction, curve harm, and enhance good. Or the inverse, because like all people, so very much is possible there. “What computerized analysis of all the country’s school tests has done to education is exactly what Facebook has done to friends” - People are conditioned to succeed at a concept that is abstracted in a way that is divorced from itself: friendship is defined by social media terms, not friendship terms. The quality of a friendship is transformed into quantification, and this has major setbacks. In quantitative social science research, you have to transform an abstract, complex idea into a measurable, quantitative operative definition, and in doing so, you oftentimes narrow the range of experience in order to better be able to answer questions: you flatten meanings dimensions in order to make binary meaning out of it. Parsimony, but at what cost?

Chandler Sterling

Well, I had a whole post ready to go for this week, and then CJ asked me, the person who is reading this, a question, so I gotta answer that, and my original post will just be a reply to this. When I first started, I was probably at a 3 or 4 as far as feeling like a person goes because I felt unqualified and out of my depth coming in on Braiding Sweetgrass. It was like walking into a conversation halfway through, I could tell there were already some established voices (the elders), and I wasn't sure where I fit in just yet. I was in Lanier's pack niche with no clue how I had ended up there from my typical loner zone. It was a useful time, and I learned just by listening. So imagine my shock when today I can honestly say I'm at an 8 or 9 for most posts. I feel like I can be honest and excited about things, even when they're somewhat unrelated to the book like my Dune tangents. I feel like I'm fully myself here which is not a thing I can normally say because as someone who was diagnosed with ASD kind of late into the game, I have a habit of masking subconsciously. It's something I work on, but it's always a huge relief when I find a place where it doesn't take considerable effort to unmask. This is top of mind when I think of places where I can just be me. It took me a bit to justify the time I put into these posts. I was reading books that didn't pertain to my field of work or really anything I had been paying attention to up until that point, and I spent hours writing posts that maybe 5 people paid any attention to. Going back to the older books, especially ZMM and Lila was a wake up call because there was inherent value (Quality) present in everything they touched. I was still technically "wasting my time", but I would have ignored anyone who tried to genuinely convince me of that. I was in community with people who were passionate about the same things I was, and here were books that helped us voice those passions. Since then, I've tried to be present and open at each of these book club posts. I hope that I've improved with my replies and given plenty of incentives to check out the previous threads because it really is special walking through the road we've taken in the KTI Book Club. I've continued to fall into non-person holes from time to time, but this is the first place where I've felt rewarded for caring about being my own person again. I'm working my way to a 10 with every day. A website is certainly going a long way to that, and I never would have taken that step without this place. I don't know if there's a way to fully remove ourselves from the digital incentive to do just enough nothing that we don't feel bored, but I think places like this where we can be caring and intentional with our thoughts and words are the best way to become aware of it. Most people scroll through Tiktok and Reels because they have nowhere else to go, and they start to forget there's any other option. I've taken comfort in knowing that every time I return to Reels and feel guilty, it's because I remember that I can be better than that. So thanks to everyone for contributing to this. It makes me feel like a human, not a gadget. P.S. Dune 2 was so good, oh my god, I want to talk about it for 12 straight hours and then pass out for a week so I can digest everything and talk about it for 12 more hours. You do not understand the RESTRAINT I have shown by staying on topic these past few weeks.

Sylvan Thomas

Today I am reveling in non-selfhood, in being a collection of dreaming atoms. Me is fuzzy and becoming more so. Maybe the atoms next to me have some kind of perception or being. I will never know. We are still kin. Somehow, this non-being feels more right than any self-defining attempts I've made in a long time.

azalea water

I was listening to “Neverwhere” by Neil Gaiman while drawing pigeons before this, so I’d say my personhood is around like an 8 right now? - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - I think this is the first time I’ve looked at something Lanier wrote and disagreed. I don’t love the way he talks about collaboration and design/art. I think he’s on the right path but hasn’t quite hit the mark. Lanier proclaiming “when a collective designs a product,you get a design by committee, which is a derogatory expression for a reason.” (p56) and “What matters instead [...] [is] an adventurous individual imagination that is distinct from the crowd” (p50) irks me. Lanier seems to be suggesting that design, or creation as a whole, is best in the hands of individuals. I think this is a fundamental mistake in his logic. Collaboration breathes beauty into art. Quoth Jreg: “make art pro-social!” People dig at pop music a lot by just bringing up the wikipedia page of the album, seeing a large list of songwriters and going “look, bad!” Take Beyoncé for example: sure, “Virgo’s Groove” off “Renaissance” might have eleven writers, but it’s also a six minute funk-fest of pure, unadulterated c~nt. It makes me wanna slam my head through a brick wall out of ecstasy. Same thing goes for auteur theory. When you watch a film, you're seeing the work of writers, cinematographers, actors, MUAs, set-designers, dozens of techies - not just the fever-dream of one dude in The Special Chair. Lanier starts to reign me back in with: “without an independent press [...] the collective becomes stupid” (p57) - but I still think he’s a bit off. An independent press *also* has editors, photographers, lawyers ect. - no art is made in a vacuum. We have specialists, academic experts, and artisans for a reason: no one person can be good at everything. But experts work together to create beauty. Wikipedia isn’t really pro-social, nor is it run by visible experts. It’s just strangers passing over each other's work. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - What follows is an quote-less ramble about the pacemaker study: This shit has been plaguing my brain, so I just need to get it out of my head: what the fuck was that pacemaker bit?! I didn’t think it was real, so I googled it. Low and beyond - the bastards figured out how to just hack into a pacemaker and TURN IT OFF! I’m sorry, but that study was published in 2008 - that was nearly 20 years ago! The results are publicly available online, the tech’s old enough for there to have been advancements - and yet, you don’t see it anywhere on the news. I was able to find a single New York Times post about it from 2008 and apparently it was in a bit of “Homelander” around 2013 according to an IOActive article, but that’s it! If there is any evidence that humanity is good, it’s the fact nothing seems to have come of this. Just what exactly was going on in Kevin Fu’s mind when he went “oh yeah, this is a normal thing to study”. That shit was peer reviewed, Jesus Christ! I’ve spent like half an hour going back and forth on weather to link the study, and decided to because I know there are a number of computer scientists and tech-y folk in the book club who will probably be able to make more sense of it and may find it an interesting, if terrifying, read. It’s a piece of internet history that seems to be overlooked and a stare down the barrel of a gun that thankfully seems to be empty. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - (pacemaker study - https://rb.gy/tst64a) (NY times article - https://rb.gy/d6iuiz) (IOActive Article - https://rb.gy/rgkmg9)

Ajey Pandey

I’m going to be thinking about signal processing now…I don’t have better thoughts but I’ll at least share my scattered notes from this chapter. “Google and other companies are scanning library books into the cloud in a massive Manhattan Project of cultural digitization. What happens next is what’s important. If the books in the cloud are accessed via user interfaces that encourage mashups of fragments that obscure the context and authorship of each fragment, there will be only one book.” …oh hey that happened, hello ChatGPT The heading “Rejection of the Idea of Quality Results in a Loss of Quality” is extremely CJ Lanier is focused on a sense of quality within an artist, but I’ve seen the fallacy affect the art, too. There is a “hivemind” conception of taste, but at the time I left tabletop RPG Twitter, at lot of the work considered excellent was simply garbage writing with shiny art and “flawless” politics. “Am I accusing all those hundreds of millions of users of social networking sites of reducing themselves in order to be able to use the services? Well, yes, I am.” HE’S RIGHT and I’m glad he’s saying it!!! I have become so much more fully human since I’ve disconnected from social media. “[Nassim Taleb] defines the dangerous “Fourth Quadrant” [of questions] as comprising problems that have both complex outcomes and unknown distributions of outcomes. He suggests making that quadrant taboo for crowds.” And crucially, so many of our most pressing political questions are in that quadrant! Reading the “Trolls” section, I forgot this book was written pre-GamerGate until he mentioned 2008 in his footnote. He fucking called it!!! I love the term “Drive-By Anonymity” for its specificity. “It’s not crazy to worry that, with millions of people connected through a medium that sometimes brings out their worst tendencies, massive, fascist-style mobs could rise up suddenly. I worry about the next generation of young people around the world growing up with internet-based technology that emphasizes crowd aggregation, as is the current fad.” HE FUCKING CALLED IT “When I told Kevin Kelly about this magical confluence of obsessive people, he immediately asked if there was a particular magical person who tended the oud forum. The places that work online always turn out to be the beloved projects of individuals, not the automated aggregations of the cloud. In this case, of course, there is such a magical person, who turns out to be a young Egyptian American oud player in Los Angeles.” I relate—I ran a Discord related to hacking a tabletop roleplaying game I wrote, and it only worked because I was very intentional about the structure of the Discord and who I let in. I just now realized that CJ pulled the same quote!

ndx

i would post something but my laptop is about to die. I'm new and I have to catch up!

saba

Re: Love is Blind speaking on behalf of my sibling, nigist Feleke: "the reason i am obsessed with watching love is blind is because i dont think reality tv will be legal for much longer and i need to cash in while i can" i dont know if tht answers yr questiom

