When we talk about “the algorithm,” we might be conflating recommender systems with online surveillance, monopolization, and the digital platforms’ takeover of all of our leisure time—in other words, with the entire extractive technology industry of the twenty-first century. Bucher told me that the idea of the algorithm is “a proxy for technology, and people’s relationships to the machine.” It has become a metaphor for the ultimate digital Other, a representation of all of our uneasiness with online life.

The Airbnb hosts’ concerns were rooted in the challenges of selling a product online, but I’m most interested in the similar feelings that plague those, like Valerie Peter, who are trying to figure out what to consume.

On top of trying to boost their rankings by repainting walls, replacing furniture, or taking more flattering photos, the hosts also developed what Jhaver called “folk theories” about how the algorithm worked. They would log on to Airbnb repeatedly throughout the day or constantly update their unit’s availability, suspecting that doing so would help get them noticed by the algorithm.

In a recent essay for Pitchfork, Jeremy D. Larson described a nagging feeling that Spotify’s algorithmic recommendations and automated playlists were draining the joy from listening to music by short-circuiting the process of organic discovery: “Even though it has all the music I’ve ever wanted, none of it feels necessarily rewarding, emotional, or personal.”

It can feel as though every app is trying to guess what you want before your brain has time to come up with its own answer, like an obnoxious party guest who finishes your sentences as you speak them.

Almost every other major Internet platform makes use of some form of algorithmic recommendation. Google Maps calculates driving routes using unspecified variables, including predicted traffic patterns and fuel efficiency, rerouting us mid-journey in ways that may be more convenient or may lead us astray.

Only in the middle of the past decade, though, did recommender systems become a pervasive part of life online.

It also reproduces images and transcripts of all the entries in Alden’s actual diary; according to Scott, Sparks drew on only about a third of them, fabricating nearly ninety per cent of what she published, including entries about how, after being sent to reform school, Jay learned to levitate objects, developed E.S.P., attended midnight orgies, and was possessed by a demon named Raul.

Sparks, for all her fact-fudging, seems to have had a genuine conviction that young people in crisis needed adults to do more to understand them—a conviction so smothered by anti-drug and pro-abstinence propaganda that it’s hard to appreciate her sincerity fifty years later.

Ecologies of Houston

If you purchased chicken in Washington state in the last 10 years, you were harmed

Both Peale and Boy Scout literatures build on the earlier language of cheerfulness as articulated in the Bible and in the work of early modern philosophy. But they strip it of its collective dimension. And as those communities are erased and reimagined in the developing world of industrial, and now post-industrial, capitalism, cheerfulness is at once endlessly evoked and drained of its power to bind humans to each other. Today, cheerfulness mainly evokes the ghosts of earlier cheerful scenes: we walk among the ruins of theological and natural cheer. Contemporary cheer – the gaiety of networking apps and cheer squads – mimics the spirituality of communities that no longer exist.

In his essay ‘Shakespeare, or the Poet’ (1850), Emerson asserts that poetic genius requires two things. First, the ability of the poet to see natural phenomena as moral phenomena – that is, to turn things in the world into metaphors of our inner lives. It is the poet who first sees that apples and corn can mean something beyond their use as fruit and grain. The poet turns things into signs that convey ‘in all their natural history a certain mute commentary on human life’. Through the poet’s noticing, nature and humans are linked. No less important is a second trait: ‘I mean his cheerfulness, without which no man can be a poet – for beauty is his aim. He loves virtue, not for its obligation, but for its grace.’ The poet’s cheerfulness involves his ability to see the beauty of the world, to see things ‘for the lovely light that sparkles from them’.

Modern readers might be struck in these early accounts by the extent to which cheerfulness is much more than the superficial performance of the upbeat colleague or the annoying salesman. A social quality, it shapes and defines a particular moral community. It emerges between people, binding them together.

‘Cheer’ comes from an Old French word that means, simply, ‘face’. The term comes into English and spreads through medieval culture in the 14th century. In Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (1387-1400), for example, people are depicted as having a ‘piteous cheer’ or a ‘sober cheer’. ‘Cheer’ is an expression, but also a body part. It lies at the intersection of our emotions and physiognomy.

Melancholy, for example, arose from an excess of black bile, while certain stimulants were understood to counter melancholy and generate cheerfulness – one glass of wine (not two), bright music, a well-lit room. The Renaissance doctor Levinus Lemnius recommended good company, ‘dallying and kissing’, drink and dancing – all of which, he noted, generate an emotional uplift that endures for days afterwards, visible in the face. Other doctors argued that it was possible to stimulate cheer chemically: in 1696, the English doctor William Salmon prescribed a powder to stimulate cheerfulness: mix up some clove, basil, saffron, lemon peel, bits of ivory, leaves of gold and silver, with shavings from the heart of a stag and, voilà! – you will be made cheerful.

This brown bread was probably more appetizing than it sounds, Rubel says. Bran carries the nutty, complex flavor associated with whole grains,

Horse bread, typically a flat, brown bread baked alongside human bread, fueled England’s equine transport system from the Middle Ages up until the early 1800s. It was so logistically important that it was more highly regulated than its human counterpart, with commercial bakers adhering to laws dictating who could bake horse bread, as well as the bread’s price, size, and occasionally even its composition. The ubiquitous bread was made from a dough of bran, bean flour, or a combination of the two, and typically was flat, coarse, and brown.

He chose the silky and concentrated Syrah because he was cooking a wild boar shot on the vineyard grounds and thought that the red would work better with that meat. He writes, “After a little experimentation, I decided that the right proportional volume of Syrah to garum was 225ml wine to 50ml garum–that seemed to have the right fruit to savory balance.” I find David’s choice interesting because many historical cooks use a 1:1 ratio, that for me, at least, is much too heavy on the garum. David’s ratio of about 4.5:1 (wine:garum) works extremely well from a culinary point of view as a sauce to prep dishes with in the kitchen.

