maya.land

laptop of the magi: an annoyed iMessage antitrust anecdote

2023-12-26T00:00:00-08:00

I bought my mother a MacBook Air for Christmas.

About a year back, I’d switched to a secondhand iPhone, but my family is all on Android. I have her email saved in her contact information on my phone, and that email is now associated with her Apple ID, which is now associated with a device that supports iMessage. My texts to my mother therefore switch over to iMessage automatically.

These, of course, do not show up on her phone anymore.

Logging her Apple ID out of the Messages app on the MacBook does not fix this.

It takes me, a Professional Computers Person, a bit to figure out there is a dropdown in Messages on my phone that will let me force my texts to go through SMS and thus reach her phone – but nothing about the messaging interface would have made clear that I needed to do that if I did not know in advance. Even after she was logged out of Messages on the Mac, the happy little blue bubbles looked on my phone to be delivered just fine.

So now I begin to panic slightly.

Most people are not even fractionally as tech savvy as the average reader of this blog post. By buying my mother a gift, I have now made it so that her contacts with iPhones, who all have her email saved, will – by default – send her messages that she cannot access on her phone, and they won’t know that they’re doing this when trying to text her.

This seems terrible. Apple must have a way to fix this, right?

Well, while there is a settings pane that Apple suggests should be able to remove iMessage reachability by her email, the checkbox is checked and can’t be toggled. (Perhaps because she doesn’t have a phone number associated, and something must be there? They don’t seem to explain why, anyway.)

And while I’m searching around, aghast at the idea that this can’t be fixed within three clicks, every second or third thing I find on the topic suggests

lol just get an iphone

I am appalled.

My mother suggests she ask everyone she knows with an iPhone to delete her email.

A disclaimer

I’m writing this day-of, so there very well may yet be some solution I can find – but at the same time, it was so easy to get into this situation (by default!) that I’d bet big money there are a lot of people living with how broken it is. At this point, even if there is some workaround somebody can tell me about (set up a new secret garbage email alias for her Apple ID and only mark that one as reachable via iMessage?), I feel pretty strongly that there’s still a problem here.

I self-host a Matrix instance¹. That’s the tech underlying a lot of what Beeper does, so I’ve been following the whole story pretty closely where Beeper wanted to open up iMessage to Android users, and Apple wanted very much that it not be opened.

A common strand of techie sentiment I read in comments about this stuff goes something like:

Look, probably Apple should make their stuff interoperable. The world would be a better place if messaging were end-to-end encrypted by default. But they should also be able to run an exclusive messaging service if they want, and it’d be freeloading for the rest of us to rely on their servers and infrastructure if we don’t buy their stuff. Nobody has a right to iMessage, and it’s not anticompetitive to just… build a proprietary messaging thing.

There’s something to that, but there’s also something missing. SMS objectively sucks, so it’s understandable that commentary doesn’t tend to frame it this way – but iMessage is a parasite on SMS. If Apple designs its stuff to smoothly and silently upgrade away from SMS – even to the point of making someone unreachable-by-default on her Android – then all the inevitable frictions on the boundary of those systems are an externalized cost to iMessage’s parasitism that scales with Apple’s dominance. If they’d just built their own thing in a separate app that needed both sides to explicitly opt-in to use in their communication, I wouldn’t be writing this!

Yeah, I know they’re not the only ones trying to leverage SMS-parasitism – WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger at least used to do it, Signal, whoever else – but I’m hard-pressed to think of a comparable situation those other companies can get you into. (Maybe the general pattern of letting people send messages to someone who’s installed then uninstalled the app? Sorry to anyone who’s tried to contact me on Signal or Snapchat over the past decade.)

Anyway, if I were someone with any power (I am not), and I had the ability to influence the relevant US antitrust investigations (I do not)… I’d try to get people to think carefully through how Apple isn’t just bundling an application, but instead actively undermining a non-proprietary thing that users may be intending to use.

It’s actually what my mom and I mostly use since the demise of Allo. ↩

even the OECD world is only half literate

2023-11-26T00:00:00-08:00

This is from “The Survey of Adult Skills, a product of the OECD Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC)”. Slide twelve gives the salient definitions: Adults at level 2 literacy can only handle getting single pieces of information out of short pieces of text. Adults at level 4 can – well, it’s about what I’d probably describe as being able to think while you read. Level 3’s in between.

And so there’s a line between level 2 and level 3, that sort of matters for being able to get along in the world.

Before you look – what percentage of adults would you guess fall above that line, in the US? In other countries?

I was looking this up because of an internet comment argument I’d read, where someone had pointed out that literacy rates in the US are terrible, and someone else had said that “most” people in Europe speak two languages¹.

And it all feels like the kind of thing where it’s far too easy to navigate by your gut, to assume you understand the world because you live in your part of it, and you observe what you observe, and aren’t you normal enough to know how Most Things Are?

But: it’s a bit less than half. Of adults, being able to read, in the way that doesn’t hold them back all the time. Across the whole OECD, and in the US. Some countries are much better, some much worse. Even in the highest-scoring countries, something like a third of people don’t make it over the line.

Were you surprised by that number? I was – never mind whatever Propublica reporting I’d read in the past – and that very surprise… the more you think about it the queasier it should make you. Power in this world is held by the literate. Every terrible exploitation is licit against those who cannot parse The Fine Print. And I in level 4 live my life unaware of just how many can’t.

It’s a sobering exercise to consider how the interfaces to the institutions in our lives – legal, financial, technical, medical – dictate that individual agency must be enacted through literate engagement with a more-or-less adversarial bureaucracy.

Sure, it’s not contradictory for people to speak two languages and yet have just-as-poor literacy, but in context, the argument was trying to imply generally Higher Standards in Europe. ↩

a hidden art reference in shirley jackson’s the haunting of hill house

2023-10-28T17:00:00-07:00

Happy Halloween! A spooky connection I’ve found for you. As far as I’ve found, this connection has prior documentation only in a 2013 blog comment, but it’s really something and merits its own note¹.

From The Haunting of Hill House²:

“I found it in the library,” Luke said. “I swear I found it in the library.”

“Incredible,” the doctor said.

“Look,” Luke said. He set the great book on the table and turned to the title page. “He made it himself—look, the title’s been lettered in ink: MEMORIES, for SOPHIA ANNE LESTER CRAIN; A Legacy for Her Education and Enlightenment During Her Lifetime From Her Affectionate and Devoted Father, HUGH DESMOND LESTER CRAIN; Twenty-first June, 1881.”

They pressed around the table, Theodora and Eleanor and the doctor, while Luke lifted and turned the first great page of the book. “You see,” Luke said, “his little girl is to learn humility. He has clearly cut up a number of fine old books to make this scrapbook, because I seem to recognize several of the pictures, and they are all glued in.”

“The vanity of human accomplishment,” the doctor said sadly. “Think of the books Hugh Crain hacked apart to make this. Now here is a Goya etching; a horrible thing for a little girl to meditate upon.”

The Blood Collages of John Bingley Garland (ca. 1850–60)

Sasha Archibald writes, for Public Domain Review:

The Blood Book is handmade, folio-sized, with a handsome marbled endpaper and forty-three pages of exquisitely crafted decoupage. John Bingley Garland, the manuscript’s creator, used collage techniques, excising illustrations from other books to assemble elegant, balanced compositions. Most of the source material is Romantic engravings by William Blake and his ilk, but there are also brilliantly colored flowers and fruits. Snakes are a favorite motif, butterflies another. A small bird is centered on every page. The space between the images is filled with tiny hand-written script that reads like a staccato sermon. “One! yet has larger bounties! to bestow! Joys! Powers! untasted! In a World like this, Powers!” etc.

[…]

The occasion of the Blood Book was the 1854 marriage of his daughter Amy, who treasured it as the pious craft of a loving father.

Hill House, again:

“Underneath he has written,” Luke said, “under this ugly picture: ‘Honor thy father and thy mother, Daughter, authors of thy being, upon whom a heavy charge has been laid, that they lead their child in innocence and righteousness along the fearful narrow path to everlasting bliss, and render her up at last to her God a pious and a virtuous soul; reflect, Daughter, upon the joy in Heaven as the souls of these tiny creatures wing upward, released before they have learned aught of sin or faithlessness, and make it thine unceasing duty to remain as pure as these.’ ”

“Poor baby,” Eleanor said, and gasped as Luke turned the page; Hugh Crain’s second moral lesson derived from a color plate of a snake pit, and vividly painted snakes writhed and twisted along the page, above the message, neatly printed, and touched with gold: “Eternal damnation is the lot of mankind; neither tears, nor reparation, can undo Man’s heritage of sin. “Daughter, hold apart from this world, that its lusts and ingratitudes corrupt thee not; Daughter, preserve thyself.”

[…]

“Wait,” Luke said. “You haven’t seen Heaven yet—even you can look at this one, Nell. It’s Blake, and a bit stern, I think, but obviously better than Hell. Listen—‘Holy, holy, holy! In the pure light of heaven the angels praise Him and one another unendingly. Daughter, it is Here that I will seek thee.’ ”

Public Domain Review, again:

The book’s reputation, however, rests on a decorative detail that overwhelms: To each page, Garland added languid, crimson drops in red India ink, hanging from the cut-out images like pendalogues from a chandelier. Blood drips from platters of grapes and tree boughs, statuaries and skeletons. Crosses seep, a cheetah drools, angels dangle bloody sashes. A bouquet of white chrysanthemums is spritzed.

To be clear, Garland’s blood is not that of surgery or crime or menses, but of religious iconography. He obviously intended the blood to represent Christ’s own. And yet the final work suggests that the properties of actual blood tugged the artist’s shirtsleeves, pulling him away from the symbol and towards its source. It’s as if God gave Garland permission to fetishize hemorrhage.

Hill House:

“The last page is the very nicest, I think. This, ladies, is Hugh Crain’s blood. Nell, do you want to see Hugh Crain’s blood?”

“No, thank you.”

“Theo? No? In any case, I insist, for the sake of your two consciences, in reading what Hugh Crain has to say in closing his book: ‘Daughter: sacred pacts are signed in blood, and I have here taken from my own wrist the vital fluid with which I bind you. Live virtuously, be meek, have faith in thy Redeemer, and in me, thy father, and I swear to thee that we will be joined together hereafter in unending bliss. Accept these precepts from thy devoted father, who in humbleness of spirit has made this book. May it serve its purpose well, my feeble effort, and preserve my Child from the pitfalls of this world and bring her safe to her father’s arms in Heaven.’ And signed: ‘Thy everloving father, in this world and the next, author of thy being and guardian of thy virtue; in meekest love, Hugh Crain.’ ”

“Theodora shuddered. “How he must have enjoyed it,” she said, “signing his name in his own blood; I can see him laughing his head off.”

Blood Collage, John Bingley Garland ^ Minneapolis Institute of Art

I think Archibald is mistaken to characterize the blood imagery as fetishistic. This image in art is part of a tradition and devotion that long predates the invention of the psychological lens, and you’ll miss a lot framing it that way. Sure, meditating on the blood of Christ is also to meditate on human blood within one’s own veins in a way that’s pretty foreign to contemporary OECD culture – but to begin from the context rather than the image is the only way to grok it.

I suppose, following that, I must put Jackson’s repurposing of a fictive Garland for horrifying effect in a fair context: the history of educated people being grossed out or embarrassed by the tradition of very bodily embodiments of holiness is also centuries-long. For Jackson to twist that into “[Geez, what a freak]” is not unprecedented.

I do believe we’re all somewhat worse off for the triumph of this line, the purge of the catacomb “saints”, but I admit myself partisan on the topic: a kind Mastodon acquaintance and the Minnesota Institute of Art made it possible for me to order a real-size print of this work of Garland’s and I am terribly attached. We could get meta about why it’s fantastic – any honest Christian art in our time has something of the spirit of collage to it – but my niche aesthetic preferences play a large enough role that I won’t attempt an objective defense here.

At time of publication, my website makes a feeble attempt to not be slurped up for a large language model, which makes it unsearchable by major engines. So the observation, documented here, will not contribute to the commonly searched knowledge commons. Does this make it literally occult? ↩
I am quoting as much as I am in order to show how the explicit details Jackson seems to lift from Bingley Garland’s work, but also how she’s using the whole idea of such collages in order to produce a creepy effect and to occasion characterizing dialogue within her scene. I believe this is the de minimis quotation for my purpose. ↩

social media isn’t chalk milk: a guess

2023-08-12T00:00:00-07:00

epistemic disclaimer: I’m not an expert on this, and I’m not sure who would be. Largely speculative.

I love weirdos. That is: people who may be off-putting in some way, but who are out there managing life by attacking it from an entirely different direction than most folks do. Even when a tactic seems obtuse, there’s a creativity there. Like hammering in nails with the side of a hammer head: hey, maybe it’s working well enough!

One common weirdo tactic is orienting life around a non-normative interest to an extent that perplexes broader society¹. There is a lot of writing about weirdo interests out there. A lot of this writing exists because people who don’t love weirdos still like to gawk at them². Writers and journalists are often conscious of this gawking-jeering dynamic, and that it is bad. They therefore often try to include fragments of perspective in their Weirdo Interest pieces that represent how the weirdos see themselves, not just how they look to a presumed-normal audience. I find these quotes and asides interesting. There is a pattern of extrinsic justification in social terms that weirdos cite in their involvement in XYZ oddity: “this community was so accepting, it really helped me come out of my shell”. Like: you should respect Gunpla even if you don’t get expensive plastic kit assembly as a hobby, because the whole phenomenon does good things in people’s lives in a social sense.

So you might think: okay, that’s just the thing to say, right? It’s easier for a reporter to try to sell their audience on “look, I made friends!” than “my Agatha Christie-themed forum RP is a trove of literary merit”. To evaluate the claim itself, whether there is something different and special about this socializing — look, everyone knows these communities have all their own kinds of drama. There are cultural reasons why they’re a bit more tolerant of personal oddness, but they’re not magically better than the rest of the world, they haven’t solved interaction.

Yet: if you know weirdos, then you also probably know people for whom this narrative has seemed to play out.

The vintage troll doll collecting blogosphere saved my life.

That erogame translation Discord server helped me keep it together after my divorce.

Prepper YouTube is my real community.

Since I moved, I mostly relax by hanging out with the other people in chat for Spanish-language Fortnite streamers.

That fan podcast made me feel less alone.

How?

Set aside the weirdos for a moment.

Here are two theories of how social technology use can be bad for you. Both can be expressed by analogies to things you might eat. (I’m laying them out here explicitly, but you can find one or the other underpinning a lot of writing on this topic with the reasoning being implicit.)

One analogy is poison: this would hold that social tech use³ is just straightforwardly terrible for mental health. To me, this seems likely to be true of some social technology, and some patterns of use (and to which some people are likely disproportionately vulnerable), but it is still early days. We are still figuring out what’s what, and none of the research here is any good because the social media giants that have all the data are not incentivized to make it good.

This poison argument doesn’t feel very generally convincing to people, because without that differentiation, without drilling down to particulars, it feels pretty easy to dispute by counter-case. I have learned a lot about local weeds by joining a Facebook group where all the knowledgeable gardeners in their 50s hang out. That just… isn’t poison. It isn’t!

So a second analogy is to chalk milk. Before the US had the food safety enforcement we rely on today in blessed ignorance, food producers here got up to serious shenanigans. They used to adulterate milk by mixing it with water and a variety of whitish substances. Now, some of those substances were poisonous or contributed to spoilage, but some were just inert – and that was bad enough, so let’s focus on that in our metaphor. In this telling, the bad thing manages to be appealing by seeming enough like the food you really need – it preys on your natural and functional appetites – but while it can satisfy those appetites, displace real food in your stomach and life, it doesn’t provide the nutrients that you really need. You can see why this is so pernicious: if it’s cheaper to produce the chalk-adulterated milk, they can probably sell it a little cheaper, too. So it’s more accessible than the real thing, particularly to those struggling. Already-vulnerable people will be the ones who end up displacing more of what they need, which hurts them further.

