The solution, at least on an individual basis, is never to use Google and its like.
Use DuckDuckGo for safe and secure searches, not Google.
Use VPNs and/or Tor to surf, so your data doesn't get trawled.
At the very least use an Adblock addon for your browser, plus apps to block unwanted scripts.
Never use streaming services for music or video content - use physical media or torrents.
Buy physical books or use an archive source to DL.
I do all these and I never get spammed with nonsense.
Life is so much more serene this way.
It makes me a pretty poor consumer and probably a bad citizen, true, but I get my stuff done without being bugged by spambots, AI slop or unwanted ads.
I was going to recommend DuckDuckGo myself. I avoid Meta wherever possible and have been warning my friends about their data mining for years. Ideally I'd give up on WhatsApp too, but too many of my friends haven't switched to Signal (created by one of the founders of WhatsApp after he resigned from the Meta board in disgust – Meta gather more data about their users than anyone else and the influence and insights it gives them into us is frightening).
For music streaming I recommend Deezer. For my broad tastes it has a much better catalogue than Spotify. Most often I use its random play from my library of 1,500 odd albums, but when I've used its ‘Flow’ feature its suggestions have usually been really good. I've found rarities such as a Charlie Parker 10" EP that my dad gave to me – he gave it to me because when I first heard it it made me cry and it had the same effect on Don Weller when I played it to him (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Weller_%28musician%29?wprov=sfla1 he was one of Britain's greatest jazz tenor saxophonists) – and a Claude Bolling big band recording of Django Reinhard his that was a present from the French family I stayed with on a school exchange visit! When Deezer were looking to sell I had some real problems with it and looked into alternatives, but of the first four albums I searched for, I couldn't find three on any other service (two were by Depeche Mode and one by Focus, so it's not as if they were obscure)!
I hope you find those recommendations useful. Thank you for your thoughtful and interesting pieces.
I just don't get it . Don't most of you have 1000's upon 1000 of things to listen or watch or Look at by now ? WHY oh WHY do you have to participate in any of it ? Doesn't most everyone have Thousands upon Thousand's of pictures stored somewhere ,videos, You tube, on & on & on forever. That I'll bet most of you never look at.
I had a relative way back when, before digital who took enough photos to bankrupt them many times over. Who in HELL ever looked at ANY of them ? Nowadays it is just multiplied to the Googleplex ! Nothing new. nothing different. With endless "content" being stored in useless Data centers - wasting electricity - wasting million year old water going over dams to power & store it all. So you - consumer- can STREAM stuff. Wow - what progress
Some of us like new things. Yes, I can watch the same old things I watched in my college days for the 12th time... But once in a while, someone draws a NEW cartoon. And at least in animation, and video games, we're living in a golden age where the media's never been better. Don't get me wrong - not much of it - but I appreciate the steady trickle of creativity over the years.
Really - I'd love to see something "New". Or hear something "New" not happening too often. It's more of - say the same Old things & play the same 12 notes.
Yes, it's quite a cynical way to see things but really - when have you heard or seen something truly original ?
I hear, see, and read what is both new and truly original all the time. If you think there's nothing new under the sun, it's probably because you are stuck relying on a proverb [nihil novi sub sole] that's thousands of years old to understand the world.
Or it could be you are stuck looking in the land of the dead for fresh ideas, since you won't find many in the US or Europe these days where the culture has been in the terminal stage of its life cycle for quite some time, as was understood well by many in the past who understood its impending fate, like Spengler.
It will be an especially rough search for the new and original if one is only able to speak, listen, read, and understand English.
That originality is a quality hard to find and always has been hard to find does not mean it cannot be found, however difficult it is to do so and see it for yourself. Drops of water are invisible, but nonetheless form the sea.
Originality has always tended to fall into two broad camps. First - the arbitrary. "This cryptographic hash is totally unique! It's scarcity must mean it's worth something!" But of course, there are an infinite number of random numbers to choose from, so, no, your procedurally generated terrible ape drawing is not in fact "unique." This is the deceptive originality many in the arts laude because it's easy to hype any pet project for extrinsic motives if you point to the "uniqueness" of a series of essentially arbitrary decisions - whether it's noise art, or installations of pickled teddybears on a bedding of bubblegum tinfoil. If you want more than 12 tones, go grab your microtonal music, or that stuff based on trinary octaves.
Actual originality admits that "All of philosophy is a footnote to Plato." Actual originality is a slow, thankless trickle of contributions over the century little appreciated in their own time. We have the benefit of having two Millenia of the Western Canon packed into your average library. Those who grow up with it are continuously stunned to silence with it's brilliance - until everything in our own times begins to seem like "footnote." Proust would have it that in general, high culture has always been a series of self-important salons where no one could remember more than a couple witty things to have been uttered over decades of company - and things are not much different today. Don't be among those who "little appreciate" the contributions of your own time unless it's to have sympathy for those who, in the past, couldn't tell the wheat from the chafe. The problem has always been to identify who were the predecessors and influencers of the great originalists of the past - and to appreciate the refinements made by creative people working today.
Sorry , but that is a bit funny to me - "Refinements". Not meaning to insult in any way - but for me - it's all been said before, already. And 99.9998 seems to be just that ... "Refinements".
But that isn't to say there isn't very rarely someone new, interesting & original. It is just SO hard to break through the Internet Hurricane Wind machine of Mediocrity & repeating everything
This is why MTV should convert from showing videos to showing recorded concerts/performances of all types of music, from Jazz to classical to whatever is modern.
I know there is a strong market for a channel like this. I wish someone with deep pockets would take the time to put it together.
Unfortunately, I had my record and CD collection stolen (some 1,500 recordings) so streaming is the only way I can listen to that music. I was heartbroken when I lost it all, not least because it should have been part of my legacy to my son. Music is my one abiding passion – I am a musician myself. And I don't take a lot of pictures either. When I do it's usually to share with someone (eg when the cherry blossom blooms outside my front door). I quite agree that we never really look at them, so I periodically delete the ones I don't need.
Man that must hurt, losing your personal collection. I was lucky enough to keep mine through the years, and digitized my own CDs into mp3s back when laptops had CD readers. Been growing it since then, it's quite fun sometimes to put a 2000+ album collection in full shuffle.