Still lower in quality was lora, which was made by soaking the pomace of grape skins already pressed twice in water for a day, and then pressing a third time.

Below that was posca, a mixture of water and sour wine that had not yet turned into vinegar. Posca’s use as soldiers’ rations was codified in the Corpus Juris Civilis and amounted to around a liter per day.

Kolay Mor Salkımlı Şerbet Tarifi

context collapse refers to the removal of any meaningful signifiers which could go into helping us understand where someone might be coming from, or just whose living room we just walked into unannounced to take a big shit on the floor (and therefore the ability to discern if they might like that we’d done that, or think it was very rude and weird).

The students used a vivid combination of vintage decor, collegiate pennants, high school diplomas, family portraits, and advertisements to decorate their walls.

OUR ARTILLERY IS DROPPING A BARRAGE DIRECTLY ON US. FOR HEAVENS SAKE STOP IT.

Lepp, who writes under the pen name Leanne Leeds in the “paranormal cozy mystery” subgenre, allots herself precisely 49 days to write and self-edit a book. This pace, she said, is just on the cusp of being unsustainably slow. She once surveyed her mailing list to ask how long readers would wait between books before abandoning her for another writer. The average was four months.

the kind of Catholics who, if they didn’t have this community where they can count on someone to pray every week for union organizers or LGBTQ rights, might abscond to the Episcopalians, the kind of Catholics drawn to apophatic theology and social-justice movements, Catholics who have their doubts but just can’t let go.

The novel thing on my new website is sentiment. I decide whether the link will make readers feel better or worse and color the post white or black.

Under the conditions of liquid modernity, in the human and material realms, such permanence is unattainable, and we are living with the psychic and social consequences.

In retrospect, I think what I was registering was a more textured experience of material culture.

An array of distinct physical objects—cash, maps, analog music players, cameras, calendars, etc.—become one thing. The texture of our experience is flattened out as a result.

The digitized book by contrast may have its own advantages, but by being the single undifferentiated interface for every book it loses its function as a mooring for the self.

At the very least, it becomes an always available potential portal into my past.

It suggests that the self and its relation to the world is not merely a mental phenomenon. It has a sensual, embodied, and material dimension,

The majority of things that ought to count as “technology” are ignored and the more subtle, and possibly more significant consequences of technology are unaccounted for.

All of this said, it seems to me that our experience of the self can range across a spectrum from more free-floating to more anchored. In these examples, people act as anchors. And, to be more precise, what we are being anchored to is some segment of our own past.

It is an elegy for the era of cross-origin browser requests and off-site embeddable media

The latest report shows that the consumption of old music grew another 14% during the first half of 2022, while demand for new music declined an additional 1.4%.

In a Baroque palace, access down an enfilade suite of state rooms typically was restricted by the rank or degree of intimacy of the visitor. The first rooms were more public, and usually at the end was the bedroom, sometimes with an intimate cabinet or boudoir beyond. Baroque protocol dictated that visitors of lower rank than their host would be escorted by servants down the enfilade to the farthest room their status allowed. If the visitor was of equal or higher rank, the host would advance down the enfilade to meet their guest, before taking the visitor back. At parting, the same ritual would be observed, although the host might pay their guest a compliment by taking them back farther than their rank strictly dictated. If a person of much higher rank visited, these rituals extended beyond the enfilade to the entrance hall, the gates to the palace, or beyond (in modern State visits, to the airport). Memoirs and letters of the period often note the exact details of where meetings and partings occurred, even to whether they were in the centre of the room, or at the door.[citation needed]

wonderful desert sand - used it as top cover for my potted citrus tree to combat fungus gnats. sand even came with free lizard.

Perhaps my least favorite discourse is the crowing about how the whites have destroyed the meaning of “namaste.” They clearly haven’t, because Indians still say it. Nothing has been lost, you just spend your time around non-Indians now.

When people say the X community, I wonder whether they just mean some X people I know and refuse to say that because it sounds sillier to extrapolate uniform feeling from the latter, as there’s no X convention where everyone votes on a slate of propositions. I feel no allegiance toward Vietnamese, Vietnamese(-)American, Asian, or Asian(-)American “communities” because no such things can be composed of millions of individuals without interpersonal relationships. I graduated from law school recently, and you could not have caught me dead at any Asian Pacific American Law Student Association events making polite small talk with people headed to clerk for the country’s foulest xenophobes. I do not care for the nation-state, any nation-state; I care about people who have fed and held and loved me, and those I’ve tried to love back. When people say representation, I wonder why anyone should accept fictive lookalike kin, an indirect democracy of culture and its quasi-electeds, rather than a direct one, and what anyone even wants from art. I cannot preface my thoughts with “as a Vietnamese-American woman” credentials, not with a straight face. Of course, everything I think is “as a Vietnamese-American woman,” but my critical legitimacy derives from elsewhere. Still, every cover letter I write explaining that I’m of Vietnam, in some sense, is an act of pathetic, irreparable, mercenary, crass disloyalty.

Despite the seriousness of his subject matter and the esoteric quality of his references, Tooze’s writing has a kind of magpie joy. In person, he comes off as intellectual, sure, but also self-deprecating, voluble, funny.

a terrible tweet she made in which she corrected a service worker’s grammar

Tim's was fine, I don't really "get it" but I don't really "get" fast food in general…

I was only able to spend fifteen minutes in [[powell's books]] but I loved every minute of it and it was enough to know it's amazing.