This second argument is much more rhetorically appealing, partially because it provides its own excuse for talking over contrary personal experiences. Let’s say you’re committed to it. A teenager comes to you and says:

Hey, no, I don’t think internet use is poison – the kids at my school were pretty uniformly shitty to me, and I learned a lot about conflict resolution managing my Percy Jackson-themed Minecraft server. Choosing to socialize digitally worked out well for me.

By the chalk milk theory, you can respond:

Well, sure, it feels like that, and sure, some of your experiences may have been based on meaningful connection – but if you’d been putting in the right amount of effort into real world social stuff, you would actually have had better, deeper, more fulfilling, more ultimately beneficial social interactions. Yes, the chalk milk was easier to get, but you should have put in the effort to get the real thing. Any experienced satisfaction with this ersatz good belies the long-term rot it will bring you.

Okay, now let’s say you buy this approximate analogy, but you’re less of an asshole. There’s a less individualized version of this theory that goes around. In this telling, it’s not so much about our own choices to go for the chalk milk, displacing nutrition in our own guts, and more that culturally, taking chalk milk availability for granted has driven us to replace norms that have served us well with ones that serve us worse.

An example: if I’m at a bus stop and something funny happens across the street, is it normal to make small talk about it with the other people at the stop? Or is it normal to look down at my phone, message my friends about it, and not interact with these strangers – my neighbors – at all? in this example, it’s not just that I myself might have to overcome some discomfort to make the real-world gesture. When people didn’t have infinite entertainments⁴ in their pocket, it was reasonable to interpret a conversational overture as an invitation to be a bit less mutually bored for a minute. Now that obvious motivation is off the table. It’s therefore reasonable that other people are going to see conversational overtures as more likely to hide a demand, as more of a Thing, perhaps even as more of a threat than they would if we were all standing there twiddling our thumbs. So the norm shifts, and we all become a bit more alienated from the people around us.

There are good reasons why this chalk milk metaphor feels right to people. Don’t most people have in our lives something we know is better for us, that we nevertheless neglect for a lower-effort option? Many of us have found ourselves in situations where “try harder” actually does garner returns. I, individually-personally, have a whole spectrum of social things that I prioritize incorrectly all the time, and convenience plays a huge role in that. The time I put into one thing can’t be put into another. Social norms are shifting around tech without anyone intending to drive that change. All this is true!

But we will arrive at some wrong conclusions if we don’t think about how hunger and loneliness work differently.

Hunger is a signal that your body gives you to get you to eat so that it can keep on living. The signal seems to vary from person to person, and sometimes it seems wildly miscalibrated, but, like, I think I’m okay not citing a source for the broad strokes here, right? You need food to live, and you need it regularly, and hunger is how you are motivated to make that happen.

So you might initially imagine, primed by the analogies, that loneliness works similarly. We might engage in some cavalier evolutionary-psychology-like speculation ⁵ and think that, okay, people are better off not being alone, so when we start getting too alone, it’s advantageous for us to be motivated to fix that. It’s advantageous for us to be drawn to socialize, so loneliness must make us want to do that more.

But it doesn’t, exactly.

(This piece is a bit scattershot but it has some really good links):

The problem with loneliness seems to be that it biases our thinking. In behavioral studies, lonely people picked up on negative social signals, such as images of rejection, within 120 milliseconds — twice as quickly as people with satisfying relationships and in less than half the time it takes to blink. Lonely people also preferred to stand farther away from strangers, trusted others less and disliked physical touch.

This may be why the emotional well-being of lonely individuals often follows “a downward spiral,” said Danilo Bzdok, an interdisciplinary researcher at McGill University with a background in neuroscience and machine learning. “They tend to end up with a more negative spin on whatever information they receive — facial expressions, texting, whatever — and that drives them even deeper into this loneliness pit.”

So adjust the ungrounded speculation: imagine that, on some evolutionary timescale, you were part of your little band of sixteen hunter-gatherers. Despite a wildly interdependent lifestyle, you are lonely. Knowing these two things, what else should you guess about what’s going on? It might represent things not going great for you, and your priors about your social interactions maybe do need some psychological-level adjusting toward greater risk. Maybe it’s protective in this context to start interpreting everything more negatively, at least in the short-term. Loneliness isn’t drawing you toward others – it’s making you more likely to guess they might stab you in your sleep.

And for us today, you can immediately think of all kinds of feedback loops that make this work very badly for people. Someone with no friends is less immediately desirable as a friend, because there’s a kind of baked-in social proof there, right? A subconscious assumption: there must be something wrong with them. Someone who comes off like they have a chip on their shoulder isn’t pleasant to be around, even if there’s some objective lens through which they’re “right”.

It’s in this context that we have to take social tech use, parasocial media consumption, all that “low-quality” online interaction – we have to see it differently if we start by centering the potential feedback loop of loneliness.

Let’s go back to the weirdos. How can we understand the claim that “low-quality” tech-mediated socializing (or even parasocial content) can help someone get out of a bad place? The feedback loop of loneliness presents a theoretical mechanism.

Weirdo interest-based communities still reflect the hierarchies of social capital you might expect (“horse famous”); you’re going to have a lot more cred if you’re hot and/or funny and/or rich. But the culture is one of principled inclusion to the point of pathology; historically, a lot of online communities of this kind have struggled to even appropriately exclude children.

All of this means that even if you’re at the bottom of the loneliness spiral, and even if you’ve got no social capital or meaningful normal social opportunity, you can probably find some kind of social media connection to people you used to know, or online community around an interest, or some kind of fully parasocial media – you can find something like that where you might not be having the most meaningful human connection, but you won’t experience rejection, and you’ll feel a bit less alone. And that alleviation of that loneliness in turn will make your further interactions a bit less painful, a bit less paranoid⁶, and you might do a little bit better outside of your weirdo circle as well. And now you might be on an upward path – one that you’re never going to be able to explain to people who’ve never needed any kind of social affirmation available from the community of people who create Sonic OCs.

And all of this is relative to whatever else is on offer, right? Even in that surgeon general report blaring alarms about social media and youth mental health, they shout out the research showing queer kids report really getting something from social media that they don’t offline. If you’re a member of a minority group in a small town, your access to offline social circles that are actually affirming may or may not be great. Look, I know I’m arguing against viewing this all too simply and categorically, but just from my own experience: being a teenager sucked! There was already ample pressure to adjust socially, to be as normal as possible; online windows into different worlds of being were really important. I said that the poison analogy was probably true unequally for some subsets of social tech use, but it’s also true that ordinary social life isn’t nutritive and great for everyone equally. We should have a lot of humility when we approach how an individual is navigating all this, and not assume that their laziness or exploitation explains everything.

None of this means that social tech use as it is shouldn’t be interrogated, that it’s fine to allow such influence of our social selves from VC-funded companies maximizing engagement, that there aren’t ever circumstances where we have opportunities to get something better by pushing ourselves harder. But while pulling chalk milk off the market was clearly the right call, further stigmatizing the lowest-barrier-to-entry ways that people can feel less lonely… isn’t.

By “weirdo” here, I mean something that isn’t aligned with all the connotations of “nerd”, but I don’t think it’s super-important to my piece here to nail down quite what. I ask your indulgence. ↩
I am going to say “they” here in reference to both “normal” people and “weirdos”. This is because I am working my way towards a point about the subset of weirdos who are on the social margins of broader society, which isn’t quite me, but obviously I am, uh, weirdo-identified. ↩
I’m here lumping in all of the tech-driven stuff that “works” by playing on your social drives. This can include media built around parasocial attachment. I haven’t found a convincing example predating print, so whether or not you find that very techy, I’m comfortable bucketing it together. ↩
Please appreciate my restraining myself from making an explicit Infinite Jest reference in the body text here. It is hard for me. ↩
And is it not all pretty cavalier? ↩
Yeah, sometimes you do meet people who learn The Wrong Lesson from this – “only other Xes can be trusted and it’s so much harder to deal with normies that I shouldn’t even try” – but in my experience it’s not common. ↩

update: open vs. hidden

2023-08-12T00:00:00-07:00

Song of the summer:

Site updates first this time.

I bought and read this art book about Leonora Carrington’s tarot. It was itself excellent, but also contained a lot of tantalizing citations. It’s really interesting to see an alchemical color symbolism that doesn’t, you know, try and four-elements itself into an illegible polychrome.

I performed an elaborate bracket comparison of a bunch of perfumes seeking out a replacement for Le Labo Santal 33 for my tarot deck.

I translated the important bit of the prayer from the Locked Tomb books into Latin, and added some notes about some allusions that came up.

A new user style for reading works on sacred-texts.com, and one for that hideous Mastodon 4 sidebar.

I played Pentiment and had a lot of feelings about it.

I am on principle opposed to the internet poster apologizing for her absence. It speaks to an expectation that doesn’t feel appropriate for someone putting stuff out there freely. However! Without the slightest tenor of apology, I thought I’d talk a bit about why you’ve been seeing less from me.

The first part is that thing that I’d written about wishing that I were digging into more substantive projects, then combined with oh sweet Lord I hate the very idea of being “trained on”. Just… bad vibes! Bad vibes for internet times. But I’ve freshened up my please-don’t-scrape-me file and… dunno, that’s about all I can do. This one’s a bit unresolved.

The second part is work. About a year ago, I started on a new team. It turns out that while I had thought I had built up boundaries for myself, work-life-wise, it would be more accurate to say that I’d found an equilibrium. On my new team, the work I’m doing is much more interesting to me, the impact I can have is greater, the outcomes are really meaningful, and I’m less stymied by external factors. (Everything is also always OMG Urgent, but that had already been true.) Given this, it is very hard for me to strike the right balance with all of the rest of life – where matters require constant care without being able to see a difference made, where opportunities don’t tug at me the same way that work does, and where I’m terrible at life-maintenance stuff and despise myself for it. Since return-to-office, this has gotten worse. I know none of this is the slightest bit novel for people in my line of work at my kind of employer, but… well, it’s the kind of thing where one’s gut feelings are what’s out of whack, so you can’t really learn from other people’s mistakes, other people’s helpful advice. You have to inch your way through until you learn how to feel differently about it. I’m trying!

The third part is that in the extralaboral time that I have been spending on this kind of thing, I’ve been doing a lot of reading about the occult. “Occult” itself just means “hidden”, etymologically. Where there’s material worth spending time on, it doesn’t feel right somehow to make one’s every thought and reaction public. I’m sure someone’s already written some godawful thinkpiece in the Atlantic about how cancel culture is making people retreat from openness or whatever, but… I keep thinking about what internet users do to academic terms yanked out of academic contexts, leaning on them to sound educated but distorting their meaning, until you can’t use the word for what it had originally meant confident that people will be able to parse what you’ve said. To some extent academic obscurantism functions as its own filter, I guess — its own gate on the conversation. But the culture believes in an ideal of openness, and it’s sort of taken as decided that the benefits outweigh the costs. And: that feels like it can’t be true! It can’t be true that everything is best approached with the same broadcast mindset. I think I’d be better served finding a way to structure production around my reading, recommendations, commentary, whatever – but the open internet is a little too open, maybe.

Remember the Tumblr phrase about posts “breaking containment”? The quotidian agony of content collapse. A tiny illustration: the feudalism Reddit piece was on the front page of the orange site for a bit, and got a tiny bit of traffic on Reddit itself. People got annoyed enough to comment that they were so put off by the typeface and the site design that they didn’t want to read. In a practical sense, one could point to browsers’ Reader Mode – but in a deeper sense, if people find the vibe so offputting that they leave without looking for a workaround, that’s probably a win-win. Not a true filter, as such, but not nothing, either.

It is blueberry harvest time for us, and the summer is beautiful. I wish you a wonderful rest of your August, reader!

dark mode in the ancient world

2023-08-01T00:00:00-07:00

Purple parchment or purple vellum refers to parchment dyed purple; codex purpureus refers to manuscripts written entirely or mostly on such parchment. The lettering may be in gold or silver. Later the practice was revived for some especially grand illuminated manuscripts produced for the emperors in Carolingian art and Ottonian art, in Anglo-Saxon England and elsewhere. Some just use purple parchment for sections of the work; the 8th-century Anglo-Saxon Stockholm Codex Aureus alternates dyed and un-dyed pages. It was at one point supposedly …

There’s nothing listed from before the Christian era. Does that reflect what had been produced, or are those texts just what people chose to preserve?

At any rate: I adore these. It seems strange there aren’t white pigments used? The claims seem to be that it’s all silver and gold ink – wow.

And also:

Black books of hours are a type of luxury Flemish illuminated manuscript books of hours using pages of vellum that were soaked with black dye or ink before they were lettered or illustrated, for an unusual and dramatic effect. The text is usually written with gold or silver ink. There are seven surviving examples, all dating from about 1455–1480.

/u/spez is right about feudalism and that’s why reddit as we know it is doomed

2023-07-01T00:00:00-07:00

Since Elon Musk bought Twitter, people have been making a lot of comparisons between internet institutions – particularly various social media things – and premodern political forms and figures.

These comparisons typically rely on the level of understanding of antiquity or of medieval life you’d expect to get from DKfindout! Castles. I am not a historian, but I know, like, just about enough to be embarrassed for the speakers.

So in this post, I want to talk a bit about how the relevant historical phenomena worked, a bit about why feudalism tends to be a pretty bad comparison to internet stuff, and a bit about why Reddit CEO Steve Huffman is – still! – maybe more correct than he knows when he compares moderators to landed gentry… in a way that suggests the end coming for Reddit as-we-know-it¹.

Medieval sociopolitics? In my blog? It’s more likely than you think

Feudalism is such a shit concept to work with that if you look it up in the Encyclopedia Britannica, instead of getting a history of feudalism, you get a history of the term’s use in history, how it has always been an awkward oversimplification, and how it only got muddier over time. Everything I can find goes to great pains to explain that any summary you can give will erase a lot of very important variance over time and place, and that even within one state at one time shit could get stupid complicated.

However! If I am to claim that internet comparisons to feudalism are bad, then I need to evaluate charitably what they might best mean, squinted at under flattering light.

To that end, let’s try and disentangle two parts. Bret Devereaux, actual historian²:

Veteran readers of the blog will already know that I generally avoid the terms ‘feudal’ and ‘feudalism,’ as do many medievalists these days. The problem is that ‘feudalism’ comes to conflate two very different systems: manorialism, the economic system which structured the relations between peasant farmers (mostly serfs) and their elite landlords, and vassalage, the political system which structured relations between elites. But these systems and the relationships they structured were very different and their conflation together as a single system is a modern, not medieval, construction.

Okay. Manorialism and vassalage. This sounds doable, right?

Here follows sketched-out summary.

Manorialism

Premodern subsistence farmers, on their own, don’t optimize for producing a surplus, but instead on increasing their resiliency.³ This is because having a surplus – whether in goods or money – is, in their context, both more difficult and less useful than you might expect. To increase resiliency, they can employ less facially efficient farming methods that will diversify their risks, and when times are good, they can invest any small surplus in social relations.
Large landholders rely on the desperation of the little people to make it possible for them to secure enough borrowed/bought/forced labor to make those larger holdings produce.
The relationship between the small farmers and the elites is the exchange of “labor, deference and some support” for “[military or political] protection […], some access to farming capital and most importantly the implied promise that in a catastrophe the big landholder would come to the ‘rescue’.”-
This relationship is largely exploitative. In many places and times, it relies on a lot of “non-free labor”. The non-free-ness of it all is enforced with violence or the threat of violence, whether state violence or not.
The manorial relationship also “[serves] to reorient production away from subsistence and towards surplus” to support elite lifestyles. “[Doing] anything that isn’t farming means somehow forcing subsistence farmers to work more and harder in order to generate the surplus to provide for those people who do the activities which in turn the subsistence farmers might benefit from not at all.”

