/inbound

I’ve been thinking about taste for a while now, but last spring I decided to dig deeper into it, feeling the pressure of AI on the creative industries: what builds taste? how do aesthetics reflect ideologies? why didn’t I think genAI was art even though it looked like it — what made something art? what was the point of making something yourself if an LLM or diffusion model could generate text and graphics effortlessly?

I didn’t know quite what I would end up writing about when I set out on this experiment with more focused reading a year and a half ago. After a few rounds of library borrows, I realized I wasn’t that interested in some of the paths I first explored, and noticed the direction of my library borrows shifting. (This is the beauty of the library: open exploration without financial restraint.) First I was working through how aesthetics and taste work online and what defines art-making — and then it felt natural to turn my attention to aura and the digital signifiers of authenticity. I hadn’t been thinking about digital aura when I started reading about aesthetics — but every book suggested another to read and every answer generated a new question*.

Now that this line of thinking feels like it’s wrapping up, I’m not sure what question I want to take on next. I’ve enjoyed this process so much that I know I want to keep going… just not towards what. Looking back at what I read as I chased the question of digital aura has been a reminder that I don’t need to know yet — that I can simply follow my curiosity; starting with some reading that draws me will open up new questions I wouldn’t think to ask now. (I’ve collected a number of books about places and non-places, but I’m not sure what my question is there yet.) There are multiple stages in the question answering process; the first phase of reading can be exploratory, with focused attention toward specific problems and gaps coming later.

I recently read an article by Carlo Iacono challenging the narrative that people’s attention spans have been permanently ruined for long-form reading, instead proposing that people who struggle with long-form reading are suffering from a bad reading environment:

“What strikes me most is the difference between people who’ve learned to construct what I call ‘containers for attention’ – bounded spaces and practices where different modes of engagement become possible – and those who haven’t. The distinction isn’t about intelligence or discipline. It’s about environmental architecture.”

I think this is a bit of a yes-and situation: that people’s habit of focused attention has been eroded and needs to be rebuilt, and a bad reading environment* is what is getting in the way of that. (Setting up a reading chair by the window has been a boon for reading physical books for me.)

I also wonder if some of the friction people are noticing in long-form reading comes from choosing the “wrong” books to start rebuilding their focus. Optimization culture makes us want to read “the best” book on any subject (or the longest novel if Goodreads is any indication), even if we might not be ready for it yet. We know better than to expect ourselves to be able to run a marathon without training, but it’s easy to forget that our minds are embodied too: our thinking both softens with disuse and can be honed with practice.

Part of this project for me has been practicing how to read towards a question, and part of that is learning how to read more effectively. I knew from the repeated references that Walter Benjamin was going to be a key text, but let myself work up to him. (I’ve started re-reading the essay recently and my attention has been drawn to different parts than my first read — what a gift this essay has been, and continues to be.) Sometimes it’s worthwhile to hurl yourself into a challenging book (this is what How to Read a Book advocates, and worked out OK for me on The Pleasure of the Text)… but sometimes the brute force approach makes learning much harder than it needs to be. Choosing a good route is critical to reaching the summit of a mountain; coming at a difficult text or a big question from an angle might make the climb much easier (and more enjoyable).

The way I often read non-fiction — snatches of twenty pages here, twenty pages there, putting a book down for two months (or two years) at a time — is not conducive to *finishing* books, but I do find it conducive to thinking. Rich texts can take a while to sink in, so I’ll jump to another book while I let the first one marinate. (Hence why I’m still chipping away at Simulacra and Simulation 😂) Robert Poynton writes, “Slow hunches don’t develop if you work relentlessly on a problem.”

I read part of The Extinction of Experience last summer, then checked it out from the library again when the parts I had skipped on first read seemed pertinent. Earlier this year, I was working on a blog post and realized, “Saving Time might have something to say about this!” which I’ve read half of over the past couple years in two distinct chunks. (Saving Time would probably have something to say about this 🤔) This might sound utilitarian, that I’m reading things as I “need” them, but I think of it more as reading things when I’m ready for them.

It’s possible to fall into work mentality even for a self-assigned project, but given that this labor is a form of leisure, I want to grant myself an unhurried approach and preserve an attitude of play. I want books to be an invitation I offer myself, not an assignment. In The Plenitude of Distraction, Marina Van Zuylen suggests letting “good” distractions take you somewhere interesting:

“The key to this positive distraction lies precisely in the delay, a delay that energizes and creates the free circulation of ideas and affects.”

Ah, yes, I skimmed back through my underlines in Saving Time and Jenny Odell comes through for me again! She talks abut “self-directed wandering” as leisure — this is the intellectual equivalent — and imagines “a kind of leisure that pushes against rather than bolsters the current order… something vitally related to political imagination.” This is exactly what blogging is for me: a way to perceive the world more clearly, cut through false mythos, and build a better dream.

Leaflet is a nice editor designed to work with Bluesky. But they've been branching out. They now support email and RSS output. They're going in the right direction, toward the internet with the email, and toward the web with the RSS support. As nice as Bluesky is, it's a small part of the web, and it isn't as open as it might appear to be, imho. #