A local copy of [[Wikipedia]] could be a good thing to have on our laptops.

idea to make a [[memex]] for the agora. browser extension where node name is url of page and each annotation is a blockquote with comment for that node

One says to oneself that there must be happy people somewhere. Well then! Unless you get that out of your head, you have understood nothing about [[psychoanalysis]]. — [[Jacques Lacan]], Seminar III

My brain is going wild right now thinking about all the [[p2p systems]] I want to build

[[email]] is decentralized but >90% of people use gmail/hotmail

Remember those wonderfull days of childhood? Remember playing with your most favorite toy in the whole world, that battered old skull you found in the attic?

Everybody doing together the same gesture, everyone speaking together in one voice — this transmits to each individual the energy of the entire assembly. It is a uniformity that not only does not deaden but, on the contrary, educates individual believers to discover the authentic uniqueness of their personalities not in individualistic attitudes but in the awareness of being one body.

Our body is a symbol because it is an intimate union of soul and body; it is the visibility of the spiritual soul in the corporeal order; and in this consists human uniqueness, the specificity of the person irreducible to any other form of living being.

The Liturgy is done with things that are the exact opposite of spiritual abstractions: bread, wine, oil, water, fragrances, fire, ashes, rock, fabrics, colours, body, words, sounds, silences, gestures, space, movement, action, order, time, light. The whole of creation is a manifestation of the love of God, and from when that same love was manifested in its fullness in the cross of Jesus, all of creation was drawn toward it.

Wonder is an essential part of the liturgical act because it is the way that those who know they are engaged in the particularity of symbolic gestures look at things. It is the marvelling of those who experience the power of symbol, which does not consist in referring to some abstract concept but rather in containing and expressing in its very concreteness what it signifies.

Interiority can run the risk of reducing itself to an empty subjectivity if it has not taken on board the revelation of the Christian mystery. The encounter with God is not the fruit of an individual interior searching for Him, but it is an event given.

The action of the celebration does not belong to the individual but to the Christ-Church, to the totality of the faithful united in Christ. The liturgy does not say “I” but “we,” and any limitation on the breadth of this “we” is always demonic. The Liturgy does not leave us alone to search out an individual supposed knowledge of the mystery of God. Rather, it takes us by the hand, together, as an assembly, to lead us deep within the mystery that the Word and the sacramental signs reveal to us. And it does this, consistent with all action of God, following the way of the Incarnation, that is, by means of the symbolic language of the body, which extends to things in space and time.

It is not magic. Magic is the opposite of the logic of the sacraments because magic pretends to have a power over God, and for this reason it comes from the Tempter.

We may not even be aware of it, but every time we go to Mass, the first reason is that we are drawn there by his desire for us. For our part, the possible response — which is also the most demanding asceticism — is, as always, that surrender to this love, that letting ourselves be drawn by him. Indeed, every reception of communion of the Body and Blood of Christ was already desired by him in the Last Supper.

No one had earned a place at that Supper. All had been invited. Or better said: all had been drawn there by the burning desire that Jesus had to eat that Passover with them.

Life is too gorgeous to waste a second of it in drabness or open-mouthed stupidity. One must work and riot and throw oneself into the whirl. Boredom and denseness are the two unforgivable sins. We’ll have plenty of time to be bored when the little white worms crawl about our bones in the crescent putrifying earth. While we live we must make the torch burn ever brighter until it flares out in the socket. Let’s have no smelly smouldering.

Then too I suffer from a multiplicity of desires. I want to swallow the oyster of the world. I want to peel the rind of the orange. I want to drink the cup to the dregs—no—I want to swallow it and still have it to look at. I want to peel off the rind in patterns of my own making. I want to paint with the dregs pictures of gods and demons on the great white curtains of eternity.And I do nothing. I blame the army, the weather, the food—O if I could wrench myself out of the blankness of inertia.

(anyway, it's interesting that these days there isn't really a strong brand association for sunscreen, at least not in the US. It's one of those rare fully genericized products; no one cares what brand of sunscreen they get, it could be the cheapest possible product on the shelf as long as it has a high SPF. One cynical point of view would be that this is a market niche just waiting for someone with a clever marketing idea to swoop in and make a name for themselves.

The same process occurred with the invention of stoves to replace hearths. Most pre-industrialization meals were usually a meat stew of some kind that was cooked in a single pot over a hearth, and people typically ate the same thing day after day. This task also involved men’s labor: they hauled the necessary wood to the kitchen every day. When stoves and ovens became affordable for most households, men’s contribution to the cooking process was no longer necessary, but women’s contribution remained just as burdensome as ever. On top of that, a skilled cook suddenly had the ability (and therefore, the obligation) to cook multiple different dishes simultaneously, spelling the end of the simple one-pot stew.

Take, for example, white flour. Traditionally, most bread made in a household was quick bread (such as cornbread) which could be made, as the name implies, quickly and without relying on yeast cultures or rising time. Men played a significant role in the cornbread-making process: they shucked the corn and ground it into meal by hand or hauled it to the local grist mill for grinding. Over time, as refined white flour became widely available from large commercial flour mills, it replaced cornmeal as the household’s primary grain. This shift from home-grown to store-bought grains relieved men and boys of one of their most time-consuming chores, while paradoxically increasing labor for women. This was because women were now expected to make more complex yeast breads that required more time, more skill, and more physical labor in the form of kneading dough. In short, men’s portion of bread labor disappeared, and women’s was augmented. 

Cognitive ease also comes from a feeling of hope. Uncomfortable information that could generate fear (such as a report on the devastation of this year’s flu epidemic) is more palatable to people if it comes with a side of specific actions that people can take in response (such as a list of pharmacies offering free flu shots along with their hours of operation).

