In The Gift of Good Land, Wendell Berry writes of the value of small solutions. An example he gives is riding a bike to lower your personal carbon footprint. There are massive global technology companies spending billions of dollars (and expending who knows how much carbon fuel) to work toward making vehicles more efficient and emit fewer pollutants. One of the towering figures of our age is Elon Musk, who (even with his re-sized public image after his brief yet intense involvement with the current administration) has been heralded as one of the great generals in the army against emissions with his luxury electric cars. (Be reminded that his other pet project does consume a little rocket fuel, about 700,000 gallons a second, and his newest pet project [Grok] is wreaking havoc on the power grid of Memphis).

And yet, as mentioned in an article from the NYT, e-bikes are now reducing the daily need for gasoline by a million barrels a day - more than all the electric vehicles in the world. Getting out of your car and riding a bike has more potency than marginal gains of vehicle efficiency ever can.

My other favorite example of this is Stoop Coffee. A couple living in San Fransisco wanted to get to know some neighbors and grow a sense of community where they live (don’t we all). The obvious course of action here might be to put invitations to a party under all the neighbors doors or form a community organization and try to get people to join. Maybe gossip on Nextdoor a bit more.

But their brilliant solution was small. They decided that every Saturday morning, they would take lawn chairs outside and sit on the sidewalk while they drank their morning coffee. That’s it. For a month nothing happened other than doing what they would have anyway, just outside. Then one neighbor joined them. After that, it was a cascade of connections and community formation unlike anything most young Americans have ever experienced. They now have a neighborhood WhatsApp group, shared spreadsheets with resources and needs, and throw larger events regularly. A small act that took a little bit of courage transformed a collection of urban housing units into a neighborhood.

My small solution this past year was leaving books where I tend to sit. At any one time I now have a couch book, a chair book, and a bedtime book. I read eleven more books this year than last year without changing any else.

What else is in need of a small solution?

I’ve been listening to podcasts for about 20 years now, about as long as I’ve been doing anything regularly and roughly the full lifespan of the podcast. Long enough at least that I have noticed the major shift they have undergone in the last few years. When I first started listening they were primarily actual radio programs distributed via RSS. This meant they could expand listenership to those who didn’t happen to be around their radios during broadcast time (perfect, since radio listening was beginning to decline, though it is still much stronger than I would have guessed). I remember describing it to my mother: “It’s a radio show you can download and listen to anytime.” The accessibility of RSS syndication meant everyone could broadcast, and that’s what they did! This continued a long time. Podcasting was a free-form audio genre that became it’s own pillar of the media institutions (RIP Gimlet Media) but was accessible to anyone because of the openness of distribution (of which I learned all kinds of things from Manton Reese’s write-up about syndication). There were the pros, radio people who found creative freedom away from the clock and radio format needs, but using largely the same set of professional tools. The archetypal This American Life, an actual radio show rebroadcast as a podcast, and its many imitators are the coin of this realm. Then there were the indie folks. People with a passion project that found an audience through the delivery of the podcast feed. Two great examples of this are the History of Rome podcast and the History of English podcast. Both wildly nerdy, encyclopedic passion projects run by amateur enthusiasts. All of these are in the lineage of radio. Scripted or structured interviews, they are information, entertainment, edutainment, criticism, and commentary. They could be many things, but they had the soul of radio without the limits. The technological constraint of radio is the limitations of the AM and FM radio bands. You can only cram so many channels into the Very High Frequency band, and you are limited to a certain power transmission. These are regulatory controls more than technological, but they had major cultural impacts. Radio is regional. You can reliably find a public radio station in the 80s or low 90s, and they will syndicate a lot of the same shows, but the announcers and local commentary will indeed be local to you. This limitation means a finite variety of channels in any vicinity, and thus at least some amount of cultural cohesion in a location. Nearly everyone I knew growing up listening to our local public radio and thus exposure to a similar band of information. We were on the same wavelength (sorry, that’s all my radio puns). RSS (magical as it is!) means everyone is chasing personal interests, which are likely not provided for locally and take the place of local news. (Radio also had a profound influence on music genres and commercialism. Interesting interview here.) About 2023 there seems to have been a seismic shift in the nature of podcasting. I first started to notice that younger people (late teens and 20s, my students) started talking about podcasts again. There was a while there where the fact that I listened to podcasts was a generational marker, but all of sudden we were all listening to podcasts again! Then I realized my students meant something wildly different by “podcast” than I did. All at once I started seeing people posting YouTube videos with a host and guests sitting on couches talking into microphones about whatever banality of the day was getting clicks, and this was a “podcast.” I noticed that all the podcasts I listen to (almost exclusively in the car) started referring to those “watching” since they had started recording in video. About the same time various smutty “podcasts” became wildly popular and a “podcast” hosted by someone with a tangential relationship to the world biggest pop star became a major culture force. (I don’t intend to burden my mind with understanding how all of that worked, but I understand they are getting married). Dear reader, what I just described is daytime television. The podcast I grew up with is something you download and listen to on your iPod while you mow the lawn or ride the train or exercise. They are primarily monologues. Maybe you learn something you discuss over dinner (the famous words, “There’s that episode of This American Life…”). The new podcast you watch on YouTube while attractive people with full makeup interact in charming ways. They are almost exclusively unscripted and conversational and draw on celebrity power to attract viewership. This shift from exclusively audio to primarily video is a major portion of why Derek Thompson’s argument that everything is television is so convincing. Privately watching distant people, the state of Television, is the default state of being alone. And the podcast has become exactly this: being alone while observing other people together. I also wonder if it has become the dominant form of conversation. Listening to this podcast (which I downloaded and listened to in the car like a proper millennial) this week I was somewhat amused by the way the host and guest sound almost exactly alike. They are both intensely “conversational” in their manner. They talk about interesting things as well, but I suspect the main benefit we get from these is that we feel like we are participating in an engaging conversation, a privilege it seems harder to find IRL.

