Taste As Interface Behaviour

The Guardian had a great piece over the weekend by pop culture writer Rachel Aroesti called Have I been influenced, or is this actually me? How personal taste fell out of fashion. It’s about taste. Good taste and bad, and the author’s suspicion that due to the state of social media, we might not have any taste at all any more. What we might think of as our personal preference, is in fact just psychic residue left over from having been shown the same thing 100 times a day by a machine. It’s really good! go read it it.

Six years ago in Animal Crossing Is The Place For Taste I was thinking the ‘demonstration’ of taste online. In that game, taste is demonstrated by arranging virtual objects in a toy box world. You perform taste by making a place. Later I argued in Good Taste Online that each platform had its own physics and affordances, and therefore its own way of making taste visible: Twitter has retweets and likes and replies. Pinterest has boards. Tumblr has juxtaposition. Minecraft configurable virtual environments.

But after reading Aroesti’s piece, I would put it more strongly.

Taste is an interface behaviour

Millennials and older might like to romanticise pre-internet media discovery and wax lyrical about the noble struggle of crate-digging, mixtape making, and hanging around in bookshops… I know I do! But none of these nostalgia bait memories are pure encounters with culture. Just like the code-spaces we encounter today, bookshops, libraries, the radio all had interfaces too.

Aroesti writes:

This is no longer the case. We increasingly encounter most aspects of the world through a single aperture: streaming and social media platforms. Or, more specifically, the algorithmic feeds of streaming and social media platforms, plus algorithmically optimised search engines and e-commerce sites, from Amazon to Vinted. In many cases, these are programmed to show each individual specific content based on data gathered from their own activities and those of other users – content that will ideally keep them on the platform for as long as possible.

This is exactly right, though I think “aperture” is too passive. A window is something you look through, the feed is something that watches you doing the looking. It’s an apparatus that observes you observing, then changes its own behaviour based on that observation, which in turn shapes the future view you see though the window.

But, the record shop as taste interface was kinda optimised in the same way too. Genre bins ar ea kind of taxonomy. Staff picks are the recommendation engine. The counter both a record and comic book shop is a social checkpoint, and for better or worse, a site of community moderation. If hardcore punk or UK Jungle was getting popularity with customers, the shop would respond by stocking more of that genre. There is how a big difference between a record shop and the feed.

Latency. A lot of what I think of as taste matures in the delay between exposure and judgement. I belive things need to ‘settle in‘ to culture. The immediacy of the feed collapses the delay. The feed responds to you, instantly, and the world it builds next is shaped by the gesture you just made. The shop has a feedback loop measured in months and pointed at a market. The feed is measured in milliseconds and pointed at a person.

It’s a bewildering paradox: these platforms made personalisation a major part of their business model, then synthesised, commodified and automated individual taste into oblivion. We no longer choose what we want to consume; we take what we’re given. And we are being given it in such overwhelming quantities that we no longer have the mental capacity to properly digest and assess what we have encountered.

I understand the feeling here, but I don’t think that we no longer choose on social media. Your Attention is Sovereign. We are always actively making choices on social media; by pausing, not skipping, replaying, hovering, letting the next episode begin. I understand these can be influenced by dark patterns and UX tricks etc, but you are still responsible for your actions. Social media is less a battle for attention than what I’ve elsewhere called a Conflict of Disinterest: the ongoing, internal work of choosing what to overlook. The choices are still yours. They have just been turned into a continuous stream of tiny, pre-formatted gestures.

Online taste though an interface becomes behaviour, that behaviour becomes data, and that data becomes prediction. Then you fall into The Loop. Code Space is Bayesian prediction all the way down. Inside the feed you are being presented with a ‘culture-world’ shaped by all your previous gestures of choice. The self is still in there somewhere, but it’s increasingly buried under its own captured behaviour.

This is also why I am not sure taste has been destroyed. Flattened, yes. Operationalised? gamed? automated? captured? Yes. But not destroyed. Taste has been translated into interface behaviour.

Emily Segal’s recent viral piece on “tasteslop” is also useful here.

To riff on this: if taste classifies (and classifies the classifier), tasteslop is what happens when the classifying function is automated, overly explicit, or reduced to spitting out rote taste tokens.

Segal is right that tasteslop happens when the classifying function is automated, but I would put the emphasis on individual behaviour. The machine does not really know taste, it knows the gestures that have clustered around taste.

See Marek Poliks’ ’No One Listens to Music Anymore’

I think the internet and social media recommendation algorithms made taste programmable, in the same way it made culture playable. The token is not the taste. Taste is the relation between the object and the person, and the social world in which the judgement is made.

There’s a whole sidequest into the concept of ‘Answerability’ here, but I’m going to leave it to one side as that’s what a chunk of the next episode of Permanently Moved is going to be about.

Anyways, the platform sees media as a collection of ranked ordinal points, vectors in a database, but the person has a relation to the work. This is why so much tasteslop feels dead even when it is made of tasteful parts. It has the references, but not the relationship. If you have a relationship to the media in question, it is answerable, then all good. But to do that you need to explain why:

Segal’s own summary gets very close to this. She writes:

“Taste is not really a property of various objects. It is a socially validated relation between objects, people, histories, scenes, and timing.”

Yes. Exactly. But if taste is a relation, then interfaces matter because the kind of interface shapes the relation. A mixtape and a Spotify playlist can contain the same songs, but they do not ask the same behaviour from either the maker or the listener. John Peel or Mary Anne Hobbs were also interfaces in a way. A mixtape or radio show is a sequence of songs with pacing, and tonal change etc — All the things that make the film High Fidelity romantic. An algorithmic playlist does all of that too, but the platform also makes the gesture searchable, measurable, and reproducible at scale.

Taste is not just what passes through you. It is what culture becomes after passing through you, via a particular interface. This is why Animal Crossing still feels like such a good early example. It gives you a little island and a lot of objects and says: okay then, make a world.

I personally have never thought that having bad taste was the bad thing. John Waters didn’t tell you to have faith in your good taste; he said have faith in your own bad taste. But faith in bad taste is not the absence of discernment, it is a higher form of it.

Which is why I’ll keep hammering on the idea of discernment.

To knowingly like the unfashionable thing, you first have to know it’s unfashionable and why, and step outside that on purpose. That is his whole game. Liking something other people think is bad taste, and being able to say exactly why you like it anyway, is good taste. The judgement is still there, just pointed against the grain. The worse condition is having no taste at all, when your preferences arrive entirely from outside without the practice of discernment. The feed is very good at supplying preferences and very bad at leaving you the latency to act upon them.

Segal lists “Discernment” as the first part of definition of good taste, asking: “Can you tell one thing from another, and can you make a specific, articulated judgment about why one thing is better than another?” I agree with this, but again I would go even harder than Segal does.

If taste is a relation between objects, people, histories, scenes and timing, then discernment is the one part of that relation the feed cannot perform on your behalf. It can supply the cultural objects, but it can’t do the telling-apart for you, no matter how hard it tries. Discernment is not the whole of taste, but in the 2020s it may be the most important part: choosing one thing over another that the feed serves up. Which in many ways we are doing all the time, acticly choosing.

This is the same act I’ve described in the Conflict of Disinterest, but from the other direction. Disinterest is the refusal; deciding what not to spend attention on. Discernment is what that refusal makes possible. Once you have a tighter field of view though the window, you can actually tell one thing from another. I don’t think you can hav the second without the first.

Discernment is the ability to ask and then articulate why you like something, or why you hate something, or whether you have spent enough time with it. Good taste online is the practice of noticing what interface brought the thing and what gesture it is inviting you to perform. The headline “Have I been influenced, or is this actually me?” is actually a very run of the mill millennial crisis of authenticity (which I also think is a silly niche and generational concern). It’s actually I think a crisis of lack of discernment. Being influenced is not the problem online, not being discerning about what is influencing you is the problem. It’s the same with advertising, as the same flattened interfaces that serve you culture, also serve you adverts.

Near the end of Aroesti’s piece, publisher Ione Gamble offers this advice, and it’s very similar to my own.

When it comes to tuning into your own taste, Gamble’s advice is essentially the same. “Always question yourself. Why do I like that? Do I just like it because I’ve been shown it 100 times – or do I genuinely love it?”

But I don’t think you can out-question a system whose whole physics is around the production of rapid questions. You can only take responsibility for where you put your own attention. If taste matures in the delay between exposure and judgement, then discernment needs latency. You have to somehow and somewhere put the delay back; to let a thing sit long enough that your relation to it can form before the interface asks what you think about it again.

And once that delay returns, the discernment can move up a level. The wider battle ground in the Conflict of Disinterest not whether this or that video in the feed is to your taste, but whether the entire act of engaging with the form is. Is short-form vertical video to your taste as a way of encountering culture? Is short-form microblogging? Boomer box television? Radio? Podcasts? Do I like the interface and the medium that keeps placing objects in this relation to me?

If your Attention is Sovereign, then taste is what you do with that sovereignty; and discernment is how you keep it from being spent for you. Otherwise you end up with no taste at all. Only a feed-shaped pattern of exposure and reaction.