In conversations across profound divides, Resetting the Table trains people to listen for specific clues or “signposts,” which are usually symptoms of deeper, hidden meaning. Signposts include words like “always” or “never,” any sign of emotion, the use of metaphors, statements of identity, words that get repeated or any signs of confusion or ambiguity. When you hear one of these clues, identify it explicitly and ask for more.

My opinion on trigger words has not changed; but I can no longer dismiss its supporters as clueless, coddled automatons. (Well, I can, but it requires a slight effort, which is new.)

Starting in the 1990s, Stanford political science professor Shanto Iyengar exposed people to two kinds of TV news stories: wider-lens stories (which he called “thematic” and which focused on broader trends or systemic issues — like, say, the causes of poverty) and narrow-lens stories (which he labeled “episodic” and which focused on one individual or event — say, for example, one welfare mother or homeless man).Again and again, people who watched the narrow-lens stories on the welfare mother were more likely to blame individuals for poverty afterwards — even if the story of the welfare mother was compassionately rendered. By contrast, people who saw the wider-lens stories were more likely to blame government and society for the problems of poverty. The wider the lens, the wider the blame, in other words.In reality, most stories include both wide and narrow-lens moments; a feature on a welfare mother will still invariably include a few lines about the status of job-training programs or government spending. But as Iyengar showed in his book Is Anyone Responsible?, TV news segments are dominated by a narrow focus. As a result, TV news unintentionally lets politicians off the hook, Iyengar wrote, because of the framing of most stories. The narrow-lens nudges the public to hold individuals accountable for the ills of society — rather than corporate leaders or government officials. We don’t connect the dots.Great storytelling always zooms in on individual people or incidents; I don’t know many other ways to bring a complicated problem to life in ways that people will remember. But if journalists don’t then zoom out again — connecting the welfare mother or, say, the controversial sculpture to a larger problem — then the news media just feeds into a human bias. If we’re all focused on whatever small threat is right in front of us, it’s easy to miss the big catastrophe unfolding around us.

i think it is interesting, and perhaps a bit suspect, how quickly everyone has started to make their boards into mini-feeds, archives of their own history, timestamped, and interactive. honestly, i do bristle to that usage, compared to the purity of thought that was present in the original writing about the spec.

custom board sizes/aspect ratio (maybe chosen from a few standardised variables, to allow fitting in a grid and prevent misuse)

i think it could really come into its own with 0 padding/margin between boards,

i like imagining it could have been there unchanged for decades - or it could have been updated the second before i logged on.

tools which abstract that process in the name of making it easier only serve to frustrate and obfuscate how something actually works - we end up with something beautiful and complex that we don’t actually understand under the hood, a lot of the time.

animated favicons

i still feel like that's amateur hour around here

i can see that ryan embedded one of his too ⧉ - hosted on his own server - with a note that it’s much easier to update than the rest of his site. i think that’s super interesting, because to me it’s absolutely the same!

spring ’83 boards are so inherently creative, it’s beautiful to have that kind of customisation not only encouraged but really forced

it feels pure in a way, to not be able to message or like or comment natively - everyone has their own solutions to links out, to emails or mailing lists or whatever.

i struggle a lot with getting distracted and not following through, so having a place i can see everyone else updating their boards is inspirational for me to take the moment to sit down and write a little haiku.

How do clients enforce the board aspect ratio? I don’t know enough about HTML/CSS to understand how boards wouldn’t just be able to override this with !important or something.

I’ve got my hands full working on a secret DNS project for now anyway .

DNS could be used to get around having to share public keys with people Set a TXT record on _spring83.mydomain.com with your public key Then clients will resolve that, so you can just tell your friends to follow you by entering mydomain.com

larger, or at least well explained and justified.

However I think the user experience of having to generate a new key every two years and tell all your friends about it is quite bad, and will make people wonder why they have to do this.

Please don’t use YAML for the peer list. YAML is not great. A simple JSON list would be better.

Historically, every attempt at structuring society in a perfectly rational way has been a folly, and has resulted in tremendous individual suffering, in part because the human beings made to endure such political projects remain exactly the same inwardly as humans in those societies that have found effective ways to manage all our dark impulses and unjustifiable but beautiful attachments rather than simply to suppress them.

Can groups like LessWrong ever really eliminate irrational decision-making as it relates to artificial intelligence and business operations? JS: Of course not. As I say in the book, they’d be a lot better off just reading some Virgil or Shakespeare and not worrying so much about whether it’s helping them to better apply Bayesianism to their daily lives, rather than acting as if human flourishing is equivalent to making rationally justifiable choices. I mean, obviously, if you spend your days writing Harry Potter fan-fiction, which seems to be a thing in that subculture, something has gone very wrong, and no amount of formal epistemology or probability theory can rescue you from what appears to an outsider to that subculture as an obviously bad choice, not just of how to spend one’s time, but of a whole form of life. 

My own book may be crap, but I am certain, when such an imbalance in profitability as the one I have just described emerges, between photojournalism and selfies, that it is all over.

Someone who thinks about their place in the world in terms of the structural violence inflicted on them as they move through it is thinking of themselves, among other things, in structural terms, which is to say, again among other things, not as subjects.

It is not surprising, in a historical moment in which such structural breakdowns are easily perceived as injustices, as occasions to ask to speak with a proverbial manager, that in more straightforwardly political matters people should spend more time worrying about structural violence than about violence

I experience my love of Burroughs as singular and irreducible, but I am given to know, when I check in on the discourse, that I only feel this way because I am running a bad algorithm.

And as nice as Wikipedia is, as nice as it is to be able to walk around foreign cities on Google Maps or read early modern grimoires without a library card, I still think the internet is a poison.