Robert Lasica

I'm reading this chapter in one of the few good third spaces I've been to, the third street market in Milwaukee. I can see People of all ages, good food, conversation everywhere, and fun communal games decorating this space I unknowingly walked past at 8 am this morning. As I write this two red faced childen are destroying a happy couple at table tennis. On 47 the anonimization and contentification of websites resembles the shift of the music industry from smaller musicians making CDs that sell well enough to make a living, to the devalued music streaming system that presents all music basically for free devoid of context. My buddy's buddy Rocco has 1 million monthly Spotify listeners, and that kind of reach pays less than you might think. Pg 48, "Something like missionary reductionism has happened to the internet with the ride of web 2.0. The strangeness is being leached away by the mush making process", so there was this tabletop RPG forum called "The Forge" http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forge/index.php , which I only experienced a decade later in its aftermath. This was a dedicated space heavily moderated by a few people to focus on new, long form productive conversation around game design and dissecting play experience. Having countless pages of pedantic discussion as a backbone, conversations there could be explore depths and Intricacies that are hard to uncover. I'd argue that the flattening entry level discussion of the social media form limits the productive structured discussions that you can find in moderated communities or academia. We can dislike this specific backbone the forge's conception of rpgs, but it provides an opportunity to imagine different, better structure we could provide to discursive spaces we moderate. After the forge's owner felt that they made enough progress on their mission statement the forum shut down, and forum members like D. Vincent Baker made influential games like dogs in the vineyard and apocalypse world. On page 55 when I read that wisdom of the crowds was a real argument applied to markets and democracies I physically frowned. Market failures and crowd failures are extremely common, and the idealized way the concept is applied to economics without looking at the world as it exists is maddening. Humanity won't emergently become a super entity that flaps it's wings and transcends earthly limitations, we are always going to be an ecosystem. Maybe some other things emerge from us eventually, but It feels like almost everyone will be living lives in ways vaguely similar to how they've always lived them. For us to break from that pattern would require so many resources and a labor investment that is truly unimaginable. Pg 66 when I was an edgy teen the ideology of violation felt very productive to me, creating a world of perfect systems where nobody is vulnerable. Looking back with more knowledge now, security through obscurity is one of the driving forces of the world. I Wasn't quite expecting Jaron to focus so much on the labor of violation, but thinking about it the time and financial investment are the defining reason so many company secrets and techniques aren't publicly known. As I write this first draft I see the haunting spectre of a skyscraper miller lite billboard receeds into into the distance. This will be the conclusion to my Milwaukee day trip trilogy with "You are not a gadget". While editing the final draft of this message I'm making the trip to GDC with all of the reading time that entails. It feel's pretty clear in 2024 that Jaron has been proven correct about at least some of his statements on algorithmic echo chambers. In my personal experience there is an abrasive quality to contentification platforms, and a smooth whole-ness to minor websites of all kinds. The echo chambers of friend groups or discord communities have similar problems now as they've always had, but the anonymous flatness of larger sites have come with overwhelming side effects. CJ additions: I feel like 8/10ths of a person. I'm reading the post on the subway and I feel like I'm deviating from my habits in a fairly human way. Regarding your weird idea, utilitarian service is being fulfilled, but I think we can still groan about those pop films getting funded while longtime and newer filmmakers can't get stuff greenlit. It's Anti democratic elitism, sure, but in a good way. You have to be fortunate to afford good taste. Money is a big limiter, but the freedom of the free time kids and teens have plays a big part of developing taste. What you pirate as a 12 year old is more foundational than what you watch with a friend after a long shift in your mid 30s imo. Switching to the contradictory nature of collective art being kinda bad. I think there are some projects in which that is more true than others, it's about the social structures of the studios. Into the spider verse had a ton of agency and creative control given to individual artists that can be seen everywhere from the rigging to shaders. The last of us part 2 had Neil drukman as the primary or only feedback for level artists. He would record a video playing through it, give some thoughts, and workers had to account for those changes. Without other forms of scrutiny this gives individual artists a bunch of control, mediated through the whims of a guy. So yeah, I think breaking down the idea further is productive to see what parts of authoritarian or collectivective projects are working from our perspectives. When you move into CJ of X phase 3 and become too busy to signal process the patreon, I do think a discord properly curated by people you trust is the best way to go. There is this videogame guy, Tim Rogers, who set up a discord randomly one day with a few people he could trust, and it has flourished into an autonomous creative haven that gives me good game, movie, and music recs. Tim considers it a distinct community from himself, and allows the mods and community members free reign to build the space they want.

Just Connor

i was feeling like a 10 all day till i inevitably fucked up, but ive decided to not let it stop me from trying to achieve that 10 again. -~-~-~-~-~-~ "What I'm saying though, is that the user interface designs that arise from ideology of the computing cloud make people--all of us--less kind." this is precisely the core idea of my critique of social media. making sure to include all of us, not targeting a specific company or app, and the words "less kind" are exactly what i feel is needed in a thesis or core message. -~-~-~-~-~-~ "What computerized analysis of all the country's school tests has done to education is exactly what Facebook has done to friendships. In both cases, life is turned into a database. Both degradations are based on the same philosophical mistake, which is the belief that computers can presently represent human thought or human relationships." I absolutely fucking love this point. the flawed education system was first issue i was truly passionate about. that was in 6 or 7th grade (im 1 year out of highschool now). i had my whole list of arguments and values that i based this on. ive gone through now many minor deities of this kind, and right now social media is the big one. so to see the 2 connect was kind of a awesome moment where i felt whole. this is where i start getting spiritual as well. a lot of my friend group are materialists and it gets weird when they start talking about people this way. this is the point where i see not only the value of religion, but the truth in it. im not a gadget, and that is why i will always be more inclined towards something like religion/spirituality despite the fact im not a christian or an actual religious person. anyhoo thats my thoughts really liking the book :)

Louis-Antoine LeBel

Hii. This chapter definitely felt more dense than the previous ones. I might go through it again and edit in more of my thoughts once I have a deeper understanding of it. “If the books in the cloud are accessed via user interfaces that encourage mashups of fragments that obscure the context and authorship of each fragment, there will be only one book.” Lanier was pretty bang on with that prediction. But as it turns out, large language models, like ChatGPT, are trained on any kind of text that could be scraped online, not just published works. The result is still the same: LLMs output strings of text that are the aggregate of countless sources and rarely point to any source (sometimes they even hallucinate sources). Little anecdote: During the last semester of comp sci degree, I took an english class as en elective because I was getting a little tired of cs courses and I wanted a change of pace. One of our readings was “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” by Ursula K. Le Guin (it’s a great essay, everyone should read it). Anyway, one of the members in our discussion group hadn’t done the reading and I could see that instead of quickly reading the essay in class (it’s a pretty short essay), he was on his laptop with ChatGPT open and asking it about the essay. He was consulting the One Book. He didn’t participate in the discussion and I think he dropped the course shortly after. I feel a little bad that I didn’t try to include him more in the discussion, but I also feel sad that he preferred to check ChatGPT instead of engaging directly with the text or even just talking to his peers. “What computerized analysis of all the country’s school tests has done to education is exactly what Facebook has done to friendships. In both cases, life is turned into a database. Both degradations are based on the same philosophical mistake” Hey that’s pretty similar to what C. Thi Nguyen says about quantitative ways of knowing. https://youtu.be/1LpbGW3qLVg?si=fS95RrTn6PLBj_IX&t=928

Christine Guzman

I’ve felt like a 10 in a very ironic way. I’ve been sick this weekend, it’s beautiful out but my body needs rest. And you know what, I’m very proud of myself. To be okay with resting, with listening to my body - my pre-pandemic self would be ridden with guilt. Instead, I took the opportunity to watch the YouTube videos from Lanier from last post. It’s been a great Sunday so far. A note on Love is Blind: I have my reservations on the ethics of reality tv, but putting that aside, I think wasting time is okay. The one thing I have been doing is really trying to single task. IT IS HARD Y’ALL. But it’s been helpful. So if I’m on reddit, I try to only be on reddit. With a time limit. I have been out of social media since the beginning of the year and it is crazy how these apps suck time away. Blink and it’s been 30min. ~ What you seek is seeking you ~ Been thinking about this line from a poem from Rumi, and that is how I feel about this book, about this community, about these discussions. Was very much taken with Lanier’s idea that the problem is *some* people’s incapability of accepting the unknown. That mystery that exists within us and outside of us, there is so much magic there, magic that makes us human. This “special element” (p.51) is key to our humanity, or maybe that IS our humanity. And I’m happy to see it in a non-religious context. I’ve been struggling with some religious/spiritual questions, and the reason why I still hold on to some of these ideas is because religion explains the exceptionality of being human in a way I have not seen in atheist circles. This sounds like a nice compromise, and I really like it. Overall, loving the book so far. The whole What Is a Person section has blown my mind. It’s vindicating. I started becoming wary of IA when I noticed the blatant obsession from techies wanting to make machines more human, while making humans more like machines. I did not vibe with the idea then, and the more I delve into this topic the more I am grateful for my intuitive suspicion. However, I’m resonating with the book so much that after listening to C. Thi Nguyen’s lecture on the Seduction of Clarity I’m not sure if I should be vindicated or should be suspicious of Lanier, lol. We’ll see where this takes us.

Evelyn G

CJ, thanks for taking time out of your day to address me as a single individual and ask me a question about how I feel in my soul, I'll respect your time by giving a bit of mine to you. I haven't felt like much of a person for a bit over a year. Chronic health stuff is very dehumanizing and destined to form survival mode tactics to get by. But it's getting better. When the flare ups started I was forced to reflect on my life and values so I dedicated my spare time to becoming an artist (a novelist specifically) which has been absolutely life affirming. I'm finishing my book in the next month or two and it the creative process just feels right to me. Because of our tumultuous economy I had to put in 12 hour shifts in the past week as a painter (houses, not canvas), which felt oddly grounding. I had zero energy and it drained my soul, but it left me feeling connected to my body. It feels perverse, but I spend so much time in my head that having all my energy drained made me lose that headiness. I got a 3 day weekend this week and I've been enjoying walking around town under the sun and bathing in its warm rays. So like a 9 probably. On the matter of the messiah myths for pop-cultural gods: I've been thinking about this issue a lot. Last year I read Dune and that theme drips off every page of that novel. Not to mention the film adaptation knocks it right out of the fucking park. Right after reading Dune I cracked open Infinite Jest which quickly became my favourite novel. It made me think about mythologizing humans in a different light. It would be easy to worship DFW's dynamic prose that is by far the most elegant use of language I have ever seen and not to mention the complicated character portraits that are so beautiful they can carry the weight of a 1079 page near-plotless book. It is fucking genius and I am so happy I read it. BUT! I don't want to worship its author for reasons that should be obvious at this point. A fundamental principle of a crowd's weakness is its ability to be lost in single thought leaders. The Lisan al Gaib. Crowds become immediately susceptible to the power of a single messianic force which allows people to comfortably fall into line as a member of a restrictive system. We can't lose ourselves to individuals in the same way we can't lose ourselves to the crowds. They go hand in hand. There are plenty of decently successful channels that just talk about DFW or Infinite Jest. They do alright for themselves. But is that what YOU want to do with your life? Do we want to worship at the alter of a fragile and pathetic individual or should we turn our attention to something larger like 'quality' or genuine community? I vote for the latter.