Vassalage

It is with some trepidation that I will point to non-popular-history⁴, “Fiefs and vassals : the medieval evidence reinterpreted”, by Susan Reynolds⁵. If anyone with a relevant degree wants to tell me I’m wrong in my summary or choice of source, they are welcome⁶.

She reiterates the thing about feudalism being a blob of concept that confuses more than it elucidates. She extends that to vassalage and fiefs, saying that, well, we might have hoped they would be more dependable concepts since they’re smaller in scope, but that was wrong. To the extent that we can pin down little bits of them with adequate definition, she says they aren’t as generally useful as they’ve been made out to be.

So in as far as we are here to make a comparison between vassalage and anything internet, it is probably fair to say that we are making it to a kind of 16th-century historical myth-narrative rather than a usefully abstracted description of real social relations.

Of this vassalage narrative, then:

Vassalage denotes the relation between a lord and his free or noble follower. This was undertaken with oath and ceremony. It obligated the lord to “protect and maintain his vassal”, and obligated the vassal to provide military aid and attend at the lord’s court. (The latter obligations were also sort of implied outside of vassalage relationships if you were otherwise propertied enough to be able to provide demanded knights, for instance.)
It hacked a state structure into existence through personal relations when “there was [supposedly] no idea of the state and very little idea of impersonal, public obligations at all”⁷.
In the modern mind, there are nice crisp distinctions between “rent” and “tax”. This is because we like to imagine we have a crisp concept of “ownership” of land distinct from jurisdiction. In fief-holding Europe, it’s more accurate to say that the classic ideological structure dictates that the land belongs to God, and God says kings have charge of bits of it, and the kings say lords have charge of bits of those bits, and the lords may say various non-lords have charge of bits… Rent-y-tax-y obligations are owed back up chain, and rights-like obligations exist along it. However, this idea obscures that folks down the chain may often feel that their land is more meaningfully theirs by custom than by the higher layers’ authority, and the language in primary sources doesn’t dictate clean lines.
“[In] an age of low literacy, few records, and poor communications, great men needed to use personal loyalties, ceremonies, and ad hominem rewards to maintain and extend their power over the land; and that, since rulers, nobles, and most free men lived off the work of a dependent peasantry, rulers could maintain, control, and reward their followers by delegating control over land and peasants to them. It also seems clear that, as collective activity became more organized, as bureaucracy developed, and as literacy increased the range and power of propaganda, so government relied less on direct interpersonal relations.”

One more thing: state capacity

There’s this book called Seeing Like A State by James C. Scott. If you’re not in the mood to read it, read the first chunk of this blog post, but mentally credit it with a bunch of examples Rao doesn’t include in the summary. This section is kind of cribbed from parts of it.

So – why did our mythically-feudal king need vassals, if other states didn’t always have them?

A state needs revenue, and in the premodern era, that’s got to come “mainly from levies on commerce and land, the major sources of wealth.” This turns out to be at least as complicated as taxes today, if for very different reasons. Knowing from a distance what taxes you should demand is hard. Take too little, and your state is feeble. Take too much, and you’ll have a whole new set of problems: flight, resistance, etc.

The local systems of measurement may vary from tiny place to tiny place – and even if you have more abstract ones to hand, local practices and land quality may mean that “two acres” in one place might acceptably be taxed far more highly than in another. So you can see why there was so much pressure to standardize the measures in the early modern era, right?

But it wasn’t just the measures getting standardized – it was also the rights people had.

Scott gives an example amalgamated from Southeast Asian practices. You might have land that’s parceled out among families during the main growing season, but reparceled out every seven years. After the main-season crop is harvested, then everything is common land, so anybody in the village gets to graze their animals and plant dry-season crops. But you might only be allowed to graze a certain number of animals, and that right might be transferable among the villagers, but not to outsiders. You might get to gather firewood for your own use but not for commercial sale – customs where fruit belongs to the family who planted a tree, even if not on their current parcel, but fallen fruit is fair game for anyone – rules about who gets branches that broke off of trees in storms… Rules “riven with inequalities based on gender, status, and lineage.”…

And all of this varying wildly from place to place.

Now: how could you as the king figure out how much rent-tax to demand directly from each of these people? Maybe you can figure out to some approximation the overall productivity of the overall land associated with the community, but actually extracting resources has to come from these households, right? And none of the inequalities are clear to you as an outsider – and everyone will lie to you and to your representatives because fuck tha rent.

And do you have the capacity to go around enforcing all this? To send people from your royal court out to each little hamlet, figure out how much to demand, and punish those who don’t meet the demand?

This points to an important function of the local feudal hierarchy, looked at from the perspective of state capacity. If the vassal is around in the community to be able to figure out the local practices and maximize the rent-tax he can extract from the little people, then the king can extract value from the vassal and thus indirectly the region, even without having a bureaucracy under his own control that knows every town’s Local Fruit-Gathering Rules.

One of the main themes of Scott’s book is that throughout history, it is infeasible for states to build the Local Fruit-Gathering Rulebook at scale if they want to increase their centralized power and do Bigger Things. So what they actually do is come through and force people to stop measuring things the ways they have and to use standard measures, to stop thinking about property rights the ways they have and to use standard property rights, to stop using names the ways they have and to use patrilineal surnames… and while everyone hitting the pointy end of it hates this stuff, it makes it so much easier for the top-level state to do its state business that it can expand its state aspirations and be Bigger⁸. The capacity of the state isn’t just a function of the kind of bureaucracy you can build if you can force people to become more governable.

Why this stuff doesn’t map well onto the internet

I would hope that everything I’m about to write is self-evident – so self-evident that you might as well skip this section. However, I would also have hoped that “people who want to sign up for an account on a new web service instead of using an old web service they don’t like as much anymore” would not consider it appropriate to term themselves “refugees”, so forgive me some obvious points.

The business at scale in social media is advertising. I haven’t given up hope on the long tail, Gioiaian jeremiads notwithstanding, but at scale, today, direct monetization pales in comparison to advertising’s revenues. This means that the economic productivity of social media use is indirect and highly mediated. Also, the business models are often opaque. This is a lot harder to track than wheat farms in medieval France somewhere. Comparisons risk implying we understand more than we accurately do about just who’s generating value and just how. (…more on this.)
In the settled medieval context, there are subsistence farmers, and there are people eating surplus that subsistence farmers were squeezed into producing. Other food sources do not exist at the scale needed for the population. Reliable sources assure me the eventual consequence of going without food is death. Social media – the whole user-content internet – is only one of a whole host of entertainments, information sources, and communication options available to the kind of person who has internet access. Breaking one’s e.g. YouTube habit may be unpleasant or difficult, but it is not inherently life-or-death. When we make comparisons between our info-luxuries and survival necessities, we ratchet up the stakes in these conversations way too high, way too fast… and we also distract from actual life-or-death issues at play.
Over my lifetime, there have been a number of attempts at manufacturing digital scarcity. They have been pretty embarrassing and not made too much of a dent. That doesn’t mean that there are no relevant scarcities to bear in mind – money on offer for advertising, eyeball-hours monetizable on the other end – but naive analogies between, like, namespaces and arable land holdings often get pretty silly.
I am not in debt bondage to Instagram. You are not a LinkedIn serf. Yes, there are relevant “switching costs” to this stuff. Those are notable because they operate in contrast to the general idea of businesses offering freely substitutable goods and services, not because someone will come recapture you if you try to leave. When someone writes a “Why I’m Leaving Twitter” post, they do not then have to go defend their violation of an oath of homage on the battlefield! If we pretend that we’re less free to leave than we are, we distort reality in ways that only benefit the big platforms.
If you are a premodern small farmer, you are subject to the varying jurisdictions that cover the land you live on and farm⁹. The social ties associated with your local community are essential to your survival. If you are an internet user today, you have clicked through more terms of service than you can count, migrated through more dead sites than you remember, and your ability to feed yourself is extraordinarily unlikely to be truly predicated on the particular group of otherwise-strangers with whom you interact on any given app¹⁰. There are a lot more options to the modern internet user than acquiescence or revolt-in-place.
The jurisdiction associated with lords’ enfiefed land is a burden, not a perk. Having to deal with little people problems is not a longed-for opportunity to get to tell people what to do – it is part of the trade-off necessary to get to extract rents/taxes from them. Remember: these are actually inherited positions, not first-mover-benefits-maintained-over-time. I am sure you can find an example of some medieval baron getting petty about dumb shit (send it to me!), but for the most part, everything I’ve read suggests they are trying to further delegate this work to their retainers so they have more time for… you know, falconry. Fulfilling their other obligations. Flexing on other rich people. 1% problems.

So if it’s that bad, why do people keep making the comparison?

Reynolds’ book begins:

Feudalism, to any members of the general public who ever refer to it, stands for any hierarchical and oppressive system. Bosses or landlords who bully their employees or tenants are being feudal. If they bully them fiercely they are worse: they are positively medieval.

To some extent, that’s the long and the short of it. The kind of person who imagines that the Dark Ages are called that because they weren’t yet Enlightened is not trying to make a historically-grounded point about political theory. They’re trying to say that something sucks. Anyone who grew up in a liberal democracy absorbed quite a lot of civic ideology about what makes governments legitimate; therefore, any authority that the speaker had no hand in appointing is a likely target of this condemnation. “Someone who isn’t me has power and control and I don’t like it”. That’s a fair thing to want to express, even if I’m salty about inaccuracy of comparison.

So… okay, so what? I didn’t get thousands of words into this just because someone said something obviously wrong about a medieval thing on the internet.

Can we redeem this desire to compare the two?

How far can we get with a comparison if we try to say /u/spez is right?

Steve, my liege, a word

Steve Huffman (/u/spez) is the CEO of Reddit. Reddit is a social media site that is somewhat unlike its competitor social media sites in form, but which is trying to have its business become publicly traded. It therefore needs to become more like those other sites – at least in profitability narrative. Reddit makes most of its revenue from advertising. It relies on a vast amount of unpaid volunteer moderation labor – $3.4 million’s worth a year, by one estimate. Some of Huffman’s IPO-minded moves have proven very hostile to the moderators, who have been protesting by taking subreddits dark – restricting access or posting or otherwise creatively disrupting their function.

And then Steve forces my hand, makes me write all this, by saying the following:

If you’re a politician or a business owner, you are accountable to your constituents. So a politician needs to be elected, and a business owner can be fired by its shareholders.

And I think, on Reddit, the analogy is closer to the landed gentry: The people who get there first get to stay there and pass it down to their descendants, and that is not democratic.

There is obviously a lot about this that immediately sounds alarms, right?

Look, I’m even less of a lawyer than I am a historian, but if “a business owner can be fired by its shareholders” then they weren’t actually the owner of the business, no? They were, like, a CEO or something?
Conflating citizens and shareholders is a classic American thought disease. Polysyllabic cringe.
It sounds like Steve thinks that “gentry” operated on Oklahoma land grab rules.
While I am willing to get hype about the general idea of property inheritance being so anti-democratic in nature that a democratic society must expropriate that property to function, I am guessing Steve Huffman, estimated net worth in the millions Steve Huffman, is not too married to what that implies, and really intends only to speak of inherited authority.

But… fine. Come at me, Huffman.

What can we get from comparing moderators to feudal lords?

You need manorialism to make little farmers produce surplus, and you need moderation to make openly hosted user-generated content ad-monetizable

Our subsistence farming household does not really want to produce the kind of surplus that can then be rent-taxed away, so the feudal structure has to force that to happen to exist. There’s real production, valuable activity, going on no matter what – but to make your state a Thing you need to beat that production into a useful shape.

Small, closed groups of internet users often function on top of internet infrastructure without explicit internal moderation. You, the reader, are probably in a number of group texts from which you have never formally banned a member for spam.

The openness of a platform can create a lot more monetizable engagement than the group chats. There are many of you who will never get to snigger at the jokes in my group chats, and Homo economicus might see that as lost opportunity to engage-and-advertise-and-monetize, if he squints. A missed opportunity for extractable surplus – because, like the subsistence farmers trying to maximize resilience instead of production, my friends are not sharing bad puns with an eye toward anyone’s ad revenue.

However, open, public internet infrastructure has its own downward tendencies. Whenever a truly unmoderated hosting service opens on the internet, there is a clock ticking down until that service is first used to host content related to child sexual abuse. The openness can create an economic opportunity, but you need moderation to make that hold together – even just on the legal front.

Or just imagine an ad equilibrium. You, a user, are probably willing to tolerate a certain amount of promotional stuff in a Web Thing before you go off and find another Web Thing; call it an ad-viewing threshold. Variable by individual, but probably measurable in aggregate. Promotional material that is posted by a user and shown to you counts against your threshold, and any ad space bought with the platform on your feed also counts against your threshold, but only the latter makes the platform money. If the platform has enough would-be paid-advertisers to max out whatever it estimates its users’ ad-viewing threshold to be, then it has a strong incentive to go and hunt down any user content on its platform that has even a hint of promotion and hide it from sight. Maybe it’ll get those users to give up and pay them, but even if it doesn’t, it stops them from displacing monetizable ads under your threshold¹¹.

So even if a moderator isn’t engaging with the ad infrastructure of a site, and even if they’re not explicitly dealing with maintaining a high bar of “advertiser-friendliness”, their role functions to make the thing stick together in the open way that produces the engagement-surplus that attracts ad money.

Local variance in custom makes it really hard to moderate from outside the community…

If you ask heavy-use Redditors about their use of the site, many will, unprompted, bring up that the main big subreddits are trash and, while they might also subscribe to /r/gifs or whatever, they’re really there for the niche communities that are quite different – in both tone and content. Yes, it’s impressive that the recommendation algorithms on short-form video platforms can deduce my susceptibility to thirst-trappy woodcutter lady content, but the level of specificity in which such content is arranged on Reddit is far more impressive (sometimes horrifying in its specificity, if we’re being honest). These are far more diverse in intent and effect than the “communities” of shared engagement that arise around algorithmically recommended topics.

Maintaining engagement on /r/AskHistorians requires a very different standard of post and comment moderation than e.g. /r/circlejerkaustralia; they are trying to be different things, people go to them for different things, and the rules that will best encourage posters to post and consumers to consume are different.

How would you do that in a scalable way from the outside? Hell, set aside trying to keep things on-topic – from the outside, how can you keep up with the ever-shifting dog whistles and coded signifiers of bigotry that accompany the first encroachments of Nazis into your bar? Maybe advertisers won’t understand either to care about the first wave, but you better believe they won’t like the media coverage of the later ones…

In an environment as heterogeneous and nichey as Reddit has been: you can’t. It works about as well as compiling the Local Fruit-Gathering Rules with the Firewood Addenda for every village in your nation. So if you’re going to have heterogeneous and nichey social media, you need moderation to be heterogeneous and nichey, enacted by the kind of person Scott calls a “local tracker”. Reddit as it has existed does not have the “state capacity” to do this any other way. Maybe, at least for the high-engagement subreddits that it considers most important, it can replace the local trackers with more compliant ones – but it can’t go without them. The king of Reddit, today, needs somebody to go be baron. If he couldn’t get them for free, he’d have to pay them.

…but if you can rent-tax from outside the community, you can shift the balance of power

Reddit does not pay its moderators. It is not fully accurate to say that Reddit even confers the status and control that moderators possess, because that status and control is scoped to their moderated communities, and thus principally a function of community prominence. Anyone can be a mod; being a moderator of something that matters is something different entirely, and it’s Reddit’s userbase that makes that happen. On Reddit, many communities are extremely fungible; use the site long enough and you’ll observe schisms and migrations to new bits of namespace. We can argue that there is some extent to which community prominence is driven by the desirability of the community name, which is a bit conferred by Reddit – if I’m looking for an X subreddit, I’m going to look for /r/X before /r/originalX, /r/seriousX, /r/XUncensored etc., so there’s something meaningful to who gets to keep running /r/X – but in practice this is moderately fluid, as genres of content merge and divide even without explicit mod drama.

So if I were going to pin down what Reddit “gives” its mods, I would probably put it something like this: The ability to create and grow an online community with a bunch of useful (and not free-to-operate!) infrastructure and with intercommunity discovery among a large existing userbase.