I’m not so sure we can do that today: the horn and its demon are one and the same thing.

Today, of course, it’s gone the other way: computerized systems form our opinions for us and decide what music we enjoy; dating-app algorithms choose our sexual partners. Meanwhile, the pressures of capitalism force us to act as rational agents, always calculating our individual interests, condemned to live like machines.

Similarly, many of the big conflicts within institutions in the last few years seem to be rooted in the expectation that the world should work like the internet. If you don’t like a person, you should be able to block them: simply push a button, and have them disappear forever.

Apparently wanting to read anything other than YA fiction means that you’re an agent of the patriarchy.

You have no free speech—not because someone might ban your account, but because there’s a vast incentive structure in place that constantly channels your speech in certain directions.

Remembering working with him on Phantom of the Opera (in which she plays the past-her-prime diva), Minnie Driver meanwhile recalled this week that “once, on set, an actress was complaining about me within earshot [about] how I was dreadfully over the top (I was).” Driver said that Schumacher “barely looked up from his New York Times” and replied: “Oh honey, no one ever paid to see under the top.”

He is the author of We Could All Probably Be Better at Oral Sex Than We Are Now: Haiku for Life (Forthcoming).

In that, its conceptualization as a narcotic is quite apt: it provides a form of relief that ultimately only exacerbates the underlying problem.

Under current atomized, depressing, and anxiety-producing conditions, if you port all social media users over to a democratically-run cooperative or state-owned platform, you’re going to get many, though not all, of the same problems—trolling, “fake news,” narcissistic preening, etc.

Social media is not just accepted—it’s also seen as something functionally beneficial, something that not only supports but also enables our lives.

And unlike the pub, where novel encounters can and do happen, the social media experience is curated and siloed—the most inhospitable terrain for organizing.

Social media users, by contrast, skew middle-class and well-educated.

An ideal tool for this are the “new social media” that produce social structures for individuals, substituting voluntary for obligatory forms of social relations, and networks of users for communities of citizens.

unions and membership organizations have been gutted, replaced by heartless, top-down non-profits

It also gives us an illusion of control: every sentence can be carefully crafted, every picture carefully staged. The digital self is as malleable as social reality is inflexible.

What they omit is that the entire history of the culture industry since its appearance in the early twentieth century has been that of the increasing individualization of marketing techniques. Before we lamented the siloed micro-communities of Facebook, we did the same for the fragmenting effect of cable television channels. Before Google was scanning our email to target ads, relevant snail mail catalogues were following important life events like clockwork. Social media platforms have certainly enhanced and accelerated already existing cultural trends, but they didn’t create them.

It was organized labor, not journalists or newspapers, Progressive businessmen or silverite populists, that truly civilized American politics. And if there is any hope of any such civilizing project today it will start in our union halls, not on our TLs.

Here’s a free idea for a research project: these social facts suggest that social media is likely more detrimental to rich modern countries than poorer, more traditional ones. The Philippines boasts extremely high levels of social media usage, but the size of Filipino families and the fact that some 37% attend mass every week suggests that social media is likely to have less deleterious social effects there than in the United States.

Our society discourages virtually all forms of social behavior and encourages all forms of indulgent individualism. Everyday, Americans are moving their homes thousands of miles from where they were born and where their parents onced lived (often like their parents before them), making social life on the neighborhood-level deeply ephemeral. We have virtually no shared social rights (save the right to a social security check) and, not coincidentally, we feel almost no social obligations.

On the one hand, the online thrives off of the atomization that the neoliberal offensive has inflicted on society. It is the substitute association for a world in which all associative units have been pulverized. (There is now ample research showing positive correlations between declining civic commitment and broadband access.) At the same time, the internet evidently accelerates and even entrenches this atomization. In this sense it is hardly a substitute for the older types of civic association we knew from the twentieth century. The exit and entry costs of the online of our new, simulated civil society are extremely low. The internet is the ideal exit option for a general “exit society”—it allows people to exercise “voice” in the Hirschmanian sense while always keeping open the possibility that you can completely drop out and check out. The stigma that comes with leaving a Facebook group or a Twitter subculture is incomparable to having to move out of a neighborhood because you scabbed during a strike. The internet does create communities, of course, from meme groups to cooking tips. Yet the thickness and density of previous associations—to call them “voluntary” is misleading—are nowhere to be seen online. Perhaps, then, the internet is here best understood as the first properly “voluntary” association; the commodification of the social come into its own.

The extreme marketization of society that defined the 1980s and 1990s made the West uniquely vulnerable to the perils of social media. The dissolution of voluntary organizations, the decline of Fordist job stability (and with it trade-unionism), the death of religious life, the evaporation of amateur athletic associations, the “dissolution of the masses” and the rise of a multitudinous crowd of “individuals”—all were forces that generated the demand for social media long before there was a product like Facebook to supply the consumer. Social media could only grow in a void not of its own making.

But the profound magic trick of the signature: that it allows a piece of content to flow around the internet, handed from peer to peer, impossible to tamper with... it's too good to pass up.

New boards should be transmitted to peers asynchronously. The server must wait at least five minutes before sharing, but it may wait longer. In this way, the server acts as a buffer, absorbing and "compacting" rapid PUTs.

Simple. This means the protocol is easy to understand and implement, even for a non-expert programmer.

Accordingly, a Spring '83 realm is limited to 10 million boards

display each board in a region with an aspect ratio of either 1:sqrt(2) or sqrt(2):1

load any images, media, or fonts linked by the board

(It also means the protocol doesn't provide any mechanism for replies, likes, favorites, or, indeed, feedback of any kind. Publishers are encouraged to use the full flexibility of HTML to develop their own approaches, inviting readers to respond via email, join a live chat, send a postcard... whatever!)

n the IndieWeb we’ve talked a bunch about following people rather than feeds, and wanting to be able to see that in one place rather than going to each service.

please assume that any- thing I'm not commenting on is an enthusiastic "wow this is cool!"