I agree, but I didn't have that option (and it would have taken a long time!). My collection was stolen in ’93 when hard discs and memory were still pretty pricey.
Million year old water? Hardly. There's no fresh water being dammed anywhere on the planet that remotely approaches being near that old. It either flows downstream until it reaches a salt-water body or evaporates as vapor and falls afresh somewhere else. Even in deep freshwater lakes convection creates enough circulation that eventually every single molecule will evaporate from the surface as fresher water flows into the lake. Even the oldest glaciers everywhere outside of Antartica, which has no dams anywhere restricting the flow of glacier melt to the oceans on that continent's coastline, have formed in only the past 100,000 years or so. Those are located in Greenland and, to the best of my knowledge, are also not restricted by any dams downstream from where they melt.
One can argue the merits and demerits of damming rivers and streams, but somehow disturbing "million year old water" is not one of them.
This is all a good point. We think all this digital storage and things we can do is free,and somehow 'non physical',it's of the air,it's up in the clouds,no trees are getting cut down. Yet as you say all our use is putting immense strain on electricity production that is physical at source. But like most people I mostly don't think about it. I'm trying to get all my important photographs printed off in photo books and I'm getting on well with that. I'm buying actual books. I'm even sometimes posting paper letters. (Googlespy hasnt read whats in them). I even sometimes leave my phone at home when I go out, especially if it's local as I know the bus times etc.
Signal is doubtfully any more private than Whatsapp, considering it was CIA funded via NED with the purpose being to help foment dissent across the globe in countries the US doesn't like and destabilise them. The CIA is not a trustworthy actor when it comes to your privacy, or really anything else.
Far from being a trivial matter, when people recommend apps like it as private, it can result in people losing their lives and freedom when those who actually need privacy most think they have it and don't. Unfortunately, privacy has become a brand and mostly the luxury concern of those who don't need it (if still obviously deserve it) and aren't speaking from experience of evading state persecution or LEOs to know what actually holds up.
The only communication you can trust to be private is face-to-face without microphones and cameras listening (meaning no phones, smart TVs, or anything like that nearby), or if on the Internet communicated through PGP encryption and sent through a VPN (or two) and TOR. Note that not one of these technologies can help on its own, because PGP isn't sufficient by itself, VPNs can and do give user data to governments and law enforcement, and TOR is known to have honeypot onion nodes setup by FBI and CIA and has had DoD ties from the start.
Another tactic: randomly surf web pages you have no interest in. I started doing this and Amazon and all the rest have no clue what I’m actually interested in.
It seems suitably pranksterish and I approve in principle, but who has time to send Google on a wild-goose chase? The algo has almost infinite time, while our time as mortals is limited.
I think there are browser plugins that will do it for you. (If not, I should write one.)
How I did it was a little more unintentional: I used to play this game to help me fall asleep where I would pick two subjects on Pinterest and navigate from one to the other, just by clicking: like, randomly, going from Pinterest posts about medieval castles to pictures of ‘66 Mustangs.
And I started to get the strangest recommendations from Amazon, like DJ’ing equipment and 50-lb bags of grub worms.
This goes deeper. It throws off all the recommendation algorithms in Facebook, Amazon, etc. They start to have no clue what you are actually interested in, and it’s fun to get bizarre recommendations for random things like beekeeping equipment.
From the likes I should go ahead and write a Chrome plug-in. It would be fun if all the people who have it installed surf the same random websites so that the Internet thinks there’s a trend, like a sudden interest in 14th Century arrow fletching techniques.
I prefer Brave search (on Brave’s browser) and Luxxle. When searching using Google (I refuse to verb that noun), the same results come up over and over again on each page with different ads. On the other two, I get real results.
Right; avoid Google, set up DuckDuckGo as your search engine; that's what I did many years ago. Use Opera browser with a good, built-in ad blocker and exquisite features to organize your searches and finds.
I stream podcasts on Spotify, but consistently ignore any suggestions from the software. All recommendations come from trustworthy sources (like The Guardian's "Hear Here"), or own searches, trials and errors.
If you want to support the good guys, check out Kagi.com -- you get total privacy, no ad model, none of that, plus you can block, demote or promote sites as you please. They also have a Lens feature that limits searches to specific sites. Not having to wade through a sea of SEO garbage is so liberating. It's not a massive search engine right now, but it has reputable people singing its praises (Stephen Wolfram is on the board).
DuckDuckGo is not safe or secure, and it is not private. There is no good search engine. For privacy, Startpage and MetaGer are better alternatives than DuckDuckGo. But the Internet is not private and you should always act with that in mind. You would need to go to extreme measures to prevent state actors and advertisers from tracking and surveilling you, not to mention law enforcement if that ever were to become relevant.
It censors search results for political and other reasons, essentially because they just don't like them and want to play at being the Ministry of Truth and control what information you see the same way Google does, considering there's nothing illegal about displaying you results from independent media websites they don't like, Russian websites, or torrent websites.
Microsoft trackers are not blocked by them since they have an agreement with them, and why trust anyone who makes agreements with a company that sells surveillance and AI tech to tinpot dictators across the globe with your privacy? Little bit of conflict of interest, there.
DuckDuckGo is also based in the US. This should be all the reason you need to know not to trust them with your privacy, really, considering what Snowden and Assange revealed to us (the latter with Wikileaks' Spy Files on the global mass surveillance industry that predated Snowden's leaks). NSA will have a direct line to them intercepting all the data and can request whatever info they want from US companies on users (i.e., all they have usually)—secretly—while companies have no legal authority to refuse. All information they've got through it on you will be permanently stored by the US government, then shared with the entire Five Eyes Network.
I only use Google for a quick search on spelling or a quick fact check. I RARELY open any hits as Google generally lists the info I am looking for at the top of their hits, so I am unsure how the companies on the hit list make money any longer.
Generally, I use Perplexity.ai when searching for detailed info.
