“I just HAVE to know which of my weird relatives thought that dog photo was cute.”

This Medium post from a former Google “Product Philosopher” (a weirdly pretentious title to be sure, but once you get past that he has a lot of smart things to say) on “How Technology Hijacks People’s Minds” is very much worth the 15 minutes it takes to read.

In it, he covers a handful of ways the web and mobile apps are designed to manipulate your choices and play on our human psychological weaknesses to keep you using them, or do what they want you to do vs what you may actually want to do, mostly without you even noticing.

A few examples: using Yelp to find a place to go after a movie will probably lead you to a bar or restaurant to spend more money, when a park bench could do perfectly fine. Notifications just vague enough to pull you back into apps for very little information, which leads to more news feed scrolling. Netflix autoplaying the next episode of a series. Even the basic principle of a menu forcing a choice between a few options they’d prefer you to take. Super interesting stuff we probably don’t think about much (*begin conspiracy voice*) because that’s exactly what they want.

Which apps or website do you think manipulates your choices or steals your time the most?

How aware are you of this as it happens?

What, if anything, do you do to combat these designed manipulations?

The depth of despair: sites that force you to watch ads before trailers — which are already ads, for movies — which have now become content. WE ARE PRODUCT.

Plenty have complained “they give too much away”; and yet people click, watch, and share new movie trailers like crazy. At The Ringer, they’ve had enough.

Stop watching trailers. I don’t mean: If it makes you mad, you should avoid it! I mean: Stop watching trailers. You’re buying a broken product. Trailers are free? No, you’re paying to see a movie, and when you watch a trailer, you are decreasing the value of your ticket. You’re cheapening the experience. Everything costs something. Trailers are ruining good movies, and they are making average movies unwatchable. They are bad and they need to be sent back to the factory.

Framing it as a consumer value proposition feels like a new angle to discuss this from, so I had to offer it up for comment.

If the thing you enjoy and pay for is the movie, why diminish that with trailers?

What would be a better way to find out about and get you excited for a movie that diminishes that joy less?

We can’t blame one crazy man for a system helpless to stop him.

Only a fool would attempt to summarize an entire Atlantic cover story on “How American Politics Went Insane” in a sentence or two. You should read (or at least skim) the full piece; even if you don’t agree, it’s eye-opening.

But one of the key premises does jump out as counterintuitive and worth considering: when the parties were more entrenched, hierarchical, and in a way, closed off, they actually did a better job of serving the larger goal of governing.

Chaos syndrome is a chronic decline in the political system’s capacity for self-organization. It begins with the weakening of the institutions and brokers—political parties, career politicians, and congressional leaders and committees—that have historically held politicians accountable to one another and prevented everyone in the system from pursuing naked self-interest all the time. As these intermediaries’ influence fades, politicians, activists, and voters all become more individualistic and unaccountable. The system atomizes. Chaos becomes the new normal—both in campaigns and in the government itself.

Which is all very counter to what we think of as our modern values of transparency, equality, free speech, and other purely democratic principles. Provocative stuff. Maybe there was more value in some of the old-fashioned stuff than we realized as both the right and left were tearing it down?

Does a functioning democracy (or representative republic) require at least a little bit of hierarchy and closed-door, back room party power brokering to function?

Looking at today’s political chaos, how might we get back to that better working model, or alternately, push through this chaos into something new and improved?

Definitely unfair: judging images based on beauty per square inch.

Over the weekend, I played through a video game called Inside, which I am comfortable calling a masterpiece. Its moody visuals drew me in. Its haunting environments kept me constantly on edge. Its unsettling themes left a mark I won’t soon forget. Games of this high caliber give me hope for the artistic potential of the medium. It’s that good.

It’s especially easy to recommend because I played through the game in two sittings of a few hours each, making it convenient to absorb in its entirety.

This in contrast to another recent game I also loved, The Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt, a giant role-playing adventure that I spent roughly 80 hours to complete. As I joked on Twitter: “In the time it’s taking me to finish #Witcher3, I could have listened to the entire audiobooks of both Infinite Jest and A Game of Thrones. This is not an exaggeration. I checked.”

Which is not to say that a game becomes immediately less worthy by being longer, deeper, or more epic in scope. Merely that very very long works in any medium, whether a three-and-a-half hour film or a thousand page novel, come with certain baggage. And in the case of Inside, or the original The Office, or the short story collections of George Saunders, there is a sense that every minute, moment, or page were agonized over to distill a work down to their very essence.

The obvious counterargument is that different works have different aims, and a George RR Martin book or Godfather film would not be what they are or achieve what they set out to by slimming down. But if you were to invent a metric that measures Quality Per Minute of artistic works, those shorter works would rate extremely highly, where the longer ones by their very nature would rate lower.

With Inside, that rating would be off the charts. Every minute brings some new surprise, some newly disturbing tableau, some beautiful choice of artistic direction or thought-provoking inversion of expectations. By this measure, this may be one of the best games I’ve ever played.

The question is:

Should quality-per-minute factor in to judging any work of art?

Is that metric an unfair way to consider more ambitious works that aim for a bigger, deeper explorations of ideas?

Or, are those works being unfair to their audiences when a shorter work could achieve a similar resonance without requiring so much time?

**Do not be a coward and dismiss the question. Care enough about the limited time you have on this earth to value every minute and demand more of art.

At least constant headphone wearers can still look down on constant walk-and-texters.

I wear headphones constantly. At work, to tune out office noise. Almost 100% of public transportation or commute time. While running errands. I’m an avid podcast listener so it has to be done, only so many hours in the day.

Amanda Petrusich in The New Yorker asks if our personal audio bubbles are making us more antisocial:

Certainly, headphones are an obvious method of exercising autonomy, control—choosing what you’ll hear and when, rather than gamely enduring whatever the environment might inflict upon you. In that way, they are defensive; users insist upon privacy (you can’t hear what I hear, and I can’t hear you) in otherwise lawless and unpredictable spaces. Should we think of headphones, then, as just another emblem of catastrophic social decline, a tool that edges us even deeper into narcissism, solipsism, vast unsociability?

And then goes on to ask if the way we’re listening to music — mostly through headphones — is affecting the kind of music that’s made, or the way it’s made, but that question is way harder to address with evidence, and way less interesting on a personal level. So:

Are headphones making you more antisocial? How much or how often?

Is that a net positive or negative for society? What are the benefits or drawbacks?