Emrys

Another book club, another late night submission. This stuff gets my night gremlin urges flowing. (Also im finally getting the hang of formatting a patreon comments, hurrah!) --- Lets start with the Noosphere as it was the title of the chapter. The webster definition is as follows: “the sphere of human consciousness and mental activity especially in regard to its influence on the biosphere and in relation to evolution” https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/noosphere The origins of the the word are pretty interesting as well. I found this book/report called: Whose Story Wins - Rise of the Noosphere, Noopolitik, and Information-Age Statecraft (available for free here: https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PEA237-1.html) that I have not had the time to completely read through. However the sections that I did parse were very interesting. I’ll start with the origin of the term Noosphere. The term was the brainchild of a french theologian-paleontologist names Pierre Teillhard de Chardin, a french mathmatician names Édouard Le Roy, and a Russian geochemist Named Vladimir Vernadsky. An unusual reuion between three very disprate fields can lead to some very interesting conversation forks, and it appears that their meeting in 1922 in paris was no exception. The details of each thinker’s conception of thinking framed in a global context is extremely interesting, and difficult to summarize in a few sentences, but here is what I presume to be a key concept of the nooshpere: “Teilhard and Vernadsky shared a deep belief in Earth’s evolutionary path: first, a geo- sphere; then, a biosphere; and next, a noosphere.”(P.10, Ronfelt, Arquilla, 2020) In other words, the noosphere is a logical result of globalization of thought and commication. This was expounded upon further with this quote from the next chapter in this book. (Also I can't help but draw comparisons between the Noosphere and Jung's collective unconscious.) “The noosphere concept captures a number of key contemporary issues - social evolution, global ecology, Gaia, deep ecology and global environmental change contributing to ongoing debates concerning the implications of emerging technologies such as human-created biospheres and the Internet. (Samson and Pitt, 1999, back cover)” (P.13, Ronfelt, Arquilla, 2020) The concept of noosphere is detailed, and nuanced, and is the subject of much intellectual debate and disagreement. Most importantly, it’s hard to define and to put into a little easy to understand box. The fact that an idea first proposed in 1922, is still seeing relevant research and discussion more than 100 years later is testament to the above mentioned. So why doesn’t Lanier talk about any of this? It’s in the title of the chapter, presumably that’s because it’s of great importance. But somehow there is no attempt to contextualize the idea or name any of its authors. All we get is a single sentence bastardization (in parenthesis!) of it at the beginning of the chapter: “(like the noosphere, which is a supposed global brain formed by the sum of all the human brains connected through the internet)” (p.45, Lanier) Again and again Lanier promotes these intellectual boogeymen, of vague but larger than life origins, as opponents to his intellectual ideals. But rarely will he be forthcoming with information as to where these ideas come from, who’s talking about them, or if they have any social relevancy at all. This roundabout writing style makes the reader do all the work by having to connect disparate dots that Lanier lays out on your own, and then taking the credit for your own reflections. Frankly he should be taking his own advice and filter his ideas to talk about the ones worth keeping, because he seems to have a lot of very disparate views that more often than not contradict each other. /rant over - *sigh* im very exhausted with myself in regards to my own negativity towards this book so far. It’s frustrating when you see an interesting concept like Noosphere brushed aside haphazardly in that way, but I think from here on out, I’m going in the subsequent chapters with a laissez-faire attitude. So if you’ll indulge me, please allow me an attempt to redeem this trash talk with some praise: --- “The only hope for social networking sites from a business point of view is for a magic formula to appear in which some method of violating privacy and dignity becomes acceptable. The beacon episode proved that this cannot happen too quickly, so the question now is whether the empire of facebook users can be lulled into accepting it gradually” P.55 First off, I’m glad that scepticism about the fiscal viability of social media networks was present even back in 2010. But I’m more interested in the second half of the statement. How does one implement cultural change? Would all at once, building everything from the ground up be best? Or would be it better to build things little by little. Thinkers partial to communist ideals posit that the tear it all down to build it back up approach is the way to go as I’ve been learning in my reading of Ideology and state apparatuses by Louis Althusser. But take a look at the modern conservative politics of the past half century, and you’ll see the death by a thousand cuts hard at work, with little stepping stone legislation being passed slowly but surely. I don’t have a way of pointing one out as better than another, only that both strategies exist. --- *"Signal processing is a bag of tricks engineers use to tweak flows of information. A common example is the way you can set the treble and bass on an audio signal. If you turn down the treble, you are reducing the amount of energy going into higher frequencies, which are composed of tighter, smaller sound waves. Similarly, if you turn up the bass, you are heightening the biggest, broadest waves of sound. Some of the regulating mechanisms for collectives that have been most successful int he pre-internet world can be understand as being like treble and bass controls." (p. 57)* “The crowd can't signal process itself, and someone is always Signal Processing. It just comes down to who is doing that Signal Processing. Spontaneously emerging elders? Democratically elected leaders with a vision? Or is the elite technocrats in search of profit?” CJ - Chapter 3 Post When I read Lanier’s thoughts on signal processing, I immediately had this vision shoot into my imagination. Imagine a room with a set of speakers, and an audio mixing console in it. You walk into the room and there is a tone playing on the speakers. When you play around with the dials and knobs of the mixing console, you can modify the sound coming from the speakers however you want. So you can make the sound anything that you want using this complex console. Now imagine that in a room adjacent to you, there is an identical console and set of speakers, and in walks a participant to that room. They hear the same tone that you did, except now it’s been passed through your mix. So they hear your mix, and can do what they want to it. The catch is any modifications that participant 2 makes to the mix, will feed back into the room of participant 1. Now how would the tone sound with 4 rooms with consoles? With 1000 rooms with consoles? At any time, any one participant could try and modify the signal, or could sit back and listen to the signal. The larger the participant ground gets, the lower the perceived impact on the signal, and the less incentive there it to want to try and modify it to resemble what you desire of it. When you think of the participants, you have four possible descriptions of their actions: 1. Change the signal to try and make it resemble what you want it to. 2. Fuck with the signal to cause chaos and mess with others (even if you don’t know what their reactions will be) 3. Chill and do nothing because you enjoy the signal at its current state 4. Do nothing and mope because you feel defeated and upset that you can’t bring what you want into the world. This is a good representation of the scaling of culture IMO. Smaller groups (lets say 50 people) have an easier time adjusting the signal to reflect the general consensus of the overall population. But larger groups (500+) will have a much more difficult time trying to come to any kind of consensus. You’ll kind of get what you get, and have a very very hard time trying to get it to change. But if you have a vision for what the signal could be, and you’re dissatisfied with where the signal is at. Why would you ever be satisfied with option number 4. So Cj, to answer your question: I could only ever reply with a resounding yes! Because the alternative is to simply be subject to culture, and never ever exposing myself to the opportunity to be a part of the filter. To pass up the chance to have even the slightest impact on those around me would be a tragedy of the utmost proportions. As to sense of personhood, im feeling a mid to strong 8/10 for that one. My sense of purpose, and drive is higher than its been in a long time, and being a part of this book club positively contributes to that for sure. But there’s a part of me that’s holding me back from being a 10/10 and I have a very contentious relationship with it. It’s the part that wants to make something great. The narcissistic impulse to think I can be better than everyone all while rationally knowing that that line of thinking is a zero sum game. The hurt human urge to want to make something that everyone likes, and gain critical acclaim and adoration, rather than making it for my own satisfaction. But at the same time, the drive that that side of me provides is invaluable. So I feed it a small part of my personhood on a regular basis; an offering to allow me to create like I never have before, as I pray that I have the wherewithal to not let it consume me entirely. --- I’ve come to a place somewhat of neutrality in regards to my moments of weakness where I’m doom scrolling, or doing otherwise NPC like behaviour, because ultimately I know rationally that those kinds of activities don’t help me towards my goals or aspirations. It’s one thing to know it rationally, but without the physical experience of it, the warnings and dangers about those behaviours are useless. You have to feel how shitty it makes you feel before it can be able to motivate you to do otherwise. Sure it would be nice to skip the process and just do the thing you want to do, but that’s hardly the world we live in now is it. Wishing everyone a good week , see you all next sunday!

Josh Foreman

"how much do you feel like a person right now?" I guess a bit higher than normal personhood. But only because you broke the forth wall and asked me. I like to think of myself as someone with high Openness To Experience but I know that's mostly a lie. Reading Deep Thoughts from others is a part of that self-image/formation process. I think a Person is more a Process than a Self, and so reading deep thoughts is Personhood for me. "If people are given only one kind of thing and endlessly sold only one kind of thing, of course they’re going to want more of that one kind of thing." Many years ago I wrote a script for a YouTube series intended to make a case against the use of cutscenes in videogames. I made Scorsese's argument in that script, though it was before he said it. I wrote the script in 2008. I'll finish the project any year now! Anyway, this idea of the tension between some kind of platonic Mass Appeal and the real world mass appeal that is influenced by feedback loops was missing from my thinking, so thanks for sharing. Also, I'm going to be 50 next year so that automatically makes me an Elder here, right?!

mouse

I've got thoughts about this chapter, and the book is still so so interesting and involving. but uh my brain has been destroyed by What We Owe The Future which i read in about one (1) week and I accidentally wrote over 4,000 words comparing it to You Are Not A Gadget and im still not done. oops🫠 so I don't know if I'll post that. I might idk yet. but I did read yanag too!! so I might just post those thoughts instead. just wanted to say that I'm still super interested in what Lanier has to say!! hope yall are doing well 👍🌱✨️

annadante

So, I realize this was not the point of the post and I'm not reading the book right now. So, me coming here can be a little unproductive. But I try to read them just because I find nuggets of little inspiration. And... I got so hung up on the word you used there, "elders". Coming from a culture where "elders" are respected by default. Where age and "experience," whatever it may be, is one of the ways you get respect and notoriety and just get into a place of a little more security, at least in social situations. Seeking out a community where there are "elders" is for me like going back into the worst time of my life. I understand what you mean by saying "elder," by the way. However, I feel like the status of an "elder" is given out far too easily in communities. Age and experience can't be the only parameters one has to check off to become an elder. In such a case, we all will become elders sooner or later, and as much as I'd love to say "yay we are all elders," no. Some people frankly should not be. And this ties perfectly with the theme of Dune here (as I'm also a hardcore Dune fan, read all the books and such). Talking confidently, having some charisma, a laid-back attitude. Just saying the right things and right opinions can make someone an elder in the community. There have to be other parameters. There has to be a space for people to be able to come out and speak plainly about how some elders may have treated them not in the best way. There has to be a space for people not to be afraid to do so. Age, experience, and popularity should NOT be the parameters of becoming an elder. Rather, empathy. The ability to connect with people should be put forth. How does this person make you feel? How does this person change the room when they enter? In this day and age, all those characteristics are so easily discarded that I'll not even trust the community to select the elders, to be quite honest. And I know this is me sounding bitter, but frankly, I'm tired of seeing this exact scheme play out in almost every community where people conflate goofy sarcasm, number of years in experience with genuine wisdom. The perfect elder, in my opinion is an archivist. A person who collects everything and saves them into neat drawers and is able to give you relevant data or how the things you talk about played out before, all with empathy and a genuine ability to listen. From that point of view Irulan is perfect elder. Which is why I will always say, justice for Irulan and justice for Alia. The girlies who read Children of Dune know what's up 😭 //end rant