I’ve been using Duck duck Go for more than 3 years and have no issues having ads on my email or any other nonsense . We opted out of Spotify by not being a paid/ premium and outside of the inconvenience of not being able to play my playlist / album in the exact order , I’m good
So you come online to tell us not to go online. How does this "not using any of it" work exactly? I mean, I remember the days before Internet, but I'd quite like to keep my search engines and email thanks very much.
"We value your privacy." Who hasn't seen this all over internet? Well, it turns out this Orwellian statement is partly true, because sites ARE making money off your privacy. Once an algorithm gets hold of you, it's the gift that keeps on giving.
Yep. Translation: "your private information is valuable to us."
One database holds device ids and locations, another has device ids and search history, another has usernames and device ids, and on and on... and I'm sure there are multiple companies aggregating it all.
I have to assume you're familiar with Cory Doctorow's term "enshittification" and his thinking around it. Quite in line with what you're saying. Personally, I feel like humans are driven by addiction, and the worst addiction of all, the one that's destroying all life on the planet, is the addiction to profit.
Whatever the “wisdom of crowds” ever was, it has long since been polluted by pervasive commercial greed. It will be further polluted increasingly by algorithmic idiocy (AI).
Welcome to the return of knowledgeable experts, edited books, libraries full of physical codices, encyclopedias, and rational discourse — or at least the tools for rational discussion. Digital “utopia” can be no more practical or likely than any utopia of the past.
Man’s pursuit of perfection — in the absence of deep humility — always suffers the doom of dystopia. None of this is new.
Thank you for shining a bright honest light on it — again. Please keep up the great work.
I have been researching recommendation algorithms since the 90s and could not agree more with the sentiments here. These companies (who will swear up and down that they care about "user experience") could do a lot better and they are choosing not to. What surprises me is that they somehow think users won't notice? Or do they think that we have so little choice now that we'll stick with crappy systems because that's all there is? On Spotify, I listen only to albums or playlists that I've created and I've turned off autoplay (just go to "Settings") so that when the album is over, I'm not subjected to whatever it wants to push at me. I think it will be interesting to see the outcome of Ethan Zuckerman's lawsuit against Meta. He argues that sections of the Communications Decency Act should entitle users to create their own interfaces to systems like Facebook with alternate third-party front ends. https://knightcolumbia.org/cases/zuckerman-v-meta-platforms-inc
I think it comes down to a philosophy prevalent in Silicon Valley, now especially prevalent among proponents of AI, that computers can know what we want better than we can and be made fundamentally better than we are at everything. This is considered more of a truth than a belief, despite being obviously the latter, since it's not based on any kind of evidence or science of any sort, and is more like some kind of primitive religious cult that has emerged naturally in the absence of other beliefs or spirituality without being understood as such by its believers, or noticed by outsiders.
Technologist, early proponent of the Internet, and father of VR Jaron Lanier gives a good introduction to this type of attitude prevalent in Silicon Valley in his book "You Are Not a Gadget."
The spellchecker is a primitive, early example that stemmed from this belief. At first, it would give helpful suggestions, and then many word processors started to not only check spellings, but automatically *correct* them. Microsoft Word still did the last time I used it by default, which was a long time ago (switched to LibreOffice).
I see it all the time as a programmer. It's not so much that the people making these decisions don't think users will notice, or that they have no choice. Usually, those are not considerations to begin with, because they think they know better than users in the first place, both in general and in what they want.
They don't even think about how anyone will be harmed by anything, because disruption is a good thing and everyone else is the problem when technology harms them: users, humans altogether really, must adapt to technology rather than the other way around, because technology is in their belief system an inevitable march forward, and many of them think we will inevitably be replaced by machines altogether.
It is very hard to get through to anyone who is very insular in what beliefs they are exposed to and what company they keep, who think they know better than those who do not share their beliefs, and who think their beliefs are somehow scientific or evidence-based despite rarely being able to point to any science or evidence, since their beliefs in the machine might as well be ordained by God and are held with religious conviction by many who work with anything computer or IT in general.
As an artist and an art lover the algorithm is the bane of my existence. In the old days the art world had it's gatekeepers, they were high brow elite critics and curators who could be bought for a handsome sum, but they were still human and they still had a reputation to protect. The new gatekeeper is the algorithm which can be bought for a dime and has no soul or sense of what anybody wants, it operates entirely on data and a new form of payola, paid ads, boosted posts, etc.
I have pretty obscure and outsider tastes, the algorithm has no idea what to do with me so it just gives me more of the same.
According to the algorithms, I am apparently either a black female who is dissatisfied with her hair and skin care options, or I might be a Hindi (I think) human with an interest in celebrity culture.
My SWAG is that, if you don't fit neatly into a few boxes, the algorithm doesn't know what to do with you.
Not to be that guy, but I was far more worried about algorithms 5 years ago than I am now. Possibly the most powerful technology ever - untold data on and computing power for tracking and predicting human behaviour, threatening to enslave us by knowing us better than we know ourselves, and it just gets used to recommend Joe Rogan to everyone because that's the deal the streaming service struck and they need to sell those ads? God really does have a tremendous sense of humour.
I think you're blaming a symptom of a more fundamental issue, which is that advertising is the business model of the modern Internet. Scott Galloway calls the embrace of advertising "the original sin of the Internet," and I think he's right. The algorithms serve the business model, and because advertising on the Internet is both massive in scale and granular in precision, nobody has the same experience, commercial clicks driven by algorithmic matching become the goal, and bewildered users click more or settle for advertised options, driving massive amounts of money into a few companies' coffers — because scale and precision are expensive to manifest, so everything trends toward monopoly, something AI will on exacerbate.
It's the business model that's broken. The algorithms seem to me just a symptom of a much deeper rot.
There's an upside though: they mostly do that by the power of defaults. If you go into the depth of settings for each app that you adopt, and tailor it to your preferences, and remember to keep using according to your preferences instead of mashing the shiniest button like a monkey, it's mostly all there.
Not to sound like a freaking Google salesperson, but it's quite amazing how much high quality and hugely varied live music can be found on youtube - and how much quality improves when you click to add the "20minutes+" filter on your results.
You can see it as a non-monetary transaction both ways. They offer lots of content for free in exchange for a chance to mine your attention. But you can alternatively "pay" by paying attention to the settings.