What Reddit gets from its mods is – following the above – the ability to make the money that it makes from ads.

So how do you know whether that’s a fair trade?

It isn’t disqualifying to our comparison that the mods/lords don’t get paid in the same kind of thing that the company/king gets. For example, it was fairly common for the king to principally extract military support from the lords, rather than the same kind of rent-taxes the lords extracted from the commoners. However, this dynamic was always a bit in flux; making your vassals mad by giving them a shitty trade-off posed risks the king had to deal with in much the same way that the lords had to contend with the risk of overtaxing the populace. No one involved was stupid, and all the weird ideological language about divine right of kings shouldn’t make you think that people weren’t looking out for their own interests.

But crucially – the lords knew what kind of revenues they were getting from their lands, and they knew what the king was getting from them in turn. Maybe they’d lie to the king about the exact surpluses they’d extracted, just like the farmers would lie as much as possible about how much surplus there was – but their local control meant they had the local knowledge necessary to piece together the situation themselves.

So you can imagine that maybe the status quo is a fair trade – maybe the costs of running Reddit (data centers, engineers, lawyers), minus the ad revenue pretty much balance what Reddit gets from the mods in return for the chance to run their little communities. But how do you know?

A mod might be able to estimate how replaceable the job they do is, how replaceable their community is, and start trying to figure out what their leverage is…

But how do they estimate Reddit’s end of the deal?

Let’s talk about online advertising platforms for a second. (Sorry.)

YouTube does some revenue-sharing with video creators, so the amount of information exposed illustrates some interesting dynamics. First, remember: many videos lose YouTube money, possibly even most. They don’t ever get enough monetizable engagement to pay for their own (secret) marginal contributions to operating costs. Video hosting is expensive! But where there is monetizable engagement, the fact that we have some numbers doesn’t clear as much up as you might think.

Let’s say there’s some genre of enterprise software that’s hugely profitable to sell, but niche in potential customers; to advertise products of this kind, you need to reach people who work at companies who have jobs where they can influence buying decisions. Let’s say you are trying to sell one of these products. You know that the kind of person with the kind of job that makes them useful to influence likely uses some other kind of software – Tableau, maybe. Now let’s say that I run a YouTube channel with Tableau tutorials. You and your competitors want to advertise on my channel so bad. Maybe you don’t specifically know about my channel, and you’re letting YouTube figure out the eligibility of where to put your ads – but that’s the advertising opportunity that might work for your business, so if YouTube is willing to offer you that specificity, it’s gonna be valuable to you, and that means it’s gonna be pricey. If YouTube is revenue-sharing honestly, then that means that I am gonna get a way bigger cut per video than the creator of a equally watched channel that doesn’t imply some super-valuable advertising opportunity. And indeed, we see some amount of that: “best short term insurance plans” as keywords gets a CPM about 50 times higher than “best USB mic”, and some of that trickles down to the actual video creators.

But this can be alienated in ways that give the advertising platform a leg up. Let’s say that there’s a Norwegian law news channel that, like, every Norwegian lawyer watches religiously. It doesn’t post much, maybe, so it doesn’t get a ton of traffic, but the correlation is flawless. Norway has a high CPM, law has a high CPM, so let’s just say that intersection is a super valuable advertising target. Furthermore, though, this channel is so boring and specific that probably anyone who watches it much is a Norwegian lawyer. YouTube keeps track of those accounts. Let’s say there’s a second channel that’s all about… I dunno, drama commentary about the Norwegian National Opera and Ballet, and it just so happens that – unbeknownst to either the law news channel or the opera drama channel – Norwegian lawyers eat this opera drama shit up. This second channel might not have any high-CPM topics associated with it – but if YouTube lets advertisers target by “likely to be a Norwegian lawyer” rather than keywords associated with the actual opera video, then the signal about target demographics gathered from the law news channel combined with the engagement generated by the opera drama channel creates very profitable advertising opportunities for YouTube. Should the law news channel get a cut of the law-targeted ads on the opera drama channel because its content provided the signal that let that targeting happen¹²? Should the opera drama channel be paid better for desirability of the eyeball-hours it attracts, independently of opera drama keyword CPM? Does either channel have accurate information on how competitive its market is? If neither channel knows about the correlation, how incentivized is YouTube to remunerate them for the profitability of the intersection?

Maybe YouTube has the data it could crunch to figure out the marginal contributions there, but this begins to sound a bit like… parcels of land that maybe you can farm on some of the year, but during the dry season your neighbors can graze their animals on, but then with trees that the old tenants get to harvest… Right?

Substitute “subreddit” for “YouTube channel” and mix in that Reddit doesn’t have to share its detailed ad numbers, and you start to see how any given moderator of any given community can’t know whether they’re being exploited or how badly, even if as a whole it seems like mods produce way more value for Reddit than they benefit from. Your subreddit might marginally make Reddit a ton of money or might lose Reddit money, and you have no visibility into which.

The real dynamics of online advertising are fundamentally hidden from the creators of content and from volunteer moderators, and this means that no one can negotiate from their own actual value in the market. The illegibility of local variation may have meant that feudal lords were necessary to the feudal state, and the illegibility of local custom may similarly have meant that community-embedded moderators are necessary to Reddit as it exists today, but these platforms have information asymmetry that weights the balance of power heavily toward them. That’s kinda wild, and I can’t think of a parallel that real landed gentry had to put up with.

The tension between custom and putative authority seems important for understanding feudalism and moderator revolt

Let’s say the king comes to you, a feudal lord, and tells you that you’ve got to shave your beard. Maybe he bothers justifying it, whatever. You don’t want to shave your beard. “You know, your Majesty,” you say, “this new law seems pretty risky. Obviously I would never, but, uh, what if the rest of the lords tell you to, you know. Fuck off?”

One thing the king might say is “Well, my good man, who would definitely never say such a thing himself, they only matter because I say they do. Because God says I matter, and I delegated authority to them. And they know that, so they know that it would be both inherently ridiculous and self-defeating to go against me. Like, what would they be without me? Nothing. Peasants in violation of sumptuary law.”

You are not totally confident in this description of affairs. It sort of seems to you that the tenant farmers under you are mostly under your control because everyone’s used to it and because you pay men with pointy metal things to tidy up the exceptions, not because you have a royal stamp of officialdom. Sure, technically you are under this king, but is that really relevant to how the yearly harvest gets brought in and taxed? If that royal stamp were revoked, wouldn’t you still be able to exploit the local farmers all the same?

But it’s a little ambiguous. Even if the king’s authority seems like a fiction, if he has the military power to come in, squash you, and give your fief to the neighboring Baron Dogface, then… well, the little people would probably shrug and pay rent-tax to Dogface and try to get on with their own lives.

So who does a subreddit belong to?

Imagine starting one, hyping it up, patiently providing four-fifths of the content until people show up, moderating spam, moderating jerks, growing it gradually over time. Setting rules, establishing tone, running the weekly topical threads. Would you feel like that /r/whateverItWas existed because of Reddit the company? Would you feel like it fundamentally belonged to his Royal Highness Steve, and Steve was just delegating it to you to run? No! You started it! You shaped it! You collaborated with the people it attracted to make it what it is! Even those users – they could switch tomorrow to /r/whateverItWasTwo and you couldn’t do a thing about it – if they decided they didn’t like your vision for /r/whateverItWas, they would, so the fact that they’re still here is a kind of voting with your feet, it validates what you’re doing… To the extent that /r/whateverItWas exists as a thing within Reddit as a whole, to be run or misrun, managed or mismanaged? It feels like yours.

But at the same time, to an external observer – you can see how they would feel that this is pretty silly, right? The thing that’s “yours” is nothing but rows and columns in Reddit’s databases¹³, a series of flags giving you the power to moderate. The only thing you have is set in Reddit’s systems, a permission to edit stuff under a certain scope a bit differently than other users, wowee aren’t you important. It’s not you who has a license to the user posts, it’s not you who controls anything but a tiny little square of grass Reddit let you mow. You’re gonna protest over that? The world at large already doesn’t understand why you might volunteer for this work, why you might care enough to do it unpaid – you seem like a schmuck to them, a victim.

But not to Steve.

Steve is calling you landed gentry not because he’s really proposing to make things more democratic. Plenty of the protesting subreddits voted to protest – and even if Reddit vomits some PR about how that only reflects, like, the 9% rather than the 90% that never vote, it’s not really a convincing argument, is it? Steve is calling you landed gentry because he knows you work for him, making him money, and he wishes that you understood your authority to be delegated from him as your liege lord. Steve is annoyed that you feel like you have your own thing by local custom when what he sees is a bunch of flags in tables that are getting in the way of his business decisions¹⁴.

And I’m pretty sure Steve would like to modernize this whole feudal mess and remove the locality of your control.

The early modern state comes to Reddit

If we go back to Seeing Like A State for a minute… Technologies and practices that enabled central control were critical in the progression of the early modern state. Get rid of all that local variation in law and standardize it. Get rid of all those confusing local measurements. Bulldoze weird little windy streets and create boulevards that will make it easier to subdue local resistance. Propagandize to center your own importance. Use new media to extend your influence and control. Now you don’t need those local trackers like you once did, now you can administer your state more effectively centrally.

You know who’s managed this beautifully?

TikTok.

TikTok is really good at making people feel like they are seeing hyper-individualized content, but never allowing any explicit division of spaces within it. Without that division, no local norms can be established, no real preference expressed, and thus the tone of content is often uncannily homogeneous across wildly variant topics. This is what you’d expect: the unsteerable algorithmic recommendation feed feels like the final form of content collapse.

If I were a profit-maximizing social media company trying to expand my “state capacity”, I would be throwing money at every feature I could that took explicit navigation away from users, instead offering them frictionless spoon-feeding. Why? Social media that is homogenized (standard language!) is easier to moderate at scale. Moderation that is opaque (downweighting within hidden rankings) is easier to enact without objection, and tunably toward my engagement goals. Without even a sense of search keywords, I would increase the opacity of my advertising even further, obscuring from content creators the value I extract from them. These moves parallel the ones that Scott outlines early modern states taking to pull themselves out of dependency on local trackers. Remember: you don’t have to come up with a bureaucracy that can better handle the nation you have if you can change the nation itself to make it more governable.

And don’t you see those moves coming to Reddit?

I mean, maybe you don’t – Reddit has been pretty clever in allowing power users to maintain the old view characterized by explicit control even while it funnels new eyeballs toward recsys pablum. Part of Reddit’s whole IPO story has to be proving that it can provide a beautifully monetizable spoon-fed Infinite Recommended Content Feed just like Instagram or TikTok or Twitter or whatever – that’s just how social media companies are structured now. But especially if you’re used to using https://old.reddit.com/ or one of the very good third party apps that has existed – pop open a private window and navigate to the normal home page. Doesn’t that look a bit like they’re trying to navigate away from how Reddit has always been and towards e.g. Twitter?

So maybe Reddit moderators are like feudal lords in that they have been the necessary structure that allowed Reddit communities to be so wildly different all this time.

And maybe we need to lean into those metaphorical comparisons to imagine what’s coming next. Bloggers invoking the high-level “enclosure of the commons” are phoning it in. Let’s talk conversion of copyholders into leaseholders to remove customary rights.

And maybe we need to look at the ways those metaphorical comparisons don’t hold to imagine our ways out. Premodern subsistence farmers and early modern state subjects didn’t have all the options we do. You can’t bootstrap an alternate state by, like, automating crossposting, but on the internet all kinds of things are possible. (Hell, reminds one a bit of Reddit’s own fakery, dunnit?)

So as a non-moderator, as a peasant, as an un-titled pleb, I’d like to thank Steve for issuing the most CEO-flavored version of the age-old phpBB “the mods are mad with power!” complaint I’ve ever heard in my goddamn life.

Long live the King.

If anyone is inclined to nitpick around “landed gentry” potentially meaning something later in form than medieval fiefdoms… Yeah, fair. However, I have been suppressing a rant about these comparisons more broadly since the last wave of people trying out Mastodon led to a lot of “admins are like feudal lords” walnut-headed takes, so forgive me the framing. ↩
I am going to be citing him a lot in this first section. I promise you I am not homo unius libri and have done more reading; that said, he’s pithy to quote, his writing tries to be high-level enough for us ignorants, and anybody who enjoys my kind of thing probably will enjoy going and spending a week reading through his archives. My other reading hasn’t come across anything to meaningfully contradict his stuff except Interesting Exceptions, Suggesting Significant Local Variation. ↩
Readers may be rolling their eyes at how I haven’t written something explicitly scoping this to Europe explicitly. A lot of this is, to my knowledge, not limited to Europe; in Seeing Like A State, Scott refers to, e.g., some interesting dynamics in Just How Shit The Elite Could Make Their Laborers’ Lives Before Said Laborers Would Run Off And Live In The Mountains Instead in Southeast Asia. Still, strokes this broad probably shouldn’t be relied upon even within Europe, so I’d rather say this is only vaguely applicable anywhere. ↩
It doesn’t tend to go great when non-historians dive directly into historians’ work to support the former’s claims. Even within the social context in which academic work is produced, it’s difficult to tease out how a work’s reception should complicate our understanding of its merit. Outside of that context, when it’s just, like, bloggers linking to add credibility… Even when trying for intellectual honesty, we none of us are so far from Bret Stephens desperately typing “Jews as bedbugs” into Google Books. ↩
I read the parts before the nation-specific stuff, scrubbed through that (which makes up the bulk of the book), and then read the conclusion. In my defense, the author herself described it as “a very tedious book”. ↩
If anyone without a relevant degree wants to go off Googling their own sources to prop up their own counterclaims here, they are also welcome, but only to do so outside of my mentions. ↩
She goes on to contradict this; medieval people, not being absolute ninnies, did in fact have distinctions in mind between the public welfare and the ruler’s welfare. I am trying not to contradict the myth multiple times per sentence, so I may as well add in to this footnote that she also goes in on the depiction of these bonds as distinctively “personal” rather than obviously “political” or ambiguously “territorial”… and, like, a lot else. ↩
Scott’s real big thesis is that certain strains of this have a tendency to also lead to catastrophic Big Fuck-Ups. I don’t trust all of his examples, but some of them are indisputable and important reading for the engineering-minded among us. ↩
This is already absurdly caveated, but one more: I here exclude transhumance. ↩
Within almost any career, even if you got your job via social media, most people who got the same job didn’t. ↩
This is thus why the illustrators who make up 90% of my followees on Instagram use weird Unicode text transformation to announce “shop updates”; rightly or wrongly, they believe Instagram nukes the visibility of those posts in an automated way, to an extent that’s worth awkward-looking circumvention attempts. Hard to have data on whether this is actually happening, but you could certainly see why Instagram might do that – those same kinds of shop update posts otherwise also make it into my feed as paid ads… One sign that I think Instagram may be doing this to an aggressive extent – well, my Instagram ads are often announcements stuff that I wouldn’t mind seeing organically. So why did the poster have to reach me via a paid ad? ↩
It’s Google, so they have data that could tell them where every lawyer in Norway sleeps and in what pajamas, but, uh, generally. ↩
I mean, I hope it’s not actually relational tables, but I don’t care enough about this to go look up their stack. ↩
I, of course, have no way of knowing how Steve actually feels¹⁵, but this seems like the best way to convey emotionally what I have found so fascinating about that asinine comment that I would write all of this up. ↩
“Dissect him how I may, then, I but go skin deep; I know him not, and never will.” ↩

the lawrence welk-hee haw counter-revolution polka

2023-05-14T00:00:00-07:00

the big wheels at the networks started spinning
the verdict was that hee haw had to go
cause city slickers don’t believe in grinning
and who the heck needs jokes in kokomo?
they canceled all the singin’ and the pickin’
but the stubborn little donkey wouldn’t leave
and that little fella’s still alive and kickin’
and hee haw’s still laughing up its sleeve

A profit-mindful market-oriented approach is not guaranteed to be a representative one. This can can get particularly flavorful in the arena of culture.