Lou Corben

I’m sorry, I’m not up to writing super coherently this week, so, bullet points. - I’m not feeling entirely human. I’ve just moved to a new city where I don't really know anyone and I’m broke so I’ve been feeling very Bo Burnham’s ‘Inside’. But I have dance class tonight so that’ll help. - I’m a populist too when it comes to art. But I think the populace deserves Quality. - Quality art used to and continues to be popular (Leonard Bernstein, William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, David Bowie). Those examples still are but were more-so in the past. There’s also art of Quality that gets dismissed because it’s popular, particularly if it’s popular with women (Mean Girls, The Beatles, Dirty Dancing). I fully believe it’s possible to do both. - Got into a lighthearted argument with someone recently for suggesting Caryl Churchill (Britain’s greatest living playwright) should be programmed, in an ideal world, on popular stages but was told she was “too niche”/”risky” but in the 70s, avant guard Samuel Beckett plays were put on TV for free. People had access to Quality art for beamed directly into their homes. For example: https://youtu.be/M4LDwfKxr-M?si=dLAF9tn0OWkZ7H2y&t=171 Programmers must have thought there was demand for it. - Government subsidy of the arts is *vital*. There’s more twice as much government arts funding just in Berlin than there is in all of England. With artists less reliant on box office they can make “risky” interesting work, and fill the theatres anyway because people want to see something interesting instead of the same 5 Shakespeare plays on rotation like we have here (I love him but it gets too much). For every £1 invested by the government in the arts, £5 goes back into the economy. The cuts aren’t about money. - More Artists need Manifestos. - azaela waters’ comments about collaboration - *chefs kiss chefs kiss* - We’ve never had more access to more free art, but how do you sort the wheat from the chaff? How do you discover new music if all you’re fed is the same handful of trending tiktok songs? I think it takes more effort now to find Quality art but people don’t want to put in the effort, and fair enough, we all work really fucking hard. I think people are finally getting bored of Marvel movies. I didn’t rate Saltburn that highly but how refreshing for something relatively weird to do so well. - The bad takes on movies people were posting since the Oscars were the nail in the coffin of me deleting Twitter. - If I ever do an Masters Thesis it’s going to be on ABBA Arrival (their hologram show) and Catholic relics. I will not elaborate. - “It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times?! You stupid monkey!” - Algorithmic dating apps fucking suck. - Something something Beyonce’s Renaissance World Tour. I think I need to write an essay on it because if I start I won’t stop. - We are Storytelling creatures. We make sense of the world through stories. But we also have the ability to hear a story and say “hey I relate to that, that makes it important to me." - ‘Truth’s a Dog Must to Kennel’ by Tim Crouch has a single performer on a bare stage describing a performance of King Lear he’s (supposedly) watching on a VR headset to the audience. Beckett’s ‘Not I’ is nothing but a disembodied mouth speaking at the speed of thought. Even after loosing literally everything - EVERYTHING - Bisan Owda, is gathering people around a campfire to tell stories: https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&si=2vbvyqnJSPDUfjIH&v=0e78_dSqRFk&feature=youtu.be As usual I feel like I’ve veered wildly off-topic but I’m also trying to over-explain myself less, so the girls who get it, get it. ttfn x

Jane Allred

A couple (hopefully brief) thoughts: There's a quote from Derrida, from a posthumous publication which goes something like "the problem facing modern democracy is that the alternative to democracy may always be presented as a democratic alternative", and I think that's precisely the issue with marvel movies etc. People are starving spiritually for good stories, and those are the available ones, but the people don't have control over these stories. This is why I find fan fictioni fascinating, because its an attempt to gain control over the stories, but its also regulated by this notion of canon (the religious connotations are not a coincidence) provided either by a dictatorship of the corporation or the author. I'd be skeptical about that Jordan Peterson quote. I ask myself about his sources. Some of it rings true, but it seems like an overgeneralization and a flattening. From the bit I've been blessed to understand about general plains/great lakes native culture, there's an element of spontaneity to recognition of elders, but there also tends to be a governing council who has authority in such matters. For example, clan mothers, who combine their expertise with the close knowledge of individuals that child-rearing and education brings, who have a strong role in determining elders.

benedict.m

VERY fascinating to see CJ evoking Dune here. I've been slowly marinating something I may write at some point about what we treat as inevitable and how that determines outcomes and identities. Lanier is heavily inspiring these ideas in the context of society and communication, and I've been drawing a lot of connections between Dune and Succession and Better Call Saul and Macbeth re: how people (in all these cases, white men with/seeking power) doom themselves to become villains by treating certain outcomes as inevitable. anyway now to spend too many words responding to CJ's very effective analytics-boosting call to action: I was born in '97, which I often see cited as the cutoff point between Millennials and Gen Z, so I could kind of go either way. But because I have a lot of older siblings, because I didn't get a smartphone until my senior year of high school, because I am a later adoptee of digital culture rather than truly native to it, I feel more aligned with the Millennial end of things than that of Gen Z, and I largely feel glad about that. I'm glad that most of my early development was at a time when my greatest exposure to digital environments was weird flash games on the internet. I'm glad that I spent my childhood reading and watching movies and playing outside, that my mom didn't let us have videogame consoles until I was in middle school. But I also spent a lot of high school and even college feeling incredibly out-of-sync with my peers. I felt like everyone around me was fluent in several unique internet dialects that I had very little understanding of. Instagram was a different set of norms and structures than Tumblr, which were different from those of Facebook, which were different from the various dialects of simple text communication, which I was also unfamiliar with. That's not to say I didn't use these things--I had a desperate need to express myself and a weird sense of humor and a desire to be popular--but I always had some awareness that I wasn't using them 'right.' I always had a sneaking suspicion that someone on the other side of the screen was cringing at me. And over time, I became much more of a lurker. I preemptively judged myself constantly and basically felt like it was better not to try to express myself online, rather than risk doing it 'imperfectly.' ALL THIS IS TO SAY, this is the first online space in my life that I've consistently put a large part of myself into. It's the first online space where I've 1) seriously tried to be a person, 2) gotten to 'know' a few people's names and writing styles and personalities, and 3) felt hardly any external judgement or pressure to perform. And yet. (Confession incoming:) Sometimes I check back on KTI posts to see how many likes my comment has compared to other people's. Sometimes I feel disappointed if I think I said smart shit but my thoughts aren't sparking as much discussion as other people's. My ego gets bruised. I get insecure. Now, part of this is normal healthy human stuff: it's good if I only post when I feel I have something real to say. It's good to care about saying things that genuinely resonate with people. It's good that sometimes the other people in this space make me feel dumb because they're cool and smart and articulate! But it's really fascinating to observe in myself that even in this unusual online space--one that's relatively small, where there is no real external reward for 'performing successfully,' where my natural tendencies to be way too intellectual and wordy are not treated as abnormal--I still am sometimes reduced to something less than full personhood. Patreon still displays like counts. It's still imperfect at displaying multiple simultaneous threads of discussion. This space still involves *some* amount of self-curation. Is that bad? Doesn't all human communication involve some translation from my thoughts to my words? Isn't there always a small and bottomless gap of unknowability between me and other people? Doesn't being a person sometimes involve feeling not entirely like a person? So I have no answer to the scale out of ten. I think it would be weird if you lived every bit of your life at a 10/10 on the conscious personhood scale. I think I might not like being around someone like that all the time. I do, occasionally, benefit from spending some time completely overstimulated and unconscious of my Self. I do, occasionally, benefit from letting myself yell at random people in my car as if I'm the center of the universe. Occasionally. This makes me think of Jenny Odell's ideas about the value of consistently returning to the world. Spending time away, for the purpose of returning better. I think this applies to that 10/10 personhood: complete consciousness, flow state, God, whatever you know it as. Our job is not to spend every moment of our life in that place, because we can't. Our job is to return as often as we can, and if possible to use the time we spend being 'less conscious'/'less human' at least being kind to ourselves, not judging ourselves for our imperfection, and preparing in some way to Return. Lastly I'll just say, as much as I have sometimes imagined a more democratic version of this community, I'm glad that's not what it is. We were each brought here by CJ, and it makes sense for us to be kept here by CJ, and organized loosely around their work, their ideas, their curation, their Self. The forum of oud players would not function so beautifully if they just started talking about anything. A community is held together by a shared artistic/philosophical love, a shared alignment toward a subject, and as weird as it may be for CJ, given that they also are a participant here, CJ is the subject around which we all orbit. But another function that you serve here, CJ (feels werid to address directly but whatever ur just a person), is being the first through the gate, the first to risk themselves. If you just posted "Chapter 3, go!" without sharing your own thoughts, I personally would have a much harder time risking myself in that way. The fact that I can read your sometimes brilliant, sometimes half-formed and poetic, usually vulnerable words first, helps me trust myself to speak. the author is dead, long live the author!!

Aris

I'm going to say on the person scale, I feel at about a 6 today. I finished reading the chapter and am digesting, but I wanted to share an interaction with my grandma that happened this weekend: I was reading You Are Not a Gadget in the car and my grandma asked what I was reading about. I did a quick explanation of the philosophical structure of the internet that led to the advertiser model and social media being centered around reactivity instead of thoughtfulness. She replied, "Wow, that's heavy. Let's talk about how beautiful that tree looks right there!" and she pointed to a tree in spring bloom that was planted at the red light we were sitting at. I loved this response because in order to avoid the existential crisis that could arise from engaging in this conversation, she pointed to something tangible and beautiful for us to look at together. It really fit in perfectly with a lot of what I've been thinking about with regards to how I spend my time online and how I can re-invest my time away from the internet in meaningful ways. In this very short interaction, my grandma came to the conclusion that many of us online have been coming to: being present with the living world around us is a salve to technological existential despair. The response was so immediate and wonderful that I laughed out loud. Of course, I want to appreciate the beauty of nature with my grandma. We spent the rest of the ride discussing the different trees we saw and figuring out which ones were blooming first. Spending time and attention with my elders is truly fulfilling.

RobinDH

To answer the question: I'm feeling a solid three, didn't really get anything done today that I wanted to. It's likely my current ailment has contributed so take it with a pinch of salt. Now, on CJ's Love Is Blind quandary, apologies for a probable (definite) lack of coherency and structure ― I'm very sick at the moment: WRT art, I basically follow Sturgeon's Law: 90% of everything is crap. some of the good stuff rises to the top but most needs to be searched for, which is basically the way it's always been. However, I've had a gut feeling that pop culture has been on a not-so-steady decline in quality since the nineties for a while; that the good art is sinking. It's a feeling I can't quite shake, despite some logical evidence to the contrary. The common counter to this is the fact that there has always been bad pop culture, most of it just hasn't stood the test of time. I think there's truth to that――it's definitely important to avoid that line of thinking――but I don't think it goes the whole way. Is there any uber-popular art being made to today that's on, say, Shakespeare's or Dostoevsky's or Chekhov's level? Honestly, I don't think so. I think there's contemporary art on that level for sure, but it's all pretty obscure. Recently I've been getting into Polish poetry (I'm half Polish), and I was recently struck by this anecdote related in an essay by translator Clare Cavanagh (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?volume=185&issue=5&page=36): "When Zbigniew Herbert died a few years back [this essay is from 2005], [poets] Wisława Szymborska and [Czesław] Miłosz shared a limousine as they rushed from Krakow to Warsaw for the funeral. A policeman pulled them over for speeding, but when he caught sight of the Nobel laureates in the back seat, he flagged them on immediately. Poetry rarely supersedes speeding tickets in other nations, needless to say. Miłosz's ninetieth birthday was a national holiday, marked by firework displays over Wawel Castle, the ancient seat of Polish kings, and front-page coverage in national newspapers. His apartment building on Bogusławskiego Street in Krakow was swamped in bouquets, candles, and throngs of cheering well-wishers." Cavanagh goes on to explain that this "tells only half the story at best" but while it's true that they weren't universally revered and celebrated, their international celebrity is still pretty remarkable to me. It's pretty hard to imagine any poets (poets!) in the anglosphere past maybe the 80s achieving anything near this kind of status. There are other factors to consider obviously (Poland's size as a country is the big one) and there's a good chance I'm forgetting someone obvious but this still resonates with me. So, with all that said, here's a new angle, the popular art of Quality is getting worse and rarer. So the bad pop culture is about as bad, it's just the good art getting worse and harder to find that's dragging things down. Cue Mark Fisher, pretty difficult to disagree with IMO: "Imagine any record released in the past couple of years being beamed back in time to, say, 1995 and played on the radio. It’s hard to think that it will produce any jolt in the listeners. On the contrary, what would be likely to shock our 1995 audience would be the very recognisability of the sounds: would music really have changed so little in the next 17 years? Contrast this with the rapid turnover styles between the 1960s and the 90s: play a jungle record from 1993 to someone in 1989 and it would have sounded like something so new that it would have challenged them to rethink what music was, or could be." (Ghosts of My Life) "Children of Men connects with the suspicion that the end has already come, the thought that it could well be the case that the future harbors only reiteration and re-permutation. Could it be that there are no breaks, no 'shocks of the new' to come Such anxieties tend to result in a bi-polar oscillation: the 'weak messianic' hope that there must be something new on the way lapses into morose conviction that nothing new can ever happen. The focus shifts from the Next Big Thing to the last big thing ― how long ago did it happen and just how big was it?" (Capitalist Realism) Sorry again for how messy and likely incoherent this is. And for not really engaging with the book actually at hand. I'm having trouble thinking at the moment. Will hopefully write something more substantial and coherent for the next chapter.

