Synthwave thumbnails always help content get to the top of MY algorithm.
Kyle Chayka in The New Yorker puts a name to something I’ve felt for many years while attempting to navigate the pervasive recommendation machines of the internet: algorithmic anxiety. As he relays in the article:
“I’ve been on the internet for the last 10 years and I don’t know if I like what I like or what an algorithm wants me to like,” Peter wrote. She’d come to see social networks’ algorithmic recommendations as a kind of psychic intrusion, surreptitiously reshaping what she’s shown online and, thus, her understanding of her own inclinations and tastes. “I want things I truly like not what is being lowkey marketed to me,” her letter continued.
…
Peter’s dilemma brought to my mind a term that has been used, in recent years, to describe the modern Internet user’s feeling that she must constantly contend with machine estimations of her desires: algorithmic anxiety. Besieged by automated recommendations, we are left to guess exactly how they are influencing us, feeling in some moments misperceived or misled and in other moments clocked with eerie precision. At times, the computer sometimes seems more in control of our choices than we are.
Personally, this means being afraid to ever ‘dislike’ anything on Netflix or YouTube, with the fear that anything remotely related will now be banished forever from reaching me, or hesitating to like even the most enjoyable clips only to be inundated with identical clones. I’ve begun listening to mid-tempo synth music as background while working, and though I still prefer energetic indie rock, Spotify has now almost completely shifted its picture of my tastes toward retro paradise vibes. It’s now become a side job simply to manage a computer-generated picture of who I am and what interests me.
What are your strategies for optimizing how the machine will predict your tastes?
Are you doing a good job managing them? Are they delivering as a result?
What are the best examples of the algorithm nailing it for you, or totally missing the mark?
What are your alternative discovery methods to get out from the yoke of a digitally dictated taste profile?
The endurance of mixtapes as aesthetic object will never grow old to me.
Fast Company cites an interesting new way to think about why you like the music you like:
A new study out of Columbia Business School and Bar-Ilan University in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology shows that you prefer the music of artists with personalities similar to your own. In other words, you like yourself.
Researchers studied the public personas of the most famous 50 musicians in the Western world, including Paul McCartney, Bob Dylan, Elton John, Whitney Houston, The Rolling Stones, Beyoncé, Coldplay, Dave Matthews Band, Maroon 5, Taylor Swift, and Ozzy Osbourne. In two studies of over 80,000 participants, they found that the personalities of the musicians correlate with those of their fans. A third study of 4,995 participants showed that fans’ personalities predict their musical preferences as much as other strong predictors like gender, age, and features of the music.
Which not only explains some of the most-played albums in my music library (Weezer, Decemberists, Run the Jewels), but raises the question if this same finding would apply to books, movies, TV shows, etc.
Which of your favorite artists do you have, or think you have, the most in common with, personality-wise?
How does that factor into your love of their work?
How much of that connection is true to them as real people, or a result of the image they project as artists? How much is the real you, or the image of yourself you’d like to project?
The letter itself is only three paragraphs long, and speaks mostly in broad strokes, arguing that we as a society must protect the right to discuss any idea, even those we disagree with, and particularly warns against punishing those who raise ideas that are unfashionable or supposedly dangerous with the loss of jobs or reputation.
It goes on to say that even so-called “caustic counter-speech” must be aired and defeated in the public sphere, and a culture of limiting our freedom to debate them openly can be just as dangerous as the caustic ideas themselves.
The argument itself is so unspecific, it’s sort of hard to argue against on principle. “Free speech, we like it!”
But the response has shown that’s exactly the problem: in making such a broad argument, it comes off as naive and totally unhelpful. In a time where people without a voice are finding it in new ways, it feels out of touch. As a veiled swipe against “cancel culture” it seems to miss the point that free speech is exactly what’s being deployed, finally, to hold powerful people and gatekeepers to account for their words and actions.
That in reality, “cancel culture” should more honestly be thought of as “consequence culture”. Sometimes when you use your freedom to say things, everyone else uses their freedom to say you’re out of line.
This all comes just weeks after another Big Internet Discussion that sprung up following an editorial, written by Senator Tom Cotton and published in the New York Times Opinion section, arguing for the deployment of the military against protestors.
In the blowback that followed, editor James Bennet resigned from the Times. He was not fired, fined or punished. But he did resign, probably under pressure. Which is important to the ensuing discussion around whether consequences like this are ultimately damaging to free speech in a broader sense.
