Box105: Things Just Become Stuff

The Feedz Noobz

I nodded along sagely along to this piece about choice in an age of abundance and the difficulty of discovering music, movies, shows, recipes, apps and writers you will like amongst all the stuff out there. The problem identified isn’t actually in encountering things but in the FOMO of things that you might not have encountered; that you might be missing the perfect app or band or newsletter that you’re unable to discover because of inequities of the algorithm or just not having enough time to scour the thousands of options. All very good, but; I feel like this anxiety reflects an immature approach and use of the Internet and that this FOMO in most mature users is a relatively short-lived thing, both individually and collectively (for millennials like us).

Let’s start with collective FOMO; the sudden acceleration of the accessibility of stuff introduced through the 2000/10’s (and I was there) was overwhelming but not just because of the Internet. It was also overwhelming because we were going through teenagehood at the same time as the Internet. The combined effect of being the first generation to become adults with the Internet at the same time as the Internet was figuring it’s shit out (maybe not in the best way turns out) and the normal expansion of horizons and interest a teenager might experience were immersed in the accelerating raw teenage material (music, cult films and TV) the Internet was making available. As a result, an overwhelming, anti-Hitchcock zoom of stuff became suddenly available to millennials; arguably more than previous generation. Where European boomers had their post-war bananas and international holidays, we had literal gigabytes of culture streamed to our eyeballs.

As a comparison: In 2001 when Is This It? came out I was getting all my music through MTV2 and sharing CDs on the bus ride to school. America was an abstract thing ‘over there’ somewhere and frankly so was the rest of the world beyond France where we might go on holiday and as far as I knew, the French didn’t make music. A few years later I’m listening to fifty new bands a day on MySpace and meeting up with people from ‘Canada’ who are coming to visit London and also like Spicy Nuts Zombies (not a real band but believable for 2007ish).

What I’m saying is I think Internet-enforced FOMO of abundance is something us millennials are subject to but not the generations before or after. My parents don’t give a shit about what’s happening on Twitter/X and at least anecdotally from friends with Gen Z’s, it doesn’t appear to be any higher on their agenda than the agonising, everyday insecurity of just being a teenager; they’ve already internalised and negotiated the idea of abundance by the time they’re figuring themselves out as teenagers. Millennials got FOMO because the world went from MTV to Spotify while we were getting into music and hair products and we never developed the appropriate mediating frameworks to manage the abundance. Which is fine, because we’re now ageing out of it anyway, the Internet isn’t for us anymore, nor should it be run by us.

So secondly, individually: I don’t feel any FOMO because I, like most folks have no matured out of it. At some point, you just stop caring. When I was a student and recent grad I was much more in the music ‘scene’ but was also getting more serious about design. I would spend my Sundays scouring music blogs for new tracks for DJing but at some point I realised I couldn’t balance both bits of knowledge and just decided to stop caring. The exact moment: I went on a mini European tour to set up a bunch of exhibitions in 2013 (?), told my manager I’d be back to DJing in September and just never returned. I said he could keep all the CD’s on a phone call from a cafe on the Danube in Linz. I was eating a cheese toastie.

Point is that at some point, you reach an Internet maturity level to just accept that you don’t need to keep digging. That what you’ve got is enough. Or as I would sometimes say; ‘Sand in the Vaseline exists, why do I need to listen to new music?’ This isn’t to say you should stop being curious and open-minded. If people recommend things I’ll follow along and I’m sort of excited to follow along with my daughter’s media and music interests as long as she lets me once she starts doing her own discovery.

It’s also something I had to jump through with the PhD writing: The fear of not knowing enough giving away to the sheer fact that I can never read everything even if there’s almost certainly things out there that would slot perfectly into my thinking. The question isn’t ‘have I read everything?’ but ‘have I read enough?’ Can I stand relatively straight and say; ‘yes, I feel like the things I’ve said or written are well evidenced and supported?’

Much like with academic writing, you need a way to manage the abundance of stuff so you can just have a normal life.

• Rule of Obligation: You’re not obligated to read/watch/see and engage with anything at all (unless you are in fact contractually obliged) any more than you’re obligated to have an opinion. Inaction is just fine.
• Rule of Threes: If I see an author/paper referenced three or more times, it’s probably worth investigating but Rule of Obligation can still apply.
• Trial time: If I can’t understand something (common in some academic writing) because it’s too obtuse, difficult or just not interesting, then you can stop. There’s more than a couple of books I’ve read a chapter of and gone ‘nah.’ But above rules can also apply. (If enough people insist it’s worth sticking with.) This is similar to my twenty-minute rule about meetings; if something hasn’t been figured out in twenty minutes, it’s not going to be.
• Develop a Filtration Method. I send interesting things to myself by email, read them in a sitting and then file appropriately (signals and reckons to Raindrop, papers and academic articles to Zotero, all properly tagged). I hate keeping tabs open.
• Two Steps Forward, One Step Back: I always try and read one more thing than I’ve added to the pile everyday. Today I added two things to Zotero already so I need to try and read three. But, again, above rules apply.