Jay Oshiki

The opening of CJ’s essay makes me think about passive media consumption and how often I look at my watch list, usually movies that my friends tell me will make me Feel Something, and regularly (esp after a work day!) I go “meh, I don’t want to Feel Something rn” and I rewatch an episode of The Good Place, or I watch a cheesy rom com, or I watch the Try Guys. I’m (slightly) less interested in the question, “what is the quality of these other medias that I’m using for passivity?” and more interested in “what is stopping me from wanting to Feel Something rn?” The self-judgement/introspection comes from WHY and HOW we are intending to use/consume the media that we choose to consume. i.e., it’s not even that the media is trash, it’s that we’re using it because we don’t have the energy fire off the ol’ brain synapses by taking in new intriguing info and thinking new thoughts. It’s why I have such an admiration for the familiar, it’s why nostalgia is comforting. ok so cancel culture!!!! ugh death of the author art vs artist blah blah im bleeding from the ears. I truly feel like we were better off when we knew less about celebrities. Like cancel culture comes from a heightening of the pedestal that happened when social media made the personal lives and volunteered information from celebrities more accessible. The more parasocially we see celebrities the more we hold them to the same moral standards as our friends and ourselves. With callout posting, I think we’re looking for a grasp at Doing Something towards insurmountable systemic issues. I can’t make a noticeable dent in the climate crisis, but I can boycott a celebrity for wearing shein. AND I can post about it so that everyone knows I’m doing it, and that performance feels like it is Doing Something. The desire for Keanu Reeves Christ Figure might be a desire to believe in an accessible reality where these larger uncontrollable issues are not present. Or are, at least, controllable. It makes me think about how “fake” social performance comes from a lack of trust. I can use silly goofy shorthand with my friends bc I trust them to understand the meaning behind it; I don’t hold the same trust towards my supervisors at work so I perform professionalism. I don’t trust my opinions to be taken in good faith (!!! lot to unpack w that phrase!) on social media, so if I were to post them, they would need to be a carefully curated performance. CJ strives for authenticity, but their large crowd (not community) of YT viewers means there is less trust which means making cuts and edits to videos. There IS more trust within the community of Patreon, so we get to read awesome experimental confessional essays like this one. Still performance, but the trust in community creates the opportunities for vulnerability that make us feel slightly More Human.

Sol

Missed last week but now I'm caught up!! I dug this chapter much more. He's touching if ever so lightly on some things I want him to. I'm a deeply ideological reader approaching this, I realize, and I'm looking for certain things. Particularly, the Negative. The Internet is sold as an infinite supplier but the fact that we're the source is smuggled in with it, an ideology originating so it seems from Silicon Valley's colonial roots. Deep in the design of the modern web is constant streams of content, expression, communication, exchange, but it is poor in negativity. Authenticity is a resource in these environments, which is encouraged and consumed. Authentic or otherwise, it is all lost in the deluge, indistinguishable from other cadences or else at the same level and subject to suspicion. I've always thought of trolling and so on as how a coyote will proverbially gnaw off one of its limbs to escape a trap- a feverish drive for death, silence, darkness, that is not satisfied because they are still producing more content for the positive process. Artists will always have that disappointing shithead inside because art is a negative process. If you're a marble sculptor what matters is the marble you carve away from the block to form the piece, maybe more than the marble the piece is made of; if you're a writer, you're drawing from personal experiences but isolating them, alienating them, to form something else. A director shows this and not that- and so on. Art is always formed in carving away, fragmenting, and isolating pieces. The Internet, and our modern liberal society in general, is deeply *aesthetic* in this way, yet it is not artistic. "When the audience is divided the artist is whole" (paraphrasing deeply from Oscar Wilde), so when the people are constantly trying to deploy parcels of themselves everywhere they can, they are trapped in the artifice of a hegemonic society. Art is the magic trick when something is broken and comes back together: we are sawed in two, but walk away whole, our watch is hit with a hammer and revealed undamaged. Cyber-social artifice keeps us hanging on for that "messianic" moment when we will be restored, satisfied, our debts payed, our kind honored, but it's always just around the corner. I'm an animist on some level, which is not opposed to humanism, but it's frustrated by it. It's just a matter of focus in these kinds of texts. The little turn I find missing is that the Noosphere, AI, etc, is awake, but not any more (and perhaps less) than anything else. Mud will hold and reproduce forms, wind will create novel ones, fire grows and dies. The human is the same on some level, but cybernetic totalism thinks this means that the human can be absently reproduced, that anything can be just reproduced because it's material. Materiality is extremely mysterious. My old job had a small flathead screwdriver that was very old, its handle sawed in half to fit tighter squeezed, and the steel of its shaft was soft as velvet from decades of hands smoothing and oiling it. I don't think ChatGPT will ever be as alive, if that's truly what I want to call it. Representations escape their signifiers like prodigal children, always, because they are a different thing categorically. Video game video essayist Jimmy McGee describes copy/paste as the fundamental verb of the computer (paraphrasing deeply), and this being the source of the most beautiful uses of the computer. I find this very compelling: electronic music, video games, digital media, these often need some different touch that separates them from previous media to really get kicking. (Maybe this is lock-in associated with the file storage system, but could digital systems swing very far from digital reproduction and representation?) Distortion is how the digital gets its soul, maybe. There's a yearning for the aesthetics of electronic distortion (CRT scanlines, chromatic aberation, etc) that I think points toward how to make the digital fit into our world. It has to *be itself*, and we need to let it go as well, not merge with it. Hopefully I'm not too ahead of myself since there's plenty more book to be had. Went off on a tangent but I've been awake since 4:30 so fuck it, play ball.

mouse

here are my thoughts about chapter 3 this week! (also yeah so I started writing a comparison between What We Owe The Future by William MacAskill and You Are Not A Gadget and it grew past a rant of 4k words, and then I got sucked into a rabbit hole researching longtermism and effective altruism and haven't been able to emerge yet and I'm still writing it so that's just like. a side project now I guess lmao? anyway idk what I'm going to do with that. listening to endless podcasts and scrolling forums and reading anything I can get my hands on, and I'm bothering everyone in my life bc I can't stop talking about it so whoops🫠) anyway here's my thoughts about yanag for this week lol "Some say that doubters of the one true path, like myself, are like the shriveled medieval church officials who fought against poor Johannes Gutenberg's press. We are accused of fearing change, just as the medieval Church feared the printing press. (We might also be told that we are the sort who would have repressed Galileo or Darwin.)" page 46 I think this says a lot about the vacuous nature of short form content and how it sucks away nuance from bigger picture concepts. it's kind of a refusal to understand that the critique isn't as simple as saying that "progress is bad." we see this with crypto too: "if you're against change, you're against the future, therefore you're suppressing change. this change that we're trying to introduce is to fight against the failings of the system." like, no, the critique is about how this kind of tech has real consequences on real life people who don't have the same life as you. and also how the systems they are trying to introduce are no better than or even worse than the system that exists now. uhh not to bring in What We Owe The Future but in the tech world there is a real lack of understanding that not everyone lives the same life, and if you don't live the same life as these people, then *you're* doing something wrong. the idea of calling it the "blandest possible bible" is extremely accurate. quantity is valued as quality over everything else, and oh my god, how bland is that? anyway I'm not going to go too far on this bc I've gone on for 4k words in my notes and I don't want to clog this comment up. "Doctrinaire web 2.0 enthusiasts only perceived that Updike was being sentimental about an ancient technology." page 46 yep, people who are big in the tech industry are very focused on removing sentimentality from value. that's effective altruism, baybee. "Any singular, exclusive book, even the collective one accumulating in the cloud, will become a cruel book if it is the only one available." yep, propaganda "This desire for absolute order usually leads to tears in human affairs, so there is a historical reason to distrust it. Materialist extremists have long seemed determined to win a race with religious fanatics: Who can do the most damage to the most people?" the problem with the tech industry's need to develop endless hype is because if their frankly conservative and even authoritarian ideas and plans are couched in "liberal" rhetoric it doesn't seem harmful. sorry but that's effective altruism uh anyway "An underlying problem is that technical people overreact to religious extremists. If a computer scientist says that we don't understand how the brain works, will that empower an ideologue to then claim that some particular religion has been endorsed? This is a real danger. but overcharging by technical people is the greater danger, since we end up confusing ourselves." I think this is an interesting problem when philosophy introduced by tech people is underdeveloped and vague but very very convincing. when possibly inflammatory questions are asked in vague ways and are left unanswered, it becomes the "responsibility" of the followers to answer it themselves. and that easily creates an increasingly chaotic reaction. "If the troll is anonymous and the target is known, then the dynamic is even worse than an encounter between anonymous fragmentary pseudo-people. That's when the hive turns against personhood." yeah, we see people who have deeper more insidious motives and who mean actual violence and harm co-op mob mentality reactions and confusion alllll the time. "The genetic aspects of behavior that have received the most attention (under rubrics like sociobiology and evolutionary psychology) have tended to focus on things like gender differences and mating behaviors, but my guess is that clan orientation and it's relationship to violence will turn out to be the most important study." yyep uhh longtermists are very into behaviors and biological functions that can be explained by evolutionary science. "Sites like eBay and Second Life give hints about how design can promote a middle path." that reminds me of Nguyen's discussion about how game designers have responsibilities in their designs. "The reasons I call this an expression of ideology is that there is a strenuous constructed lattice of arguments that decorate this murderous behavior so that it looks grand and new. If the same researches had done something similar without digital technology, they would at the very least have lost their jobs.... These are doable projects, but because they are not digital, they don't support an illusion of ethics." just want to mention here that the philosophy called Population Ethics is talked about in Very interesting ways in What We Owe The Future. I'm sorry to be. so focused on this other book and how closely it connects to YANAG. I'm extremely one-track mind currently🫠 anyways, I'm finding Lanier's work incredible and fascinating!! good book!!