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Terminal Access

This post on late 90’s UK Emo/Hardocre punk scene is super interesting! The Political War That Tore British Emo Apart — Scuff.

At the end of 1990, Anderson and his schoolmates worked up the courage to form their own band. They took the name Understand, and by the next year, had also welcomed Coleman. They spent their early years trading time as openers between hardcore bands and the more mainstream rock of Revolver, Stereolab and Ned’s Atomic Dustbin. For Understand, this separation never existed; Anderson had digested everything from Iron Maiden to Mudhoney to Napalm Death.  Their sound reflected this, honed around the grooving riffs of American post-hardcore groups Quicksand and Fugazi and the melodicism of first-wave British emos Sink and Bad Dress Sense, but also grunge breakouts Nirvana and Soundgarden and the alternative metal rhythms of Helmet and TAD. 

I didn’t get involved in the UK DIY punk scene until 1999 when I was 14, so Understand or Fabric were bands I only ever saw written about in the past tense in Fracture Mag.

Reading

I finished Duncan Barford’s novel The Going Down. It’s one of the best contemporary fiction books I’ve read in ages. As I said last week “Magical dreaming” is very much the operative description. Never read anything like this written by someone in ‘the west’

I moved on to some non-fiction and spent this months audible credit on Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future by Dan Wang of ‘Annual Letter’ fame. Really interesting so far. I wish I lived in a highly competent engineering state. lol

horsegiirL – Nature Is Healing (LP)

If you have been wondering where an album of totally bonkers; euro-rave pop bangers and hyper pop pastiche, performed by an anthropomorphic horse DJ has been all your life then look no further!

This album is fantastic both in concept and its execution. Some potential songs of the summer on here!

Remember Kids:

The post Taste As Interface Behaviour | Weeknotes #443 appeared first on thejaymo.net.

Just Like Stuff

I’ve written a lot on here about Attention. What we do with it, where we put it, how it gets siphoned away online. As part of that current, I’ve been thinking more and more about taste. Where it comes from, how you cultivate it, how you hold on to it Tracy Durnell has been exploring similar territory, so credit where it’s due.

Over on Substack, for the last week or so , my notes feed has been dominated by the seasonal online debate about how genre fiction or sci-fi/fantasy “isn’t real literature” and huge comment threads about what is and isn’t ‘literary fiction’. These arguments and the behaviour of the people conducting them is of course entirely about engagement farming.

I’ve had a hard rule for almost twenty years, related to, but separate from, not posting negative things on the internet: I don’t argue with people about anything on the internet.

I grew up in the late 90’s and early 00’s on phpBB forums. At university I was immersed in the blast furnace of 4chan for days at a time. Maybe it’s the Gen-X hangover I carry as a Gen-Y geriatric millennial, but I realised in my early 20’s that I just don’t care enough. I spent whole days, whole summers even when I was younger, lost to endless back-and-forth about whether a band sold out, what sci-fi books were overrated, or particular egregiously on my side, what choice of operating system or KDE vs GNOME proved you were secretly a poser. My mind boggles at it all now, the thought of spending my youth in a permanent trial by forum post. I saw the pattern in my self, how it was making me feel and how permanently warfare online was effecting other people so I opted out.

The times I have argued about something on the internet as an adult, have all resulted from a lapse in judgement, and without exception left me feeling guilty and full of shame. Not because of what others might have thought about the argument, but because I had wasted my energy and got emotionally involved in something that just… didn’t matter.

The ad-driven narrative economy of social media has been built around using this behaviour as fuel. Flame wars, quote tweets etc juice engagement and dwell time for networks. All day long people are on the internet arguing about pointless shit. Because otherwise how else are people going to spend long enough logged in to see all the adverts?

Now, I get it, I totally do. I understand that when ones identity has been so completely ‘formatted’ by social platforms and consumer capitalism that an attack on a media property, tv show, album, podcast, game, book, football team or whatever, feels like an attack on your own identity as a person. One can’t help feel the need to go to war, to protect yourself. You aren’t the media you consume, and media properties aren’t your friends. Why argue or care about if genre fiction “is real literature” or not? I suspect its because people feel like they need validation for their choice of media diet? Validation for the amount of time and energy one has spent putting ones attention towards a certain interest. This need for validation results in people expressing their taste online, not by sharing what they love, but by fighting with someone who doesn’t.

This is why people feel the need to back up every preference with a bibliography or stats. There’s so much ablative language used online. People prefacing their joy with “I know this is cringe but” as if they need to apologise before voicing their opinion. Building shields out of caveats.

But for what? and for whom?

Mostly it’s all done to placate the opinions of people that they’ll never meet.

This is a trap. The rhetorical game that keeps the whole engine of user generated content networks humming. But you don’t actually need to play the game.

Just like stuff. That’s all.

There is a fundamental truth about the internet, and it also applies to building/having an audience: 99.9% of opinions on the internet don’t matter. You don’t know these people, and they don’t know you. Other peoples approval won’t keep you warm but the perceived lack of it will keep you awake at night. Their disapproval also shouldn’t stop you from loving the thing. You don’t need anyones approval to post on the internet, you can just do things, and like stuff.

The only people whose opinions really matter in this world are the ones expressed from across the table. From your family and friends over dinner. The people in your life who’ll ask your recommendations because they know that your taste is your own.

If your position or thoughts on something emerge from a practice of discernment, and become an actual expression of your taste, then you don’t owe anyone an explanation about why you like (or don’t like) something.

You don’t need to defend what you like to people whose opinions shouldn’t mean anything to you.

On The Blog

Talking Cultural Fracking and World Running on Neomania

I was recently a guest on Lance “it’s ya boi” Robotson‘s alt-futures discussion podcast Neomania.

It’s one of my favourite shows, so it was a real pleasure to join him on air. Lance has interviewed a whole cluster of online weirdos recently, and I think the pod will become a fascinating record of where a certain current of people find themselves intellectually in the mid-2020s.

Across 100 minutes we covered many of the usual hits from this blog: Solarpunk, Cultural Fracking, and the importance of Worlds as a lens. We also touched on AI in the present moment, blogging, and making podcasts, and in an unguarded aside I think I shared some spicier opinions about copyright.

August 2025 | Photo 365

Photo 365 2025. Year 4 Month 8.
Photo-a-day for the month of Aug 2025.

BYENNE

My 100 notes on storydwelling continues over on my leaftlet pub.

BYENNE

A leaflet about storydwelling. Byenne is what’s left. After the storm. After the telling.

by Jay Springett @thejaymo.net

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The Ministry Of My Own Labour

• More writing on SLOP MACHINES
• Recorded and started editing a new episode of Experience.Computer
• Several Meetings and Calls
• Wrote all the press and marketing copy for the game i’ve been working on. More to do
• Long call / workshop about next 18-24months. On device inference and what capabilities it we might see.

The ink stamp for Family of Giants logo arrived. Unfortunately my ink pad was at the end of its life, but you get the idea:

Terminal Access

‘White People Spicy’. This recent piece in Vittles mag on how the regulation of spicy food feeds racial anxieties is really interesting!

The danger invoked by Buldak’s spiciness functioned as a proxy for many other anxieties: the xenophobia that finds public salience in questions of food and eating; fears about children’s online media consumption and the ways that the internet can encourage stupid, painful and risk-taking behaviour; and the racial disgust and desire that coalesce around spicy food products. And in doing so, the Buldak ban awakened anxieties of my own: that Asian food products, no matter how popular they become, might never escape their status as spectacle.

Reading

This week I read and finished Family Wealth–Keeping It in the Family: How Family Members and Their Advisers Preserve Human, Intellectual, and Financial Assets for Generations by James E. Hughes Jr.

Started reading The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America by David Whyte. Still reading The Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We See, Hope For and Believe by Richard Rohr 

Emergence – AM sin

Just got round to listening to the new AM sin record, which came out a few weeks ago. I’ve been waiting for a full length feature and this does not disappoint. It’s a real breath of noisy air next to all the lo-fi rock i’ve also been listening to this week. My favourite track is the remix of their previous single The Abyss by Sakr. After finishing the album I immediately went and listened to the newest Sakr album which like this track is all fat distorted kicks and snares. love it all.

Remember Kids:

The post Just Like Stuff appeared first on thejaymo.net.

Eating From the Trough

‘The Feed‘ as a technical term, is used to describe a UX pattern within an app or platform. But for me, it conjures the image of cattle lined up in a barn, heads through bars, gorging themselves from a trough. Pigs, cows. … any domesticated animal being farmed.

Relatedly, there’s that classic phrase from the 2010s: the only people who call people users are tech companies and drug dealers.

I’ve been writing (with an LLM, obviously) about the conditions that birthed the SLOP MACHINE for the last couple of months. Now, I’m ready for some self-experimentation. I wish to stand before the machine and pull the handle over and over again. I will consume whatever comes out.

For the next week, at least, I’ve decided to eat as much slop from the trough as possible. I’ve installed the SUNO app on my phone, and I’m only going to listen to AI-generated music. Both the tracks I create, and the featured or recommended charts served up by the platform.