Note: I wrote this post for my old blog in the fall of 2022. This was before the current hysteria surrounding AI automation, but it would seem the observations here are only more acute than they were then.

After several years of frustrating wrangling with various hosting, domains, website crashes, and my own stubborn unwillingness to learn how it all works (a wise person once told me “don’t be good at what you don’t want to do”) it seemed like micro.blog is the best place to make some space for myself online. This post felt like the right place to start.

In Kurt Vonnegut’s first novel, Player Piano (1952), we are introduced to a society where manual labor has been fully automated. Managerial work of various kinds remains for the educated and intelligent. A scarce amount of maintenance on the machines that accomplish the actual work supporting society give a few others something to do. For the rest, unless they are crazy enough to expend energy on creating art or poetry, there is no pressing need to work. Most of society can live in their suburban homes with regular deliveries of new goods.

This creates a social problem. The formerly employed workers have nothing to do. The result is not a leisurely utopia, but a culture rife with social pathology. It becomes apparent that large swaths of society need something to keep them busy. How do the mangers keep the formerly employed busy? Reconstruction and Reclamation.

The “Reeks and Wrecks,” as they are known, are armies of former laborers (that is, those who used to be an indispensable part of providing for the needs of every person) who now set about doing menial tasks. A stop sign has been knocked down by a careless driver? A team of twenty or thirty Reeks and Wrecks will be dispatched to reconstruct it. Some aluminum cans have been littered along the highway? A dozen or so otherwise idle fellows will reclaim them and return them to the factories where the machines they used to operate will turn them into spare parts or raw material for new products.

I am teaching “Intro to Music Technology” this semester. Most of our class will be very practical, learning basic fluency with a number of different applications, but this being Higher Education I though it appropriate to spend a little time thinking about the effects of technology on creative work.

Reflecting on my current relationship with tech has got me downright nostalgic. Like most 30-somethings, my first computer experiences were on a desktop PC in the “computer room,” tinkering with MS Paint or playing solitaire and pinball. My brothers and I would all pile on the swivel chair to shepherd our characters across the Oregon Trail or down the Amazon (which we installed from a disc that came in a cereal box).