margaret (formerly Samson)

I think i agree with CJ - something is There about the concept of Universal Basic Content. Religious storytelling, for instance, is a sort of ancient Universal Basic Content. It’s a foundational story that the whole culture is telling itself, and upon which our conversations can build. The Monomyth isn’t the only story out there, but it does the job mostly well for most people, most of the time. If that’s not a good enough starting point, what is? Also it’s not like Mass Media is always shitty trash with no Quality. Marvel movies are often good - and when they aren’t, people bitch about it (which i guess is another social need being met - the need to bitch and bond). Twilight is (in its way) a vessel of Quality. Bluey is GOOD (i’d love to see Implicitly Pretentious do a vid about Bluey’s episode called Space - it’s basically screaming the Mnemonic Imagination at me every time i see it). Avatar The Last Airbender is Good. Noah Kahan’s music is Good. Yeah, these things are also corporate mass media, but the Corporate is not the sole reason they exist and are loved like with the Fast and Furious movies or the Facebook Metaverse. We can feel the difference - some media is predominantly Art, and some media is predominantly a Product. I think it’s also worth noting that some things are still harmful, and some cravings are still manufactured or twisted towards unhealthy things. Millions of people have taken up cigarettes- an addiction which undoubtedly starts with a valid Need (for novelty, mouthfeel, nicotine, social approval, whatever other reasons people start smoking idk). The initial need is met via a less-than-Quality fix, and then over time cigarettes balloon into a cancerous cloud in their body and life. So yeah, each individual cigarette meets a need, but where does the need come from? Is the cigarette the best way to meet that need? A long time ago, i saw some tiktok of a dude who was sharing a tip for success in quitting smoking. Basically, he suggested only avoiding the part of the habit that was harmful, in this case, the cigarette itself. But you can still carry around a rectangle in your pocket, and pull something cylindrical out of that rectangle, and put that cylinder in your mouth, and inhale. He found some sort of straw or something and shoved mint-flavored toothpicks in it, which also added sensory input on the inhale. And it was working for him - the habit wasn’t just about the cigarettes, it was about all the different sensory needs that he was soothing via the cigarettes. He still got to regularly go outside and suck on a cylinder, it just wasn’t giving him cancer anymore. It was good enough to break the addiction. Or take caffeine and sugar. My husband often gets the craving for a Red Drink. He says there was some now-discontinued drink named after a nascar driver that used to be Perfect for the craving, and that the red Rockstar ones are almost Perfect. But energy drinks also have like 54g of sugar in them, and much caffeine. And husband now says that water is too boring, which, what a loss for him. These are some details about this pattern of consumption that maybe indicate that soothing the craving for Red Drink with a Red Drink may be a bit Problematic. Or at the very least, it may not be the healthiest way for him. Is that really worth his energy right now? Maybe he should be taking better care of his body, sleeping enough, exercising, eating healthy, etc, such that the craving for a Red Drink is soothed (or soothable by higher quality beverages). But that shit all takes money, time, effort, energy. He doesn’t have that. Is it really the highest priority? I mean maybe. But maybe not. It’s certainly not a Given Fact that this is the highest priority for everyone across the world. Maybe the democratic solution is having a Coffee/caffeine norm in all our cultures, and maybe the trade offs are reasonable enough that we don’t need to rethink it too much now. Perhaps Marvel Movies and Love is Blind are the media equivalent of having coffee stations in every office and gas station. We can push for higher Quality coffee, and the market might even result in better coffee everywhere, but it’s too much to ask of everyone to quit caffeine and be Fully Thoughtful and Sober. There’s High Quality, and then there’s Good Enough. So bringing in Lanier. Lanier spends page 49 criticizing the dude who says “maybe lets just all spend 1% of our Screentime on something better”. And I was like “why are you anti-small steps to advance the field?” And he answered my question, at least kind of, with this response: “What matters instead, i believe, is a sense of focus, a mind in effective concentration, and an adventurous individual imagination that is distinct from the crowd.” (p. 50) And… yeah. Maybe if we all spent 1% of our time on something more constructive, maybe some of that time would be focused, concentrated, quality time. But it’s not the only way that time could be spent. Could just as easily be smoked away. Good point. Where i disagree, I think, is where he starts simping for the individual contribution. He focuses very hard on being a sole contributor. The problem with this is that part of being human is to need community and to define ourselves, at least in part, by our groups. Dr. Fatima's video yesterday ended with a whole section of reminder that we need to work together to be productive. At one point she phrased it like "you shouldn't try to change the world by yourself, you should work to support the people who are already doing it", and that feels very true! Another (Corporatese) way to say that is “don’t reinvent the wheel”. If we're going to channel 1% of people's time and energy into something better, it will be far more likely to bear fruit if we're not also telling them to go be an island. “If you read something written by someone who used the term “single” in a custom-composed, unique sentence, you will inevitably get a first whiff of the subtle experience of the author, something you would not get from a multiple choice database. Yes, it would be a tiny bit more work for everyone, but the benefits of semi-automated self presentation are illusory. If you start out by being fake, you’ll eventually have to put in twice the effort to undo the illusion if anything good is to come of it.” (p. 52) Is this a realistic way to expect everyone to approach the internet? With custom-composed, unique sentences? That is a significantly higher barrier to entry than we currently have. — A note on spreadsheets: “There would be trade offs. Adopting a metaphysically modest approach would make it harder to use database techniques to create instant lists of people who are, say, emo, single, and affluent. But i don’t think that would be such a great loss. A stream of misleading information is no asset.” (pg. 53) This paragraph reminded me of the fact that Accounting and the Spreadsheet itself have roots in American Slavery. This is a fact that makes me feel a bit icky. Spreadsheets are where i spend a lot of my time at work. Usually I’m just looking at “who is assigned to this project” or “which projects are active”, but still. it a spreadsheet. And it useful! I have become very good at using them to take care of the needs of my superiors and my userbase, and i like being good at using them. But why were spreadsheets used? They were a practical way of figuring out how much value you could press out of, well, people. The point of that technology wasn’t to improve the world or the lives of those who the spreadsheet touched - the point was to reduce everything to a simple question of inputs and outputs, and to play the game of “how can i get the most out of doing the least.” Having that memory resurface in connection to this book gives me the feeling that i’m watching a horror movie and there’s something malevolent in the basement. But it’s not the spreadsheet’s fault. Its the evil of slavery - the spreadsheet was just a tool used in the process of that evil. And also, Spreadsheets aren’t going away. Data isn’t going away. The question isn’t whether data is being captured, it’s which data, and in what forms, and to what end. Spreadsheets (and other ways of having data) signal process things. The data that is collected indicates the data that is valued. If the data isn’t valuable, it isn't captured. So the people designing the database (and the system that captures that data) need to be extremely careful about the kind of signal processing that they do. — Lanier said “there’s no need for an imposed, official category” (p. 52) except maybe no? Clearly there is something about the adoption of systems like facebook or tinder that suggests that even if the category isn’t necessary, it’s doing A Job to at least SOME OF an extent. It’s good enough for most people to put themselves into a Box. People (generally) fit onto the gender binary when compelled. Most christians i know are content to say their denomination rather than getting into their beliefs about baptism and predestination unless the conversation invites it. There’s an extent to which putting ourselves in categories online is like the small talk that happens when you meet someone in person. “Where do you live? What kind of work do you do? Do you have any family? What do you think of the weather?” Basic, boring questions that allow you to send basic boring information to the other person so that you and they can start to get a feel for the relationship. We use the basic categories in the hopes of being found and received. We have ALWAYS had to start with the basic and the boring, and then moved on to the Deeper Human Stuff. We ALWAYS have to reduce ourselves when we first encounter others. Maybe we used to do this less often when we lived in small hunter-gatherer communities, but that’s not the world we live in now. I mean, fuck, when i tell normal people about THIS book club, i usually say “oh it’s on the patreon page for this youtube person whose work i love- they’re always off on some sort of philosophy and art topic, and we’ve been reading books that have us meditating on technology and humanity and life.” That’s a SUMMARY. It’s basically all signal words, it’s not the full complexity of whats happening here. We don’t just read books, we write pages of responses. CJ isn’t just a youtuber. We’re not just reading about technology and humanity, we’re reading specifically Kill All Normies and You Are Not A Gadget and How To Do Nothing and Braiding Sweetgrass. Even the titles of those books are surface level - you have to actually have read the book to know what the title is referring to. But I use these signal words and labels because they are good enough to get the basic point across quickly, without wasting their time or mine. If the words i say pique their interest enough to ask a follow-up, then i know they’ve found something, and i know i’ve found something interesting to them. I am once again pulled back to the bit of the Stranger Things vid where CJ notes “It’s impossible for those people [on shrooms] to effectively articulate the experience to a person who hasn’t experienced it, because a word, or a concept, is inherently definition. It’s difference, it’s cutting things off from the pure Oneness, it Limits it in some capacity so that it can be articulated. Language and concepts are essentially about definition and difference - specificity and exclusion for the sake of pointing at one particular bit of reality instead of all of reality, which would be USELESS. [cue the ducks with flappers on their feet.]” (Minute 45:00) Yes, having a dropdown in social media is a limitation. Yes, calling someone a friend on facebook does reduce the idea of friendship in that system, i guess. But i have the same question of “how good a friend is this” with my in-person friends too? I don’t gauge based on whether she says i’m her friend or not. I gauge based on the undefinable quality of the friendship - the vibe and energy and fun of our time spent together and the ways we show up in each others’ lives. And as with Universal Basic Content, sometimes Good Enough is ok. If we’re going to have an online space for people to prance about, and if its going to be something Universal, then we maybe do have to be ok with Good Enough - we have to meet people where they are. “It COULD be left to people to communicate what they want to say about their relationships in their own way.” (p. 52, caps mine) But (in the example of single people), often people communicate because they want to be found. So this adds in the question of “how do i make myself findable?” We saw what happened with SEO, is that really what we want everywhere? Maybe the Universal Basic Internet can be Good Enough with just a few basic options to allow people to have foundational data and move forward from there. —--------------- So. I need to explain this to myself. Why in the FUCK did i go off on that RAMPAGE basically defending facebook’s decision to have people fill out a form full of some Basic Info so that they can exist in an online space? I had other thoughts in response to this chapter ready to go on saturday night, and then this fucking topic has said “nope!” And…. I don’t know. I’ve now spent like 8 hours writing and rewriting and trying to figure this out, why the fuck am i stuck here is this even useful Like, its like i’m trying to argue that something Facebookey (but without its other flaws of addiction and ads, etc) is Good Enough, the same way that it’s also maybe Good Enough for most people to see a Marvel Movie, or enjoy Love is Blind. Maybe we just need a foundation that isn’t totally trash. But also I genuinely agree with Lanier, that this sort of thing does crush us into the form of a facebook or twitter user without leaving the full space for individuality. So i guess maybe the next question is: do we need to have something Facebook shaped in our existence? Again, taking out the question of how is it funded and is it designed to be addictive, etc. We all started using social media for a reason - there was a Need that was being fulfilled. That seems to have happened somewhat naturally - like, i joined facebook because it let me join the high school Drumline group and know when practices and get-togethers were happening. Need met. So then the next question, like with the need we have for quick morning energy, is: was Social Media the Highest Quality solution to meet that need? Should we be ok with the social media equivalent of coffee in every gas station? And i think i’m leaning towards no, but maybe i’m just leaning towards it because of how our specific social media companies have behaved. Because we CANT take out whether it has addictive qualities. It doesn’t matter what form it takes, or how benevolently designed, The internet will be addicting because it contains other people. Like, when we think about the internet and our addiction to our phones, we’re addicted to the phones, at the core, because we’re addicted to each other. Big Corn figured out how to refine corn into corn syrup, via excessive processing and twisting the very nature of what a Corn is, and created a highly addictive substance. We did the same with Cocaine and White Flour and probably lots of things. It’s like Big Tech figured out how to do the same thing but with humans - social media is the refinery that presses and alchemizes our very humanity to the point where it squeezes out the addictive, syrupy memes and jokes, and ignores all the boring fibrous relationship-maintenance and touching of grass. With coffee, we can demand better Quality. With corn, we can avoid the refined stuff and try to get closer to the Real Thing. With cigarettes, they’re bad enough that we should avoid them altogether. So which is social media? —----- I think i'm past the brain blockage that had me stuck writing 6 pages for no reason. Feel free to read it if you enjoy that sort of thing. At least i feel like myself again. Also some other lines that hit me nicely: (p. 50) “There are at least two ways to believe in the idea of quality” just JAMMED me back into ZMM. I couldn’t help but read that line with the voice of the ZMM audiobook narrator. Pg. 61 “What i’m saying, though, is that the user interface designs that arise from the ideology of the computing cloud make people – all of us – less kind. Trolling is not a string of isolated incidents, but the status quo in the online world.” —Ok yes, but like… are we SURE about the causality there? I wish he’d expand on the mechanism he’s seeing there. I think he tried to, but i can’t totally see it. Pg. 69 “Most people are aware of the difference between reality and database entries when they file taxes.” —godDAMN CJ thank you for re-linking the Seduction of Clarity lecture - i finally actually listened to it, and i listened to it like 3 times, and i feel like C. Thi. Nguyen is just leaping off the page. Pg. 71 “what is communicated between people eventually becomes their truth” —What a fucking SENTENCE give him a MEDAL —---------- As a last note, page 72’s discussion of the oud forum feels like a mirror being held up to our community here. I felt the deep anxiety of “any special little place on the internet can be ruined if it gets too much attention” (pg. 71). As the Peterson Video Drop approaches, i’m feeling a bit of apprehension re: the influx of people who will join the patreon. Book club has already felt a bit bigger and harder for me to digest - this book had 80+ comments on its first post in the first couple of days, where Kill All Normies had like 30-40. But, it’s not right to hoard an Eden. we should create heaven, not create heaven and then keep everyone out. And anyway, I came last year as one of those New People. Everyone here did. So the fear is probably unwarranted anxiety. And speaking of Eden, it really impacted me to read of “the particular magical person who tended the oud forum” (pg 72). I like that Lanier pointed out the value of one passionate person’s consistent efforts, and i like that he used a Gardening term. It’s an echo of the spiritual significance of our commonplace lives and our everyday tasks. Also reminds me of the Follow Your Bliss thing. See yall soon <3