I want to put myself in the mindset of people who are really into this stuff. I’m sure there are some for whom this is their life, and I want to experience it too. Full immersion. I’m going to catch up on the backlog of Trisha Code episodes and watch all the uncanny videos people are posting from Veo 3—whatever I can find. To be honest, right now, it’s all I see on LinkedIn.

Let’s be clear: I’m not expecting a gourmet experience. This is a deliberate descent into the digital pigsty. I want to feel the cognitive dissonance, the mental bloat. I fear potential nausea from overconsumption. But I’m going to treat the coming week as an act of self-interrogation, guided by some of the critical questions I’ve explored in my own writing:

1. What about this excites me?
2. Is this too my taste

I don’t think people who are deep in this world are clueless about what they’re consuming. If anything, I suspect they navigate it with a layer of irony. Close friends reading this, who are Butlerian Jihadists will, I’m sure, be fully expecting me to encounter the stark difference between ‘content’ and ‘connection’. Between the machine and the so called human voice.

I wonder: will the unreality creep in by midweek? Will I be exhausted by it all?

Wish me luck, there’s only one way to find out.

IRL

Meanwhile IRL, it’s been another jam packed week with big events. And I wish to make a public note on the blog that one of Eve’s oldest friends Jenny, married the drummer in my band Mark this week:

Don’t they look lovely!?

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The Ministry Of My Own Labour

• Closing down this first phase of the RED TEAM project
• Put a couple of thousand words into METIS III
• Started work on ‘Part 4’ of SLOP MACHINES.
• Started work on next phase of RED TEAM, and started spinning up mentally for LORE project.

Terminal Access

This Substack post on ‘The Curious, Unparalleled Ickiness of Video Games’ was shared in multiple dark forest clearings I frequent this week. Causing a riot of discussion! It looks at the friction often caused in relationships by video games through the trad pop psych gender divide lens.. its a bit of a bong rip.

Modern gaming is framed as a pure sink of male achievement drive: effort poured into competitive hierarchies that generate neither resources nor social capital useful to a partnership. It’s not just seen as a useless waste by women, but as an active demonstration of a willingness by men to try and excel at something with zero payoff for the relationship.

IMO the piece could go further by also looking at social media. Another useless time sink, but one that, as a ‘gossip technology’, feels more ‘socially useful’ to women and less like a betrayal of potential?

Here’s the entire section on Male Ambition presented without further comment.

4. Ambition Sinks

Per the Ambition Sink Theory, women are especially sensitive to the ambition, resources, and social status of their male partners, and they regard video games as powerfully retarding the maximization of those attributes (even more than other hobbies). By honing their competencies and ascending hierarchies in digital worlds (often specified by rankings or level systems, but these frequently translate into esteem from other gamers), men are exactly replicating the kind of ambition and social climbing their female counterparts cherish, but those men are unable or unwilling to effect similar traction in the outside world, within the status hierarchies that women view as legitimate and benefit from.

This juxtaposition of male industriousness in the virtual realm and their fecklessness offline is vexing, and the frustration of trying to convince their partners to swap those levels of effort could be what’s so infuriating. Maybe what burns up women so much is seeing the particular thing the covet routinely misallocated (in their view) and their inability to coax male partners into redirecting those same energies towards gathering momentum in the workforce and improving the couple’s social standing.

Because such a large fraction of what’s potentially appealing about men as companions (to women, at least) is their career potential, even women with super-elongated mating timelines often need to place uncertain bets and forecast their partner’s future earnings (to the extent men do any forecasting, it’s more about downside risk and less about upside). So, it’s understandable that women would monitor ambition like this theory supposes: maybe female hatred of gaming emanates from a fear that they’ll need to readjust projections about their partner downward, spoiling their impression of him and requiring her to discount her expectations more steeply. Are women managing their romantic portfolio like investors in this way? Do men give them little choice by being otherwise undesirable?

An impecunious pursuit absorbing their partner’s ambition isn’t always sufficient to disgust women, though. For example, they wouldn’t object to him postponing careerism to prepare for competing in the Olympics; they’d gladly stomach the financial hardships entailed by something like that, given there’s potential validation that translates to status hierarchies women value (e.g., from something like the Olympics). Thus, if hatred of video games is tied to wasting ambition, it’s not entirely focused on financial standing—it’s more about status.

Would love to hear your thoughts on this article, on your blogs or in the comments!

Reading

Who has chance to read anything when one is so busy?

Jewelia – Little Wins

I’ve been getting adverts for London based indie pop synthpop artist Jewelia and i finally checked out her 2024 album Little Wins, and I love it. To my ear it sounds like late 00’s early 2010’s alt pop, or rather post-crash pop. Which make sense when you think about it as I have filed Jewelia alongside other examples of the Post-Brexit pop scene that seems to be thriving in London right now. I’m going to try and get to some shows. See what pop like this sounds like in venues that I normally see hardcore punk bands in.

If synthpop is your think, this single Queen of Make Belive is a good entry point. And wow. what a DIY video. So cool!

Remember Kids:

The post Eating From the Trough appeared first on thejaymo.net.

Meme Stash as a Folk Archive

While cleaning up my laptop’s desktop today, dragging images into my GOOD MEME’s folder, I had a thought: Saving memes down to your computer is a way of holding onto cultural memory. The Meme Stash as Folk Archive

Memes are little artefacts of online thought—symbols, fragments of language, snapshots of the collective mind. Downloading them is a way of taking control of the wider media environment, keeping something from disappearing off and away into the endless scroll.

So what is a meme stash really?

• A personal archive? – A collection of images, jokes, and references saved according to your own system, not dictated by an algorithm.
• A way to stop things from disappearing? – What’s everywhere today might vanish tomorrow. Without saving, it’s left to the mercy of the internet’s short memory.
• A form of curation? – Not all memes are worth keeping, just like not all books are worth owning. Saving is a choice.
• A tool for asynchronous cultural participation: A meme might sit untouched for months or even years before being brought back at the perfect moment.

To collect memes is to exercise discernment.

It’s not that different from Pinterest or any other way people collect and arrange things they find meaningful. Pinterest is about curating an aesthetic, picking and organising images to express a personal style or mood. A meme stash does the same, but with humour, commentary, and internet culture. I think if Pinterest represents an aspirational self, the meme stash is the ironic self.

I don’t think a meme stash is JUST a random folder of saved images—it’s a living folk archive, a personal repository of cultural moments that mattered enough to preserve. Unlike institutional archives, which collect with authority and intent, a meme stash grows organically, shaped by individual taste, humour, and memory. And like all folk archives, it tells a story—not just of internet culture, but of the person curating it.

On The Blog:

Oh lord! I finally finished copy and pasting all my podcasts on to the blog! The Permanently Moved Online Archive is now fully complete! It was fun revisiting some of the episodes I made back in 2018. The first 10 .. were not very good at all. LOL. Very happy to have finished this. Means I get 30-40mins back every morning.

I’ve started organising / rebuilding my Blog Categories page but ran out of steam. Quite a bit more to do!

Permanently Moved

Email is a Destination

https://permanentlymoved.online/

In primary school, we had a lesson in the new computer lab which involved sending an email to each other at adjacent desks.

Full Show Notes: https://thejaymo.net/2025/02/15/2502-email-is-a-destination/

• Experience.Computer: https://experience.computer/
• Worldrunning.guide: https://worldrunning.guide/
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Permanently moved is a personal podcast 301 seconds in length, written and recorded by @thejaymo

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Photo 365

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

• 90min book sprint with RIVAL
• Full day on/with PROJECT ENTRY team
  • Much spreadsheeting 👀
• Lots more editing on SLOP MACHINES
• Played with ChatGPT pro and … have book on my kindle I didn’t write…
• Sent some invites to potential Experience.Computer Guests
• Took a look at some data for Novara, need to come back to that as it’s another epic spreadsheet.

Terminal Access

Spend my evenings catching up on friends and acquaintances public output this week. Really enjoyed this XCamp keynote from Dre about using AI in his creative practice.

I also highly recommend this conversation between Dougald and Nate Hagens from The Great Simplification.

Reading

Still re-reading Autobiography of a Yogi. Still reading How to Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens. I had to put Immediacy: Or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism by Anna Kornbluh down. It’s like reading molasses, all the words just start spinning around

I started reading Fangirls: Scenes From Modern Music Culture by Hannah Ewens. Its fantastic! I’m about 1/4 of the way though Bill Gates’ The Road Ahead too. Just got to the bit where he predicts the iPhone or ‘wallet computer’!!

Summer Portraits – Ludovico Einaudi

I think if you had told anyone 20 years ago that the Italian composer Ludovico Einaudi would be getting Nine billion streams a year they wouldn’t be able to reconcile it. But here we are.

Summer portraits is a concept album loosely based around Einaudi summers as a schoolboy in the 1960’s. The whole album from start to finish is dripping in nostalgia and passions. It sounds like warm summer wind, hot summer evenings and an optimistic passion.

Remember Kids:

The post Meme Stash as a Folk Archive appeared first on thejaymo.net.