Enter: the rural purge.

The “rural purge” of American television networks (in particular CBS) was a series of cancellations in the early 1970s of still-popular rural-themed shows with demographically skewed audiences, the majority of which occurred at the end of the 1970–71 television season.

From a linked NYT piece:

Mr. Wood, believing that the network’s future lay in riskier shows that appealed to a younger demographic, instructed Mr. Dann to cancel several shows that were popular with older viewers, notably “The Red Skelton Show” and “The Jackie Gleason Show,” as well as rural-themed shows like “Green Acres” and “Hee Haw.”
Mr. Dann chafed. “Just because the people who buy refrigerators are between 26 and 35 and live in Scarsdale, you should not beam your programming only at them,” he told New York magazine in 1970[.]

The needs of advertising lead to centering the most profitable demographics, never mind what might be more representative.

A sort of reverse process would later occur when Billboard stopped relying solely on fudged numbers:

MARK PHILLIPS: Virtually overnight the charts got a whole lot more accurate, and the effects were huge. Chart columnist Chris Molanphy says the music industry responded to the clearer picture of what was popular by promoting not just underappreciated artists, but whole genres.

CHRIS MOLANPHY: The two I would point to most particularly are country and hip-hop. The act that SoundScan arguably made was Garth Brooks.

[MUSIC UP AND UNDER] The very first week SoundScan came online, his then current album, No Fences, shot into the top 10. It’s widely perceived that the advent of truly accurate counting allowed the industry to perceive just how popular he was for the first time and promote him accordingly.

Once in a production-promotion context where genre-variety could be profitably exploited, it became useful again to mine ruralish aesthetics.

So… is that good? Is it better that every niche find its consumer? Is this more democratic?

This bit is just my own crotchety complaining, you understand, but… Country music, now accepted back into the corporate fold, often ends up different to my ears. Did we benefit from the microtargeting Eye of Sauron turning its maximizing gaze upon this culture? Even country as a whole was too imprecise, so now there are country subgenres now whose consumption must perfectly correlate with bloat-trucks, and others’ with NPR tote bags. Is this good?

Even pre-purge, the same themes:

Welk relied on fan letters to tell him who was popular and who was not. Often, performers who received a positive reaction were prominently featured on future shows, while those who did not meet muster with the audience saw their solo opportunities diminish and sometimes were eventually let go.

painting of the day: alphonse mucha isn’t overrated

2023-04-24T00:00:00-07:00

Either Wikipedia or my link preview plugin is behaving badly… here’s a real link

Look, I know you are as bored of his four seasons as I am. The Moët & Chandon ad. But don’t for a second think that Mucha is just dorm-room fare!

The use of blue here is wonderful to me. I would love to know the pigment used; the dark values could remind one of how Prussian blue looks in masstone, there are also values that glow like ultramarine, but together with the lighter blues I can think only of phthalo blue – and it wasn’t available at the time, no? There’s something I’m missing, surely.

I love the choice to leave the winged figure in hazy silhouette. Ambiguity stronger than depiction¹.

Is it just a bird? It might be just a bird. But I am going to argue that this is still actual ambiguity and not just my desire to see a Winged Figure ↩

a newfound discomfort with hypertext

2023-03-21T00:00:00-07:00

I bought a printer, months and months back, because I had these ideas of beautiful janky little booklets, monochrome laser printed, lovingly finessed margins. I buy people’s zines and read them. I write, I illustrate things, I have a rotating stapler; trust me that there is a level on which this made sense.

I haven’t made any.

The reason is slightly more complicated than overambitious hobby flightiness – and thinking about it has left me with a bad taste in my mouth about this website.

I do some creative things, but I’m not A Creative. I have a carefully nurtured sense of entitlement to Fine Arts and Haute Whatever, but my college degree was vocational in essence¹, and I have a demanding job that isn’t well served by my spending time on any of this stuff.

I have cheerfully tanked my analytics by leaving Twitter and disabling search engines. I am not trying to Blow Up here.

So: whatever you notice me do, trust I am doing out of an inchoate Inner Drive To __.

But that’s okay! On the Internet, that’s okay. I can contribute something by pointing at a glassware company’s sort of bananas online catalog-thing and excerpting some found poetry. You wouldn’t have found that without me, and if you yourself don’t find it funny or interesting, you can still perceive my directing you toward it as part of My Whole Deal.

And if I get more het up about something, find myself perseverating, wearing circles in the mental carpet, well, I can write up a giant piece of “nuh-uh!!”.

What determines whether something is worth publishing?

On the margin, it is free for me to send any visitor Bormioli Rocco branding quotes. If you feel your time is wasted, well, it is not so terribly hard for you to click away, close a tab. I can be experimental or loose about what I include here. Casual. Chatty.

And as for wondering whether some counterpoint is worth writing up – well, discourse perpetuates itself. Read too many pieces saying XYZ without reading replies asserting the obvious Not XYZ, and you will find yourself convinced of the virtue of tossing Not XYZ into the ring.

I believe that this one thing I wrote is Good, and the better part of it is because I embed, quote, link to things that I didn’t see other people juxtapose in the same way. Imagining writing a zine version, something similarly scoped as a zine, gives me the willies. Yes, partially because I have grown decadent in my footnotes – but also because I derive authority from my links². You may reasonably not value my opinions or ideas, but you’d be a fool not to respect my links. I embed myself in the Web and I embed the Web in my work.

Yes, I too love the antecedents to digital hypertext, but Ramelli’s wheel is hardly a default. Paper asks to stand alone.

You know all the memes (and more than memes) about “God, give me the confidence of a mediocre white dude”? I do notice how dudely my blogroll is, despite my curatorial efforts. How heavily pale male the general population of Independent Website Proprietors is. In some ways, this is helpful: an often encouraging benchmark. “Well, I have at least as much right to speak on the topic as this fellow.”

In other ways, though, I find myself criticizing how little any of them – any of us Posters – can have to say.

I buy zines – order them, read them. I am disturbed sometimes by the critical voice in my head. Sometimes I can read between the lines exactly my own anxieties. An author-artist who wants to make Something, who feels like it’s got to be different from what she’d post online, and who thereby excises the breezy lightness from her own tone, ends up stilted. Jamie Mortara was wiser to publish a chapbook of their poem tweets, tumblr posts, directly. I buy innumerable witchy almanacs that feel inferior to search results – no, my own benefit from that lighter contract between webmaster and visitor. Procreate-illustrated personal essays without shape or substance.

But lightness…

It is hard to conquer my own fears and insecurities that what I have to say isn’t worth the staples, particularly when I have seen others waste those staples. Is it harder still to conquer because I have this lighter, easier path to take instead?

Is my ethic of link-justified hypertext a brace compensating for muscles I should develop?

I have posted thirteen thousand toots on Mastodon and that’s a pretty astonishing number but I don’t feel bad about it. The world is not worse off for my chatter. But if I didn’t have my little asbestos-free social media, if I didn’t have this site, would it encourage me to progress further? Or would the higher barrier to entry for my projects instead limit what I produce, share?

At the end of a day spent dealing with Difficult Other Shit do I even want to wrestle with my own demons in this way? Are my creative drives weak enough that I just – wouldn’t? And what would that say about me?

When I’m cooking, I experiment, because cooking is mostly boring as hell³ and if you’re not interested in Precise Technique, the creative bits are what you have to sustain you. I’ve been refining a hazelnut-based pasta sauce, for instance. Pretty much any time I cook anything, I go through these phases where I’m enthusiastic about the idea, and then excited about my variation, and then somewhere in the middle - lid on the pot, dish in the oven – I become possessed by the certainty that it’s going to be terrible. It rarely is, but of course it’s not about the food, is it?

If I could delete my efforts without wasting ingredients (sin, sin, mortal sin), without leaving a household meal-less, how many times would I have? And you must be able to infer without my telling you that I shy from ingredients expensive enough to Ruin, to fail to live Up To.

Here I find myself drawn to caveat. I’m Sure A Thousand People Have Written About This Already. I Know None Of This Is Especially Individual To Me. But do you notice that won’t stop me from publishing this? It’s a blog post! No one cares! You came here for correctly nested HTML tags and I sent you them for the fee of zero dollars. I owe you no quality, no restraint. Authenticity to the spirit of the project, maybe – but no late-arriving insecurities stop me here.

A literal B.S. degree! ↩
I wasn’t just talking about other people when I mused about the power of never-read citations, maybe. ↩
Draining labor defined by inhaling a bunch of life-shortening particulate pollution, even when you’re careful enough not to cut or burn your hands, and having to decide whether to cook to others’ tastes or your own. The cultural script that we should all pretend this is enjoyable: oppressive. Fight me and I will clobber you with the lid of a cast-iron pumpkin-shaped cooking pot. ↩

mr. openai I don’t feel so good

2023-02-14T00:00:00-08:00

STEAL

This is about kind of techie things, but the real center of this post is feelings. I can only speak for myself. I’m sharing them because I don’t think I’m particularly special, so I’m guessing bits of this will sound familiar to other people like me¹. Some of this is still fairly inchoate and I’ll probably return to it somewhere.

When I was a kid on the Internet I felt intense indignation about copy protection. The way certain websites would override right-click, give you a pop up instead so you couldn’t easily save images. I’d insist on finding workarounds to save the things anyway, little pixel witch gifs, to folders from which they’d never be used. Who do you think you are to send bytes to my computer but then try to tell me what to do with them? A webpage felt like a document sent in the mail. Maybe you should be able to sue me if I sell some copy, some collage of it, but you can’t stop me from making the copy, the collage. DVD players that blocked screenshots were an indignity I couldn’t get around, and I fumed.

Now we live in a world where if you share a copy of an illustration hi-res enough to look good on people’s screens, it’ll be on an Aliexpress product as soon as it gets enough likes. Twitter bots looking for “I want this on a t-shirt” to swoop in and automate a dropshipped version.

I have to have a more complicated view about that feeble attempt to protect against image theft in that context. It’s why I never put the illustrations I was putting up on Instagram onto Pixelfed; sensible open APIs make it that much easier for some misguided individual² to vacuum up everything you’ve put out there. I felt uncomfortable with that even as my discomfort seemed to contradict other of my values³. Nuance, maturing opinions…

And yet I have 25 lines of indignant JavaScript tucked into a Tampermonkey script because Library Ireland tried to stop me from copying a quote out from their site and How Dare They.

Writing about the web often takes as axiomatic that everyone wants attention online, and more attention is more better and we’re all supposed to Have A Platform and Use Our Platform. I have a social acquaintance with other people who have had their writing land on the front page of Hacker News, some of whom routinely have their writing there, and maybe it shouldn’t be surprising that having The Hacker News Community™️ tack a comment section you can’t moderate onto the thing you made isn’t something everyone always loves. This is a part of hypertext where the rubber hits the road, maybe. The freedom to link is the power to brigade.

The “immortal programming goddess” who checks for an incoming Hacker News referer header and redirects to a fart noise: heroic, iconic, we have no choice but to etc. etc.

The people who have less alloyed feelings about seeking attention are the ones trying to make a living selling something. I see people – artists selling prints and stickers, ceramicists, embroiderers – bemoan “the algorithm”, the platforms’ recommendation systems that mediate⁴ the presentation of their photo and video content. What is it that we are meant to contrast the presence of the all-powerful uncaring algorithm to? The past? Uncomfortable to note, but common to see: guides by and for these folks that advise doing little to none of the traditional marketing work that would have been necessary to their livelihoods before social media. Is the algorithm bad for “taking away” attention from them that they’d never have had in a pre-social media world?

No, this kind of exculpatory line of thought misses a lot of what’s really bad about the status quo by distracting you with a question of entitlement. Better to consider it together with gig work. These artists operate with supposed flexibility and autonomy, but then have to create reels based on rumored understandings of how Instagram will continue directing attention to their posts, their profiles, their sale announcements. These livelihoods entail having to pretend that your boss is not your boss, that you don’t have a boss, that you’re your own boss, and you post about being your own boss sometimes because #smallbusinesslife does okay numbers, but also what cadence do you need to be uploading on and do you have to use the app’s own camera and video editor for it to count? Someone says that they heard from someone who knows a Facebook employee that it works in such-and-such a way, but that was before the update six months ago that everyone remembers for tanking their engagement, their finances, so maybe it doesn’t work that way anymore.

So. If you’re not trying to maximize the attention you get and it comes for you anyway, that’s not all good. And if you’re trying to compete for attention with untold others on a platform where the ground is always shifting yet the house always wins, that’s not all good. Perhaps “more attention is better” is taken on faith if it holds true for the journalists who write about all this stuff, for the Substack commentariat class… but even for we the weirdo Posting 1%, I can’t say it feels true enough to generalize.

Artifact is a new app trying to be TikTok for text. I gave it a shot. I was curious as to whether, within the recommendation-system brief it gave itself, it would be more like Instagram reels – where I can sort of steer my way around, watch from searches – or TikTok – where any attempt to direct what I see other than careful Engagement Reactions seems useless. I could do a fuller write-up on it, but… more than anything, I was startled at the portion of the content that seemed to be documenting TikTok trends in blog posts.

You see people commenting on ChatGPT stuff with the worry that machine learning systems will begin to train on the generated output of machine learning systems. Maybe a good rule of thumb that we should have learned by now: never assume automating optimization is necessary for some weird thing to happen when there are already a bunch of people trying to optimize. The human TikTokkers creating and following trends and quota-hitting bloggers reifying them are enough to enact that imagined pattern⁵. Production turned into consumption turned into engagement, engagement analyzed, content promoted, encouraged, derived… the fact of the promotion and engagement becomes further material for derivation.

I don’t find music on TikTok or Instagram myself, but it’s common these days for songs to go viral there as background music. They say⁶ that music producers explicitly design around textures, interesting drops, moments that would be useful to be turned into video backing tracks. Some people talk about that like it’s horrifying that Art might be Degraded in this way. The idea that art forms are shaped by their social context is a little too foundational – foundational to, I dunno, four-fifths of what’s interesting about art – for me to take that seriously. Besides, I like texture⁷. But it’s a useful illustration of how limiting it is to approach this from an individual opt-in/opt-out mindset⁸: I don’t participate in getting my music from TikTok and Instagram, but the world of music that is available for me to listen to is different because we live in a TikTokified world. Because TikTok and Instagram have a recommendation model that uses choice of background music as a big factor in recommendations. Virality casts a long shadow.

I have never published anything under a FOSS license. Don’t get me wrong here – I’ve given money to open source projects, done some non-coding stuff, filed issues… I do believe in the thing, the heritage of the part of computers that came from acid-dropping academe rather than grindset. I can fairly say I don’t publish code because of my employer’s ridiculous policies⁹, but there’s something else as well. Automatic licensing, automatic permission, that’s what you need for industry scale, web scale, planet scale. But I like to get emails from other weirdos asking how things were done, to write back with cheerful comments. I like the inefficiency of it. I like how no one arrives in my inbox with Demands, only ever the beginning of a social interaction.

I have loved being linked to. The little bits of email correspondence. The conversations on Mastodon¹⁰. The acquaintanceships with other website proprietors. I have loved being listed in people’s handmade lists. Being aggregated and ranked is a different feeling. And there’s worse coming.

The search engines propose to summarize the contents of the web now (Bing, Google). This is somewhat like how they have been excerpting bits from pages for a long time, and contains both of the significant downsides of this existing practice: first, that it presents unvetted “information” with all the epistemic authority of the search engine’s brand, and second, through bypassing sending people to the original sources, it rips away from the original publishers whatever they had hoped to get from people visiting their pages. Ad revenue? Prestige? Clicks through to other material? All arrogated to the search engine.

These two effects would be bad enough to merit the commentariat’s angst. There’s a third and less concrete way it bothers me.