When you search for something on youtube, you can then further filter the results, and one of the options is to show only videos of at least 20 minutes. When you search for music, that tends to bring up whole performances rather than single pieces.
On the computer the actual word "Filters" appears; on the mobile app you have to click the three dots at the top right and select "Search filters".
Have you ever bought something after having seen it in an internet ad? Do you know anyone who has done so? The ad companies like Google and Meta get paid by the click or view, but I'm guessing that most of them are ignored by a human, blocked by an adblocker. seen by a machine or clicked by a bot.
Actually, yes, once or twice since Compuserve and Prodigy faded away. If you join enough hyper-specialized chat groups, the algos can eventually hit on something that you might actually want to purchase. But their hit rate is still abysmally low, at least for me.
The particularly cruel aspect to all of this is that these services were actually extremely useful for several years. The helpful and easily accessible data they provided us in just about every situation almost instantaneously seemed like magic and lured us into believing things would only get much much better over time. As an example now that I've become addicted and reliant upon Google Maps it's so painful to realize not only are they providing me directions primarily to serve paying clients whose places of business are now prominently superimposed over the maps but that I realize I'll probably have to go back to using real maps which are as cumbersome and out of date as they always used to be if they are even available any longer. And not only does Google provide me complete garbage as search results, I now realize that the functionality they provided is effectively no longer available. And it will only get much much worse from here.
Returned to paper maps four years ago. I fold them to sit on my lap driving, or fit in my tank bag (vintage motorcycle). Routing is more enjoyable, I'm more engaged, and life is better. I'll not go back. State DOTs are your friends, as are Rand MacNally and DeLorme.
I used to use Nokia maps when Nokia was a player, just for the novelty, but haven't looked up a replacement after the rather stern talking to the Nokia one gave me when I went over the speed limit by a few mph one time.
Paper maps, then using the sun and time of day, occasionally the North star at night then relying on general feel of which direction seems right to get me to where I need to be.
Same here; I was amazed to have a Tom Tom device on my dash in the '90's, used the iPhone maps to back up route sheets to the east coast on my touring bicycle, and then, like Alec Guinness' character at the close of "Bridge Over the River Kwai", came to: "What have I done?". Maps on laps now. People around me get just slightly hinky when I observe, re the mapping wonder grafted to their hand, that "I'd prefer not to".
For a real "how'd we get here" realization, pick up any merit badge booklet from the '50's, and marvel at what was routinely expected of 12-year-olds to accomplish by memory: Knots. Bicycle maintenance. Rough camping. Morse code. Civil behavior to the vulnerable.
I've trained Spotify with my preferences to within an inch of its life. So I have good control over it. But I cannot let it roam any more the way I once could, wandering through its catalog using my history as a guide. It's got its own agenda now. When a former girlfriend, a talented musician and a sharp cookie, recommended Spotify to me years ago, it was a different era. Sad.
One part of the solution has to be returning the adaptive machine learning that shapes the algorithm to user control or at least user-based inferences. What's coming out now is more and more the company's preferences.
"Algorithm" never meant something to control others. It always meant a formalized instruction sequence, boiled down to its essence. When I taught programming to non-techies, we started with procedures for making PBJ sandwiches and changing light bulbs. We formalized them by breaking the steps down into their smallest parts and writing them in logical order. A recipe is an algorithm of sorts, for example.
An algorithm makes explicit and rigorous a lot of things we do intuitively, on the way to automating the procedure. The automation should be simplifying *your* life. What were getting is like a washing machine that refuses to wash your clothes, insists that you buy a new wardrobe, then does it only on its schedule and charges you for the privilege. It's not technology as a tool for human life.
It's very clear to me that I get recommendations for the most stereotypical reading of my basic demographic attributes (married White suburban mom with a bachelor's degree). I do not watch true crime, go to the gym, or shop exclusively at Target, but someone sure is convinced I do!
I am a collection development librarian from Indianapolis, and I found my way to your substack after a Washington Post Book Club let me know that a book publisher named Leon Lanen is trying to sell me an eBook on "The Evolution of Jazz" written by "Frank Gioia" and "Ted Alkyer".
Find a book with two authors, swap the names, let AI generate some drivel, and sell it for five bucks.
Now I'm really, really starting to feel like Guy Montag, in a distant forest, wearing a raincoat and memorizing "my book". Used and indie bookstores are it for me for the past four years. At least HAL can't feed me twisted, maleficent info via a screen, or refuse to open the airlock. Thanks for this insight.
The solution, at least on an individual basis, is never to use Google and its like.
Use DuckDuckGo for safe and secure searches, not Google.
Use VPNs and/or Tor to surf, so your data doesn't get trawled.
At the very least use an Adblock addon for your browser, plus apps to block unwanted scripts.
Never use streaming services for music or video content - use physical media or torrents.
Buy physical books or use an archive source to DL.
I do all these and I never get spammed with nonsense.
Life is so much more serene this way.
It makes me a pretty poor consumer and probably a bad citizen, true, but I get my stuff done without being bugged by spambots, AI slop or unwanted ads.
I was going to recommend DuckDuckGo myself. I avoid Meta wherever possible and have been warning my friends about their data mining for years. Ideally I'd give up on WhatsApp too, but too many of my friends haven't switched to Signal (created by one of the founders of WhatsApp after he resigned from the Meta board in disgust – Meta gather more data about their users than anyone else and the influence and insights it gives them into us is frightening).
For music streaming I recommend Deezer. For my broad tastes it has a much better catalogue than Spotify. Most often I use its random play from my library of 1,500 odd albums, but when I've used its ‘Flow’ feature its suggestions have usually been really good. I've found rarities such as a Charlie Parker 10" EP that my dad gave to me – he gave it to me because when I first heard it it made me cry and it had the same effect on Don Weller when I played it to him (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Weller_%28musician%29?wprov=sfla1 he was one of Britain's greatest jazz tenor saxophonists) – and a Claude Bolling big band recording of Django Reinhard his that was a present from the French family I stayed with on a school exchange visit! When Deezer were looking to sell I had some real problems with it and looked into alternatives, but of the first four albums I searched for, I couldn't find three on any other service (two were by Depeche Mode and one by Focus, so it's not as if they were obscure)!