In an interview with WNYC’s On The Media, Vox writer David Roberts discussed his response, in which he outlines how the farthest right thinkers are no longer operating within the bounds of good faith debate, particularly when it comes to free speech. (See video for excerpt.)
This is a helpful distinction: when we’re talking about what speech is “acceptable,” we aren’t usually talking about the concept of free speech in an absolute sense. We’re more often talking about which ideas get the benefit of certain platforms to amplify them.
Think of two extremes: in one world, everyone gets their own prime-time TV show. That’s crazy and impossible, because there aren’t time slots and studio spaces to make that real. Someone, somewhere, has to choose.
On another extreme: a guy in a park screaming that all left-handed people are witches who should be shot into the sun. Now, this guy is just a guy, given no resources or platform by anyone. But even so, if he did this day after day, his community would probably choose to keep him out of that park, eventually. His crazy, violent speech is baseless, disruptive, and harmful to the public good.
Neither extreme is realistic, but illustrates that either extreme is not the real point: not everyone gets unfettered access to a large audience, and not every idea is up for good faith discussion in public.
So what we’re really talking about are the basic rules we agree upon for public debate. And under those rules, for example, we might decide that lying conspiracy peddlers don’t get to have Twitter accounts because they spread misinformation, which hurts everyone. Or that White Supremacists aren’t appropriate to interview on live TV because their fundamental position runs counter to our shared ideals of equality, and so at their very core, they don’t deserve unfiltered distribution.
And especially when we’re talking about publication or broadcast, we can’t forget all the ideas that never get their turn on the stage to begin with, because the powers behind those platforms traditionally favor certain views or voices.
So, maybe it’s time to consider what the world could be like if there were a core set of principles that outline what’s suitable for public debate — either basic requirements, or possibly a few select restrictions.
Imagine the five rules for good faith public debate; what might they be?
How and where should they be applied, and what spaces, if any, deserve to be free of any and all restrictions?
How would applying rules like this make public discourse better, or potentially worse?
Photo from a previous, less harrowing conversation, obviously.
The point of this project has always been to take a look at the news and pop culture of the moment and try to dig a little bit deeper.
To spark conversations about ideas, beyond superficial reactions of: “this movie is good and I like it” or “this article is interesting and I agree with it”, by taking the focus off of opinions and instead asking questions that lead to discussions among friends. Ideally, discussions that reveal something about who we are, and what matters to us. The kind of conversations that maybe even bring us closer to some deeper truths, and to each other.
It seems like that’s the kind of discussion we’re all having right now, about one very big thing: America’s structural racism, and the police violence that’s both a symptom — and a perpetuator — of that racism.
A few quoted lines weren’t enough to convey the point on this one. Please watch/listen.
Beyond acknowledging their validity, I’m no expert on this stuff. I’m still very much in listening and learning mode right now. So in this moment, I wanted to share someone else’s discussion. It’s between two people I admire even though I don’t always agree with them, who’ve both proven to have incredible critical minds, and who I know think deeply about the world’s problems and what we can do to fix them.
On the June 3rd, 2020 episode of the Ezra Klein Show, he and author Ta-Nahisi Coates discussed the role of the police in society, and what some alternatives might look like. The whole conversation was strangely hopeful, and though I wouldn’t normally lift such a large chunk verbatim, this exchange gave me a lot to think about — both on how to understand what’s happening today and how to imagine what the future could look like.
Right now feels like a critical moment to really consider ideas like these, and honestly discuss:
What situations have you seen or been in involving police, and how could they have gone differently with a different kind of help?
Instead of dialing 911 and having armed police respond to every problem in our communities, what might an alternative system look like?
What does the world need more of right now, that we could deploy in a nationwide effort, instead of more police forces?
In some ways, these groups are merely practicing an extreme form of the insularity many Americans have already embraced. Deep-blue enclaves such as Berkeley and brownstone Brooklyn are similarly homogenous, sought out by people with a certain set of values and hopes for their children. But the rise of more radical self-sorting poses a challenge to America’s experiment in multicultural democracy, enshrined in the motto e pluribus unum—“Out of many, one.” The dream of a diverse society is replaced with one in which different groups coexist, but mostly try to stay out of one another’s way. The ongoing experiment in St. Marys suggests what might be gained by such a realignment—and what might be lost.
Hard when the shoe’s on the other foot, this one… but maybe neither is wrong and we just have to re-think what we really want out of life, community, social mobility, democracy, etc.
Is it inherently bad to want to live somewhere among people who share our values?
Is there a difference based on what those values are?
What do we lose if we all withdraw into enclaves like this? Or is it inevitable and we have to make peace with it?
