Robin Sloan:

The speed with which Twitter recedes in your mind will shock you. Like a demon from a folktale, the kind that only gains power when you invite it into your home, the platform melts like mist when that invitation is rescinded.

This is most certainly true.

Oliver Burkeman on the reality distorting effects of the attention economy:

As you surface from an hour inadvertently frittered away on Facebook, you’d be forgiven for assuming that the damage, in terms of wasted time, was limited to that single misspent hour. But you’d be wrong. Because the attention economy is designed to prioritize whatever’s most compelling - instead of whatever’s most true, or most useful - it systematically distorts the picture of the world we carry in our heads at all times. It influences our sense of what matters, what kinds of threats we face, how venal our political opponents are, and thousands of other things - and all of these distorted judgments then influence how we allocate our offline time as well. If social media convinces you, for example, that violent crime is a far bigger problem in your city than it really is, you might find yourself walking the streets with unwarranted fear, staying home instead of venturing out, and avoiding interactions with strangers - and voting for a demagogue with a tough-on-crime platform. If all you ever see of your ideological opponents online is their very worst behavior, you’re liable to assume that even family members who differ from your politically must be similarly, irredeemably bad, making relationships with them hard to maintain. So it’s not simply that our devices distract us from more important matters. It’s that they change how we’re defining “important matters” in the first place. In the words of philosopher Harry Frankfurt, the sabotage our capacity to “want what we want to want.”

Four Thousand Weeks p. 96-97

Dan Olson’s video “Line Goes Up - The Problem with NFTs” is an excellent critique of crypto generally and NFTs in particular. It is well worth its two-hour runtime. The crypto economy, he argues, is just replacing a bad system with a worse one. NFTs represent another step toward the financialization of everything.

What I really appreciate about the video, though, is the context in which he places the crypto phenomenon. The true believers, he says, are those who saw the enormous clusterfuck of the Great Recession and turned against the financial system - not in order to liberate people from the power of finance but in order to take Wall Street’s power for themselves. To “be the boot.” History feels like it is narrowing and the crypto evangelists intend to grab what they can while they can.

He concludes:

Our systems are breaking or broken, straining under neglect or sabotage, and our leaders seem, at best, complacent, willing to coast out the collapse. We need something better. But a system that turns everyone into petty digital landlords, that distills all interaction into transaction, that determines the value of something by how sellable it is and whether or not it can be gambled on as a fractional token sold by a micro-auction - that’s not it.

I’m on a sixteen day streak with Day One. I’ve never been able to maintain a daily journaling habit but Day One is helping me do that. I had never heard of it before I saw several people on Micro.Blog talking about it, so thanks y’all.

This is an excellent video on how Amazon can afford to offer free shipping to Prime members. Basically, it hides the cost of shipping by raising prices across the internet. And that, folks, is monopoly power.

From The Revenge of Analog by David Sax, on the story of digital progress:

Our world would be successively rendered into bits and bytes, one program at a time, until we reached a state of digital utopia, or the Terminators came for us.

The Revenge of Analog presents a different narrative, however. It shows that the progress of technological innovation isn’t a story of a slow match from good to better to best; it’s a series of trials that helps us understand who we are and how we operate.

This brings to mind an analogy to evolution by natural selection. It’s often misunderstood that evolution represents a sort of upward progress to perfection. The reality is that it is progress toward reproductive fitness, integrating whatever allows a species to propagate. An evolved species is not ideal in every way. Rather, in some ways it may be worse off than its earlier iterations. (See Breath by James Nestor for examples of how our evolutionary adaptations have actually devolved our breathing functions.)

Technology evolves, but its latest iteration may not be ideal in every way - may be worse in some important ways. This is where human judgement about the purposes of life and technology must engage, refusing to allow ourselves and our world to become slaves to our technology.

The IRS will require you to use ID.me to access your taxes online. Last year, ID.me was locking people out of their unemployment benefits due to facial recognition failures. I had to set up an ID.me account to opt out of the child tax credit advance payments and it was indeed a cumbersome, annoying process. What really bothered me, though, was giving so much critical information to a third party contractor.

A Russian farm has given its dairy cows virtual reality headsets in a bid to reduce their anxiety. All comparisons to Zuckerberg’s metaverse aspirations should be avoided in order to keep the herd calm.

“Amazon Prime is an economy distorting lie” by Matt Stoller. Really good explanation of how Prime actually raises prices across the internet - and why it’s a key part of the DC Attorney General’s antitrust case against Amazon.