“The only way to change the past is with the quality of attention you give to the present.”

• David Whyte A year ago, in March 2025, after a fairly steady increase in time staring at my phone each day, I decided it was time to do something about it. The exact tipping point has escaped my memory. Most likely it was a combination of things that finally impelled me to make changes I knew I wanted. What I wanted to do was obvious. I wanted to spend several hours per day fewer looking at my phone. Those hours I wanted to turn into paying better attention to my children, being more focused at work, reading books and periodicals, and generally being more present. Maybe thinking a stray thought now and then. The why (I was spending too much time on my phone) and the how (to stop) were not as clear. I consider myself a reasonably mature and disciplined person. How was I accidentally spending several hours per day more than I said I wanted to starting at this stupid thing? An honest answer to this question had to be made. There is some amount of difference between the person we like to think we are as and the person we actually are. The size of this gap varies person to person. You probably know someone with a very large gap and others with a smaller or gap. I did not think of myself as someone who looks at his phone for 4-5 hours a day. But I was, because I did. You are your habits. I eventually figured out why. I had to come to terms with the fact that I was looking at the phone to cope. At that time, having not-quite-two-year-old twins was challenging (in a very normal sense, many people have much more challenging lives, but it was difficult nonetheless). It was simply much easier to look at the phone than to deal with two needy and often crying children. Or at least to disappear for a few minutes of pleasure after dealing with them. I would say coming to terms with this and facing it as a personal deficiency was the most important factor in this project. More accurate self-knowledge being attained, I had a fifteen year habit to kick (first smart phone: 2013, iPod touch: 2010). If will power alone was going to work, it would have already done so. I was fairly sure a change in habits would require a change in equipment. I was ready to look for a dumb phone. If you’ve explored this you know that it gets overwhelming quickly. Lite phone, wise phone, the brick. All kinds of startups (and more all the time), most of them delivering what appear to be very unimpressive tech at purity-test pricing. I didn’t see myself spending ~$500 on a phone the purpose of which was to do fewer things and that only does those things when it’s in a good mood. I wanted the sturdy utilitarianism of my first flip phones with a few of the most useful tools of the smartphone. I needed a list. (That is the second Frog & Toad allusion for those keeping track.) I came up with what seemed like a modest list:
• Navigation
  • I briefly considered a dedicated GPS, but Garmins are also expensive and appear to have made absolutely no UI progress since I last used one circa 2010. Oh, and most of their new features also require connection to a smartphone. I also navigate on foot and by bike occasionally. It needed to stay on the phone.
• Podcast app/music streaming
  • I listen to podcasts and music daily. I usually listen to CDs in my car, but there are lots of times I want to have access to streaming media away from my car or computer.
• Bluetooth
  • To connect to devices which play the podcasts and music.
• Calls, texts, and group texts (you know, a phone)
  • If you have always been on iPhone you need to emotionally prepare for the violent reaction your iPhone friends will have when your texts now come through in green bubbles instead of proper blue bubbles. This is real. I was willing to compromise on just about everything else, but these few things painted me into a surprisingly small corner. The number of phones offering actual navigation and streaming media without a large screen and everything else in the world is quite small. This was all a bit of a non-starter, until I found Jose’s Dumbphone Finder. This tool allows you to select your nonnegotiable features then shows what phones are available. This brought me to what was quite literally the only option that met my criteria, the Tiq M5 Mini. I ordered one for $190 on eBay, which arrived broken. When its replacement came I switched my SIM card over and used this phone exclusively for the next 6 months (except for a ten day period when I was leading a study abroad trip in Europe and needed more firepower; for that I just swapped my SIM back to my old iPhone).  The M5 Mini is indeed a full-featured smartphone running Android, which I actually prefer to the well-dressed bully that is iOS. And along with the physical buttons it has a touch screen and supports voice-to-text, which is really the only way to do anything on this phone. The thing is though, that screen. It’s tiny. It has terrible colors and a slow refresh rate. It really doesn’t draw you in. It was exactly what I was looking for.  It is a very mediocre piece of hardware. Slow, laggy, takes almost 5 minutes to boot up, don’t even think about multi-tasking. Unappealing and just barely able to get the job done, but priced accordingly. This is what you want to reset your brain. The friction wears down those pleasure receptors quickly. The first few weeks I would impulsively reach for this silly little phone only to think “what am I going to do with that?” This was exactly what I was hoping to fix - the habitual reach. It was also a great conversation starter. Millennials were nostalgic; other dads at the park would rush over to ask me about it. Gen Zs were curious and slightly horrified. The physical buttons were a wonder to them. I showed some of my students how I could text with T9 and broke their brains. I felt like Jed Clampett. I used this little guy for about six months. Then I dropped it in the toilet. It dried out and seems to still work, but while it was in the rice I switched back to the iPhone. And guess what? I’m ok. In fact, now that my itchy trigger finger was reformed, the iPhone helped me be on the phone even less since it was good at doing the few things I wanted it to do. No black and white screen, no parental controls, just fixing my own broken default attention. Here is my five step guide to spending less time on your phone: 