I have been fine with search engines linking to my posts, my pages. The web search feels virtuous in an era of Twitter jokes showing up on TikTok made into trends for blog posts aggregated into recommendation feeds…

The few things Google sends people to my site for seem reasonable enough. Google didn’t offer searchers anything about the cursed idea of dithering images with CSS before I did my write-up, which I know because I was searching extensively assuming someone must have done it already. That it is now an answer they give to similar queries: reasonable.

But I have never aspired to create neutral reference content. I only ever want to write things with enough voice that someone who’s on my frequency will enjoy it, and enough that someone who dislikes my style will wrinkle their nose and tab away. This sorting effect seems to me to be at the heart of what niche self-publishing ought to be able to offer; I’m not trying to maximize attention! I don’t mind when the search engines ignore me.

This site has been too much of an experiment for me to claim now that I have a grand theory about it, about similar sites – but certainly by now I have instincts, feelings…

…and making my writing available for automated summarization? So someone can sell ads by a depersonalized version of my stuff? The feeling is nausea.

I’m not a lawyer. One thing I understand to be true of copyright is that you are never meant to be able to use it to protect your ideas, but only your expression of your own ideas. Isn’t it exactly this expression that the large language models propose to be able to recreate, to sand off the things that make your version yours? It doesn’t have to be copyright infringement to be plagiarism – but then I suppose copyright never did much for anyone not shelling out for a lawyer.

I don’t derive the kind of gain from this site that justifies getting angry about “stolen” “traffic”. The professional artists and writers can point to the material effects on them, and that’s all real. People visiting my little blog posts more or less will make no material difference to my life. This line of reasoning – guesstimating impact – seems a bit hollow, though, as consolation goes. If there are other people out there who, like me, participate in the open web because we’re motivated by the small joys of connecting with similar weirdos, sharing with the younger weirdos coming up… well, feelings can cancel each other out. Does it feel good to be made gristle for a giant corporation’s sausage-making machine, even on your own independent website? Can I really tell people making a personal website is great with that as a caveat?

Where do we go when good web citizenship itself may be biting people?

Rutkowski has also added alt text in English when uploading his work online. These descriptions of the images are useful for people with visual impairments who use screen reader software, and they help search engines rank the images as well. This also makes them easy to scrape, and the AI model knows which images are relevant to prompts.

It’s enough to make me consider running back to cozy group chats, removing anything scrutable from public availability. Sending out printed content with stamps.

I said that Google sends people to my stuff sometimes. That’s been true, but I’m hoping it’ll stop. I set up a robots.txt file, and I’ll switch it to an allowlist approach. I added meta tags in the head¹¹.

I don’t think it’ll ensure anything with regards to the model training; the pattern they’re establishing for images is setting up the datasets under the auspices of some “non-profit” “research” institution and gosh isn’t it all the most fair use thing you can imagine? Never mind what hypercapitalist nightmare the funders have in mind for it. They don’t think they need artists’ consent, so they don’t really think they need mine. Levers exist for me to communicate my discontent, opt out of search, but only because I have a role worth small respect as my own server admin… so there’s some tradition to let me indicate how not to overload my system.

I know we all know by now that the ad industry is low-sulfur Satan. But it is also true that my mother is a librarian and her mother is a librarian and I always kind of looked at Google and thought, you know, maybe being a Professional Computer Person could end up being a little like being a librarian too. Family joked about high-school age me – “Mayapedia!” – for my enthusiastic insistence on looking up anything that was wondered about in conversation. Search has been a force for good in my life, over and above the good of open publication. To remove my own stuff, my own little pen recommendations and book reviews and tiny Chinese videogame handheld info… it’s sad.

You, reader, when you came here – likely from Mastodon – you reached out with your computer, your phone, to my server, where I had assembled my nonsense ready to send back to you. I sent you gold picture frames and a starfield GIF¹² and a moon phase emoji with JavaScript to match it to the great moon phase emoji in the sky. And my writing – overwrought, terminally online, smeared with syntactic remnants of whatever book I last read. I put it together for you. The stitching is visible, crooked seams.

Will the future hold clean summaries, phrasings less convoluted than mine? A chatbot delivering the hallucinated view from nowhere? Will you be able to fine-tune a Maya model 20% less annoying than the real one?

There are men in California ready to sell ads on its sides.

V wrote up a talk they did that, among other things, hits a lot of what I was waving at here, but with, like, examples and explanations so it’s better. I maybe have a couple of nitty-ass annotations (e) but it’s basically what you would want to recommend people read instead of this post.

At least a bit technical. Both consumer and creator. A life deeply involved with technology. A sense that that’s not been only for the good. ↩
This is me trying not to say “some asshole” so please read “some misguided individual” with the appropriate tone thanks. ↩
“But Maya, no one’s going to bother stealing your stuff” is maybe true¹³, but it doesn’t make the dynamic more comfortable. Compare how any streamer considering showing her face has to reckon with not only the current availability but the future availability of deepfake tech. The expected-value calculation – risk, impact – might come out in your favor, but boy does it not feel good to have to do the math. ↩
I like Corey Doctorow a lot more than I like Benedict Evans¹⁴, but on this, the EFF activist who I’d hope would be more plugged-in has failed to understand the dynamics as well as the venture capitalist, which is, like, kind of a bad sign for all of us. ↩
I would be titling this pattern The Content Centipede except that the content involved doesn’t have to be shit. (It is often pretty crap, but not always! Creatives can get creative, even in cringey bad-meme-shaped boxes.) ↩
This was in coverage I’d read, so I went and looked for it to link here. Duck Duck Go often lets me down, and I’m still trying to degoogle, so out of habit, I went to Bing¹⁵. And they chatbotted me! In my research for my own goddamn thing about it! Agh! ↩
This is my favorite drop. You should listen to it in context, too. I have been striving in vain to find ones as good for almost a decade. If you, dear reader, know of a drop of this kind, reach out. ↩
Those remembering my earlier variation on this theme may rest assured that I will stop talking about it exactly as soon as I stop tripping over dumb-ass well-no-one’s-making-you-do-anything takes on the topic. ↩
Here’s something I always wonder about: if they’ve explicitly stated that even a code example short enough to fit in a tweet is impermissible, is website JavaScript verboten? Would it matter if I minified it? Should it matter that I have never written them a line of JavaScript, of CSS? ↩
This isn’t me omitting Twitter to be catty. People didn’t talk to me much on Twitter about my stuff back when I used it and had more followers there than Mastodon. You probably can’t extrapolate anything interesting from that. ↩
I live in a swamp! I put up signs! I’m a [technically competent admin]! What do I have to do to get a little [moral rights]? ↩
Alternate post title: if you can’t handle me at my deranged aesthetic choices then you don’t deserve me at my fun facts. ↩
Manually, it’s happened before. ↩
Reasonable to guess my readers have heard of the former and not the latter. Benedict Evans: notorious thin-skinned VC who is, at least, often considering interesting questions in his writing. I’ve annotated a couple of his posts before. ↩
I know DDG is backed by Bing. I have not always known this. Habit is habit. ↩

no more startups. programming skills only to be used for projects based on surreal dreams

2023-01-28T00:00:00-08:00

She processes her voice into a birdsong-like sound because of a bird speaking to her in a dream.

Via @Vierkantor

I realize now that everything I have ever seen called a hedge was an embarrassment to the name

2023-01-24T00:00:00-08:00

This makes so much sense that I’m genuinely troubled I’m only encountering it now, today, in the year in which I turn thirty. How many little mentions of hedges in old books hadn’t quite made sense because I had American sheared boxwood in mind?

(Further viewing, for the interested)

poison the (data) well! poison it I say

2023-01-20T00:00:00-08:00

…year so far: “radioactive data.” They write:

In the subfield of computer vision, researchers at Meta have demonstrated that images produced by AI models can be identified as AI- generated if they are trained on “radioactive data”—that is, images that have been imperceptibly altered to slightly distort the training process. This detection is possible even when as little as 1% of a model’s training data is radioactive and even when the visual outputs of the model look virtually identical to normal images. It may be possible to build language models that produce more detectable outputs by similarly training them on radioactive data; however, this possibility has not been extensively explored, and the approach may ultimately not work.

No one is sure exactly how (or if) this would work; it’s much easier to alter an image imperceptibly than it is text. But the basic idea would be to “require proliferators to engage in secretive posting of large amounts of content online,” they write, in hopes that models trained on it would produce text that could be traced back to those “radioactive” posts. If by now you’re thinking “that’s bonkers,” you’re not alone. Among other things, the authors note, this nuke-the-web plan “raises strong ethical concerns regarding the authority of any government or company to deliberately reshape the internet so drastically.” And even if someone did go to those lengths, they write, “it is unclear whether this retraining would result in more detectable outputs, and thus detectable influence operations.”

Regarding the “ethical concerns”, I have to say: you can’t cheat an honest man. If this altered material is posted publicly but without permission for use, and it happens to be slurped down by those with no intention to license it, should I feel bad for them? The republication of scraped publicly posted content is already a travesty before neural networks are brought in to launder the IP concerns. Even I on this proudly two-bit, proudly dog-and-pony website have had my writing stolen¹!

Anyway, I think whatever mischief folks can get up to that gives the creators of these things a hard time is probably good on balance – even if just to rattle the bars of the narrative that it’s beneficent “research”.

I sent one (1) email to the effect of “I see what you did there” and the stolen piece was deleted, but it leaves one wondering if there are more I never found… ↩

winnie lim keeps a personal changelog

2022-12-15T00:00:00-08:00

… changed since the last update. I see all these archives of my thoughts and psyche as keeping a personal changelog. They document what has changed in me since.
Maybe to many people this wouldn’t be useful. But I tend to have a poor memory, and my mind tends to be stuck in time from years of being chronically depressed, sometimes like a broken record that plays the same tune over and over again. Reviewing my past allows me to see myself clearer. Without my documentation I would truly believe I am the same old helpless boring person who is in constant despair, but my writing tells me otherwise. There were so many things I wanted to do and learn, and I have this impression of myself that I am not good at following through, but my personal history has demonstrated that I did eventually follow through, but sometimes it took many, many years. But what matters is that I did …

At one point, my life was not going very well. I was living with my parents. I was (and to a lesser extent, am) very intimidated by to-do lists. Trying to buck myself up, I put a big piece of butcher paper on the back of a door and labeled it “Accomplishments”.

I never wrote anything on that sheet. But every time I saw it – over years¹ – I would think, well, hang on, that void isn’t right, I have accomplished stuff since I put that up. And mentally I would tick through growing list of accomplishments. I moved away, visited, thought through the list again.

It’s very easy for me to focus on the faults, the things I want to fix, what I want to get better at. But that blank piece of paper really did help me build a mental narrative around momentum, around being on the right track.

thanks for leaving it up so long mom lol ↩

choosing algorithms: we live in a society

2022-11-28T12:00:00-08:00

And we can’t settings-toggle our way out

Tim Bray is somebody one can reasonably look up to with regard to a lot of things. He recently moved from Twitter to Mastodon and I and 3.9 thousand others are happy to have him there.

He posted – linked above – about how Mastodon does its algorithmic feed-building a bit differently, how the users think about it differently, and how Mastodon could allow a new user-choice-centered approach. I had feelings and thoughts spurred by the post (as well as by other Discourse of the moment, as will probably be evident between the lines). Go read it first!

Do engagement-maximizing algorithms maximize engagement by giving us what we want?

Protect me from what I want · And anyhow, those algorithms are just showing you what you want. Don’t try to deny it, if it wasn’t what you wanted you wouldn’t be doomscrolling so much, would you? These ML models know what you want and that’s what they show you. (Jenny Holzer is wonderful. On…

I think this is presented in a tongue in cheek way, but I want to unpack it a bit for reasons that will become clear.

Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills.

– Schopenhauer, I’m told

I do not want to eat an entire loaf of Oregon Hazelnut bread in an approximately two-day-long period. If I buy the loaf and have it in my house, I will do this. Therefore, I do not buy the loaf.

Should my ephemeral will to eat be considered as more authentic or real than my longer-term will to not eat? The latter is capable of overruling the former by not buying the bread. The former certainly wins when the bread’s around. Clearly “what I want” is both to eat the bread and to not eat the bread. It’s not that one is a “want” and one is a “meta-want”, because both straightforwardly inform my actions to bring about their intended results – it’s just that those actions oppose each other by being enacted at different timescales.

This isn’t binary, either; if we could talk about “what I want” simply at a meaningful level, I think you wouldn’t expect it to be helpful for me to put Franz pumpkin bread in a cabinet too high for easy perusal. But when I do, I eat less pumpkin bread. Is it that I want to eat the bread and am stymied by reaching up? Is it that I want to not eat the bread and am protected from its siren call by cabinet doors? We can pretend to model it with quantities, “activation energy”, “speed bumps”, but I think we all know we’re discussing a map, not the territory.

Volition isn’t simple enough to use this language. To apply something akin to systems thinking here, we can recognize that what I “want” and what my environment cues me toward also interact at a higher-level: what I want my environment to cue me toward. Whether I have the bread in the cupboard is the level at which my short-term and longer-term decisions interact. That’s the level at which people are having this discussion - so it is flattening to pull it back down to a level equivalent to “well if you didn’t want to eat so much bread then why did you eat it all when it was there hmm”.

So – what? Who cares? Well, I’m particularly touchy about how we talk about volition because it is not separable from how we discuss actual addiction (no, not my problematic relationship with bread). There are some incorrect but deep-seated puritanical beliefs about how self-control works that show up in how we talk about addiction: “you don’t really want to quit, or you would have quit” is the kind of thing that I have heard pretty commonly voiced with regard to alcohol, with regard to drugs, with regard to smoking… but predominantly voiced by people who haven’t gone through it and haven’t seen a loved one going through it¹.

Oh, and all that is premised on choices that are pretty easy to notice yourself making! It’s easy to drift into niches on TikTok for quite some time before you even notice the pattern you’re being shown. It’s easy to make choices without awareness of their impact. The poisonous Bradford lozenges were tasty enough to be sold by someone who’d had one.

If we are to describe the most fleeting want as the most real, and the conscious repudiation of it as inauthentic, less true, a mere “want to want”, then we arrive at some silly places when it comes to how entirely non-suicidal people experience “l’appel du vide”.

Is my least aware, most instinct-driven self my truest self? When I went on antidepressants that let me wrest control back from that self, was I denying who I was?

You can tell I have pretty strong feelings about this stuff because I’m writing all this in response to a paragraph that, to be clear, seems like it was presented with irony. But… oof. When former Twitter employees write about how they’re confident people preferred non-chronological feed-building algorithms because that’s what the data showed – I mean, what would they have been inferring from data about me and bread?

Can the debate over what feed-building algorithms should be like be resolved by giving individuals choices?

…plausible, but very difficult. Mastodon introduces a feature where you can download and install algorithms, which can be posted by anyone. They are given the raw unsorted list of posts from people you follow and use that produce a coherent feed. You might have to pay for them. They could be free. They could involve elaborate ML, or not. They might sometimes pull in posts from people you don’t follow. They could be open-source, or not. I like this idea a lot, although the technology would require careful design. The algorithm would have to be a…

Look, it’s not that it’s implied by the above, but historically, I think it’d be fair to say tech folks as a whole have under-considered the externalities of individual choices. The mindset has been approximately: if it’s a setting an individual can toggle, surely it’s only that individual’s business? We can see this showing up in the replies to Tim Bray’s original Mastodon post: “not only “own your own data”, but own the way you view it too”, “people who are against algorithms can just turn them off in their settings”.

If I were going to phrase this as a Take, it might be this: people who have technical skills enough to build and influence stuff should not believe this. In a world with Pizzagate and genocide in Myanmar and eight million other awful things the Internet has enflamed just since I graduated high school, innocent optimism is irresponsible; we have to own what our systems incentivize. So I want to take a tediously explicit look at how even individually-selected transparent feed-building algorithms have knock-on effects in a non read-only world.

Non read-only? Well, to compare: if we were to ignore the fact that I linkblog from the stuff I find there, the way that I sort the stuff in my RSS reader probably shouldn’t matter to anyone but me.