I hope you find those recommendations useful. Thank you for your thoughtful and interesting pieces.
I just don't get it . Don't most of you have 1000's upon 1000 of things to listen or watch or Look at by now ? WHY oh WHY do you have to participate in any of it ? Doesn't most everyone have Thousands upon Thousand's of pictures stored somewhere ,videos, You tube, on & on & on forever. That I'll bet most of you never look at.
I had a relative way back when, before digital who took enough photos to bankrupt them many times over. Who in HELL ever looked at ANY of them ? Nowadays it is just multiplied to the Googleplex ! Nothing new. nothing different. With endless "content" being stored in useless Data centers - wasting electricity - wasting million year old water going over dams to power & store it all. So you - consumer- can STREAM stuff. Wow - what progress
Some of us like new things. Yes, I can watch the same old things I watched in my college days for the 12th time... But once in a while, someone draws a NEW cartoon. And at least in animation, and video games, we're living in a golden age where the media's never been better. Don't get me wrong - not much of it - but I appreciate the steady trickle of creativity over the years.
Really - I'd love to see something "New". Or hear something "New" not happening too often. It's more of - say the same Old things & play the same 12 notes.
Yes, it's quite a cynical way to see things but really - when have you heard or seen something truly original ?
I hear, see, and read what is both new and truly original all the time. If you think there's nothing new under the sun, it's probably because you are stuck relying on a proverb [nihil novi sub sole] that's thousands of years old to understand the world.
Or it could be you are stuck looking in the land of the dead for fresh ideas, since you won't find many in the US or Europe these days where the culture has been in the terminal stage of its life cycle for quite some time, as was understood well by many in the past who understood its impending fate, like Spengler.
It will be an especially rough search for the new and original if one is only able to speak, listen, read, and understand English.
That originality is a quality hard to find and always has been hard to find does not mean it cannot be found, however difficult it is to do so and see it for yourself. Drops of water are invisible, but nonetheless form the sea.
Originality has always tended to fall into two broad camps. First - the arbitrary. "This cryptographic hash is totally unique! It's scarcity must mean it's worth something!" But of course, there are an infinite number of random numbers to choose from, so, no, your procedurally generated terrible ape drawing is not in fact "unique." This is the deceptive originality many in the arts laude because it's easy to hype any pet project for extrinsic motives if you point to the "uniqueness" of a series of essentially arbitrary decisions - whether it's noise art, or installations of pickled teddybears on a bedding of bubblegum tinfoil. If you want more than 12 tones, go grab your microtonal music, or that stuff based on trinary octaves.
Actual originality admits that "All of philosophy is a footnote to Plato." Actual originality is a slow, thankless trickle of contributions over the century little appreciated in their own time. We have the benefit of having two Millenia of the Western Canon packed into your average library. Those who grow up with it are continuously stunned to silence with it's brilliance - until everything in our own times begins to seem like "footnote." Proust would have it that in general, high culture has always been a series of self-important salons where no one could remember more than a couple witty things to have been uttered over decades of company - and things are not much different today. Don't be among those who "little appreciate" the contributions of your own time unless it's to have sympathy for those who, in the past, couldn't tell the wheat from the chafe. The problem has always been to identify who were the predecessors and influencers of the great originalists of the past - and to appreciate the refinements made by creative people working today.
Sorry , but that is a bit funny to me - "Refinements". Not meaning to insult in any way - but for me - it's all been said before, already. And 99.9998 seems to be just that ... "Refinements".
But that isn't to say there isn't very rarely someone new, interesting & original. It is just SO hard to break through the Internet Hurricane Wind machine of Mediocrity & repeating everything
This is why MTV should convert from showing videos to showing recorded concerts/performances of all types of music, from Jazz to classical to whatever is modern.
I know there is a strong market for a channel like this. I wish someone with deep pockets would take the time to put it together.
Unfortunately, I had my record and CD collection stolen (some 1,500 recordings) so streaming is the only way I can listen to that music. I was heartbroken when I lost it all, not least because it should have been part of my legacy to my son. Music is my one abiding passion – I am a musician myself. And I don't take a lot of pictures either. When I do it's usually to share with someone (eg when the cherry blossom blooms outside my front door). I quite agree that we never really look at them, so I periodically delete the ones I don't need.
Man that must hurt, losing your personal collection. I was lucky enough to keep mine through the years, and digitized my own CDs into mp3s back when laptops had CD readers. Been growing it since then, it's quite fun sometimes to put a 2000+ album collection in full shuffle.
Everyone should digitize their music and photo collections to protect against theft, earthquake, fire, flood, tsunami, etc.
I agree, but I didn't have that option (and it would have taken a long time!). My collection was stolen in ’93 when hard discs and memory were still pretty pricey.
Million year old water? Hardly. There's no fresh water being dammed anywhere on the planet that remotely approaches being near that old. It either flows downstream until it reaches a salt-water body or evaporates as vapor and falls afresh somewhere else. Even in deep freshwater lakes convection creates enough circulation that eventually every single molecule will evaporate from the surface as fresher water flows into the lake. Even the oldest glaciers everywhere outside of Antartica, which has no dams anywhere restricting the flow of glacier melt to the oceans on that continent's coastline, have formed in only the past 100,000 years or so. Those are located in Greenland and, to the best of my knowledge, are also not restricted by any dams downstream from where they melt.
One can argue the merits and demerits of damming rivers and streams, but somehow disturbing "million year old water" is not one of them.
Oh my - I'm So grateful you set the "facts" straight
I was going to say it that way but I got into trouble by saying it was even a "Million" years old. Shouldv'e just said Ancient
All water on Earth is mostly BILLIONS of years old, continuously recycled from when it was originally deposited by meteors and comets.
The only new water comes, again, from what is brought to the Earth from space via comets and meteors.
True enough. Those server farms are anything but green, yet there is this preaching going on. Hmmm...