1. Face yourself. 1. Say out loud or write down in your most private journal that you are a person who spends X amount of time on your phone every day. If you do not like the number you hear/read, proceed to step 2.
2. Disrupt your habits with a low-reward, high friction digital environment
   1. Lots of ways to do this. A change in tech worked well for me. When the fingerprint sensor on my wife’s phone broke she found she was opening it less because it’s just slightly harder to press those buttons.
3. Maintain this environment as long as necessary.
   1. If you still reach for the phone without a distinct purpose you aren’t ready yet.
   2. You might start to examine those moments and wonder why you are reaching at this particular time. This is a sign of growth.
4. Test the waters of the normal environment.
   1. Mutatis mutandis, you can have the convenience of a smart phone without getting sucked into the void every day.
   2. Or don’t. When my iPhone dies I expect I’ll go back to the M5. I actually enjoyed it. If nothing else, it’s something to feel smug about.
5. Transform the quality of the past with your attention to the present.
   1. Fill your environment with beautiful things and people to love.
   2. Deeply paying attention is one of the greatest forms of pleasure.

I have read the essay going around about habitats of attention and multimodal information consumption. It’s compelling, and I laud the sanguine approach. I am also wary of challenging anything a librarian says - I have learned they are so often right - but I think it has two major problems: one around incentive structures and one around media ecology.

Iacono hints at why our digital environments are the way they are, but doesn’t quite come out with it: greed. The companies that have designed our most addictive apps have reaped the rewards. Massive IPOs, rising stock prices, a seemingly infinite market cap. When you can harvest the time of humanity at scale you can get wildly wealthy. They do this while knowingly creating products that are harmful and they do not care.

Who then is going to make these proposed interfaces designed for deep thought? The fact is, they already exist, but not at scale. There are any number of small companies providing low-distraction phones, quiet RSS readers, or research and information tools. There are in fact still companies that sell physical books. These are utterly different kinds of companies though, because they are selling a product.

Slow, deep thought is not a scalable business model because there isn’t a wide demand for it. The market (by which I mean, people’s) demand is for diversion, as L. M. Sacasas gets at in this essay from a few years ago. The moment the steam-powered printing press lowered the cost of producing books, there was demand for penny dreadfuls. The moment we could deliver endless streams of whatever that stuff on tiktok is, there was an attentional market (billions of souls strong) demanding it for hours a day. As much as I would like to think that this is a design problem, my humanist instincts are telling me that we have a human-problem at the heart of all this.

My other issue is around issues raised by McLuhan and Postman: the medium [has an inexorable push toward certain modalities of attention to maximize profit, which given the above description of the financial incentives of screen-based attention means engagement maximization] is the message. Now that some of our biggest and most famous companies don’t sell products, how else are they supposed to operate? Surely we can’t expect them to fix themselves. It also seems highly unlikely that any government could or would seek to impose some kind of design regime. Nor would, I think, we want them to.

The most compelling idea from the essay is the construction of “attention habitats.” This is absolutely true, attention is a designed and cultivated good. It won’t just happen. Distraction is always available. But just like no one is going to clean your room or do your dishes, it seems unlikely to me that there will be a large scale effort to correct our attentional issues. Building and defending your own habitat is required. We need individuals who desire that for it to happen.

A recent post by @dwalbert about the proliferation of the phone-based vertical video format (and a vertical ways of noticing) got me thinking about musical mediation. One of my perennial preoccupations, as it turns out. This post suffers from a case of Too Long, but I’ve trimmed it as much as I can.

We have two primary ways of experiencing music: playing it and hearing it live. These are both embodied and direct. Player and listener are quite literally interface. We also have two mediated ways of encountering music: notation and recording. As formats of mediation, these are quite different and have very different results from one another.