September 21, 2024

|

Permanently Moved 🔊 | Taste 🧐

If you create something that’s to your taste, you have to dig back in. Figure out exactly what it was that worked for you and not the algorithm. Iterate on it, and do it again. 

Full Show Notes: https://thejaymo.net/2024/09/21/2424-dig-back-in/

• Experience.Computer: https://experience.computer/
• Worldrunning.guide: https://worldrunning.guide/
• Subscriber Zine! https://startselectreset.com/

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

Subscribe to the Podcast: https://permanentlymoved.online/

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Dig Back In

When you create something that reflects your own taste, you’re bound to receive honest feedback. I want to thank everyone who shared their thoughts on last week’s episode, whether by email or in the comments—whether the feedback was supportive or simply expressing that it wasn’t to your liking, I appreciate it all. For those who didn’t weigh in, I’ll just assume a strong indifference – with no opinion either way.

The decisiveness of last week’s episode has made me think harder about the process of discernment and my own taste.

So lets, talk about that, today…

When you create something that feels transparently honest, something that satisfies your taste. It’s not actually about the thing itself. It’s also about understanding why the thing resonates with you. 

You have to use your discernment to interrogate the work: What is it about this thing I have created that aligns with my taste? And why does it resonate?

At the beginning of the year (see episode 2401) when I decided that I was going to start doing sound design for each episode, I wanted to try it out in part to gain a bunch of skills. But also to explore what the show could become. A shift from Podcast to Radio thinking. This is still the ambition. 

However, when I tried to execute on that ambition over the first 10 episodes I found it creatively unsatisfying. Something just wasn’t right. I was making the show as I always did, and then scoring it. It was a massive amount of extra work and effort on top of making the usual show and I was dissatisfied with the results.

So I stopped doing it. Discouraged.

But last week’s episode reminded me that the ambition at the beginning of the year, was still something I wanted to pursue. It also made me realise that if you are going to do the sound design for something, It can’t be divorced from the thing that you are making. It can’t be an afterthought. Just adding some drones or drums underneath a voice isn’t to my taste.

In the past I have called this podcast a 301 second long container for my creativity. Seeing what I can pour in every week. Adding music changes my understanding of the shape of the container.

Words + music + video together as a single piece. Complete. 

On the surface, of course making something abrasive and noisy – yelling over crazy drums last week is to my taste. In fact it’s on the way to being the logical endpoint of almost all my creative work. From the breakcore I made in my mid 20’s, yelling through a gas mask over harsh white noise. To the occult noise and drone art I made at university, to the grindcore band I was in when I was 16. So all that suits me aesthetically. 

But thinking about the thing I actually made. I realise that it isn’t all the noise that I find so satisfying. Not a single episode of this show has been a finished product, it’s always been a work in progress. 80% done. Good enough. So I ask again what was ‘good enough’ about last week’s show?

It was the integration—the music, writing, and visuals came together as a single entity, a cohesive whole. Something I don’t think I’ve achieved before. 

Once you have made something to your taste, you have to explore why it satisfies you. This is one of the most important actions of the artist. You have to keep moving, keep exploring the thing that excites you, even if you can’t name it or pinpoint it exactly. 

You have to go back to it, and make another. Make something to your taste and then iterate and do it again. 

Explore what worked and try to figure out why it resonates with you. Each time you try again, you get a little closer to the core of it.

Right now, I’m not sure if making episodes like last weeks (or this one) are sustainable. They weren’t the last time I tried it. It was a different approach. The only way to find out is to try it again. You have to keep experimenting, until you find the thing that clicks.

That’s what makes the creative process fulfilling.

So, what you are listening to or reading right now is part of that return. This is real time learning. What about last week’s show can I find this week, even if it sounds completely different? 

Even though last week’s episode was divisive, with some people loving it and others not so much, it helped me understand something deeper about my own process. And it’s made me more confident about what I want to build towards in the longer-term when 301 runs out of road. What about this, can I take with me when I start making longer but less frequent work.

Because here’s the thing about making stuff and putting it online: You can only ever do the experiments in public. And they are not about making something that everyone loves; it’s about finding what satisfies you and pushing that further. Don’t worry about the clicks and likes and follows, that’s all just a stupid game.

Create something that’s to your taste, and then dig back in. Figure out exactly what it was that worked for you, not the algorithm, and iterate on that and do it again. 

Being creative isn’t about the finished product at all. It’s about the process of creating. The search for what satisfies your taste, and why.

Start Select Reset 📑

Subscribing to SSRZ supports my online work and creative projects.

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The post Dig Back In | 2424 appeared first on thejaymo.net.

September 15, 2024

|

Attention 🎯 | Permanently Moved 🔊 | Taste 🧐

You can, you know, just make any creative work you want, and post it on the Internet.

Full Show Notes: https://thejaymo.net/2024/09/15/2423-make-something-to-your-taste/

• Experience.Computer: https://experience.computer/
• Worldrunning.guide: https://worldrunning.guide/
• Subscriber Zine! https://startselectreset.com/

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

Subscribe to the Podcast: https://permanentlymoved.online/

Show Supporter 📻

£5 MONTHLY 👏

Quarterly zine; my gift to you ✉️

Subscribe 🔊

Wherever you get your podcasts

Make Something to Your Taste

Start Select Reset 📑

Subscribing to SSRZ supports my online work and creative projects.

Get the Zine!
£5/month 💌

As a thank you, I send you my zine four times a year, just like it’s 1994.

No spam. No email. Cancel at any time.

The post Make Something to Your Taste | 2423 appeared first on thejaymo.net.

June 29, 2024

|

Attention 🎯 | Permanently Moved 🔊 | Taste 🧐

We should abandon the external ‘Battle for Attention’ and instead engage in an internal ‘Conflict of Disinterest’

Full Show Notes: https://thejaymo.net/2024/06/29/2413-conflict-of-disinterest/

Support the show! 
Subscribe to my zine
Watch on Youtube

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

Show Supporter 📻

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Quarterly zine; my gift to you ✉️

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Conflict of Disinterest

A friend the other day was telling me about their ongoing struggle with distraction. We all suffer with this and I lent a sympathetic ear. Of course throughout our conversation I played all the hits. The need to develop good taste online, going deep, the doing, and of course the most important fact. Your Attention is Sovereign. 

My friend expressed a deep deep frustration with how technology captures, quantifies and commodizes their attention. Everything about ‘right now’ is defined by a decline in our attention spans and ability to focus. The main thing that struck me throughout our conversation was the framing. The challenge of online distraction as ‘A Battle for Attention‘. 

A couple of years ago, I think I would have agreed. 

Sure, advertising and any media trying to promote itself operates under the assumption that it’s competing for our attention. And what’s going on out there in the semiotic sphere, the competing signs and symbols and media sure feels like a battle. But what about here, in our own psyches. Should we see it as a battle? Should we even get involved? Do we want to be at constant war?

Instead I suggested, we should abandon the external ‘Battle for Attention‘.
And instead engage in an internal ‘Conflict of Disinterest‘.

Back in 2019 when I wrote Your Attention is Sovereign I broke the statement down into two parts:

But on reflection this is ‘Battle for Attention’ thinking. 

Mastery of attention is less about what you see and more about what you choose to overlook. It’s about making active choices about the things you choose to not pay any attention to. 

This is related to what I was saying in Episode 23-03 about taste online and the practice of discernment – the ability to choose one thing over the other.

The conflict of disinterest is a two-step dance: one step toward what matters, one step away from what doesn’t.

If a piece of information or media engaged in the attention battle does reach you, the conflict of disinterest inside of you should ask, ‘Who cares?’.
If you personally care, then great. If you don’t, then pretend it doesn’t exist, move on.

There are a great deal of quote unquote normal things that I have chosen a conflict of disinterest over. When I say I take a disinterest, I mean I actively come into conflict with the media environment around me and choose not to pay attention to it. I don’t care about football. I don’t care about the entire medium known as film and television. I’m also not interested in cars, fashion, or gossip. Well … I take that back actually… I’m not interested in gossip about strangers, But I’m very interested in gossip involving my friends.

To illustrate the depth of my cultivated ignorance. Here’s a personal anecdote: Until It was well after he had retired from playing the game, I had no idea the English footballer Ashley Cole was black.

Now, if something you have actively chosen not to care about is unavoidable, then what do you do?

The answer is nothing – you let it pass. 

Don’t ever yuk someone else’s yum. Just be silent.

Only people who engaged in the logic of the attention battle would get mad and rant about it. Scream culture war. Ranting just means the thing you don’t like, or don’t want to care about, gets larger in your attentional sphere. It grows in importance, instead not being present at all. If you are sick of the world feeling like it’s made up of endless noise, you don’t start shouting too.

When you choose to take an interest in something in particular. You choose to be disinterested in a much wider spectrum of possibilities.

The conflict of disinterest therefore is the cultivation of a kind of productive apathy or anti-focus. A strategic indifference. 