Maggie Moffat

just caught up. found the book at my local library, too cool ! anyways my only thing i have to add is that i i'm constantly monitoring my impulse to post about this book on insta lol. my projected digital self must be seen as clever or why read at all ! ay ay ay

phil e the theyby

I think I’m at a 7 right now. I feel connected to ideas and I feel like myself in how I’m engaging with those ideas, but I’m also vaguely disconnected from the world at large and mildly connected to the other people here. A big theme I found myself thinking about in both CJ’s post and the chapter is the need for a grounded sense of direction and purpose. Do we fundamentally understand what we’re aiming to do with our actions, and are we being honest with ourselves and with others about the consequences of our actions? Where collaboration becomes really important in designing things (for most of us) is because other people help ground us in consequences of our actions we may not have considered. The ideology of folks working towards The Singularity is a problem precisely because the tech sphere see their “genius” vision of the future as beyond critique or feedback from people with other ways of thinking about things. When you’re dealing with really complex systems that impact a lot of lives (like government), you need to be able to draw in a lot of different perspectives, or you’ll end up harming the very folks whose perspectives weren’t considered. I see this as being the fundamental problem behind a lot of what Lanier is discussing; Silicon Valley folks committed to this ideology without actually listening to any other perspectives. The role of elders in society isn’t having the singular genius vision of things; it’s that they understand the wide range of different perspectives needed, and can integrate them for the common good. In my mind, that’s what signal processing is (though I may be misunderstanding the concept): developing a space or a message based on the integration of disparate perspectives and information. I think a major problem with modern society is that it’s so complex that no one actually understands things well enough to be an elder to the world at large. People can hold that role in individual communities, but when you start talking globally, it gets messy. But as a species who typically evolved in communal groups with elders, we long for that. I think a lot of celebrity worship, and the resulting cancel culture, emerged because celebrities we see as “admirable” are the closest approximation of elders any of us have. They’re the exemplars we’re supposed to aspire towards, the same way an elder is, and so we want them to be exemplars of moral virtue. The problem is that they’re in no way qualified for that (nor did most of them claim to be). Tech bros meet our cultural stereotype of “intelligence,” so they’re the other set of people lots of folks look to as elders, despite them being totally ignorant to the human condition. Certain folks direct similar reverence at CEOs. I guess all that to say, I think the fundamental role that elders play is actually listening to people and integrating different perspectives. In my mind, the reason this space works isn’t just because CJ’s super smart or something, it’s because (as well as I can glean) they’ve been attuned to a wide range of different ideas, perspectives, and ways of being, as well as their own internal experience, throughout their life. All of that is integrated, consciously or not, into the design of this space. Hooray, I’m caught up! On to Chapter 4 🙂

reva

i just had a thought reading cj's thoughts about obscurity's role in internet communities. places like this patreon sometimes feel contradictory to me, because they feel really private even though they technically aren't. like, i feel as though i can talk here freely and that just a few select people will read my words, even though there are thousands of people with access to my words and anybody just joining the patreon tomorrow might happen upon my comment just because they're scrolling. but that *probably* won't happen, especially if i'm commenting at the same time as lots of other people and my personal contributions become obscured to somebody skimming the thread. i think this combination of publicness and obscurity is what makes the best internet communities – everybody has the ability to join a community, but only some people will ever come across it. this reliance on obscurity to keep my words somewhat private and personal in a public-private space like this can be a little bit nerve-wracking sometimes. but i think acknowledging that obscurity is the driving force behind my privacy is important because it keeps me aware of the truth. people who subscribe to the ideology of violation aren't willing to accept that obscurity is what keeps people safe, maybe because it makes them a little bit nervous to realize that they are never 100% safe from harm. saluting my fellow late venturers into the book club threads o7

halley

I've been haunted by this question of "how much do you feel like a person right now" but I'm at a loss of how to rank myself on a scale of 1-10, and I'm actually not convinced that this is the right question. should I rank myself overall, in this moment, or compared to other humans? where do I find my humanity- is it in connecting with other humans or doing things humans have done since forever, since before industry and modern technology- like watching a fire or looking at the stars? what I'm finding more useful is asking myself: what makes me feel more or less human? when I'm trying to fall asleep next to my partner and we're both on our phones I feel less human, and when we eat together without needing to watch anything I feel more human. sometimes the art I consume makes me feel more human, but some makes me feel like I'm slipping into zombie brain. acting on the urge to create makes me feel human, as does doing hard physical work and interacting with the more-than-human world. my favorite part of the day is having my afternoon turkish coffee and dedicating that time to being present and reading or journaling and putting away my to-do list and phone. I really enjoy trying to read my coffee grounds, looking for the shapes or symbols that jump out at me. I'm not trained to do it 'correctly' and I don't have any illusions about being able to read my 'future' but I find it a really nice exercise to practice honing my intuitive vision- like looking for shapes in the clouds or interpreting tarot cards. It makes me feel very human. I'm happy to hear the deleted scenes of CJ's thoughts about taste, which I think is a fascinating subject to explore. I don't think one needs to be rich or privileged necessarily to afford good taste, I think it has more to do with breadth of exposure to a variety of media. you have to know the depths and heights to judge the mediocre as such even if you enjoy it too. taste is cultivated and developed but it is also something innate that people either have or don't. I find myself disagreeing quite strongly with this statement: "Bespoke, healthy high Quality products are more expensive, exclusive and are less pragmatic." mcdonald's is only cheap depending on how you phrase the question/criteria. homegrown and home cooked food is by far the cheapest, best quality, healthiest, and most accessible food there is, but it does take time. when time has become money then that could be too expensive, but if you've got little money and nothing but time it's the most pragmatic option. I could go on and on about this in relation to folk art but I’m afraid I won't be able to stop myself if I get started! It seems a crucial distinction between a crowd and a community is organization. I liked phil e's comment linking elders to celebrities, and the critiques towards elder worship and lanier's praise of individuality. I feel there is a hunger for certain roles that people can turn to for authority- and not the type that needs to be enforced by intimidation, but rather in the sense that David Foster-Wallace uses the term, a reverence based on willingness and trust. I'm reminded of the indigenous social structures described in The Dawn of Everything with chiefs whose power comes from the trust of their community in their wisdom. another term I really like is facilitator, which I think is an essential role to preserve and encourage agency- not to direct or teach but rather to guide and encourage, to bring out what is already present in some raw form. like an artist who can't fully take credit for their work, describing themself as a vessel for the will of the materials and some kind of god-ness. when I work with kids I see myself as a facilitator because the success of the activities is completely dependent on their willing participation, and I am always happily surprised by their creativity and contributions. it is an active exchange of energies as much as between an audience and (live) performer. it's funny to me how they'll ask to play certain games that they already know because they need me to lead and decide what we'll do together, or else it would descend into chaos. they're not able to organize themselves into group activities without me at the helm. this concept seems to sit somewhere between the individual and collective, and I think it is what bewitched me to theatre early on- a play needs a director, a playwright, a producer, the organization and roles that make everything come together, but the production itself has this quality of magic because it's an experience composed of so much more than any individual actor or artist could create alone. since reality tv has been brought up I'm going to take this as an opportunity to go on a tangent about my latest guilty tv obsession since having access to satellite TV, 90 day fiance! I definitely thought it was trashy before I actually watched any of it (I mean sure, much of it is) but there's something in that raw realness of reality TV that is deeply revealing and enlightening in a way that curated content isn't. watching with this chapter in mind I was thinking of how much social media mediates modern relationships, with the importance people place on changing their relationship status or posting a picture together. most of the relationships start out with the couples talking online for months or even years before meeting in person, and the difference between their expectations and reality when they do meet usually leads to a lot of conflict from disappointment and nuances in personhood that can't be expressed online or through video chat, no matter how long it's been. in the last ep I watched someone found out they were being catfished after building a relationship with someone for two years and there was a moment when they threw their phone and said something like 'it's all because of this damn thing' and it was such a KTI moment, I was like yessss it really is! even though it's not the most high quality art it's fun and brings me connection because it's something my partner and I enjoy watching together. which brings me back to my humanness conundrum, because it seems like watching screens together is the default way to spend time with people now. do I feel more human watching TV with someone I love, or doing non-digital things alone? when I'm around people and they're all on their phones, am I acting more human than them or less for not being connected to some something else? thinking of Matthew M's comment, there's only so far we can get with our online communities and written words. we need physical presence to really know people, to complete the circle and fill the gaps with nuance and body language and things that can't be put into words. the One Collective Book concept made me think of the idea of a universal language. so often my partner has tried explaining concepts that don't have any equivalent in english and complained about the poverty of expression in the english language, the inevitable aesthetic losses that come with translation. (I like the idea of aesthetic losses and victories from the first chapter, I keep using those concepts) I can't believe I've heard otherwise reasonable people argue that it would be better if everyone just spoke the same language because the colonial biases already pushing in that direction is so tragic and obvious to me. I also believe that the internet emerging and developing in the english speaking world has created a linguistic monopoly that permeates the digital world with this bias and creates conditions that make it necessary to be fluent in english to use and get the most out of the technology and access information. I'm curious if the book will explore the role of language and word-based mediums permeating the design of the internet. it reminded me of an uzbek artist I found on instagram (aziza.kadyri) who is training her own custom AI on traditional central asian embroidery and images to examine the western biases inherent in AI's output and training data. 'they tend their doppelgangers fastidiously... insincerity is rewarded, while sincerity creates a lifelong taint." I feel like I'm getting left behind or perhaps leaving myself behind by not being better at promoting myself online or willing to make myself into a brand. I cringe whenever I see artists I admire contort their work and self by following the latest trend to game the algorithm. I'm unwilling to do the dance of being an artist online because I simply don't have energy for inauthentic expression, and even if I did, sustaining that for success sounds like a nightmare to me. I'm pocketing a lot of these new phrases like safety in obscurity, drive by anonymity, cybernetic totalism, etc. Lanier's really good at coining (or using?) new terms, they feel useful and catchy. there's so much in these chapters I think could spend another week or two just on this one but I want to keep going, I'm hoping at some point I can catch up and join the discussion on time!