Routing around the algorithms#

• AOC in an interview nailed everything in one brief answer to a question from the audience. You can watch it here. #
• It was so good and quotable that I recorded it and created a transcript via Google and Claude. #
• I've been emailing with Josh Marshall at TPM for the last few weeks, saying that we can't just keep building on what the tech industy has given us as a news distribution system. AOC touches on this in her answer -- she says the tech people control the algorithms, and they do. But the web doesn't have algorithms, and we have enough standards available to create a very good network that isn't owned by anyone. #
• I was at one time motivated by money, the same way politicians are motivated to attain higher office, but I had an impulsive idea when the web popped up that I am not doing it for money anymore. I'm doing it so we can change our political and work communication so it gives power to the people, not to the tech industry. At that time we were already dealing with the excesses of tech, I knew it well because I was an an insider. #
• They are welcome to make products for it, but they can't control the users. That's what I envisioned in the 90s and 00s. The ads won't be as important as what people say, because the price of using the web is very low. But we got snookered anyway. The VCs were only motivated by money, and to maximize that, they needed maximum control, and they got it. People like being part of big things, and Twitter was and still is big.#
• We're now at the next turning point. AI is creating new pathways for ideas to flow. It's all wide open right now, more open than it's been in over 20 years. Right now we could put a twitter-like product there that you can set up in a few minutes, run it yourself, and or join one that's run by a friend. And they federate immediately. All based on the open standards of the web. Every component replaceable. No big central thing to be owned. #
• But Josh, we can't do it without your help. AOC doesn't know us. She probably doesn't think how the web could route around the algorithms. But she, and you should be thinking about that, and Heather Cox Richardson too, because we can create the people's tool for the change she wants, which is the change I want, and you want too (I read your columns). But we have to work together to make it happen. #
• BTW, all politicians should swear by what she says. And we should never care about polls. We should only care about results. #
• Transcript of AOC's answer#
• I recorded the interview, Claude did a light edit of the transcript. I highlighted the part about the algorithms. #
• You know, it's funny, because, in this op-ed that Jeff Bezos paid for in the Washington Post, there was this line where you had mentioned earlier about me as a potential 2028 contender, and in the context of that, it was very clear this was a veiled threat, right?#
• So the elite think: if you want this job, you just stepped out of line. And we want you to know where the real power is. And it's in the modern-day barons who own the Post and own the algorithms. And we're gonna— we'll make an example out of you.#
• And what's funny about that is that they assume that my ambition is positional. They assume that my ambition is a title or a seat. But my ambition is way bigger than that. My ambition is to change this country.#
• Presidents come and go. Senate and house seat elected officials come and go. But single-payer healthcare's forever. In many ways, it's forever work, right? Forever work is what we should follow, and so anyways, I— the way— but to put a finer point on your question, is that when you aren't attached, right? When you haven't been, like, fantasizing about being this or that since the time you're seven years old, it's a tremendously liberating thing. Because I get to wake up every day and say, how am I going to meet the moment? And conditions change radically all the time. So, I make my response— less out of an attachment to a positional, like, you know, title or position and working backwards from there— but I make decisions by waking up in the morning, looking out the window and observing the conditions of this country and saying, what move or what decision can I make today that's going to get us closer to that future— stronger, faster, better than yesterday?#

First, I went to work on my new budget emulation machine. I moved some more games over and then compressed the games with a built-in compressor. That saved me even more space, so now I can keep expanding my PS2 library which already sits at over fifty games.

I also watched a few YouTube videos so I could learn how to make adjustments to improve the graphics. My first attempt went quite well, although I am experiencing some slow down in certain games (the fights in NHL Hitz 2003, the entire game for Simpsons Road Rage), so I need to keep tinkering. That's for another day.

While all that was going on, I started moving files from my portable external hard drive to my new external hard drive. My goal is use the portable for my Plex streaming only, so I removed everything else. Then I went about renaming and organizing files and removing anything I've watched and don't plan on rewatching. My goal is to make as much space as possible for growth, especially as I need move a few seasons of Stargate Atlantis over.

I bought my wife a MacBook Neo a few weeks ago, so now our Lenovo Yoga 6 really has no use. It's always been a bit too small for me, so I've decided to move my Plex server from my six year old HP All-In-One onto this laptop so I can keep it near my router. So, I cleaned everything off of it that I could, debated about installing Linux, but I decided if I run into any problems, I'm just more familiar with Windows. So, I got the server up and running and everything was working fine. However, despite changing the setting for the laptop to go to sleep when the lid is closed, it somehow disconnected after a short period of time. I'm hoping its not the wi-fi, but I'm going to have to troubleshoot this some. Until I get around to that, if I need to use my Plex, I'll just open the laptop up.

This isn't my ideal set up by any means, but I'm making the best of what I have lying around while trying to keep all spending to minimum. I feel like I made some great progress, I just have a few kinks to work out, which I'll hopefully get to this week.

Now I just need to figure out what to do with the HP. Honestly, I don't use it much, but it does have some PC games installed on it. I'm experiencing major cord fatigue, so part of me wants to get rid of it, but I guess I'll think on this a bit more before doing anything hasty.

Pure Blog/Comments and Simple.css were the most challenging as they all had other people who relied on them, but I managed to get them moved with a little bit of messing around.

The others were super simply, I used Codeberg's migration tool to migrate the repos over, the ran a command locally to point my repos to a new target:

git remote set-url origin git@codeberg.org:kevquirk/[new-repo].git

That's it! Repo migrated.

Thoughts on Codeberg

It's fine. And I don't mean that negatively - there's a lot less going on in the UI than on GitHub, but everything is still familiar and similarly laid out. There's been almost zero learning curve moving from GitHub to Codeberg, so props to the Codeberg team for that.

I've applied for a Coderberg membership as I think it's important to support the open source projects we use, so hopefully that will be approved soon.

Overall I'm very happy with the move. All the old GitHub repos have had their README.md files updated to point to Codeberg, and they too have been archived.

So that's one less piece of big tech I need to rely on.

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Terry must be tons of fun at parties. Way to rope us in Terry.

He redeems himself by the end:

But the actual internet — the protocols, the federated services, the plain-text commands, the open feeds, the small servers, the personal sites, the things people built when user and developer were sometimes the same word — is still right there.

Build protocols not platforms.

Tangentially related: The blog isn’t dead. It is just sleeping. and Blogging is alive and well.