The last time I taught my music technology class I asked this essay question on a quiz:

“Which technology do you think has had a greater impact on the development of music: notation or recording?”

I expected a variety of answers but was surprised at the veracity with which most students (10 out of 12) argued for notation. These were all young musicians undergoing classical music training so perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised, but it did get me thinking about the different ways we relate to music through technology.

As a tool of preservation and communication notation is of enormous value. Without it, nearly every piece of music before about 1900 would be lost. At least we assume this. Without notation would the western tradition have continued as an oral tradition rather than a written one? Would violin teachers pass Bach partitas down to their students like sitar masters pass down ragas? Would they have subtly changed over the years the way folk songs do? Would there be Bach Partitas at all or would music have sounded utterly different in his day? I don’t know, but I am fascinated by these kinds of question. I would 100% read a book of speculative musicology (which should exist) imagining a European music tradition without notation.

For everyone who ever lived before c. 1900 (and many others since) the only music they ever experienced was played within ear shot. Thinking this way it’s easy to realize why Pa’s fiddle is so present in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s childhood memories and why music and religious ritual are so closely intertwined throughout the world.

Notation is not just a means of idea capture, it is also provides a model for compositional thought. Mozart had the inner ear to write complete pieces in his head before writing them down, perfect and complete, while Beethoven worked out his musical ideas on paper as he revised draft upon draft. The key here though is they were both translating sound to notation in their heads, Mozart at his desk and Beethoven walking around the countryside. (His typical day involved two hours of vigorous walking.) The notation was to communicate intent to the musicians, but also provided the frame of creative possibility. I’m fond of this definition of notation from Ferrucio Busoni, “Notation…is primarily an ingenious expedient for catching an inspiration, with the purpose of exploiting it later” (from Sketch of a New Esthetic of Music).

Another of my speculative questions is whether Mozart would have been such a prodigy in a different era. The classical style, with its homophonic texture and clear rhythms, is the style most well-suited to Western staff notation. It makes complete sense on the page, which is why it’s the music we give beginning music theory students to practice analysis. Mozart possessed a potent combination of aural imagination, creativity, and facility, but he was also born at the perfect time. Compared to later styles, which visibly strain against the limitations of staff notation (and eventually sought to break free of it altogether), Mozart’s music on the page is like a boat in the water drafting beautifully.

Stravinsky was the first composer I know of that bragged about composing at the piano. The complex sonorities of his music had to be worked out audibly since they didn’t follow an established vernacular. Historically though, composers hear the music then they write it down. Bach considered anyone who composed at the keyboard an amateur. Professionals do their thinking by ear.

This is why it seems obvious to me recording is a more impactful technology and has changed us as musicians much than notation. Notation is potential sound, recording is actual sound.

Think for a moment about the diversity of music you have heard in your life. Now think about the music you have heard live. One of my favorite composers is Arvo Pärt. I cannot recall ever hearing one of his works in a live concert (though I have played one!). Even the concert I attended at the actual Arvo Pärt Center in Estonia didn’t have a piece by Arvo Pärt. And yes, this felt just like going to church and not praying. There are dozens of composers whose works I know and admire for whom that is true. Recording has allowed us to become musical globalists in a way that notation could never have done. Compared to notation, recording is a populist technology giving access to an entire world of music. No skills required, just the equipment to play it.

Richard Taruskin points out in the introduction to his six-volume Oxford History of Western Music, that what we generally call “music history” is really the history of notated music plus a few bits of archeological evidence. At least until the 20th century. Now all other musical activities can be recorded, preserved, and studied. The earliest ethnomusicologists developed arcane notation systems to capture the idiosyncrasies of folk musicians’ individual performance. A generation later they could just record them.

This is the place where the “Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer” quote usually falls, but I’m not going to. Recording has enriched my life more than almost anything else. (And I bet Wendell has a hi-fi somewhere on that farm). If I had to choose it or notation I wouldn’t have to think two seconds. I am extremely good at reading music, but I can learn the music I want to play by ear if I have to. I cannot hear the music of the world except through recordings.