Ten mil­lion boards gives us a max­i­mum disk space require­ment of 22.17 gigabytes, eas­ily stored on a com­mod­ity hard drive or a cheap-enough cloud volume. A capa­ble com­puter could even hold that in RAM. Turns out, when you don’t store every user’s entire history, plus a record of every adver­tise­ment they’ve ever seen, your data­base can stay pretty slim!

Boards are cryp­to­graphically signed in such a way that they can be passed from server to server and, no mat­ter where your client gets a copy of a pub­lisher’s board, you can be assured it is valid.

More importantly, every board holds its place, regard­less of when it was last updated.

I recommend this kind of project, this fla­vor of puzzle, to any­one who feels tan­gled up by the present state of the inter­net. Pro­to­col design is a form of inves­ti­ga­tion and critique. Even if what I describe below goes nowhere, I’ll be very glad to have done this think­ing and writing. I found it chal­leng­ing and energizing.

Client appli­ca­tions dis­play all the boards you are fol­lowing together, lay­ing them out on a 2D canvas, pro­duc­ing unplanned juxtapositions, just like the news­stand above.

unable to exe­cute JavaScript or load exter­nal resources, but oth­er­wise unrestricted. Boards invite pub­lish­ers to use all the rich­ness of mod­ern HTML and CSS.

You prob­a­bly reached this web page through an email.

For my part, I believe presentation is fused to content; I believe pre­sen­ta­tion is a form of con­tent; so RSS can­not be the end of the story.

when a user stops speaking, they disappear, and, by corollary, as a fol­lower, you mostly encounter the users who are speak­ing nonstop.

I am not shar­ing, at this time, code for a client or server, although I have ref­er­ence imple­mentations of both that I’m test­ing with a cou­ple of friends.

And it makes writing feel fun and worthwhile again, valde operae pretium.

WordPress vel sim.,

In all my work with lan­guage mod­els since 2016, noth­ing has approached this feeling, and I think I am ready to close the loop, finally: I don’t believe AI tools are use­ful for seri­ous writers.

I hope to see more AI artists iden­tify a tech­nique or model they love and stick with it, even as the state of the art advances, leav­ing them behind. I don’t mean that in a crusty, regres­sive way; the vibe is not “640K ought to be enough for anybody.” I just want to sug­gest that it’s fun and satisy­ing to form attach­ments to spe­cific tools; to get good!

When the young women arrived at Oxford, strict quotas were still in place to ensure that the male-to-female undergraduate ratio would not dip below 4-to-1. But the upheavals of the war had at least one unexpectedly positive effect on their education: After their male classmates went off to fight, the women no longer had to compete for professorial attention. As Midgley commented toward the end of her long life, “In normal times a lot of good female thinking is wasted because it simply doesn’t get heard.”

the use of a consistent sweatpants-and-crop-top aesthetic (key tenets of her “girl next door” self-brand)

art markets — from which they once could keep a safe personal distance even as they depended on it

They are obliged to produce both art and a portrait of themselves as an artist.

sectors that operate on freelance and insecure labor, in which individuals take on a slate of unremunerated promotional work in lieu of job security

self-optimization for platforms (organizing one’s content to be recognizable by algorithmic systems)

consistent self-branding (defined by sociologist Alison Hearn as “self-conscious construction of a meta-narrative and meta-image of self)

Q: Why do you have a semicolon in your name? On raccoon typewriters, the semicolon was originally on the 2 key, where the @ symbol is now. It's a visual pun that only raccoons get, but m; is still pronounced "mat". Also, raccoons traditionally put punctuation in their names because they don't like to be tracked, and it foils government databases.

The readymades of Duchamp were art because of their audacity, because of the context of the other art around them, and because of their arrangements—when everything is a readymade, it’s not an art gallery, it’s a scrapyard.

The response of AI-art enthusiasts, like those at the tech companies standing to make trillions off AI, or those who simply enjoy nerding out over new technological toys, will be to suggest that what matters in art is solely its extrinsic properties. That is, a painting is a painting, an image an image—in this view the definition of art is expanded to be such that if an image strikes someone as art, then it’s art. Case closed.Consider the banality of this view, a view that reduces art to merely what’s in front of us. Without taking into account the consciousness of the artist, the word “art” loses all meaning, becoming merely a synonym for “beautiful.” We may find something pretty, or interesting, or striking, or pleasing, but none of these mean that it is art. We may find a natural vista affecting, we may even weep, but to say that it is “art” implies a cosmic consciousness working behind the scenes, an intrinsic property like a teleological origin, or a purpose that goes beyond the mere material. Without the intentionality of the artist taken into account, the definition of “art” is bled of all meaning, all differentiation, all usefulness as a term—such a move is really a defeat claimed in the name of victory. This is why deflationary theories of art, like how art is “whatever is in an art gallery” or “whatever anyone says” or “whatever pleases the senses” are all unsatisfying as definitions, for they strip the word “art” of all capacity to do the job of a word, which is to differentiate.

n the space below, please provide an example of each listed cognitive bias. Reactance When I thought you didn’t want me, I would have done anything.

