Overlong, overwrought intro
It’s an undeniable fact that there are already too many words on the Internet. In an age of a trillion distractions, no-one has the time or mental capacity to take additional information on board, let alone engage.
So why create more words? And who needs another middle-class/middle-aged white man’s generalist view of the world?
My feeble line of defence is that I genuinely miss having a place where I can post things that grab my attention online – whether they excite me, annoy me, frighten me, or bring me delight – and pick up a conversation around them.
I used to rely on Twitter for this purpose, but that feels like a very long time ago: before Elon, before hashtags became a marketing staple, before the combined efforts of journalists, politicians, and culture warriors sucked all the joy out of it.
Twitter lost its sheen for me in the mid-2010s when it started to spiral from a pleasant village-like community, to an era of bandwagoning and showboating, to a place where increasingly extreme views took centre stage.
Since then I haven’t found anything that comes close to replacing it, but maybe Substack can provide a little of that sparkle. (Although while we’re on the subject, let’s not pretend it’s a platform that’s all sweetness and light).
When I started my last-but-one job, working for National Museums Scotland, I used to tweet daily with a ‘museum website du jour’. Despite its reek of pretentiousness, it was a nice way of exploring what other cultural institutions were doing online and communicating the features and content I liked. It helped me get a handle on what was going on digitally in the culture sector – a sort of research-in-the-open project – and it was really useful in building a network of peers and interested parties.
These were the days before Twitter had ❤️ likes, retweets were mostly manual (that’s RT kids), and there were no official stats, so I used to run all my links through bit.ly to measure how many clicks my posts would get. Nothing earth-shattering, but on a good day 30, 40, sometimes 50 people were clicking through. Which was certainly enough to satisfy my ego and start up occasional chats with interesting folk.
I was also lucky enough to move to Edinburgh in 2009 and fall in with the already burgeoning IRL Twitter scene. Every Friday morning before work, in a buzzing restaurant on George Street, caffeine-fuelled discussions about tech, social, and the seemingly endless possibilities of digital culture would take place, and then continue online long after people had dispersed. I was a late joiner but Edinburgh Coffee Mornings, complete with the omnipresent #EdCM hashtag, provided a layer of community and connection that I just can’t imagine gaining traction these days.
Much of the public lament about what’s happened to Twitter seems to hark back to a time, a place, and a vibe that can’t be repeated. Undeniably, Musk consistently finds new ways of digging a deeper cesspit – which is fair game to call out – but the desire to replicate the tweeting glory days of yore (whether you thread, skeet, toot, or plain old post) feels like it’s largely going to result in disappointment.
So maybe it’s time to try something different. Taking all of the above on board, I guess I’m attempting to reframe things with something that’s more comfortable for me – a few links, a smidgen of context, and the odd bit of chat if you happen to be on the Substack Reader app.
I’ve routinely failed at blogging over the years, so don’t get your hopes up – this may well be an illustrious one-off.
And at least I’ve not started a podcast.
🌞 AI: The First New User Interface Paradigm in 60 Years
Most people who have done any sort of digital content production will go a long way back with Jakob Nielsen. Here he offers a simple model to explain how AI is shifting the way we interact with machines. It’s a bit drunk on the word ‘paradigm’ but I’ve thought about it a lot since I read it, and have found it useful in helping conceptualise the profound ways in which AI may change how we undertake tasks.
[hat tip to Adrian Gans]
Before any of the recent Russell Brand revelations took over the news, this piece by Sarah Manavis in Prospect shone a light on the content factory that Brand operates and the tactics he deploys – some of it unique to his status, some of it with a very specific understanding of where people really spend their time online.
I was quite surprised by some of the “I-thought-he’d-disappeared-years-ago” reporting in the wake of the Dispatches/Times story. Platforms like Rumble, Discord and even (in this context) YouTube command huge audiences and reach, yet often get discounted or ignored by mainstream reporting as a sideshow. As the article illustrates: Brand was alive and thriving, just not necessarily in the places you were looking.
It would be easy to write Brand off as a small part of a booming cottage industry of alt-right, online talking heads. After all, there are plenty of men ranting on the internet, from the comfort of their homes, regurgitating popular conspiracy theories for cheap views and gaining a following… But what Brand is doing is unusual in terms of its style, tactics, content and in how effective it is in getting people to believe him. It may, in its potentially extraordinary impacts, even be unique.
The second segment [from about about 17m:30s on] in the latest Hard Fork podcast wins the fascinating/horrifying award of the week. Kashmir Hill talks about her new book and the real-world harms (not the usual vague existential ones) being perpetrated now by AI and facial recognition software. *30 billion* images of faces scraped from the Internet, no consent given. Yikes.
I loved this newsletter from Waterstons Innovation (you should subscribe to their Substack, it’s great). Explaining how ChatGPT ‘thinks’ by articulating its hopes and dreams is – to me at least – far more effective at getting across what’s going on under the hood than your average tech article. And it’s highly amusing.
👋 Until next time…
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