True Dat
This is all a good point. We think all this digital storage and things we can do is free,and somehow 'non physical',it's of the air,it's up in the clouds,no trees are getting cut down. Yet as you say all our use is putting immense strain on electricity production that is physical at source. But like most people I mostly don't think about it. I'm trying to get all my important photographs printed off in photo books and I'm getting on well with that. I'm buying actual books. I'm even sometimes posting paper letters. (Googlespy hasnt read whats in them). I even sometimes leave my phone at home when I go out, especially if it's local as I know the bus times etc.
Signal is doubtfully any more private than Whatsapp, considering it was CIA funded via NED with the purpose being to help foment dissent across the globe in countries the US doesn't like and destabilise them. The CIA is not a trustworthy actor when it comes to your privacy, or really anything else.
https://english.almayadeen.net/articles/analysis/signal-facing-collapse-after-cia-cuts-funding
Far from being a trivial matter, when people recommend apps like it as private, it can result in people losing their lives and freedom when those who actually need privacy most think they have it and don't. Unfortunately, privacy has become a brand and mostly the luxury concern of those who don't need it (if still obviously deserve it) and aren't speaking from experience of evading state persecution or LEOs to know what actually holds up.
The only communication you can trust to be private is face-to-face without microphones and cameras listening (meaning no phones, smart TVs, or anything like that nearby), or if on the Internet communicated through PGP encryption and sent through a VPN (or two) and TOR. Note that not one of these technologies can help on its own, because PGP isn't sufficient by itself, VPNs can and do give user data to governments and law enforcement, and TOR is known to have honeypot onion nodes setup by FBI and CIA and has had DoD ties from the start.
Old fashioned 'snail mail' letters,and yes,in person conversations with no phones present.
Thank you for the info, I want aware of that. But I wasn't claiming Signal was any more private, only that they don't collect as much data.
Sorry, wasn't aware.
Another tactic: randomly surf web pages you have no interest in. I started doing this and Amazon and all the rest have no clue what I’m actually interested in.
It seems suitably pranksterish and I approve in principle, but who has time to send Google on a wild-goose chase? The algo has almost infinite time, while our time as mortals is limited.
I think there are browser plugins that will do it for you. (If not, I should write one.)
How I did it was a little more unintentional: I used to play this game to help me fall asleep where I would pick two subjects on Pinterest and navigate from one to the other, just by clicking: like, randomly, going from Pinterest posts about medieval castles to pictures of ‘66 Mustangs.
And I started to get the strangest recommendations from Amazon, like DJ’ing equipment and 50-lb bags of grub worms.
That doesn't sound very efficient... why not install a content blocker to remove their ads and trackers?
This goes deeper. It throws off all the recommendation algorithms in Facebook, Amazon, etc. They start to have no clue what you are actually interested in, and it’s fun to get bizarre recommendations for random things like beekeeping equipment.
From the likes I should go ahead and write a Chrome plug-in. It would be fun if all the people who have it installed surf the same random websites so that the Internet thinks there’s a trend, like a sudden interest in 14th Century arrow fletching techniques.
DuckDuckGo is apparently repackaged Bing.
That may be so, but I’ve found the results entirely satisfactory and spam-free
I second that. They don't keep your search data either.
I believe so, but the additional layer strips out a lot of the cookies that (literally) feed the algorithm.
I prefer Brave search (on Brave’s browser) and Luxxle. When searching using Google (I refuse to verb that noun), the same results come up over and over again on each page with different ads. On the other two, I get real results.
Time consuming
Stopped using the word “google” years ago, hearing someone say they will “google” something is annoying. Say internet search, not that
Kagi's just repackaged Google; also, vastly better than Google. Google can do excellent search, you just have to filter out the sponsors and botshit.
Bad citizen? I think not! Minding your own business, not others', breeds civility!
Right; avoid Google, set up DuckDuckGo as your search engine; that's what I did many years ago. Use Opera browser with a good, built-in ad blocker and exquisite features to organize your searches and finds.
I stream podcasts on Spotify, but consistently ignore any suggestions from the software. All recommendations come from trustworthy sources (like The Guardian's "Hear Here"), or own searches, trials and errors.
We don't need to be slaves of the "algorithms."
If you want to support the good guys, check out Kagi.com -- you get total privacy, no ad model, none of that, plus you can block, demote or promote sites as you please. They also have a Lens feature that limits searches to specific sites. Not having to wade through a sea of SEO garbage is so liberating. It's not a massive search engine right now, but it has reputable people singing its praises (Stephen Wolfram is on the board).
More info here: https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-features
DuckDuckGo is not safe or secure, and it is not private. There is no good search engine. For privacy, Startpage and MetaGer are better alternatives than DuckDuckGo. But the Internet is not private and you should always act with that in mind. You would need to go to extreme measures to prevent state actors and advertisers from tracking and surveilling you, not to mention law enforcement if that ever were to become relevant.
It censors search results for political and other reasons, essentially because they just don't like them and want to play at being the Ministry of Truth and control what information you see the same way Google does, considering there's nothing illegal about displaying you results from independent media websites they don't like, Russian websites, or torrent websites.
Microsoft trackers are not blocked by them since they have an agreement with them, and why trust anyone who makes agreements with a company that sells surveillance and AI tech to tinpot dictators across the globe with your privacy? Little bit of conflict of interest, there.
DuckDuckGo is also based in the US. This should be all the reason you need to know not to trust them with your privacy, really, considering what Snowden and Assange revealed to us (the latter with Wikileaks' Spy Files on the global mass surveillance industry that predated Snowden's leaks). NSA will have a direct line to them intercepting all the data and can request whatever info they want from US companies on users (i.e., all they have usually)—secretly—while companies have no legal authority to refuse. All information they've got through it on you will be permanently stored by the US government, then shared with the entire Five Eyes Network.
What about qwant? It's based in France, I think. Well, the EU can't really be your savior.
I don’t think that makes you a bad citizen at all!
People are moving away from search engines of any flavor and turning to AI. The WSJ did a story on this a couple of days back:
The Great AI Challenge: We Test Five Top Bots on Useful, Everyday Skills
May 25, 2024 5:30 am ET
https://www.wsj.com/tech/personal-tech/ai-chatbots-chatgpt-gemini-copilot-perplexity-claude-f9e40d26
I only use Google for a quick search on spelling or a quick fact check. I RARELY open any hits as Google generally lists the info I am looking for at the top of their hits, so I am unsure how the companies on the hit list make money any longer.