But in an actually social medium, we’re all in the soup together.

If other people are using feed-building algorithms that weight “likes” into the prominence of content, then I can no longer hit like on a post without that also constituting an act of signal-boosting, which may direct unwanted attention to a person to whom I just wanted to give acknowledgement². My use of this feature now has to shape itself around other people’s algorithmic choice.
Since we know there are people who enjoy being assholes on the internet recreationally, if they are empowered to more easily use feed-building algorithms other than reverse chronological sort, it follows they will find algorithms better suited for the kind of griefing they want to do. (The classic Twitter “ratio” makes clear that even very simple signals are enough to find an ongoing dogpile if that’s your goal, and there are already controversial Fediverse forks introducing features some believe to be abusive, so this prediction isn’t a stretch.) Even if I don’t use those algorithms myself, that’s going to impact the number of turds in the pool that I was planning to swim in.
If the surface area of algorithm-to-understand becomes as complicated as “anything anyone might build and plug in”, this will encourage the kind of paranoia that one sees in Tiktok word-substitutions for purportedly downranked keywords. You will get a lot more superstitious pigeons as different people try to meet their complex goals of social media participation without a full understanding of the landscape. Listening to artists on Instagram complain and theorize about how to maintain reach across various incarnations of that feed-building algorithm has led me to believe that chaos/complexity in this domain has real costs, ones that are disproportionate to what the technically-minded might assume. (How much money gets spent on scammy “beat the algorithm” Instagram/YouTube courses every day? The purchasers are doubly victims of the scammers and the algorithmic world too complicated for them to make sense of.)
Right now the default reverse chronological sort produces a neat decay in engagement with posts. It takes real social effort to keep something in circulation. This serves usefully to limit the spread of some kinds of take-y discourse. We only get to have this conversational atmosphere through alignment, through sharing a quieter lower-engagement view on the world. If a lot of other individuals – even well-meaning ones – are picking Thunderdome feed-building algorithms, I might be able to keep my reverse chronological algorithm, but the universe of posts that are out there for me to sort reverse chronologically are going to be far, far more Thunderdomey. If the people I follow are tempted by the junk food Thunderdome-style engagement numbers, the current conversational atmosphere I get to have with them will dissipate as they’re nudged toward Takes. Maybe I can invest ever-increasing amounts of effort in filtering out the nonsense, I can walk away entirely – but if a market is all about incentives, where is the cost of this accounted for?

Individualizing stuff like this feels like freedom, especially to those of us with the skillset to reach our hands into the guts and tinker. There’s something to that, certainly. I spend far too much time writing user scripts to not see the romance. But I can’t help thinking of how we’re struggling to de-individualize issues like plastic pollution where we didn’t take adequately into consideration how my “individual choice” is constrained by others’ in aggregate, and how my choice in turn impacts others. There are huge collective action problems in clawing back the messes free marketplaces create where externalities are high, and I think that’s a really important lesson we should take from the past couple decades of social web.

You can see how people’s perceived “freedoms” bump up against each other: my freedom to “like” without ramifications, your freedom to use the public “like” data to some end³. Etiquette encompasses ethics and politics. I’m sure many people I respect hold different beliefs about how those conflicts should be resolved. The only thing that I really, really, really hope we’re all explicit about, is that pushing “control to the edge” does not sidestep the impact and cannot be seen as neutral.

Conclusion

Here are a couple things from the archives that seem real relevant:

The death of the newsfeed (and its afterlife) – I read a piece on social media written by a venture capitalist (I know, I know) and it gave me a lot of thoughts⁴.
No, the Facebook feed algorithm is still bad – The expressed connections people make on social media are made in a context of expected result. The expectations are a product of built-up experience with social practice and with the feed-building algorithm. Yanking around the algorithm as a blind experiment is bad and unethical – and it’s also not representative of what people’s experiences with it would be with signaling and time to adjust.

Further reading: buprenorphine injections for opioid addiction, buproprion for smokers: these can’t have their efficacy by manufacturing virtuous desires, or no one would take them in the first place. ↩
This is already a problem with “trending posts”. On the other hand, at least they ignore unlisted content – but on the third hand, it’s already a pain to have to suss out whether my posts should be public, unlisted, or followers-only… ↩
Federation involves uncomfortable amounts of trust in how other entities will use what you federate over to them. One of the things that you get when you leave the corporate platform web is greater control over your own content. We should all be thinking carefully about what permissions we wish to give each other. ↩
You may perceive an inconsistency between some of my doom and gloom here and musing there. There, I note that I actually liked the Twitter feature that shoved “liked” posts into my feed, that if I could see it separately on an opt-in basis that could be nice/cool. Here, I note that the social context of the like feature on Mastodon relies on its current non-use. This isn’t strictly contradictory – but one thing I’ll note is that on Mastodon, I hide retoots⁵ in my timeline by default, and tab over to a feed where they’re enabled, and this gives me pretty much the experience that I was hoping for in that piece. (Except, of course, that because other people don’t all do this, I have to be more parsimonious with my retooting to not spam their main feeds. A society, I say!) ↩
If Eugen is going to try to take “toot” away from us, I must double-down on its use. (Think “retweet” from Twitter, or “boost” in the standard Mastodon UI.) ↩

the rebirth of the infinite jukebox and autocanonizer

2022-11-23T00:00:00-08:00

The link above is broken because the site has some bad metadata, but the site itself works!

Do you remember the Infinite Jukebox? It’s alive again as the “Eternal” Jukebox!

Digital elaboration of music is fun, a wonderful way to really hunker down and stare at its structure. This kind of project – based on really crunchy analysis of music done by The Echo Nest – is why I refuse to set up a hierarchy of Good, Virtuous Human Music Commentary and Bad, Deleterious Algorithmic Curation. There is stuff going on in music recommendation – Every Noise, anyone? – that is good and a wonderful complement to caring about music’s social context.

I have some thoughts about discoverability I need to write up, prompted by Robin Sloan, but for today, pick out a few of your favorite songs and see how their structure can add loops.

update: fonts and vampires

2022-11-02T00:00:00-07:00

the vampire part: look, I’m effortposting! There is a time-sensitive link in there – scoped to the next day, so I guess click through? Or don’t. You’re gonna be okay either way.

content warning: not caring about the distinction between fonts and typefaces

Fonts seem like they ought to be disposable. Substance over style, right? A heuristic of value I’ve been playing with lately, though, is how much people cared about something back when it was far more costly than today. Like: when one was writing on actual animal skin, having properly wide margins was far more costly - and yet people cared enough to have them. Type seems similar. It’s always shocking to see how “modern” something from the 1400s can look - and imagine how much harder it was to pay that attention to detail and consistency when you’re carving physical materials, not copying and pasting on a computer!

Another heuristic: paying a lot of attention to aura. I can’t really pretend to fully know the theory context because I’ve been too suspicious of theory to learn much (even while loving the prechewed bits I come across). So I’ll abuse the term freely: a lot of what we think we’re perceiving in an artwork or Thing is the part that can be flawlessly reproduced, but the way our minds grab onto it is all about its aura – the origin, the context, the situatedness that a mechanical reproduction wouldn’t duplicate.

I don’t know if this idea is right, but it’s very useful thinking about the applied arts and design particularly. Like: that 1475 typeface I linked is a “humanist serif”, a style that has had genuinely ideological associations built up around it over time, and those can be unknown to people even while they’re able to perceive some shadow of them. So a 90s design look is retroactively named and diagnosed, and people can pick the lettering out without any explicit knowledge of what makes a humanist serif a humanist serif or why. They’re identifying based on untrained visual resemblance, maybe, but importantly, they’re also feeling their way around the cultural context.

There’s something obviously manipulative about it, isn’t there? Fonts are really expensive. On the supply side, that reflects just how much work goes into them – a truly horrifying amount, jokes about carpal tunnel abound – but on the demand side, it also reflects how a Brand can use a font to say a lot about itself very quickly without exposing what it’s saying to conscious examination. That’s very valuable to them. That’s gross! But at the same time, there is absolutely no neutrality in these matters, so something extratextual was always going to be conveyed, whether someone strategized what it was to be or not. (Compare: clothes, very much the same. Scent, where people are extra untrained, but there are less communicative options for personal presentation.)

I like making much of these associations. So I really wanted a typeface to use that yells IT’S ME MAYA – not in the Brandy way of insisting on something custom to be subtly recognizable and to control consumer associations, but in the IT’S ME MAYA (AND THIS IS WHAT I’M ON ABOUT) way.

And you might think I’m making it all up, right? That this is deeply overblown and doesn’t reflect the subtlety of association I’m reading into it?

Like wine.

But also like wine.

There I was, hand-interpolating different letter forms from fonts that seemed Almost Right, trying to figure out how the associations I wanted (echoed aura!) translated into concrete replicable elements.

So then when I found the one, that matched the concrete aspects I was guessing at –

Of course it would be inspired by a semi-obscure Catholic mystic heresy.

I feel like I’ve identified the particular slope of a grape, the exact bit of trellis. Ha!

I wrote the above, links and all, in an email to my esteemed mother. And I thought, huh, that seems like something I should put on my site. And then I thought, you know, if the whole thing is winding up to a line that requires you know that a “semi-obscure Catholic mystic heresy” is particularly appropriate to me, I don’t know how many people that’s really going to land for.

And then, just now, I thought “I don’t know how many people that’s really going to land for” is probably the tagline of this site.

Anyway, I bought the fancy font from Michael Rafailyk, who has a number of other cool things you should look at if you’re font-minded. Piacere Text is very nice and as of writing only $30, for instance.

In order to use it, I came up with a new chunk of CSS you’re witnessing now¹. I won’t be purging the site of the older styles, and I don’t think the new one is quite Zingy enough in total, yet, but the old one didn’t start out that way either.

We bought a house that has a very nice bottle shop nearby, so I split out some of alcohol into brews. It… has a lot of pumpkin beer listed.

I wrote up crude summaries of Olia Lialina essays but haven’t yet added my commentary.

I’m going to revamp my site advice soon inspired by this, I think. Is anyone reading who has anything they’d want to make sure I put in there?

I am putting together a list of takes, many of which should probably be real posts. It’s not meant to be a list of my opinions so much as a list of the things that I think are distinctively my opinions, the things that I fixate on a bit more than other people. Are there any worth expanding? How should I filter out the ordinary online thunderdome competitor takes?

Oh look scribal abbreviations! New words! A crappy hypothes.is dark mode! Robin Sloan’s experimental protocol! A blogrollroll (send me ones to add)!

Unless you’re reading via RSS or whatnot. Hello, RSSers! ↩

this is a seventeen-second video advertisement from a chicken supply company

2022-11-01T00:00:00-07:00

Their Amazon storefront.

voting on voting: colm maccárthaigh on seattle’s choice choices

2022-10-25T00:00:00-07:00

Right, so, cards on the table: I think Colm is great, a highly esteemed dude in my view of the world.

And one reason I’m sharing this is because I think his emphasizing his lived experience of Irish elections is particularly useful; all of these discussions feel a little risky to Americans because it’s All So New here, but that doesn’t mean this hasn’t been stable plenty of places.

But… Elections. Hoo boy.

I wrote before about voting systems and how Nicky Case’s web toy thing had convinced me that approval voting was better than my previously favored RCV. Then hearing Colm talk about coalition-building – well, that’s a very important political value to me, so obviously my opinion wavers a bit.

But in 2022?

I can’t help feeling like the most important part is knowing which improvements, if more widely adopted, won’t manage to give an excuse to a bunch of walnuts to bring rifles to government buildings.

I don’t have a pithy opinion to answer that – approval voting seems simpler to explain without an iterated infographic, so if you believe simplicity is key then that’s no worse than first-past-the-post. But maybe the coalition-building aspects of RCV would be politically clarifying in a way that tones down the fringey-fringe.

Has anyone written about these systems in the Rather Important Context of “haha wow democracy isn’t looking too good guys”? I don’t think you can quantify voter satisfaction to talk about those kinds of risks – does anyone have more qualitative / speculative analysis?

a rainy WA view on amending soil with wood chips

2022-10-17T00:00:00-07:00

just very recently, in the last, again about 15 years, it’s discovered that fungus actually has another method for digesting wood, and it’s called non-enzymatic chelate or mediated biocatalysis. you want to make a note of that for discussion at the dinner table tonight with your family

This video is specific, sourced, and actionable. I should probably be posting it over at https://faust.land/ because it is part of a larger journey we are on re:compacted soil, but the whimsy present in the dry delivery of this line merits a post here.

learned helplessness and necessary help

2022-10-13T10:00:00-07:00

…and over again, we unlearn it. I’ve been thinking about this a lot because I’ve been finding myself perplexingly incapable of late. I’m a smart guy with enormous privilege, financial resources, and I’ve been known to have moxie by times. And yet problems that, in theory, are solvable have been slaying me, and I’ve been grasping for reasons why. Driving downtown this morning …

From the linked wiki:

In Seligman’s hypothesis, the dogs do not try to escape because they expect that nothing they do will stop the shock. To change this expectation, experimenters physically picked up the dogs and moved their legs, replicating the actions the dogs would need to take in order to escape from the electrified grid. This had to be done at least twice before the dogs would start willfully jumping over the barrier on their own. In contrast, threats, rewards, and observed demonstrations had no effect on the “helpless” Group 3 dogs.

There are a lot of neuroses a person can acquire around locus of control. If you look at the wiki for that one, they’ll sort of make it sound like “strong” locus of control means believing that everything is under your own control, and within a certain (very American) mindset that is obviously Right And Good. Yet… that can lead to a lot of flailing or self-blame over things that were never really up to you.

(“You”? It’s me. I am the person with an inappropriately internal locus of control. I have very hubristic intestinal bacteria or something: in my gut, I foolishly feel that if I were to Just Buckle Down, I could solve a good chunk of the world’s problems, certainly all of my problems… this also thus means that anything I ever come across that’s wrong is, conversely, My Fault.)

My mother told me about Seligman’s experiments, in reference to someone who has a very external locus of control. The thing that she pointed out was that you really can’t pressure the dog out of its learned helplessness – but the dog really can’t will itself out, either. It is persistent external support that makes it possible to learn the actions you can take that make a difference. Even if you understand on a cognitive level – t’s training wheels that keep a bike upright so you can get a feel for moving forward in the way that’ll let you balance later on your own.

I have not yet lost someone in the way that Peter has. I think it’s the kind of thing that you can’t understand till you’ve been through it. But I have seen learned helplessness before – so if there’s one tiny corner of this metaphor I’d dog-ear (sorry not sorry), it’s that importance of someone physically moving the dogs’ legs to show them the motions of getting out. Not even once, but more than once.

Probably what that looks like is very situational. It’s hard to recognize learned helplessness, so it’s probably even harder to figure out what the support is that you’d need. I won’t presume to advise Peter because

a. I would cosign that he is a “smart guy” b. meanwhile I am a lumpy goblin who just ate more ice cream than I meant to because it was warming in my hands and continuing to eat was easier than figuring out whether I should put it back c. he does emphasize asking for help, “over and over and over again”

So just generally, then, to anyone else who may be vibing with the sentiment here but may not have grokked why the help is so important… I can only note that, you know, maybe there’s some way that the people who love you can help move your paws as you’re figuring it out.

servers, sewers, alienation

2022-10-13T00:00:00-07:00

epistemic status: drafty as hell lol

Is being a software engineer real engineering¹?

I certainly didn’t think I was going to Become An Engineer when I went about beginning my computer science education. I told myself that I was like a savvy user becoming savvier, a math dabbler dabbling in a new kind of math. There are plenty of kinds of personalities in tech, I told myself, and the one that I have doesn’t need to change.

Flash forward a few years, and I now believe that awe and respect, real emotion, ought to be inspired in all of us by seismic codes, water treatment systems, and air quality reports.

So. You know. It’s maybe had an effect.

