MINUTES of a MONDAY #146
A couple of bits and pieces to get your Monday off to a flyer
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BRAIN FOOD: The Hallucinating Internet
“The internet is now optimised for metrics that have nothing to do with human enjoyment, or convenience, or the profits of anyone except the platform overseers. And it’s only getting worse, as our dependence on these flawed tools grows daily.
On a mundane but practical level, I can see this playing out when I go to the website of, say, Audible, and there’s absolutely nowhere there that will allow me to resume playing the audiobook I was just listening to. No play button, no “pick up where you left off”.
They prefer you to shop more, so you face a wall of new offerings, but not the thing you’ve been listening to that very day. It’s the same experience as being in the Moynihan Train Hall, where you might want to sit down and read a book while you wait — or dive into your smartphone’s infinite scroll — except that the main concourse has been denuded of furniture and surrounded by shops.
Humans still have agency (one hopes), but we must deal with these systems as we find them. And right now, there’s little alternative if one refuses to take part in an increasingly degraded digital world. To be online today means navigating an environment whose design feels adversarial, manipulative; it means wading through toxic slop to get to the thing you want. It’s a recipe for cynicism, discontent and dysfunction, wholly in conflict with the democratising impulses that supposedly drove the internet’s development.
In a 1932 essay, “The Radio As An Apparatus of Communication,” which in some ways anticipated the internet, the playwright Bertolt Brecht proposed turning radio into a tool for two-way communication, thereby elevating a multiplicity of voices.
“The radio would be the finest possible communication apparatus in public life, a vast network of pipes,” Brecht wrote. “That is to say, it would be if it knew how to receive as well as to transmit, how to let the listener speak as well as hear, how to bring him into a relationship instead of isolating him. On this principle, the radio should step out of the supply business and organise its listeners as suppliers.”
The listeners did become suppliers, in line with Brecht’s democratic vision. Some of us are listening and hearing, but many more of us are shouting over one another, brought into relationships that are as likely to be conflictual as nourishing. That “vast network of pipes” pictured by Brecht turned out to be controlled by the same sort of venal moguls who gave us radio in the first place, and they lined those pipes with lead.”
on the the hallucinating internet
SOUL FOOD:
“Deep listening is an act of surrender.”
Bono
LOL:
Arnold Schwartzenegger on the art of lying:
APPENDIX:
“Please don’t think satire is ever a potent avenue for change. Satire can be an agent for catharsis; it can identify certain problems, but change is grunt work and that is what you are going into (in public policy).
Cultural power is not power. It can bring reinforcements, but nothing changes without ‘boots on the ground’ with well-intentioned people.”
Jon Stewart
A.O.B.
That’s it my friend. Another one in the bag.
Thank you for stopping by & checking in.
If you’re looking for a TV fix, can I reccomend season 2 of THE GOLD on BBC? It’s a stinkingly good story and I was lucky enough to be part of it.
And, as always, mind how you go out there & slán agus beannacht - Niall