^{*note on this (because there’s a two week gap from when I wrote this bit ↑ and that bit ↓ – the discussions this week over copyright in the context of AI and Disney have highlighted a change in the shape of the Internet; where big corporation fought against how the Internet was attaching their business models (record companies) and sometimes lost (Blockbuster), they are now fighting for the Internet way of doing things (OpenAI and IP theft) because they’ all millennial kids of the Internet who also now happen to be Silicon Valley billionaires-in-waiting.}

Reading

I finished Jay Owen’s wonderful book; Dust, over Christmas. An expansion of her newsletter (early on the train, 2016!) and thesis. It’s a super interesting set of vignettes and stories using dust as a way of tracing the history of modernism (e.g. humans attempting to dominate nature and not understanding the side effects) as well as a great metaphor (and artefact of) entanglement in a global system. It takes in desertification, nuclear testing and pollution as part of the tour. I’m hoping there’s more to come. The book reads like a rigorous introduction of a great framework and theory and I’m left with the question of what to do with it.

I also started on the ‘Children of…‘ series from Adrian Tchaikovsky, largely on Matt Jones’ recommendations. It is every bit as good as I hoped it would be; big, classic space opera spanning decades, generation and centuries. Alien(ish) ontologies and concepts, beautiful world building and story telling and (unusually) a punchy, twisting and meaningful conclusion.

Short Stuff

• Dan Hon’s done a short recent essay (yes, I’d call it an essay) on the implications of Open AI’s copyright dilemma. They are effectively claiming that the whole generative AI project needs laws be changed because it is ‘too important’ to be stymied by copyright legislation, does this mean it has public utility and thus should be nationalised as infrastructure?
• Eryk Salvaggio highlights the reversal of fortunes in copyright law and protection; it used to be Internet punks demanding a softening of copyright law to unclench the monopoly of big corporation on music and media. Now it’s artists and Internet punks worried the protections they have gained might be eroded – as a several have pointed out, OpenAI and others are suggesting that they’re too important to be subject to copyright law – ‘too big to attribute?.’ Something about this goes to the above about the changing shape of the Internet.
• I really like the ‘too cheap to meter‘ model that Matt turned me onto a few months ago in reference to AI. I think it’s what I was also thinking about with ‘breezepunk.’ If I could sum up social constructivism in a pithy sentence it’s that ‘things just become stuff‘ (the trick who gets to decide what things, what kind of stuff and how that transition happens).
• Most of what Generative AI has achieved is a vibe shift for what might otherwise have been a dead Silicon Valley in the wake of the failures of Xr/metaverse/crypto of 22/23. It restored futurity vibes (and so investment) even if it continues to produce little material value or use.
• In conversations about so-called ‘deepfakes’ I often made the point that grainy YouTube videos of stock imagery were enough to convince thousands of people that Bill Gates was injecting people with 5G chips. The problem was never the quality of persuasion but the willingness of people to be persuaded. This extends to the threat of persuasive chatbots that might be used by nefarious state or private actors. I’ve been thinking more about dark patterns. Forget (for a moment) deceptive chatbots, niggling at your specific insecurities and neuroses, what about interfaces, logins, forms, and spam emails – the white noise of the Internet – all twisting your perception and information sphere; conniving to force you into certain decisions or behaviours? What if instead of just dumping U2 onto your phone, Spotify upped it’s game to convince you that you actually like U2?
• I’m always torn between ‘things are terrible’ and ‘but things could be worse.’ This is probably most people tbf. Climate wins for 2023.
• A syllabus for studying the end of the world.
• A conversation with Federico Campagna about the end of the world.
• A kid beat Tetris after 30-something years. There’s a lot to that spiritually.
• Nicole bringing “cringemaster 5000” (but great) on thinking about her book on images of the sky.

One of the things that I’ve noticed recently is the massive uptick in the quality of spam. I was almost convinced by a fake delivery email yesterday and this morning came across this ‘content phishing’ email. I get a few of these a week but they’ve never been so specific. It’s only the somewhat neutral, robotic voice (and the inevitable offer of ‘publishing content strategy’ that turned me onto it).

I got Audible credits/membership (not sure of the difference) from colleagues as part of a recovery practice and just redeemed them. I tried audiobooks last year but found I couldn’t concentrate enough to justify £7.99 a month when an actual book costs about the same. I feel like books are written to have your attention and thought while podcasts are made to be accompaniments to your day. If you have tips on how to use audiobooks properly, let me know.

Kane sent a voice note about watching ‘making of’ videos and what they do for us. It made me wonder if (as millennials again) being raised on Dorling Kindersley cut-outs and Richard Scarry has given us an aesthetic fascination with how things work without so much of the critical engagement and what that means for critical design/art. But that’s another post. This is long enough. Love you, especially now, more than ever maybe. Speak next week.