It’s about recognising that not everything deserves our emotional investment or cognitive resources. In an era where we are constantly bombarded with information, messages, and stimuli, productive apathy allows us to conserve our mental energy for what truly matters.

It is a choice to pay attention to the voice and words of the friend across from you at a dinner table. Which is downstream of a much more important decision. The exclusion of everything else happening in the restaurant. The clinking of plates, the family at the table next door, the phone in your pocket.

Paying attention to anything fully is an act of cognitive sovereignty.

But you master your attention by deciding not just what to engage with, but also, and perhaps more importantly, what you ignore

The post Conflict of Disinterest | 2413 appeared first on thejaymo.net.

Settling In

People have been fretting about the acceleration of culture and new technology for as long as there’s been a culture and new technologies to speed it up. In 1858, an unnamed New York Times correspondent complained:

There can be no rational doubt that the telegraph has caused vast injury. Superficial, sudden, unsifted, too fast for the truth, must be all telegraphic intelligence. Does it not render the popular mind too fast for the truth? Ten days bring us the mails from Europe. What need is there for the scraps of news in ten minutes?

How trivial and paltry is the telegraphic column? It snowed here, it rained there, one man killed, another hanged. 

That was in the 1850’s! Since then we’ve had the influence of the mass paperback novel, film, radio, television, and the Internet. Culture responded to them all, digesting, re-digesting. In my lifetime I’ve seen the rapid acceleration of culture with 24-hour news, the web, then social media, the emergence of fast fashion, music streaming etc.

The rapid feedback loops between creation and consumption work upon each other, spinning the flywheel ever faster. ‘Consumerism’ is what we call the response to this state of affairs. It’s found across the board: Clothing, cars, phones, products, fashion, art, movies, books, comics whatever. Physical goods or otherwise. There’s always a ‘new thing’ someone wants you to buy or consume.

In the current moment, creatives make art (commercial or not), and we the consumers have to try swallow as much of it as we can before the next thing comes along. We sense this in our personal lives, we describe it as ‘information overload’, ‘social overwhelm’ or whatever. But if we’re feeling this as individuals, I can’t help but wonder what its doing to ‘The Culture’ at large.

The rapid creation / consumption cycle leaves no space for anything to ‘settle in’

Despite being my mortal enemy – This week I was happy to see Disney announcing that they are scaling back the release schedule for its Marvel properties:

“We’re slowly going to decrease volume and go to probably about two TV series a year instead of what had become four and reduce our film output from maybe four a year to two, or a maximum of three,” Disney CEO Bob Iger told shareholders during Disney’s quarterly earnings call Tuesday (via Variety

The key line came later in the investor call when he mentioned ‘quality’

Disney CEO Bob Iger told analysts that the company is finally moving away from “a vestige, basically a desire in the past to increase volume.

“I’ve been working hard with the studio to reduce output and focus more on quality, that’s particularly true with Marvel,”

As per ‘Cultural Fracking‘, Disney has been treating culture like a commodity. Therefor under the logic of consumerism, more product is better product- regardless of quality.

Whats been happening for the best part of a decade, with social media and the explosion of metrics beyond crude numbers like ticket sales etc, is that our cultural overloads owners have managed their releases/products solely towards what they can measure. Engagement online on Twitter became part of a media properties measure of success etc. Not just box office receipts or sales.

The peak of this thinking has got to be from the brain of Spotify CEO Daniel Ek:

Spotify’s billionaire CEO Daniel Ek informed artists that in the streaming age “you can’t record music once every three to four years and think that’s going to be enough. The artists today that are making it realise that it’s about creating a continuous engagement with their fans. It is about putting the work in, about the storytelling around the album, and about keeping a continuous dialogue with your fans.”

When you are a streaming platform, the only cultural quality that matters are the streaming numbers. Under his logic you have to be continually releasing new music and new content in to the fast feedback loops of consumer culture to survive. An artistic practice built around the gesture of the album, a self contained world of sonic ideas once every 4 years isn’t enough according to Ek.

But thats not how culture works – culture needs to marinade. Work needs to settle in to the collective psyche. Albums are super important.

Art takes time to act upon culture

The idea that a new work must come out, be consumed, burn bright before we all collectively move on to the next thing is a crazy one. It’s rotting peoples brains, its rotting culture.

The other week a friend was bemoaning in the group chat telling us about the following interaction Her newest book came out in February, and she was being interviewed on a podcast. During the conversation the host apparently straight up ask the following (I’m paraphrasing): “Why are you still talking about your book? what about AI? what about xyz? whats next for you?”. Translated: Why are you still, 4 months on, talking about the book that took you 3 years to write?

Rapid cycles of media consumption prevent any kind of deep cultural engagement and collective sense making from occurring. True engagement with art requires time, attention and taste – which the current pace of media release does not allow for. ‘Content’ needs time to embed and resonate within societal and individual consciousness. One thing needs to influence another, be juxtaposed and in dialogue with one another and the audience. It’s from this psychic vibration that responses can begin to flower.

Take for example, Netflix and other streaming platforms approach of dropping whole seasons of TV shows at once – the season binge. This release strategy leads to brief, intense periods of discussion followed by a rapid falling away on social media towards the next ‘new thing’. But this only ever leads to confused commentary. Who knows how far any one has got though the series on day one, two, or three after release? Little sense making can occur when just as everyone finally gets on the same page, it gets immediately turned but the industry that funded and created the work.

I don’t watch much TV – but I did binge the new Fallout series whilst I was back home on the chalk at my parents the other week. It’s the first TV show I’ve watched since the last season of The Expanse. I liked it. Nothing more needs saying.

Had the show dropped weekly as ‘appointment viewing’ we’d all still be discussing it. And thats just better for culture. Fallout would have stayed at the edge of the cultural zeitgeist for 8 weeks, not 10 days. Its release would have had a bigger, deeper cultural impact. It would have had a chance to begin the process of ‘settling in’.

Fandom is part of the problem + the solution

What passes of ‘settling in’ in our current media environment has become endless long tail proliferation of SEO optimised articles like the ones that show up in my Google Discover. ‘Culture websites’ baiting me to click on them to read what fucking stupid dross or opinion someone has.

They are always empty of actual information. Articles about speculative fan theories, canon issues, ranking who’s the best, fan drama etc. It’s not digestion or the marination of cultural works, but fan bait to grab eyeballs and show ads. All stuff I couldn’t give a fuck about.

Even Lord of the Rings isn’t safe, look at what showed up on my discover this morning! I didn’t click it.

Dune used to be my favourite of all online fandom. This 2018 article in The Outline was something I identify with very much:

Beyond that, Dune is not a corporate cash cow, and being a fan doesn’t carry with it that icky feeling you’re doing an unpaid PR internship for Disney or AT&T Time Warner. You’re not being cultivated when you make a Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohaim Appreciation Thread, the way you are when you do something similar for, like, Harley Quinn or Groot. Nor are you helping billionaires whitewash their crimes if you point out politically positive aspects of the series, like its environmentalism or its bone-deep skepticism of leader cults.

I wrote about Dune and people shouting ‘spoilers’ at me over a 60 year old book back in 2020. For literally my whole life online I enjoyed reading things about Dune. Thoughtful essays, critiques, and observations from people newly discovering the book series. Discussion of its themes and characters etc. Dune was influential in our culture for far longer than it has been ‘relevant’. But the new movies have ruined it all. Dune has been sucked into the media consumption cycle like everything else. It’s no longer marinating in the cultural psyche. Google search Dune and you get the movie not the books. This is no way to organise culture.

None of this should be seen by anyone as evidence of ‘settling in’ at all. It’s just the exploitation of ‘fandom culture’ to ensure that every last drop of monetizable attention is rung from an idea before everyone has moved on.

Settle Cycle

The thing is, as works of culture ‘settle in’ their relevancy diminishes, their influence may grow. Which is bad for owners of the IP who need relevance to sell stuff but good for audiences.

Fandoms keep old books, tv shows, movies alive in the long tail of culture. Consider all the podcasts out there with large audiences watching and discussing a 90’s TV show episode by episode or whatever. Or think of the fans that kept Star Wars influential (but not relevant) for 20+ years. These are the people who (rightly) got fucked off when Disney blew up the canon.

Right now, everyone in my extended circle seems to be reading and discussing Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun. I don’t think anyone would say that this book is very relevant to the present, but its influence ‘right now’ on people who make and create culture seems to be enormous. Ed Rathke is currently writing a chapter by chapter breakdown on his substack. The Agitator boys talked about it on Getting Lit Pod etc etc.

The Book of the New Sun has settled in. This is 40 year old culture still marinating.

Last week I wrote about competitive Tetris, and the need to go deep on subjects. How paying attention to something for a long time allows you to develop your taste. I don’t want to sound like an again Hipster, but there is immense value in paying attention to things that aren’t mainstream. Taking time with the content and culture you enjoy.

Hopefully Disney slowing down the MCU juggernaut is a sign that culture owners have seen that fast release cycles does a disservice to the art and our culture. No one is still talking about the Barbie movie, but I have (personally) noticed that folks are still talking about Oppenheimer.