I will point out some ill effects though, perhaps analog to David’s original point about ways of seeing. Recording has had profound effects on our expectations of music. Most notably in our standard of perfectionism. I see this in my students frequently. If your main exposure to music is through studio-edited recordings that simulate perfect performance then you can have a falsely elevated standard for how good a live performance needs to be. Just like we think there are actually people who look like the instagram-famous with their clever poses, cosmetic surgery, and camera filters, we think musicians actually sound like this in real-life. They don’t. Striving for this standard leads the most dedicated students to practice to the point of injury and psychological torment over their mistakes.

Nearly every music student has had the experience of performing a recital that goes well and is well-received. Everyone (genuinely) says how nice it was, and you feel great. Then you get your recording back and eagerly listen only to hear mistake after mistake. Mistakes that nobody noticed in the live performance and didn’t detract from its effectiveness in the least sound like a pimple on your nose in a photo. Unnoticed in real life, absolutely glaring on record.

However much you might love recordings, we all know that the experience of person-to-person music-making is the real item. At least for those of us who still listen to live music. It seems some of us are so used to hearing pristine, auto-tuned, doctored vocals that hearing a real singer can be a letdown. Like the virtual porn-addled college student who has lost his desire for real people, we can lose sight of the beauty of unmediated musical experience. However much I may admire Glenn Gould, his animosity toward audiences and performing should be seen as an early harbinger of this pathology. In Adam Neely’s sharp video on AI generated music he includes results from his informal survey of Suno users. One of his questions is which AI generated music they consider influential on their own music. The responses were primarily bafflement. Why would I listen to someone else’s AI generated music? I listen to my own!

Music-making, ideally an instrumental activity extending and enriching our humanity, can become another device. Removed from the need for cultivation, discovery, experience, and sharing, one of the most humanizing of all activities, playing and listening to music, enters the goon cave.

A few vignettes, then the point:

When I was an impressionable young musician, I attended a masterclass with Angel Romero (one of the famous Romero family of guitarists). He was drilling a very short passage with a technically accomplished guitarist who was getting bored trying to pull off a phrasing idea. The student finally complained, “It’s just five notes…”

Maestro Romero promptly threw him out of the masterclass and left to get a coffee.

In my grad school days when writing papers was a significant part of my life, I used to work on papers for weeks before writing them. This involved a lot of reading, score study, note taking, and thinking about stuff on the bus or while walking around Baltimore. Usually the night before it was due I would sit down and write the thing start to finish, then edit early the next morning before turning it in. (This process caused my wife great distress. Much like Donald Draper napping on the office couch, it was impossible to tell if I was working or not most of this time).

The majority of the work was figuring out what I wanted to say. How to say it was the final stage. Saying it with some level of style took up the smallest amount of time.

In an interview, microtonal pop musician Maddie Ashman says, “When you have to program every note of a song individually you really think about if it is the exact right note at the right time or if it should be left out.”

This is a great observation made necessary by a stupid music culture. Imagine a composer from the 18th century commenting on how labor intensive it is to choose all those notes. The writer who must find all those words for each sentence. The painter mixing colors. The horror! (Maddie’s music is actually very interesting, though likely not everyone’s taste).

My kids were recently watching this animated version of The Very Hungry Caterpillar. While the animation is lovely, what struck me was the incredible quality of the music. Someone wrote and orchestrated a beautiful piece and then a whole orchestra of live humans (who got paid) with a conductor (who got paid even more) sat down to record it in a studio. For a six minute cartoon. When this was the only way to do it, it was normal.

Edited to add another:

I’ve been wrangling versions of this post for weeks and couldn’t get it to work. It was up to over 1000 words of the kinds of thing you read everywhere about AI. It had a tortured aside about Sturgeon’s Law. It was terrible.

After giving it another go this morning, it all clarified in a single moment. The stories were the post. They say everything I was trying to say on their own. It took a lot of friction to get there.

This is my post about AI. Let the reader understand.

Just found out that when you turn off the new AI summary in gmail (much like Charles Baker Harris, I can read thank you very much) it also turns off:

spell check/autocorrect, grammar suggestions (already off), package tracking (kinda useful), Reply/follow-up reminders (very useful), DESKTOP NOTIFICATIONS (the most non-smart and basic feature imaginable), and many other things it has had for years. It’s all or nothing now, you no longer get to choose which of these you would like unless you also let them scrape all your email contents. (Realistically, I understand they’re probably doing this already, but can any company operate at least pretending your email is sort of private?)

I’ve never had anything but gmail for my personal email, but this kind of bullying is hard to stomach. Considering alternatives for the first time.

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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