Patrick Fermor’s A Time of Gifts. In the middle of describing (many decades after the fact) walking though Swabia in between Stuttgart and Ulm as a teenager in early 1934, he gets into a digression about what sorts of poetry in what languages he had memorized at various points in his life, which leads to a further digression about the time he was an SOE officer in German-occupied Crete in 1944 and he and his colleagues and some local Cretan guerillas kidnapped the German commander (General Heinrich Kreipe, 1895-1976). They spent some time moving around the mountains with their captive while evading pursuing German forces before they were able to get the captive to a beach where a British boat picked him up and took him to Egypt and thence into POW camps. One morning during this process, as the sun was rising rather spectacularly over Mt. Ida, the captive general murmured to himself a bit of memorized Horace: Vides ut alta stet nive candidum Soracte … Fermor, who was 20 years younger then his captive, then picked up from memory where the general had stopped: …nec jam sustineant onus Silvae laborantes geluque Flumina constiterant acuto (etc etc etc.) The general looked at his young captor and said “Ach so, Herr Major.” “It was very strange. As if, for a long moment, the war had ceased to exist. We had both drunk from the same fountains long before; and things were different between us for the rest of our time together.”

Because nobody but me would notice it, I feel weird about opening an issue on github. I know it's a bug, I know it's something the developer would want to fix if he knew about it, but something about it feels entitled, like "excuse me, you broke my toy, wtf are you doing." The new issue is, at least for awhile, right at the top of the issue page, implying that it's the most important. It feels like I'm making work for someone, for a completely trivial reason. I can live without the favimoji. Why make a big deal about it?

XMLHttpRequest — named for the fact that nobody has ever once used it to request XML

In the past generation, concern about social values has moved from an eccentric hobby, pursued by Malcolm Muggeridge, Mary Whitehouse and their ilk, to the mainstream.

When the Austrian general von Haynau visited Britain in 1850, he was chased down Borough High Street by a mob of draymen, who objected to his brutal repression of the Hungarian uprising the previous year. By 1861, London street-singers had recorded the event in ballads. More typically, poor people took action against rule-breakers in their own communities. Across Europe, there were institutions of public shaming, with names like “rough music,” “charivari” or “skimmington”. If you slept with someone else's spouse, married an older woman, or beat your wife, you might wake to see a procession coming past your house, beating pans and bearing an effigy. You might then be captured and ridden backwards on a donkey, or thrown into a ditch.

Spotify gives you an automatically generated playlist: Try Anything Once, Twice If You Like It.

…look at a menu, run Scatter/Gather on any list. The words swim and reorganise into categories; I pick one, focus, they re-categorise.

What if it were law to name the algorithm according to its reward function? Little Miss Reverse-Chronological Little Miss I-Make-You-Click Mr I-Reinforce-Your-Prejudices And you would get to choose.

What if you discovered a secret toggle, deep in the Settings of your phone, and it was labelled “Routine” – and one morning you tapped “Turn off until tomorrow.” Then your Citymapper ranks a route at the top which is almost as quick, but you never take it. Your Priority Inbox makes sure it shows you emails from people you typically don’t read. Your alarms are all late; you get breaking news notifications from publications you don’t read. A klaxon goes off if you get the same darn sandwich from the same darn place for lunch. Your phone rings but actually it has spontaneously placed an outbound call and is just letting you know. It has called your father. He doesn’t have a blue underline in your contacts, which your phone knows. “Hello,” he says, picking up, “What a surprise! I was just thinking about you.”

My reading of this study would be that it isn’t that we live in a ‘post-fact’ political climate. Rather it is that attempts to take facts out of their social context won’t work. For me and my friends it seems incomprehensible to ignore the facts, whether about the science of vaccination, or the law and economics of leaving the EU. But me and my friends do very well from the status quo- the Treasury, the Bar, the University work well for us. We know who these people are, we know how they work, and we trust them because we feel they are working for us, in some wider sense.

The recommendation algorithms in these platforms are great at showing me more of what I like, but are there any which try and identify gaps in my experience and surprise me?

Pandemonium is another model of social intelligence. An early and influential model of computation, proposed by Oliver Selfridge in 1959. The pandemonium model assumes that problems can be solved by a legion of specialised demons. Each demon, like their underworld counterparts, has a very specialised task. In hell, a particular demon might be responsible for stoking the fires at the feet of a particular sinner. In Pandemonium, if the problem is word reading, a particular demon might be responsible for recognising the letter A, and another responsible for recognising the letter R. Each demon shrieks, with a volume related to their confidence about what they’re seeing. At the top sits a decision demon whose job is to judge the loudness of shrieks. In this way, via interactive connections, the myopic and stupid demons generate an emergent solution to the greater task

Companies design and deploy the epistemic agents and we buy their services, based on them “just working” - in other words, accurately guessing what will make us happy.

The “truth seeking” part needs to be explicit, according to Goldman, as a defence against fashionable post-modernisms which deny the existence of truth and pretend to build an account of knowledge based on some other feature, such as consensus.

I have concluded that the epistemic argument for markets needs to be heavily qualified, if not put on its head: it is not an argument for “free” markets but for the careful regulation of markets. The “invisible hand” can only, if ever, do its work on material that has been diligently prepared, and continues to be monitored, by many visible hands. Otherwise, the result may be a mere chimera of the epistemic mechanism that I learned about when studying economics: it may seem to work fine on the surface but fail to realize the goals it is supposed to achieve, such as genuine preference satisfaction and the avoidance of inefficient economic behavior.

Twitter, I want to suggest, is a machine made for intimate jokes. The central fact of the medium is its brevity. A single tweet is 280 characters. This is barely enough for a coherent thought, let alone a full story. And the gold standard of tweeting isn’t a thread—it’s a single tweet that does the job all in one.

Jokes, then, are intimacy pumps. The teller gambles on a presumption of intimacy, and when the joke succeeds, it accentuates that intimacy. The practice of joking highlights the fragility of the relationship: of the teller’s leap and the audience’s catch. Every joke is a trust fall. And every laugh is a direct experience of connection.