Some of my favourite conversations about media I’ve consumed recently has been about books I read decades ago, or albums that I’ve sat with for a few months or years. Prolonged exposure and discussion among audiences allows culture to settle in. It allows us to digest it, consider it, sit with it. Culture that is settled becomes more valuable to us all.

Permanently Moved

React + Re-Consume

Reaction videos were (and still) are considered ‘low effort’. At worst a parasitic grift. Leveraging the creative work of others for social clout

Full Show Notes: https://thejaymo.net/2024/05/11/2408-reaction-re-consumption/

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

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Photo 365

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

• I updated my online essay collection worldrunning.guide this week. It now totals 22 Essays. About 23.7k Words.
• Finished up some feedback for a start up
• Wrote some more of the impossible object text (next issue of my zine)
• 1 meeting in town
• 3 zoom calls about potential projects

I’m currently open to/for work.

Terminal Access

Ol’ buddy ol’ pal Andrew Dana Hudson is currently in Italy. The reason for his visit was a residency at the Sci-Fi Economics Lab. He’s now at the Turin book fair.

In todays newsletter he covered some of the thinking that came up during his residency and raised the idea of a ‘Planetary currency’

So I started asking the economists at the residency, as an icebreaker, how they thought a planetary currency would work.

It was a surprisingly underexplored idea, even in a room full of SF-loving heterodox economists. What would we even call it? GeoDollars? Planetary Pesos? UN-Yuan? AllCoin? Terrabucks? Unicash? ‘Credits’? Would we even need a name anymore? I’m very open to suggestions.

I would call it Bitcoin imo. Seems like a catchy name.

Dipping the Stacks

Waging Culture Wars Justly

This is all an imperfect analogy, to be sure, but analogies don’t have to be perfect to be helpful. The main thing, I think, is that we who believe that culture matters enough to fight for it ought to have equally strong convictions about how to fight – or not to fight. Otherwise, we’re part of the problem.

The Great Joy of Returning to Your Childhood Hobbies

I started practicing at night in my acoustic-blessed bathroom. Outside the door, my daughter applauded at the end of every stanza. A week later, my husband shyly told me that he was inspired by my renewed creative energy and wanted to take guitar lessons. Between his daily practice and mine, our house is now full of music.

On Jonathan Haidt’s Anxious Generation – by Clinton Ignatov

Squint your eyes, and almost every book or conversation on in this subject can be reduced to four words: “It’s the phone, stupid!”

How WhatsApp became the world’s default communication app

WhatsApp has become the world’s default communications platform. Ten years after it was acquired, its growth shows no sign of stopping. Even in the US, it is finally beginning to break through the green and blue bubble battles and is reportedly one of Meta’s fastest-growing services.

There is way too much serendipity – by Malmesbury

While researching novel uses of sucrose and its synthetic derivatives, Phadnis was told to “test” a chlorinated sugar compound. According to an anecdotal account, Phadnis thought Hough asked him to “taste” it, so he did and found the compound to be exceptionally sweet.

Reading

I finally finished reading The New New Journalism: Conversations with America’s Best Nonfiction Writers on Their Craft by Robert Boynton. It’s a 2005 collection of interviews with 19 of the top Non Fiction writers at the time of publication. Lots of New Yorker writers, Atlantic writers, Pulitzer Prize winners and long form non fiction book authors. A theme of the book is around the legacy of Tom Wolfe’s New Journalism of the 60’s and 70’s. The book suffers in 2024 by being produced in the Interregnum between the personal computing revolution and the internet. Especially the questions around the prospects for long form journalism. None of them saw whats coming. It amazes me that some of them wrote two 10k pieces a year and made a living! A big portion of the authors are now dead, some are in their 60’s grinding out Substacks.

On a recommendation from a blog reader Tom, after my post about motivation and todolist woes the other week I started reading “Laziness Does Not Exist: A Defense of the Exhausted, Exploited, and Overworked” by Devon Price Ph.D. I’m afraid I bailed on it after the first 50 pages. The book is mostly for chronic workaholics. There was nothing in it for someone like me with the twin issues of having a self castigatory nature towards not doing enough AND lack of intrinsic motivation. Ditched. DNF

I wanted something to burn though so started the Warhammer novel Harrowmaster by Mike Brooks. its not my favourite subject mater/lore topic but Brooks is a good writer and I’m enjoy it. Nearly done!

Sunshower – Taeko Ohnuki

Suns out here in the London, so I’ve been listening to Japanese 70’s lounge pop legend Taeko Ohnuki. Perfect summer sunshine music.

The post Settling In appeared first on thejaymo.net.

What About This Excites You?

I’ve read a lot of writing about the need to be mindful about how – and what – one consumes on the Internet recently. I’m sure you will have seen the links go by in my links section over the last weeks and months. Many of them align with my own thinking about taste and discernment online.

Last year I wrote about the need to practice discernment in order to clarify ones taste

When applied to taste, practising discernment means to:

• Think critically about a cultural artefact you’ve been exposed to for the first time. Its context, meaning, intent etc. 
• Engage in self-reflection about one’s own existing tastes and preferences. Eg: How does this new phenomena make us feel. 
• Have some awareness that this reaction may be shaped by one’s social class, education, and cultural background. 
• Lastly, being open to new perspectives in the first place. 

The practice of discernment is the activity we engage in in order to refine our tastes. 

But I avoided offering any specific question one should ask themselves during the moment of self-reflection in that post. The reason being – I had no good questions to ask or offer. But recently I’ve been trying out variations of the following: What About This Excites You?

Feel free to substitute the word ‘Excites’ with: Compels, Interests, Arouses, Animates, etc. I’m open to reformulation. The main thing is reflecting on how new phenomena encountered makes you feel – both in isolation and more broadly:

When you are sitting there looking at an individual tweet, watching youtube video, or looking at an Instagram post, ask yourself: “What About This Excites Me?“.

The question I’m finding, serves as good jumping off point to becoming more conscious of about the engagement with the media I’m consuming. This question helps me immediately identify whether my engagement is driven by genuine interest or merely habitual scrolling. more often than not

It encourages us to consider:

• The value or joy derived from the thing I’m watching.
• Whether the content stimulates thoughtful reflection or provokes a positive reaction.
• If the content merely amplifies existing anxieties or contributes to a negative mental state.

The other day, because the red notification bubbles on instagram were infuriating, I installed and logged into Meta’s Threads app to clear them out before uninstalling it again. Immediately upon login, the app showed me some super dumb take, from someone I don’t know nor follow, and it annoyed me immediately me. I took the bait and clicked though to look at the dumb replies – so I asked myself the question – and I realised the element that was exciting me (as in siring my feelings / emotions) was how annoying the take was. That was it.

If the answer is this does not excite me, when why are you looking at it? If the answer like the above is negative then stop watching it/close the app. And because I’m increasingly becoming a ruthless motherfucker, mute or block the person who made the content.

On the other hand, expanding the question out to the activity itself – “Why am I watching YouTube right now, and does it excite me?” zooms out our awareness as a whole. This reflection is crucial.

I personally, have often rationalised my behaviour of consuming online/social media somthing along the lines of ‘spending time here has the potential of finding something valuable’. This is in fact the unspoken/implicit promise of social media. Which masks the truth that the whole machine is structured around you advertising.

For me, over all spending any more than 20mins on any social platform: twitter, instagram, youtube etc often does not justify the time invested. So the wider zoomed out question about what about this behaviour is exciting me throws up things like:

• Whether my engagement is an intentional choice, or a mindless habit.
• How this activity aligns with or distracts from my personal goals and well-being.
• Am I getting any real payoff from time spent versus the potential for discovering something truly enriching.

The answer to point three is almost always …. no.

Coming back to one of the most important phrases I’ve ever written on my blog: ‘Your Attention is Sovereign‘.

Every act of discernment online represents a choice—whether conscious or not—about where we direct our cognitive resources. By asking “What About This Excites Me?” we can perhpas slowly reclaim control over the choices we make in the present, future AND ones we’ve made in the past. This question isn’t just a reflection; it enables a recalibration of our engagement strategies toward more mindful, intentional consumption. It helps us refine our tastes and personal aesthetic sensibilities.

I’m as guilty as anyone about railing against algorithmic feeds that power the social seas. I’ve even had to go as far as hard blocking social media on my devices. What About This Excites Me? isn’t about producing or generating guilt, its about more conscious decision-making in areas of our life that we actually have more control over than we think.

I can … just put the phone down.

It also works the other way around. Sometimes people send me links to videos, articles etc and the question works there too. “What about this excites you?“. Ask them for more details beyond ‘I think it’s cool’. Ask them specifics, why is it cool? why do you like it? why did you want to share it with me etc/ You don’t need to do this for everything, all the time, as that would be too much.

But it is worth trying every now and then, when you become aware of the fact you have been sat at your laptop, or looking at your phone for a long time.

Permanently Moved

My Todolist Over Time

The moment I finished editing this week’s show about Cal Newport’s Slow Productivity, I realised to my horror that I’d made it before. Doing the things that actually need doing, when they need getting done? Finishing Projects? It turns out that this is probably the greatest challenge of my life. 