We were duly amazed when the desk-occupying CRT monitor and floor-filling computer tower were replaced with this:

All at once we had access - not to the internet, but to creative software. This was in the apogee of the Steve Jobs era, when Apple was for the creatives. What is in the middle of the dock that comes preloaded on this iMac? iPhoto, iMovie, GarageBand. We suddenly had creative tools that were almost perfectly engineered to be accessible to amateurs while still giving enough capability to create whatever we could think up. It was truly (for us at least) a bicycle for the mind.

The internet came somewhat later when we finally got a broadband internet connection. Around 2003-ish (if memory serves) this was the height of the blogspot era when everyone you knew who was online was probably writing a blog. They were definitely reading them.

We followed the logic of our available technology at the time and used the internet to broadcast our creative work. We all had blogs. We figured out how to post videos online before youtube. Starting with the blogspot templates, some of us learned some crude coding so we could customize our websites in ill-advised ways.

In fact, the blog editor panel invited this kind of tinkering. The html was right there, you just had to start typing. The designers of this technology left an open invitation: be creative, make it your own. Create your piece of the internet as you see fit.

As I’ve experienced it since these heady days, the internet has been on a steady march toward automation. Even the first version of facebook I participated in (c. 2008) was insanely (and inanely) chaotic compared to today’s unified experience. Before the Timeline, we had a Profile that could be customized in many ways (though even this paled in the customization possible [and expected!] of a MySpace page).

I’ve begun to think of these late stages of Web 2.0 we’re in as an automated factory. Everything is automated within the high walls of our online mega corporations, where slaking the data-thirst of The Algorithm is the business model. They don’t need your thoughts on this or that, they only need the next set of pixels that will arrest attention for a few seconds longer and teach the machine what it is you really want to see so it can be delivered in an ever-narrowing form of pure attentional lust. Media is custom-made for the medium, created for consumption.

Distribution is automated. Create the right content and the machines will show it to an audience. It will in fact “go viral,” a label that used to be reserved for a once-a-year or so phenomenon. Virality is a daily occurrence on the newest platforms. It’s the business model.

Manufacturing is (mostly) automated. “Content creation” would seem to be the area where creativity still shines through. With billions of individuals inhabiting these environments, you would think you could come across something unique or even shocking in its creativity. This is the great deceit though. You may create the content, but to be successful (to be seen by an audience, the essential value of social media) you must capture the attention of the means of distribution. Without that you will not be seen, and to not be seen is the great failure of social media. (As Wilde might have it, even worse than being seen in increasingly embarrassing ways. “Cringe” is an entire sub-genre where people have made themselves famous. If capturing attention is the value it’s better to be famously embarrassed than obscure with your dignity.) In Alan Jacobs’s phrase, we are constantly directed “towards the frivolous or the malicious.” 

Distribution rewards content conformity. The designers want it this way, that’s why they have provided the creative tools within the app. You don’t have to go to any other photo-editor where you might be tempted toward originality (or worse, leave the compound and spend time in an offline app where they cannot make money on you). Have you tried this new filter that makes you look like a deer? You should try it. It’s fun. Everyone is doing it and it makes you unique.

As Vonnegut shows in Player Piano, with automation comes idleness and with idleness disaffection. What I haven’t understood until recently is that I was a pretty fulfilled factory worker before the current state of affairs. I was making stuff. Like the most skilled machinist who used to delight in lathing perfect parts with tight tolerances until on his last day of work his actions were programmed into the machine and it now continues to make his perfect parts day and night. It need only stop for occasional maintenance, while he has permanently stopped in front of his television.

What to do? Well, I have decided to enlist in the Reeks and Wrecks of Web 2.0. Reconstructing a piece of the internet that was a channel for individual creation rather than mass-attuned virality. Reclaiming a bit of space where I can create, because if you aren’t creating something you are likely going to be replaced and spend your days watching algorithmic feeds.

The point is decidedly not to build an audience, but rather a project of repairing my own broken attention and wresting it away from the consumption of frivolity. Out here in the internet wilds maybe we can find some small shards of value. Reconstructing a blog and reclaiming what tiny turf I can make by hand in whatever way I want seems like a way forward.

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