#0 - Here's the plan
#0 - Here's the plan
Hey!
Heads up, this first newsletter is a statement of intent, and therefore a little navel-gazey. Apologies, I won’t let it happen again.
My name is Ryan Johnson, I am a 24 year-old guy who lives in North Hollywood, California. My day job is raising money for the ASPCA by talking to people outside grocery stores. I’m good enough at it that I'm going to keep my job, but not enough to make it my life's mission. The actual thing I appear to be good at is learning about complicated things and then explaining those things to other people in a way they can understand. I also seem to have a higher-than-typical tolerance for doing unpleasant things like going to weird places and talking to strangers. And so, I think I have the potential to be a good journalist.
But I don’t have a lot of finished writing. I didn’t write for my college newspaper (I was an illustrator for it, but that’s its own story), and I don’t have a lot of published writing on the internet. So I’m starting this newsletter, something that can function both as a publishing venue and a weekly obligation.
What you should expect
Every week for the next year, I’m going to find the answers to interesting questions and summarize what I've learned in this newsletter. I’ll do that by cold-calling experts and reading boring documents. I’ll file Freedom of Information Act requests if I have to. I’ll go have fun in weird places, and tell you what it was like. And hopefully, if I do my job right, you will be so entertained and enriched that you’ll subscribe to this newsletter, and tell your friends to subscribe too.
Here at the outset, here are my commitments to you:
1. I’ll make sure that any assertion of fact I put in an email has at least one source, hopefully multiple. And I will share those sources with you as best I can.
2. If I’m reporting on a topic where there are multiple conflicting narratives, I will try to represent multiple perspectives in nuanced and full ways. I am not interested in publishing dogmatic points of view.
3. I will publish something every week.
4. I want every newsletter to have something in it that is interesting enough that you would tell it to someone at a party. Call it the “cocktail party anecdote” standard of excellence.
5. I will experiment. This thing will change in the doing. As I find out what topics interest me, and what topics I’m actually good at writing about, a beat will emerge. In the meantime, I will chase my curiosity.
But for real, what are you going to write about?
I love this quote by the biologist Edward O Wilson:
“The real problem of humanity is the following: we have paleolithic emotions; medieval institutions; and god-like technology. (x)”
First, outside of lactose tolerance and various skin tones, humans haven’t changed very much in the past 10,000 years (x). I think that we are not significantly different than the people who first composed the Epic of Gilgamesh, and therefore most human behavior has an ancient precedent. Whether it is grief (x), vandalism (x), or complaining about low quality copper (x), most things that happen to us have happened before. I find that to be a deeply calming phenomenon. So, I’d like to make a habit of covering current events by looking back to the pre-industrial world and seeing if, and when, we’ve seen this behavior before.
The area where I think we are seeing novel behavior is in how people navigate a world that is increasingly mediated by technology. At this point, trying to apply to a job, do a job, go somewhere, hang out with a friend, without interacting with a computer at some point is almost impossible. In order to navigate a world of computers, we learn to see ourselves from a computer’s point of view, as inputs and discrete pieces of data.
My girlfriend knows that the main way Tik Tok learns about her is by paying attention to how fast she swipes away from a video. If she swipes away quickly, the app will show her fewer videos of that type. And so, instead of watching videos as long as she instinctively wants to (for instance, out of curiosity), she purposefully swipes away from videos very quickly if they are not bizarre. And because of that practice, she only sees weird and entertaining videos. Most of us do this sort of algorithm-training on social media apps in some way shape or form. This tendency, to reshape our behavior for a machine, is pervasive and has seeped into every area of our lives as machines have seeped into every area of our lives.
Surveillance technology used by employers to spy on their workers (AKA ‘bossware’) is on the rise. For instance, it is increasingly common for employers to use tools that keeps track of what files you open, what you type, and your mouse movements. And a lack of movement might signal to an employer that you walked away from your desk, and aren’t working. According to an article on bossware published in Wired last year,“Some employees use low-tech options like taping a switched-on fan to a computer mouse to feign movement, or they can pick from a plethora of mouse jigglers available to purchase from regular outlets. Amazon sells over 1,000 versions, ranging from plug-and-play USB to a surface on which the mouse sits that mimics human movements”(x). I love this stuff, because it’s subversive. On some level, Tik Tok is trying to get my girlfriend addicted to Tik Tok. And bossware is trying to keep employees in line. But they learned how these machines saw them, and then they used that information to manipulate the machine in turn.
I want to cover what happens when the use cases technology is intended for meet the messiness of human life in surprising ways.
Lastly, I want to subject myself to things and then write about those experiences. Like Johnny Knoxville testing self-defense equipment on himself for Big Brother Magazine (x), but hopefully with less physical danger involved. For example: I want to purposefully get scammed at least once, just to see what it’s like.
Everything else I’ll figure out along the way. If you have ideas, tips, questions, or anything else you want to say to me, my email is rwsjohnson@gmail.com. Thanks for reading.
PS
I don't love the name Mudlark for this newsletter, but I don't want that dissatisfaction to keep me from writing. I'll probably re-name the newsletter later.