I’m at a total loss.

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

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Photo 365

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

• I’m looking for work if anyone has any upcoming projects – I’d be a complimentary member of

• Played a gig!
• Wrote a bunch of stuff that won’t ever see the light of day, but feel better about having done it
• Had a few meetings in town
• Started writing a strat doc for company
• Planning for summer
• Worked on a book pitch

Terminal Access

Welcome To RSS CLUB

I’m going to be blogging on thejaymo.net in a more informal way, if you are subscribed by email you won’t get notified but i’ll be doing a round up every week in Terminal Access.

I spoke with writer Dougald Hine last week about solarpunk. You can watch the first 40mins of our talk here

There’s a point in childhood when your awareness comes into tune with the coordinates of grown-up reality. The stories on the news are no longer an irrelevant blur, but something you try to make sense of. Years ago, some friends of mine set up a site called First Political Memory, and what’s striking about the stories they collected is how they map this moment in development. The chances are, your first political memory will come from around the age of eight.

Dipping the Stacks

Behind F1’s Velvet Curtain

If you wanted to turn someone into a socialist you could do it in about an hour by taking them for a spin around the paddock of a Formula 1 race. The kind of money I saw will haunt me forever.

The Money Is In All The Wrong Places | Defector

You can always tell who in Hollywood has family money by their Instagrams.

Doing weeknotes

What weeknotes are, how weeknotes work, and how to start writing weeknotes of your own

Gloriously Grotesque: How the Cherry Sisters Personified “So Bad It’s Good” ‹ Literary Hub

The Cherry Sisters filed a lot of frivolous lawsuits during their lifetimes, a habit associated with the attention-starved.

So you’ve been reorg’d… – Jacob Kaplan-Moss

I’ve been through close to a dozen reorgs. This article contains the advice I wish I’d been given earlier in my career when I didn’t yet have that experience. Reorgs are disruptive, and nobody really tells you what to do in the wake of one. It’s easy to feel adrift

Reading

I finished reading ‘Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet‘ by Katie Hafner which I started a number of weeks ago. It’s a 1994 book about the creation of ARPANET, and is full of fascinating details about BBN, early computing, networking etc. I really enjoyed it and can’t stress to people enough how good it is.

I’m still reading The New New Journalism: Conversations with America’s Best Nonfiction Writers on Their Craft by Robert Boynton. I’ve taken to reading 1 interview a night before going to sleep, which means it’s going to take me about a month to get through it. I’m learning a lot about the masters of late 80’s early 90’s narrative non fiction. So many books are creeping on to my wishlist. Peabody award winners, Pulitzer prizes etc.

I started reading ‘Voice of the whirlwind‘ Jon Williams’ follow up novel to the cyberpunk classic Hardwired.

As I mentioned in my show this week, I also started reading Cal Newports ‘Slow Productivity’

Zsela – Lilly of the Nile

I’m a huge fan of Zsela – Previously on the blog as one of the best songs of 2019!.

Finally, this week Zsela has announced their debut album ‘Big For You‘ and accompanying tour. The UK date is at the roundhouse in November as part of Pitchfork music festival. I can’t wait.

Lilly of the Nile, is a propulsive art pop song that suits her Contralto like voice. If the whole album is as good as the lead single then we’re in for a treat.

Remember Kids:

The post What About This Excites You? appeared first on thejaymo.net.

January 21, 2023

|

Permanently Moved 🔊, Taste 🧐, World Running 🌐

Given the affordances of different social media platforms … How does one demonstrate taste in the digital realm?

Full Show Notes: https://thejaymo.net/2023/01/21/301-2303-good-taste-online/

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Good Taste Online

If you follow a writer online for long enough, one of the subjects they will inevitably write about is taste. Good taste, bad taste, and worse – people with no taste at all. 

I popped my taste cherry back in Episode 20-19. About how Animal Crossing is a Place for Taste. The primary social driver in that game being the arrangement items in the toybox world. A mechanism to demonstrate one’s good taste. Supported by the Youtube ecosystem of people visiting and reviewing other peoples islands.

I want to talk more about the demonstration of taste in the digital realm today – but first…

Pierre Bourdieu’s: Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. 

Listeners will have to forgive me if I butcher any of the following. The last time I read the book was during my second year aesthetics tutorials around 2005. Anyways, Bourdieu’s main insight was that taste – far from being a natural or individual trait – is actually a product of social class and education.

The famous line goes “Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier”. Meaning taste is not just a product of social class, but it also serves as a means of reproducing and perpetuating it.

Let’s use two stereotypes as an example:

A person from a higher social class might have taste for opera.
A person from a lower social class might have taste for Marvel movies.

Attending an Opera for an upper class person is a demonstration of their taste. Useful signalling to other members of their peer group and to distinguish oneself from people of other social classes.

Taste is also influenced by Education. Which in turn is influenced by social status. Simply put however, Education is as question of access. Someone with a better education Bourdieu presupposes has access to a wider supply of cultural phenomena. Literature, fashion, music etc. The wider the supply, the more opportunity for decisions about what one can have a taste in, or not.

Which is why the trade unions and socialists of the 19th century thought expanding the proletariat’s horizons was so important. Eliane Glaser’s book ‘Elitism: A Progressive Defence’ is about why political and cultural education is still so important today.

Let’s table social status and taste for a moment, and talk about Discernment.

I have mentioned the importance of practising discernment in our daily lives many times over the years. I think its an important skill. 

My strawman Bourdieu argues that taste is completely shaped by external social structures. But through the practice of Discernment, individuals can make critical judgments for themselves.

Discernment allows people to shape their own tastes and preferences. Rather than simply accepting or rejecting culture based on one’s social background. Practising discernment cultivates a more nuanced understanding ones cultural world.

You’ll notice that I keep saying practicing discernment. Like a mediation practice, it’s an ongoing process. 

When applied to taste, practising discernment means to:

• Think critically about a cultural artefact you’ve been exposed to for the first time. Its context, meaning, intent etc. 
• Engage in self-reflection about one’s own existing tastes and preferences. Eg: How does this new phenomena make us feel. 
• Have some awareness that this reaction may be shaped by one’s social class, education, and cultural background. 
• Lastly, being open to new perspectives in the first place. 

The practice of discernment is the activity we engage in in order to refine our tastes. 

Whilst refining one’s taste won’t necessarily liberate us from class imposed sensibilities. It does increase agency in the symbolic and cultural realm. Besides, taste and class aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive anymore anyway.

The Internet has completely exploded the education and access part of Bourdieu’s thesis. All recorded media is now available to everyone, all at once. The idea of genre has exploded, and old ideas of cultural development have fragmented.  

On some days I feel like I could make a convincing argument that modern personalised content algorithms on TikTok or Youtube are technological systems that restructure an individuals’ access to and discovery of culture. Platforms now place us in a landscape of social classes rather than a vertical one. On the other hand, this is the Internet screw the algorithm – enjoy whatever the hell you want.

Now to loop back to my initial point from the opening of the show. 

Given the affordances of different social media platforms … How does one demonstrate taste in the digital realm?

It is, I think, ultimately a question of identity. 

In Animal Crossing taste is demonstrated by the arrangement of virtual objects. On Twitter, we signal taste with retweets and likes. On Pinterest we curate images, and on Tumblr we juxtapose them. Parts of our identity expressed in different ways, though differing UX, across different networks.

The chronological and vertical feed of Twitter allows a very different kind of self expression than a Pinterest board. One is fast moving and in the moment. A RT is a signal of taste with a half life of 30mins. The other, a more persistent space that can grow and evolve with us as our tastes develop.

Back in episode 20-03 I talked about making mixtapes and making sunrises in Minecraft. It’s still one of my favourite episodes. 

I keep thinking about forms of expression in digital worlds.

How might we prototype them through the lens of demonstrating taste first? Not as a secondary function of the system.

Perhaps I’ll have something to say about this in another 125 episodes time.

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The script above is the original script written for the episode. It may differ from what ended up in the edit.

If you’d like to support this blog and its various projects, please consider making a regular contribution here. It genuinely helps me keep things up and running, so thank you!

The post Good Taste Online | 2303 appeared first on thejaymo.net.

I woke up this morning to 2 requests and 1 piece of (unsolicited but welcome) advice to post a transcript of yesterdays show about Aesthetics, Taste, Late Night Talkshows, and Virtual Worlds and Animal Crossing. This volume of messages about a transcript hasn’t happened since I started the show back in 2018. So here you go:

I’ve also just uploaded the arrangement of the Animal Crossing theme for Harp and Glockenspiel I made to Youtube to kick things off 🙂

Permanently Moved :: Animal Crossing Is The Place For Taste

Having put out an hour long show last week, for the first time in 2 years I’m making an exception on 301’s 5min and 1 sec length constraint this week. I want to push the walls out a little as it were.

I, like the rest of the internet, want to talk about Animal Crossing.

But first, an update: I spent last week wiping, archiving and installing a clean OS on my Laptop. I’ve also finally set up my Notion.so workspace and it’s populated with a lot of near term projects I want to finish or complete. And for the first time since 2005 I’ve inboxed zero’d my Gmail. Feels good! 