Generally, I use Perplexity.ai when searching for detailed info.
I’ve been using Duck duck Go for more than 3 years and have no issues having ads on my email or any other nonsense . We opted out of Spotify by not being a paid/ premium and outside of the inconvenience of not being able to play my playlist / album in the exact order , I’m good
Actually, the solution is... don't use any of it. You are being duped.
So you come online to tell us not to go online. How does this "not using any of it" work exactly? I mean, I remember the days before Internet, but I'd quite like to keep my search engines and email thanks very much.
Lycos still works
OH MAN ... there you Go !
"We value your privacy." Who hasn't seen this all over internet? Well, it turns out this Orwellian statement is partly true, because sites ARE making money off your privacy. Once an algorithm gets hold of you, it's the gift that keeps on giving.
Yep. Translation: "your private information is valuable to us."
One database holds device ids and locations, another has device ids and search history, another has usernames and device ids, and on and on... and I'm sure there are multiple companies aggregating it all.
Absolutely, and Meta are one of the worst.
I have to assume you're familiar with Cory Doctorow's term "enshittification" and his thinking around it. Quite in line with what you're saying. Personally, I feel like humans are driven by addiction, and the worst addiction of all, the one that's destroying all life on the planet, is the addiction to profit.
The other side of the coin is hardly anybody wants to pay for the services provided by Google and others.
Look up Ed Zitron. https://www.wheresyoured.at/introducing-better-offline/
That looked interesting...until I tried to listen to it 'Please disable any ad trackers...'. Maybe not. (Using Duckduckgo)
Whatever the “wisdom of crowds” ever was, it has long since been polluted by pervasive commercial greed. It will be further polluted increasingly by algorithmic idiocy (AI).
Welcome to the return of knowledgeable experts, edited books, libraries full of physical codices, encyclopedias, and rational discourse — or at least the tools for rational discussion. Digital “utopia” can be no more practical or likely than any utopia of the past.
Man’s pursuit of perfection — in the absence of deep humility — always suffers the doom of dystopia. None of this is new.
Thank you for shining a bright honest light on it — again. Please keep up the great work.
I have been researching recommendation algorithms since the 90s and could not agree more with the sentiments here. These companies (who will swear up and down that they care about "user experience") could do a lot better and they are choosing not to. What surprises me is that they somehow think users won't notice? Or do they think that we have so little choice now that we'll stick with crappy systems because that's all there is? On Spotify, I listen only to albums or playlists that I've created and I've turned off autoplay (just go to "Settings") so that when the album is over, I'm not subjected to whatever it wants to push at me. I think it will be interesting to see the outcome of Ethan Zuckerman's lawsuit against Meta. He argues that sections of the Communications Decency Act should entitle users to create their own interfaces to systems like Facebook with alternate third-party front ends. https://knightcolumbia.org/cases/zuckerman-v-meta-platforms-inc
I think it comes down to a philosophy prevalent in Silicon Valley, now especially prevalent among proponents of AI, that computers can know what we want better than we can and be made fundamentally better than we are at everything. This is considered more of a truth than a belief, despite being obviously the latter, since it's not based on any kind of evidence or science of any sort, and is more like some kind of primitive religious cult that has emerged naturally in the absence of other beliefs or spirituality without being understood as such by its believers, or noticed by outsiders.
Technologist, early proponent of the Internet, and father of VR Jaron Lanier gives a good introduction to this type of attitude prevalent in Silicon Valley in his book "You Are Not a Gadget."
The spellchecker is a primitive, early example that stemmed from this belief. At first, it would give helpful suggestions, and then many word processors started to not only check spellings, but automatically *correct* them. Microsoft Word still did the last time I used it by default, which was a long time ago (switched to LibreOffice).
I see it all the time as a programmer. It's not so much that the people making these decisions don't think users will notice, or that they have no choice. Usually, those are not considerations to begin with, because they think they know better than users in the first place, both in general and in what they want.
They don't even think about how anyone will be harmed by anything, because disruption is a good thing and everyone else is the problem when technology harms them: users, humans altogether really, must adapt to technology rather than the other way around, because technology is in their belief system an inevitable march forward, and many of them think we will inevitably be replaced by machines altogether.
It is very hard to get through to anyone who is very insular in what beliefs they are exposed to and what company they keep, who think they know better than those who do not share their beliefs, and who think their beliefs are somehow scientific or evidence-based despite rarely being able to point to any science or evidence, since their beliefs in the machine might as well be ordained by God and are held with religious conviction by many who work with anything computer or IT in general.
Search window: "i'm feeling depressed"
A.I Overview: "There are many things you can try to deal with your depression. One Reddit user suggests jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge."
A mere single example of what happens when you let AI run the show.
As an artist and an art lover the algorithm is the bane of my existence. In the old days the art world had it's gatekeepers, they were high brow elite critics and curators who could be bought for a handsome sum, but they were still human and they still had a reputation to protect. The new gatekeeper is the algorithm which can be bought for a dime and has no soul or sense of what anybody wants, it operates entirely on data and a new form of payola, paid ads, boosted posts, etc.
I have pretty obscure and outsider tastes, the algorithm has no idea what to do with me so it just gives me more of the same.
According to the algorithms, I am apparently either a black female who is dissatisfied with her hair and skin care options, or I might be a Hindi (I think) human with an interest in celebrity culture.
My SWAG is that, if you don't fit neatly into a few boxes, the algorithm doesn't know what to do with you.
Not to be that guy, but I was far more worried about algorithms 5 years ago than I am now. Possibly the most powerful technology ever - untold data on and computing power for tracking and predicting human behaviour, threatening to enslave us by knowing us better than we know ourselves, and it just gets used to recommend Joe Rogan to everyone because that's the deal the streaming service struck and they need to sell those ads? God really does have a tremendous sense of humour.
Hi Ted.