If you grow up in the Pacific Northwest on the wet side², at some point your science class will go on a field trip to a creek for water quality testing. It starts with salmon; they’re not just a mascot or emblem of northwestiness, they’re extremely important to the whole everything here. They are also picky about water quality. So off we all went in our wellies to play with testing equipment, learn what the word turbidity means, count arthropods, and wait for some classmate to, inevitably, fall in. (See: elementary school something-or-other, sixth grade science, seventh grade biology, ninth grade biology, and tenth grade chemistry.)

Sure, it’s an easy field trip to connect to curriculum, but it’s also sort of a civics lesson. We dutifully reported our classes’ findings and learned about the agencies that monitor these things. Society fits together with vigilance at the edges. Someone has to be watching. Agricultural runoff and water drinkers’ health: always in tension.

We bought a house in the country, recently. Only five acres, and you can hear more civilization noise than I might wish, but it’s far out enough that we have a septic tank and our own well for water. Some of that childhood education sunk in: the house-buying process didn’t enforce thorough well inspection, but we even went the extra mile asking for testing for inorganics.

A cool thirty five thousand dollars’ worth of water filtration turns out to be necessary – though test results only came back after the inspection period, I’ll grumble to you. So we’re our own little water quality agency, installing new outlets and hiring an engineer to draw up a system plan. No one organizes this for us. No one will stop us from drinking Tap Water: Manganese & Arsenic Flavor.

You’d think this “independence” might drive a person toward that problematic pioneer fantasy, but it only underlines to me how self-sufficiency is a LARP. Sure, we might not be billed for sewer, but what would we do if the larger society didn’t have someone we could call to pump the septic tank? Hell, learning about the classic American suburban infrastructure subsidy has made the lesser amount of that here feel less like “going our own way” and more like a civic-minded act.

But we do get electricity.

Electric power transmission - Wikipedia

A cloud services company I know had a presentation meant to explain to the families of employees what it is that their beloved children are actually doing for the world. The presentation used the metaphor of the electric grid. Time was, you needed electricity for your factory, you had to build up your own generators. So every factory needed its own supply, and no matter what business you were in, you also had to be in the power generation business. As you may know, since then, we switched to The Grid, and this was far more efficient, and let businesses focus on what they do best blah blah blah, and the presenter walks you through this whole story repeated again but with computers and data centers and The Cloud.

The fact this comparison was made officially under the auspices of this company brings me perverse satisfaction. This is because (I suspect without evidence) the MBA types in the company’s upper echelons would likely sooner light themselves on fire in the street than suffer serious discussion of making their business a public utility.

There’s a famous speech by Teddy Roosevelt, the Man in the Arena speech. Let’s entirely ignore its famous chunks³. Long before I ever thought of engineering, this bit stuck in my head:

Individual initiative, so far from being discouraged, should be stimulated; and yet we should remember that, as society develops and grows more complex, we continually find that things which once it was desirable to leave to individual initiative can, under changed conditions, be performed with better results by common effort. It is quite impossible, and equally undesirable, to draw in theory a hard-and-fast line which shall always divide the two sets of cases. This every one who is not cursed with the pride of the closet philosopher will see, if he will only take the trouble to think about some of our commonest phenomena. For instance, when people live on isolated farms or in little hamlets, each house can be left to attend to its own drainage and water-supply; but the mere multiplication of families in a given area produces new problems which, because they differ in size, are found to differ not only in degree but in kind from the old; and the questions of drainage and water-supply have to be considered from the common standpoint. It is not a matter for abstract dogmatizing to decide when this point is reached; it is a matter to be tested by practical experiment.

I brought this up with a philosophy professor acquaintance who, being in no way closeted in his profession, stridently disagreed with the hard-and-fast line being undesirable. In retrospect, I think this was very funny.

It all starts from a consideration of wells and sewers and becomes a consideration of individualism and socialism. Wells and sewers: the constitutive elements of political theory.

Regular readers will, even without looking at the link at the top, have guessed that this is going to talk about the internet somehow, and that I will be quoting Olia Lialina. From Once Again, The Doorknob:

In Why Interfaces Don’t Work, sentence after sentence, metaphor after metaphor, [Don] Norman claims that users of computers are interested in whatever but not the computers themselves; they want to spend the least time possible with a computer. As a theoretician and more important as a practitioner at Apple, Norman was indeed pushing the development of invisible or transparent interfaces. This is how the word “transparent” started to mean “invisible” or “simple” in interface design circles.

Sherry Turkle sums up this swift development in the 2004 introduction to her 1984 book The Second Self:

In only a few years the ‘Macintosh meaning’ of the word Transparency had become a new lingua franca. By the mid-1990s, when people said that something was transparent, they meant that they could immediately make it work, not that they knew how it worked.

The idea that the users shouldn’t even notice that there is an interface was widely and totally accepted and seen as a blessing.

This essay is collected in Turing-Complete User, which everyone should go read. In the other essays there she pokes more at this idea of non-transparent transparency, the user being made into a child who just wants a gumball out of the machine.

The doorknob in the title is deconstructed a bit, too – don’t think that a doorknob’s job is to disappear! (Or that they manage it)

But this isn’t just interface design, really – not just the bits you interact with – it’s all technology. Is technology to be made by its priesthood to function silently and invisibly so that as few ordinary people as possible ever have to spare a thought to it?

You can certainly come up with good arguments for this, but you can’t say it’s neutral in origin or effect.

Another piece of Pacific Northwest knowledge is that a great piece of American cultural heritage is a set of songs about dams.

Think about that, though. Can’t you imagine someone arguing that infrastructure should be invisible? That the gift of the Grand Coulee Dam is that the city-dweller may flip on her light switch without awareness of the technology involved?

This wasn’t the US attitude toward these large-scale public works projects at the time, even despite all the aspects I’ll bet they really didn’t want people to think too much about. They commissioned propaganda. They had tourists.

sorry this is JSTOR:

Dean MacCannell understood the premises behind featured displays of labor associated with the construction of Boulder Dam and their allure to an emerging market of Depression-era, working-class tourists who traveled for leisure and recreation. Defined as “work display,” he described these images as the “museumization of work and work relations,” suggesting they were indicators of a cultural shift in the United States that represented the end of industrial society and the beginning of a postindustrial, modern culture. These worker-tourists showed a proclivity for guided tours of industrial plants, representations of working cowboys in advertisements, and other images of machines and humans displayed as cultural productions.

At Boulder Dam, the Bureau of Reclamation incorporated viewing platforms around the job site so that tourists could watch the work in progress. Perhaps the greatest display of work ever created, the dam was larger and more awesome than most people could imagine, an amazing spectacle of civil engineering that epitomized the can-do attitude of the American workforce.

It’s easy to miss under the subtle sneer of “museumization”, but the tourists’ interest indicates meaningful cultural attention. What Americans today go on civil engineering vacations?

The mouth of the Cloaca Maxima - Giovanni Battista Piranesi - WikiArt.org

Cloacina was the goddess of the main discharge of the sewers of Ancient Rome.⁴

Your average person nowadays, upon being informed of this, laughs and thinks it’s funny. This is because your-average-person-nowadays has a shoddy understanding of how dependent they are on public infrastructure, and a just-as-shoddy understanding of how religion works.

The Romans had it much closer to right.

My esteemed mother talks about how you could tell CarTalk was doomed long before it went off the air. People stopped being able to fix their own cars, tinkered with them less and less, so the questions got less interesting.

Maybe it was a social change – it’s not like shop was available when I was in high school.

Maybe it was how they computerized more and more of the car.

People talk endlessly about how technology-these-days alienates us from $IMPORTANT_HUMAN_VALUE. They build this discourse on the kind of mushy definition of “technology” that boils down to “things that didn’t exist when my grandparents were growing up.” “Things I can imagine living without”. This produces predictably mushy results.

You know what kinds of things count as technology among the people who are serious about its study? Clothing. Writing. Usefully shaped rocks. I went into this let’s-think-critically-about-technology business with the gusto you’d expect of a would-have-been philosophy major who found herself with a computer science degree, but I have Had Enough with critiques of technology that rely on your not remembering to apply them to, say, fire. Enough I Say.

Robinia pseudoacacia - Wikipedia

On our five acres I am at war with black locusts – one cut to a stump, one still standing. I find the extent of their roots stupefying. I’d been doing a decent amount of my digging by hand – just tearing up turf for little seedlings and things, you know – but the locust defied this. So I bought a trowel with serrated edges.

Yes, yes, I am saying that the trowel is Just As Technology as the internet, you knew where that was going, full points. But I know, too, there are meaningful differences. A trowel has no non-technical user. Everyone who can heft a trowel in their hands has the sense of it, born of feeling the weight and touching the sharp bits. I am sure that my use of it is very unskilled relative to that which my grandfather, a master gardener, would have made of it, but anyone who uses one grasps it.

This is very, very, very much not true of the internet.

I know myself to have acquired a bit of engineer brain. It is better to solve the problem Once, for Everyone, than to have Everyone have to solve it over and over for themselves. My engineer brain feels this on an aesthetic-emotional level more serious than even that elicited by having to find thirty-five thousand dollars for tap water. Things can be performed with better results by common effort!

But having come to tech relatively late in the game⁵, I also have an understanding of how it has changed how I relate to computers. It has unalienated me from them – as technology, like a trowel I can hold, and as they are maintained within social systems. It was an alienation I didn’t entirely realize I was experiencing – not an alienation from “the real world,” but from computer use. And it should raise some flags of some color that where the Bonneville Power Administration might have commissioned Woody Guthrie to write songs about the electrification of the west, the tech industry is content to let ordinary folks proceed in absolute ignorance as to what it means that they are living in a cloudified world⁶.

And so we come to the linked piece. It’s by Matt Webb, whom I read but don’t know personally, but centers on discussion with Honor whom I do know at least a bit and who Longtime Readers already know is just the bee’s knees.

Selected annotations:

But what I remember feeling most magical was the idea that there was somebody visiting that server on my desk. There was somebody coming from a long way away and going inside. An electronic homunculus. I could hear the hard drive spi…

I happily set aside my panicked “no! no! that’s not it!” about this metaphor that Longtime Readers may remember, because this is being deployed to explore what is charming about it.

First there’s the feeling of “I made that!” which leads to the feeling of “I can make all kinds of things!” You will definitely get that more when you install the software on the web server yourself, and also when you copy over your own hand-coded text files. (The web is just text!) Then there’s the feeling that p…

Man, other people have a very different experience of self-hosting. When I was just getting started with it, which I guess is years back now, I was ten kinds of “sure I can just build XYZ, let me get my glue gun”… until I came up against the wall of “learn how to accomplish a task that you thought ought to be simple in Nginx config and systemd files”, never mind that they’re “config files that keep the same format for a decade+”. It required a good deal of help to learn, not just Googling. I struggle to imagine it having felt more empowering than neocities push .

Then there’s the feeling that people are visiting and - the corollary - if other people’s experience of your website is just in that tiny box, then your experiences of all other websites are similarly physically located in boxes too.

[…]

I think it would change how we think about the internet, in a grounding and healthy way. I think it would help us regain a sense of agency and ownership, with which we would be way more demanding of the sort of internet we want to live with, a sense that is currently so distant from us that we have forgotten it is possible and can’t even tell that it is missing.

One of the things that I find most interesting about this piece is that the “functionality” it’s describing is very enchanted objects, and the benefit of that enchantment is to make the pedestrian uses of tech more legible.

Very summon the flames directly from hell rather than store-bought, if that makes sense⁷.

Maybe this is chemistry-class creek-water-testing. Scratching the surface to give a sense of what’s really going on, what there is to consider, to get a notion of how many people have to do how much to make the internet at scale work the way it (mostly) does. Maybe we all need to spend some more time peering at the non-visible to stop it from becoming invisible, transparent.

Maybe I can petition for data center tourism to pair with dam tourism, if either could be allowed post-9/11. I yearn for the internet to be understood as public works, but also for public works to be appreciated as public works⁸, so I refuse to romanticize the solo sysadmin any more than my septic tank. Yet: it is good that the trowel can be understood by holding, so it is important that the Raspberry Pi can be held, unplugged.

I wonder what the first subjective experience of computational agency was for each of us who ended up ordained as Technical. Are themes of enchantment common?

Which layers of self-hosting have the biggest bang for your buck, feelings-of-agency-and-ownership-wise? (Has this changed over time relative to the different walling off of gardens on the ordinary internet?)

If you care about the serious answer, go and read Hillel Wayne’s series on it because you will not find a serious answer here. ↩
Shibboleth: see who tries to “correct” you to “west”. ↩
Somewhere that I can’t refind, a commentator saying he’d always hated people saying It Is Not The Critic Who Counts, and maybe if we’d all given a little more credence to the critic counting, the US wouldn’t have invaded Iraq. ↩
They also had Annona, a goddess personifying the supply of grain to the City of Rome, including such supply-chainy details as its international shipping⁹. ↩
I read somewhere that it’s far more common for women to first get into computer science in college than for men, so I sort of refuse to consider it “late”. I wish we’d all quit acting like everyone who’s anyone in tech admined a linux box at the age of nine. It’s obnoxious enough before you even touch on the equity aspects. ↩
Vague theory: I would place this less at the feet of the Industry Powers and their financial incentives than at the feet of the psyche of your average tech worker and his insecurities about the professionalization of his field¹⁰. ↩
Whether or not this could be surmised from the tone, footnotes, or lack of editing here, I am not much fussed if it doesn’t. ↩
~~I possess that historicality of character which can resent in an ongoing way decisions made in 1937.~~¹¹ ↩
Annona is more “made up”, from what I can tell, to draw attention to the importance of the state in this matter. But by the point you have people making votive offerings to an entity, moderns don’t get to say it doesn’t count. ↩
you can’t get mad at me, I am in this category ↩
A commenter correctly noted that I am here complaining about what I explicitly support, which is proper public ownership of power utility stuff. This is not actually the stuff that I do resent about the BPA, e.g. how it ends up entangled with private evils like PG&E, which I somehow read into that chunk of Wikipedia text despite it being pretty clearly the opposite¹². ↩
Perhaps better said: I possess that essential wishy-washiness of character which can be loudly and opinionatedly wrong about obvious things, but which at least can own up to it! ↩

catholicism as trend? come again?

2022-10-12T10:00:00-07:00

…ink as a lens it says something. If I were to say what I think “Catholicism” represents, trend-wise, it would be something like this: the desire to see something ascendent that is aesthetically lush, intellectually rigorous, ambiguously reactionary, and which, above all, people can’t get mad at you for. Because getting mad at people for their religion is an asshole move, and nobody wants to be an asshole, and the people who do mark themselves out as people with whom it’s not really possible to have a conversation. You can also treat religion like…

via Bunny

Man, this is very interesting, because it does not match my experience of non-Catholics’ perception of Catholicism at all. How Can You Associate Yourself With An Institution Seeped In Homophobia, Transphobia, The Oppression Of Women, And The Protection Of Pedophile Priests is, like, a valid conversation to have, but also not deployed in a conversational kind of way so much as an invisible fence kind of way.

However, I run with the kind of people who see “ambiguously reactionary” and have sirens go off in our heads, so¹.

Who are the people who are pulled toward the reactionary these days? There are demographic arguments, obviously – the mainstream doctrines of social justice feel more dispensable to the safety of some than to that of others – but I am realizing I don’t have a good sense of the psychology of the type. If anyone’s written anything along these lines that isn’t, you know, NYT-fawning-over-fascists-because-look-they-have-nice-haircuts and that doesn’t endlessly ruminate on the importance of the tiny slice of society that reactionaries make up, send it my way.

As always, this post is made from a position of woundedness by the aesthetic appropriation of my heritage to ill effect. Where is the Latin Novus Ordo Mass for queerdos? Where is it?? ↩

a grid of 100px icons from ye olden days

2022-10-08T10:00:00-07:00

gif warning, images moving around warning

via kristoffer

Man, I miss this.

People unfairly criticize some altweb stuff as nostalgia when they’re not understanding what the point is.

My appreciation of this is entirely nostalgia, so I’d like to recognize that. 😁