Kiara

“What matters instead, I believe, is a sense of focus, a mind in effective concentration, and an adventurous individual imagination that is distinct from the crowd.” God, i love this book. I love how it massages my brain, it finds the knots i've been looking for. Technologists SO DO idolize the collective crowd. We SO DO think that if we can accumulate everything, average it into mush, it will be transcendental. But “garbage in, garbage out.” We need more people who have the time, the energy, the resources to Dedicate themselves to something, to stand behind what they are saying, to have the concentration to make progress through! I think this taps into one of my problems with AI, it just averages everything. There is no one to hold accountable for what it says, cause it just averages everything thats ever been said. It will always give you the surface level or less. It will always give you what has already been described, thats how its made. The new generative AI at the top of google is accountable to no one, there is not correcting a mistake it makes. All its mistakes are transient, there is nothing to hold onto. The same can be said with the stupid ass SEO Slurry articles, no one will be held accountable for them. Same with the drive by anonymity. How can progress be made when the discussion disintegrates in your hands on every touch? “To have a substantial exchange, however, you need to be fully present.” How can anyone be present when the way we digest information is so transient? The fundamental design is so cut up into bits! In the end, everything I have ever tried to express is this: “It’s the people who make the forum, not the software.” The design can sway the people, sure, but it’s the people that make the platform. Without the people there is no reason to be there. I need to repeat this phrase to myself over and over. As I embark on whatever journey I will have as a computer scientist, i need to remember that it is all about People. In response to Tearing Down Our Statues: HOLY FUUUCK SO TRUE! There is this worm in my brain that I think I got from tumblr. It feels that if i Judge Everything Morally, and then make the Right Moral Judgements, that suddenly makes Me Morally Right. But im just fuckin sitting here JUDGING PEOPLE on my high ass horse! What the hell! There was this Little Joel video about a mom who doesnt play with here kids, and my brain immediatly was all judging her and shit (as if i have kids, as if i know what her life is like, as if i am a moral arbiter of truth). Then Little Joel comes in and is like “Bro, step back! Why are you judging this mom!” And goes onto discuss more details about this specific video, but It hit me. Step Back. Why Am I Judging This Mom? And i dont really know why, but i think it was a game of Play in my brain where i could suddenly cosplay being a Better Mom Than Her. It is this knee jerk thing I have from being raised on tumblr. It a little Fun to judge people. It feels productive, like I am “advancing the discourse.” But sometimes i need to step back and realize I am being a Dick. I am huffing my own farts and believing that is Morally Correct. I need more room in my head for Messy people, because i know I don’t let Myself be messy. Sometimes things aren’t clear cut. I need to Breathe and accept that. Response to No Elders, No Culture, Only Justice: This is one of those bit of writing that i know I will need to read again. Its so true, the elders, the signal processing, the chicken and the egg, but I don’t feel it my bones yet and I know i need to. I need to hear this again and again. We Need Elders In Community. I really think there is value in repeating something to yourself. It helps it stick in your mind. I have been watching the same TED talk about Having Better Conversations every week, because I know I can Listen better. I need to practice being Present, and that TED talk reminds me to. So! I am gonna set a reminder in my phone to read this Again! Other key quotes: “Collectives can be just as stupid as any individual” “Without an independent press, composed of heroic voices, the collective becomes stupid and unreliable” “Information underrepresents reality.”

Teageen

I've been working on trying to sus out the balance point between acceptable levels of my time spent as a nonperson (good way of describing this feeling, I think. Maybe not the perfect description, but perhaps close). I'm not sure if there /is/ an acceptable amount of time to spend as a nonperson. But I've been using it as a symptom of an unmet need. There may be more fulfilling ways of giving myself whatever it is I need that the time spent as a nonperson seems to at least bandage (I'm not convinced that it actually solves the problem/needs the need)

Teageen

The bit under "Authoritarian Artistry vs. Socialist Servitude" is interesting to me as someone that has pretty staunchly thought for a while that 100% democracy doesnt actually seem that good of an idea. If someone's comprehension of a given subject matter is only like 40%, seems pretty unwise to let them make consequential decisions about it. It wouldn't sit right with most people to let someone who doesn't know shit about building a structurally secure bridge help design and build one. It wouldn't make sense to let 100% of people be involved in that biz if only 10% of people have any significant level of comprehension of the subject. Letting everyone vote feels like a similar thing to me (I'd love to hear genuine feedback on this idea; maybe this is a strawman?) Even if everyone went through the same amount of education so that everyone is theoretically on equal footing someday in an idealistic future, some people just aren't gonna get some things. Equality isn't always the best answer, I think?

Teageen

"Without an independent press, composed of heroic voices, the collective becomes stupid and unreliable, as has been demonstrated in many historical instances" CJ quotes this passage of Lanier's, and while this point ~feels~ about right, I really wish this book would actually cite any sources. Just bc it aligns with my preconceived notions of the world, doesn't make it true. Lanier does this often. He makes bold sweeping claims and does not provide any evidence to back them up. The credibility of all the claims in this book are, therefore, pretty low for me, unfortunately.

Teageen

"The crowd can't signal process itself, and someone is always Signal Processing. It just comes down to who is doing that Signal Processing. Spontaneously emerging elders? Democratically elected leaders with a vision? Or is the elite technocrats in search of profit?" -CJ in this post Is there a difference between "spontaneously emerging elders" and "democratically elected leaders"? Also not clear on what the difference between a democratically elected leader and an "elite technocrat in search of profit" is in our current system (maybe there is one and I'm being too pessimistic)

Teageen

Love this that CJ said here: "Individualistic conviction in your own aesthetic sincerity isn't the end point of art. It's the precondition for nourishing the collective effectively. Without anyone intentionally signal processing the crowd, the crowd is weak to its worst impulses, or exploitative curators claiming to be objective."

Seoyoung Park

I've felt about a 3-4 this week, and for the past few weeks. Echoing what so many other people have said, I've had chronic pain, and being homebound I never really encounter people. I've been having a really hard time organising or even thinking thoughts about the topics in this book because I don't have anyone to debrief (or even just word vomit as), and I'm a verbal processer. I think, echoing what a lot of people have said above, I found the part about personal reductionism of particular interest. I watched a tiktok earlier this week about how to detect a person is AI or real in tiktoks (as a form of media literacy for the New Age tm), and the response was largely that the ways of differentiating AI behaviour v. "person" behaviour was ableist and many of the AI behaviour touch points (not making eye contact, flat affect, etc.) were examples of autistic behaviours. I assume that there's a lot of neurodivergent people in this community, and a lot of people have mentioned being neurodivergent. Reading about personal reductionism, the lack of self expression available in our current version of web (via facebook), and how the people who are BEST at being a person/being popular are people who can curate their personalities adequately. "the ones who create successful online fictions about themselves... tend their doppelganger fastidiously... manage offhand remakrs and rack candid snapshots as carefully as a politician... sincerity creates a lifelong taint." I have a lot of friends with a huge amount of social capital; friends who have worked fastidiously to create online versions of themselves who accrue friendships through making instagram mutuals, and people who's following never rise above their follower account. Being around them is sometimes fucking exhausting. They say things about how other people are going to see them, and I think "really? Really??? This is how you want to spend your twenties? we're not in high school" and I thought this in high school too. But it is true that there dedication has lead to material success. They have friends sending them jobs, connections in arts spaces, etc. A few days ago, starting to feel some sort of manic episode, started paring off SNS apps: deleting Instagram app, to deactivating it entirely, deleting youtube, deleting facebook; ultimately this all lead to privating my tiktok and deleting the app. Being on social media is to partake in an unendingly empty vessel to be filled constantly while everyone projects on you. This is not identification of any sort. It was really interesting when he brought up how Korea has a vicious online culture because truly, it does. When western bitches first started blathering about cancel culture, I was truly shocked because literally WHAT DO YOU MEAN. When people get cancelled in Korea, it's True and Total Devastation. In America, cancelling is just mass bullying, in Korea you truly get blacklisted for the rest of your life, and will probably be accosted in front of ur home. It's really quite serious. It was interesting to see him mention this. Personally, I don't think too much about cancel culture (I don't think it's as bad as everyone thinks it is) PRECISELY BECAUSE in Korea it has actual material conditions, and in America people kind of just get up and dust themselves off after a certain point... Look at Alison Roman!! Other people have already mentioned, so I will keep this brief: The whole thing about the pacemaker hacking REEKED of nuclear bombs and mutually assured destruction. Truly it was APALLING to me that this was something anyone ever signed off on. I think there are horrible people everywhere. I think tech bros are horrible, not uniquely because they're born that way, but because they only learn about one single thing their entire lives, or they join the School for Poetic Computation (lol)