One of the things I’ve come to appreciate more deeply this week is that my laptop is a place. A psychic place in some sense. A room in my life that I portal into every time I open a laptop lid. A cyber-place, in cyberspace as it were. When I consult on Ops design with startups, I talk about techno social systems a lot. And most recently here on Episode 20-04 Make No distinction. I have come to the conclusion that not keeping your digital workspace tidy is the equivalent of leaving clothes on the floor or not doing your laundry. Eventually it all piles up. Your hard drive is a reflection of you. Last week my cyber-place had gotten so bad that I ended up a bit Bradly Cooper in Limitless. 

So there was a great article on Charged blog last year called ‘Fortnite isn’t a game, it’s a place’ inspired by a tweet by Anoop Ranganath from 2018. Fortnite isn’t just a virtual world with rules and a shared objective. It’s built in voice chat transforms the game into a place to hang out with your friends. Kids playing Fortnite for hours on end hanging out are no different from the other kids sitting around the table playing cards chatting about their day. The kitchen is the place, the game provides a social excuse.

Spaces like Fortnite, Minecraft, WOW and Animal Crossing are all successful because they all share something in common. They allow the community to develop or have built in constructed grammars for interaction. 

Web 2.0 networks like Twitter fail at any kind of civility because they were pioneers and focused on the development of the mechanics of the network, not the grammars, manners and mores that go along with acting in a virtual space. 

Successful virtual worlds also share a kind of … performativity that helps the manners and grammars of the online space. I’m my little dude in AC, or a Mage in WOW. I approach twitter the same way to make it tolerable. I’m @thejaymo, on Twitter not Jay Springett.

Animal Crossing New Horizons as a game is just more Animal Crossing. But Nintendos inclusion of thoughtful social elements IE visiting other peoples islands have been a game changer for the franchise. When you are in the game, visiting a friend or a stranger you act like an animal crossing dude. You help water the plants, ask politely to pick someone’s fruit, and you emote. These behaviours come naturally because after about an hour with the game you are fully up to speed with the grammars of the toybox, and the manners and mores of the virtual world. You act like an Animal Crossing resident in game.

A player’s Island is a complete representation of what can be done and has been done creatively with the same toybox everyone is given. A 5 star island for example represents 100’s of hours of gameplay. Over that time the player expresses themselves creatively within the constraints of the game. So what ones Animal Crossing island IS in totality is a question of aesthetics, or rather, a demonstration of taste.

Back in 2012, Nathan Jurgenson (Now resident sociologist at snapchat and author of the social photo) wrote about a hot new social network called Pinterest for the New Inquiry where he argued:

What we pin, post, and “like” allows us to demonstrate our refined tastes, to declare publicly what we deem picturesque.

And that 

Identity is performed not as through a transparent window but through the logic of mediated and curated imagery.

In the case of Animal Crossing, it one curates virtual objects obtained through timmy and tommy nook’s shop. We will set aside the consumerist parallels with pinterest for now and continue with our aesthetic considerations: Jurgenson concludes:

On Pinterest, we do not collectively fail at creating a “real self” as we do on Facebook. The perfectly curated Pinterest pinboards … make no claim to represent the full complexities of reality or self-identity.

The toy box world of animal crossing allows for something similar. In game, the placement of every curated item, every hill, river or tree is a demonstration of someone’s taste. I use taste here not in the sense of 19th Century aesthetic philosophy, but instead reach further back towards the middle ages. Where calling an object honest was a reflection on the viewer not the artist. An honest object is one that an honorable person would consider to be beautiful. A 5 star island is the result of a player acting in their capacity as Nook Incorporated’s Resident Representative expressing their self-identity through the arrangement of virtual objects spatially.

In my opinion, a sign of any virtual world’s success is its ability to transcend its own boundaries and generate transmedia on other platforms. Twitter has its feedback loop with news cycle, Minecraft popularised online streaming, Eve Online has its corporation and stock market reportage and in case it has escaped your notice Animal Crossing Media is currently Everywhere. 

One of my favourite things to have sprung up around AC are 5* island visit videos. At their best they are a cross between: Grand designs, the opening segments of queer eye where they walk round their victims apartments and critique the clothes on the bedroom floor, though the keyhole, and travel videos. There’s a lot of innovation compressed into the format for sure. Check out this clip from TagBackTV. As you listen – picture a cute little dude dressed in a top hat and tails with a moustache and monocle touring an island as a guest like some kind of island inspector.

You can hear in the clip TagBackTv’s appreciation of the host’s taste as demonstrated within the constraints of the toy box that is Animal Crossing. You can also hear the positive and polite informal manners and mores of the game that have been internalised by players from the Non Player Characters in the demeanor and performance of the voice over. I find it very compelling. There is also an emerging ‘gift exchange’ custom.  A reciprocal Take one, leave one area at island entrances when you get off the plane.

Another piece of transmedia I think you should all know about is the Animal Talking hosted by Rouge One Screenwriter and former editor in chief of PC Gamer Magazine Gary Whitta.

The setup is very simple. Garry as his little dude sits behind a desk with a coffee cup on it, wearing a snappy suit and tie in a room arranged like a US late night talk show. There’s a couch for the guests. Windows in the background that looks out over a night time cityscape, there’s plants, a TV camera, a rug, and his co host @nickervision sits at a set of drums, with instruments and amps as set decoration in the background. I know you can picture it. It’s basically every late night talk show ever. 

However, of course set in Animal Crossing, Audio is recorded presumably by some third party app as Nintendo quite rightly didn’t include that feature natively.. The host and the guests converse on Skype or whatever, and control their characters in game. Here’s a clip from rapper, T-Pain on the show from the other day talking about his island.

The show is already evolving, last night regular twitter user @directedbyrian was a guest on the couch alongside actors Elijah Wood and Danny Trejo. In this clip @directedbyrian leverages the implicit grammars of the game and gets up off the couch and spins around.

Awesome. 

We have moved very far away from aesthetics at this point, but let me explain. I listen to a lot of podcasts, and consume a lot of web media. I estimated the other week on twitter that at this point around 2/3rds of the media I consume online from Newsletters, Blogs, YouTube, Podcasts, to Booksetc are made/produced by people I know IRL. Much of it I pay for

Gry Witta’s, Animal Talking is the convergence of a podcast, real time animation, and late night talk show all wrapped up in the aesthetics and constraints of the animal crossing toy box. All grammars and manners internalised by players in the game have all come along with it. 

Animal Talking is VASTLY superior to any of the quote unquote real late night talk shows happening under extra normal lockdown conditions right now. There’s no grainy self shot webcam footage, no jokes falling flat without the audience to signal that something was supposed to be funny. In my opinion many big names have been struggling to keep the attention of their audiences as the lockdown has gone on.

Youtubers have more appealing grammars like the fast cut editing taken MTV visual literacy then super charged by vlogging culture. Late night talk show hosts/celebrities working from home used to traditional TV are floundering in their attempts to master the affordances of the changed media landscape. Why watch Gen X talking to a webcam when you could watch something made by Elle Mills instead? Just because a clip taken from the main TV does well on youtube doesn’t mean the whole show will translate mediums. The clips from the first lockdown episode of BBC’s HIGNFY was the cringiest thing I’ve ever seen. 

Why did no one tell them day 1 of lockdown that they could use a DSLR as a webcam and record crisper audio straight to their phones with a headset plugged in? It boggles my mind, anyways I digress.

Animal Talking works so spectacularly well by wearing its influences on its sleeve. It is not traditional late night media dislocated to a new platform. The extra normal condition of the show is that it’s taking place in Animal Crossing. I’m sure we’ve all evolved our own grammars and manners whilst participating in the virtual world on House Party or on zoom calls that are unique to our group of friends. Animal Talking also takes place in a virtual world that everyone understands the grammar, and manners of Including the audience that’s watching.

He presents a ven diagram of virtual worlds, premium social media like twitch subscriptions, decentralised and remote technologies like bitcoin and zoom and the quiet democratisation of eCommonce that has been going on the last few years.

In the newsletter Geffen suggests that:

Video games will guide the way
Spatial software is coming soon
And virtual worlds will continue to explode as IRL continues to lose its monopoly on normalcy as the lockdown continues. It is a very good essay that draws many interesting conclusions that I agree with. Check it out, link in the show notes:

I’m excited to see what else comes out of the Animal Crossing Toybox in future. It is an exciting time. And I haven’t even bought up the wild west that is VR chat.

If you want more from me on virtual worlds, their grammar, and the demonstration of taste please do check out episode 20-03 on Mixtapes and Landscapes. Or check out Episode 19-19 from last year where I attempted to explain Fortnite for boomers. Links to all the articles and episodes mentioned are in the show notes.

As always you can follow me online almost everywhere as @thejaymo and subscribe to my blog at www.thejaymo.net/blog

Regular 301 second transmissions will continue again from next week.

The post Animal Crossing Is The Place For Taste | 2019 appeared first on thejaymo.net.