Jokes, says Cohen, have an essential structure. All jokes require that the joke-teller and audience share some background knowledge. And that background knowledge needs to be unstated for the joke to work. A joke will absolutely fail if the teller tries to prepare the audience with an explicit declaration of the necessary background knowledge. We need to be surprised by the sudden emergence of that shared background knowledge, mid-joke.

At the end of the day, I’m the user. I want to be convinced that the approach is better. Sell me on it. Prove it to me. Don’t do it by telling me about the moral worth of open source or federation or any of those things. Care about my use case. Value how I value my time.

Even if you look at the “Guide for ActivityPub users,” it tells people to “spread the word,” saying, “the most effective way to promote a decentralized internet is by using it and encouraging others to do likewise.” This may be the case, but what this ends up as is people trying to sell me on a service because it is decentralized and not people trying to make decentralized services the obvious and easy choice for users.

Static site generators are like candy for nerds. Every serious writer I know uses Substack or Medium or Wordpress.

It doesn’t really understand how people use Twitter.

was developed for developers who really enjoy designing and implementing standards

This means that for the most basic, out-of-the-box setup, I would have to pay more to host my own instance on the cloud than I would pay for Spotify in the end.

I would control my own data; no algorithm would be siphoning off my listening habits and constructing some profile of who some AI believes me to be.

I took a look at my 2021 Spotify Wrapped, the streaming service’s year-in-review feature that tells you exactly how many times you hurt your own feelings with a song.

In recent months, Sidechat, a buzzy new app, where users log in with university-affiliated email addresses and write anonymous posts that are visible only within their school community, has racked up downloads at universities including Harvard, Cornell, Tufts and Columbia. Campus newspapers have documented the app’s fast-paced growth. In March, The Cornell Daily Sun wrote that “the app has quickly become a hallmark of Cornell social life.” In April, The Harvard Crimson reported that Sidechat “is taking campus by storm.” The premise isn’t new but is irresistible for many students: an opportunity to chat about what’s happening on campus with peers, without having their names attached to what they say. Posts go live without any prior approval and are only removed later if a message is deemed to be in violation of platform guidelines. While some students find the secrecy to be harmless fun, others seem to be emboldened by the anonymity and, as is common online, post caustic and hurtful comments. Now, some students, many already jaded by past experiences with similar platforms, say they are souring on Sidechat, but they are still signing on.

On the internet, fighting about what has happened is far easier than imagining what could happen.

On the internet, there is no present, only variously organized fragments of the past.

These inscriptions include verbal expressions as well as images, audio, videos, memes, likes, shares, buttons hovered over, forms filled but never submitted, location data, etc. The inscriptions are legible either to humans or to machines, or to both.

Alongside monastic practice, recent scholarship has identified another tradition that scholars such as Taft call a “cathedral office” of prayer, which would have been intended for the laity. Unlike monasticism, which established a pattern of obligatory prayer at set hours throughout the day, this cathedral office centered on dawn and dusk. Like its precursors, it engaged in daily prayer as expectation of Christ, and saw him present in the sign of the rising and setting sun. Vespers, the evening liturgy, expressed this in a unique way. At the hour of dusk, as the shadows set in, a lamp would be brought into the congregation to be blessed. The practice, called the Lucernarium, was a long-established custom throughout the Mediterranean world, in various religious and cultural persuasions. And yet Christians transformed the convention into a potent sign of worship: in that flame they recognized Christ, the true light of the world, whose light would, in time, replace even the sun itself. And the response to that sign, the means through which Christians might participate in that light and make its meaning real in their lives, was to sing.

Early Christians expected Christ to return soon and restore the world. The Incarnation initiated a new relationship between world and God, and in Christ’s paschal sacrifice on the cross the curtain of the temple was torn asunder. The rites and rituals reserved for the holy of holies now seeped out into the world, and every activity within creation, from the patterns of prayer to the movement of the sun and moon, became imbued with liturgical significance. Robert Taft writes that in the worship of the early church, “all of creation is a cosmic sacrament of our saving God. … For the Christian everything, including the morning and evening, the day and the night, the sun and its setting, can be a means of communication with God.”

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Politicians do not worry that thousands of toilets may suddenly start spewing water because goods like that have to "follow code" and adhere to product liability standards. In contrast to this, lawyers for today's 200-plus affected corporations will find out that the full and complete extent of the third-party software vendors' liability is that they will send a new CD if the first one is unreadable.

7. Indie music and alt music are marginalized.

2. Alt Weeklies disappear in every city—along with everything else that’s alternative or outside the norm.

Movies, music, and other creative pursuits are increasingly evaluated on financial and corporate metrics, with all other considerations having little influence

9. The experts who ‘explain’ the culture to us all seem to be insiders with identical backgrounds.

14. All those nasty, rebellious songs that defy authorities are now owned by hedge funds.

13. Everybody is encouraged to watch the same TV shows and movies—with niche options gradually removed from the dominant platforms.

12. Five companies have almost complete control over the book business—where, in an earlier day, dozens of indie publishers thrived.

11. Even elite awards for creativity are dominated by reboots and remakes.

10. This year’s movies look a lot like last year’s movies.

8. Telling jokes becomes a dangerous profession.

6. The dominant company in the creative culture views everything as a brand extension.

5. There are lots of journalists, but they all seem to be working for the same corporations.

4. The banal word ‘content’ is used to describe every type of creative work, implying that artistry is generic and interchangeable.

3. The most popular song doesn’t change for three years in a row.

This is a deep matter, and I won’t try to unlock all the nuances here.

Even avant-garde work often feels like a rehash of 50-60 years ago

Creative work is increasingly embedded in genres that feel rigid, not flexible