August 25, 2018

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Attention 🎯 | Permanently Moved 🔊 | Social Media 💉

Episode 20

The internet broke this week and we had a whole day without it – It was nice. From those beginnings I end up talking a little bit about social media being an enemy.

Warrens, Plazas and the Edge of Legibility 

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Permanently moved is a personal podcast 301 seconds in length, written and recorded in one hour by @thejaymo

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Don’t Feed The Machine

Friday the 24th of August will be remembered as the day that our fiber landline connection went down for seven hours.

My friend Ben who lives around the corner told me in the pub last night that he sat and stared at his Router waiting for it to come back on. 

We didn’t even know. I just went out went to Kingston had a coffee look around the shops look for a birthday present – it was alright. It was really nice just spending the day together and saying let’s leave it let’s go out but ho boy were we a bit lost for the 30 minutes before we made that decision 

Which leads me to an article that I found this morning that is a photo taken from a print article that was then posted online. Entitled ‘tech billionaire parenting.’

“Melinda Gates’ children don’t have smartphones and only use computer in the kitchen. Her husband Bill spends hours in his office reading books while everyone else is refreshing their homepage. The most sought-after private school in Silicon Valley the Waldorf School of the Peninsula, bans electronic devices for under – 11s and teaches the children of eBay, Apple, Uber and Google staff to make go-karts, knit and cook.

Mark Zuckerberg wants his daughters to read Dr. Seuss and play outside rather

than use Messenger Kids. Steve Jobs strictly limited his children’s use of technology at home. It’s astonishing if you think about it: the more money you make out of the tech industry, the more you appear to shield your family from its effects.”

• Alice Thompson in The Times.

This comes as a surprise to absolutely no-one that’s listening to this I’m sure. But, it feels like a ‘do as I say not as I do’ situation which of course is the elite prerogative anyway. 

The question is what are you or I gonna do about it? 

There’s been a couple of episodes where I’ve talked about ‘Avoid News’ or pairing down my social media consumption to broadcast only. Which kind of worked, but it also really really didn’t in many other ways.

Just because I’m tweeting less doesn’t necessarily mean that I’m not looking at the stream less it really is just a massive waste of time. 

I think one of the larger problems of throwing all of our time, attention and energy into the social media machine is that it causes effects around the connectedness of individuals and the awareness of what’s going on in the larger macro sphere.

Venkat rao president of Ribbon Farm comm recently tweeted “I’m kinda sick of this digital public era with its big, garishly lit public plazas and broadcast discourse. I would like a dark age marked by an underground warren of largely hidden spaces. Publics are overrated. Public figures should feel like the governed are ninjas in shadows” 

Now, again, I don’t know about you, but I think this is already happening. A large part of my social life on the Internet consists of many slack channels, DMs, telegram and signal. But I’m not on whatsapp so I don’t really have a digital social life with some of my closest friends – which is a bit annoying.

Because my closest friends whatsapp groups are the kind of groups that don’t need community management. Any other back channels with acquaintances require momentum steering and encouragement of engagement with quieter voices

In an old piece dated 2010 on Ribbon Farm Venkat talks about Warrens, Plazas and the Edge of Legibility. There was a phenomenon noted by Xianhang (Hang) Zhang of ‘evaporative cooling’.

Evaporative cooling is basically the effect of the highest status people in a group leaving lowering the average status of those left behind – I’m sure you’ve all been in group chats where someone has left and the conversation has slowly petered out over weeks or months.

The question is really once you find the others, how do you stick with them? and stick by them?

I’m starting to get the suspicion that the platform is the enemy. Which is ironic considering that I’m working on a project called Land As Platform. so perhaps I can clarify and say the platforms that are based on the extraction of abstract information are the enemy. Because it causes negative feedback loops and a toxic environment. 

So how do you play with the platform? I’m a big fan of groups of five or six people who are in group DMS on Twitter and they just use it as a feed instead of having a tiny Twitter account etc

It doesn’t suffer from any adverse or any of those ‘you may have missed tweets’. My DMS are open if you fancy added me to any group chats like that, and I’ll stay, or I’ll leave depending. I know I think of belaboured this point a bunch of times on this show but it’s something that we collectively need to get sorted as soon as possible.