I think you're blaming a symptom of a more fundamental issue, which is that advertising is the business model of the modern Internet. Scott Galloway calls the embrace of advertising "the original sin of the Internet," and I think he's right. The algorithms serve the business model, and because advertising on the Internet is both massive in scale and granular in precision, nobody has the same experience, commercial clicks driven by algorithmic matching become the goal, and bewildered users click more or settle for advertised options, driving massive amounts of money into a few companies' coffers — because scale and precision are expensive to manifest, so everything trends toward monopoly, something AI will on exacerbate.
It's the business model that's broken. The algorithms seem to me just a symptom of a much deeper rot.
There's an upside though: they mostly do that by the power of defaults. If you go into the depth of settings for each app that you adopt, and tailor it to your preferences, and remember to keep using according to your preferences instead of mashing the shiniest button like a monkey, it's mostly all there.
Not to sound like a freaking Google salesperson, but it's quite amazing how much high quality and hugely varied live music can be found on youtube - and how much quality improves when you click to add the "20minutes+" filter on your results.
You can see it as a non-monetary transaction both ways. They offer lots of content for free in exchange for a chance to mine your attention. But you can alternatively "pay" by paying attention to the settings.
what is this 20minutes+ filter, please? I googled that phrase (sorry, but I'm still using g o o g l e) and didn't get anything I could follow.
When you search for something on youtube, you can then further filter the results, and one of the options is to show only videos of at least 20 minutes. When you search for music, that tends to bring up whole performances rather than single pieces.
On the computer the actual word "Filters" appears; on the mobile app you have to click the three dots at the top right and select "Search filters".
Have you ever bought something after having seen it in an internet ad? Do you know anyone who has done so? The ad companies like Google and Meta get paid by the click or view, but I'm guessing that most of them are ignored by a human, blocked by an adblocker. seen by a machine or clicked by a bot.
Actually, yes, once or twice since Compuserve and Prodigy faded away. If you join enough hyper-specialized chat groups, the algos can eventually hit on something that you might actually want to purchase. But their hit rate is still abysmally low, at least for me.
Here’s one way to disenshittify Google search at least: https://udm14.com/
Thanks. This one seems promising. Giving it a test for a few days.
The particularly cruel aspect to all of this is that these services were actually extremely useful for several years. The helpful and easily accessible data they provided us in just about every situation almost instantaneously seemed like magic and lured us into believing things would only get much much better over time. As an example now that I've become addicted and reliant upon Google Maps it's so painful to realize not only are they providing me directions primarily to serve paying clients whose places of business are now prominently superimposed over the maps but that I realize I'll probably have to go back to using real maps which are as cumbersome and out of date as they always used to be if they are even available any longer. And not only does Google provide me complete garbage as search results, I now realize that the functionality they provided is effectively no longer available. And it will only get much much worse from here.
Returned to paper maps four years ago. I fold them to sit on my lap driving, or fit in my tank bag (vintage motorcycle). Routing is more enjoyable, I'm more engaged, and life is better. I'll not go back. State DOTs are your friends, as are Rand MacNally and DeLorme.
I used to use Nokia maps when Nokia was a player, just for the novelty, but haven't looked up a replacement after the rather stern talking to the Nokia one gave me when I went over the speed limit by a few mph one time.
Paper maps, then using the sun and time of day, occasionally the North star at night then relying on general feel of which direction seems right to get me to where I need to be.
Same here; I was amazed to have a Tom Tom device on my dash in the '90's, used the iPhone maps to back up route sheets to the east coast on my touring bicycle, and then, like Alec Guinness' character at the close of "Bridge Over the River Kwai", came to: "What have I done?". Maps on laps now. People around me get just slightly hinky when I observe, re the mapping wonder grafted to their hand, that "I'd prefer not to".
For a real "how'd we get here" realization, pick up any merit badge booklet from the '50's, and marvel at what was routinely expected of 12-year-olds to accomplish by memory: Knots. Bicycle maintenance. Rough camping. Morse code. Civil behavior to the vulnerable.
Thanks for sharing.
That film reference is perfect. And the way he played it. You just believe he feels horror at his sudden realisation.
https://www.openstreetmap.org/
I've trained Spotify with my preferences to within an inch of its life. So I have good control over it. But I cannot let it roam any more the way I once could, wandering through its catalog using my history as a guide. It's got its own agenda now. When a former girlfriend, a talented musician and a sharp cookie, recommended Spotify to me years ago, it was a different era. Sad.
One part of the solution has to be returning the adaptive machine learning that shapes the algorithm to user control or at least user-based inferences. What's coming out now is more and more the company's preferences.
"Algorithm" never meant something to control others. It always meant a formalized instruction sequence, boiled down to its essence. When I taught programming to non-techies, we started with procedures for making PBJ sandwiches and changing light bulbs. We formalized them by breaking the steps down into their smallest parts and writing them in logical order. A recipe is an algorithm of sorts, for example.
An algorithm makes explicit and rigorous a lot of things we do intuitively, on the way to automating the procedure. The automation should be simplifying *your* life. What were getting is like a washing machine that refuses to wash your clothes, insists that you buy a new wardrobe, then does it only on its schedule and charges you for the privilege. It's not technology as a tool for human life.
It's very clear to me that I get recommendations for the most stereotypical reading of my basic demographic attributes (married White suburban mom with a bachelor's degree). I do not watch true crime, go to the gym, or shop exclusively at Target, but someone sure is convinced I do!
They're coming for you Ted. (https://rhollick.wordpress.com/2024/02/19/are-fake-books-stealing-royalties/)
I am a collection development librarian from Indianapolis, and I found my way to your substack after a Washington Post Book Club let me know that a book publisher named Leon Lanen is trying to sell me an eBook on "The Evolution of Jazz" written by "Frank Gioia" and "Ted Alkyer".
Find a book with two authors, swap the names, let AI generate some drivel, and sell it for five bucks.
Now I'm really, really starting to feel like Guy Montag, in a distant forest, wearing a raincoat and memorizing "my book". Used and indie bookstores are it for me for the past four years. At least HAL can't feed me twisted, maleficent info via a screen, or refuse to open the airlock. Thanks for this insight.
I just listened to the new Microsoft launch and the theme was: “The World as a prompt”. It really grossed me out.
"or create my own algorithmic rules"
THIS is what we absolutely should be able to do!
It would truly be progress