a return to what i liked once

the feed, the notepad, the dramatized attention to small relational signals, and world signals. the notepad is thus now, a third space between complete silence and direct exposure.

youtube and instagram feel horrible right now. every 2nd video is around brand new AI skill just dropped. you should use this new open-harness. you should now do loop graph AI engineering. AI creators, AI developers, AI developer podcasters, all of them, in a row, forever. i work in this field. i may like this field. and still the feed has decided that this is the only thing i am, and it will not let go. how to up your resume-scores on ATS and flaggers. how to make a 3D model of your own face in 30 seconds.

not even alex o’connor, unsolicited philosophy, dota2 random lobbies with baumi, silly shoeonhead videos. none of the stuff that used to give organic me-feel turn up anymore. well, rick and morty appears sometimes lol.

i miss talks like this. evil is the motivation of conscious intent, when deceit, failure falls into some weird rationalism of your own, and you pretend like its right. that is the kind of sentence i used to get handed by accident, on a wednesday.

maybe i’m just so sad about my really good alienware laptop breaking down from some firmware instability, EC failures. i thought i was a superb engineer and i cant fix it myself. i got scammed in the repair store.

my neighbours crash mugs and scream against my bedroom wall. its like they’re fighting a bit too much that i should be worried. people in my home fight too. i doomscroll.

the phone is what you reach for when the room has something in it you cannot do anything about.

here is the part i only worked out recently, and it made me feel slightly less like the problem is me.

so. the feed is not choosing between an AI hype video and a video essay. it never had both to choose from.

a “new AI skill just dropped” video takes a day. maybe an afternoon. the thing it is about did not exist last week, so being first is the whole product. a proper video essay takes months. some of the people i actually want to watch publish five times a year. essays are structurally late, always, because research and filming and editing take the time they take.

so a system tuned for recent is not really ranking those two against each other. one shows up two hundred times a year and the other shows up five times. the slow thing loses before the algorithm has an opinion about me at all.

that reframed it. i had been reading my feed as a verdict on my taste. some of it is just cadence.

the other thing i read, which is less flattering to me:

people don’t really browse for essays. they go back to the same one. there’s a whole documented habit of the comfort video. not knowing what to watch, so returning to the thing you’ve already seen a thousand times.

i do this. i absolutely do this. i have rewatched the same two or three videos or creators more times than i have watched anything new this month, and i had been telling myself the feed took my curiosity away. some of it i handed over. shoutout to gorgc dota2.

some examples of what i keep going back to:

we need to talk about pseudo-profound bullshit

what can you ACTUALLY learn from video essays??

i love these kinds of vids a lot. oliSUNvia and Unsolicited Advice.

there is actual research on pseudo-profound bullshit. sentences built out of real words in a real grammatical shape that carry no content, and the finding is that people rate them as deep. which is uncomfortably close to what half my feed is doing now.

and then it turned into a different problem

i thought this note was going to be about consumption. what i’m fed, what i click, the shape of the slot machine.

but somewhere in the middle of writing it i noticed the actual thing bothering me is not that i’m watching badly. it’s that i stopped making anything. so, a detour that turned out not to be a detour.

in 2018 i was shameless. i wrote something like 300 notes on my xiaomi phone. the stock notepad app, the ugly one. i’d be on a bus and think something and write it down and feel inspired, genuinely, with no irony attached to the word.

i did not once wonder if it was good.

now even writing feels like… what if its cringe. what would people think?? bs??

i want to be precise about what changed, because “i got older” is not it and “social media bad” is not it either.

in 2018 the notepad had no audience at all. not a small audience. zero. it was a text file with a lock screen in front of it. the only reader was me in three weeks.

everything i could write into today has an audience, and worse, it has all of them at once.

this has a name, which i did not know until this week and which annoyed me slightly with how exactly it described me.

context collapse. Marwick and boyd, 2011. offline you are fluent at being slightly different people in different rooms. one way with your manager, another with your friend, another with your mother, and none of that is dishonesty, it’s just competence. online every one of those rooms is the same room. the audiences flatten into one.

and the documented response to that, the thing people actually do, is choose their words very carefully. or, they stop.

there’s a companion idea, the imagined audience. when you can’t see who’s reading, you invent who’s reading. and the invented one is never generous.

then i went and found the actual room

so i went looking for what people say about video essays.

i found a thread about (someone).

it is 7hundreds of comments of people taking someone else apart. these are reframed versions but the actual comments were so cruel.

obvious statements packaged with hot take branding — the algorithm thinks i’m stupid and it’s not wrong

23 year old who thinks they know everything is all you need to know about this

i go to a liberal arts college if i wanted to see these bozos i’d just go to class

16 to 26 year old ex or present tumblr girls with no differing opinions, talking about the same topics for 15 mins to an hour, hoping to outdo each other with everything they learned from english class, meme pages and video editing tutorials

it’s like eating a bowl of lucky charms with vodka redbull instead of milk and snorting a whole mess of coke while listening to a playlist of the most earwormy blink 182 songs

there are worse ones. i’m not going to paste those. the actual heck. people hate on self expression this easily. even if its not perfectly crafted.

what is actually going on in there

the price of the comment is not the price of the thing. someone spent months.

contempt is the cheapest available way to buy the appearance of discernment, and nobody can check whether you could have done better, because you didn’t do it.

recognising a genre feels like analysing a work. “16 to 26 year old ex-tumblr liberal peeps” is a description of a type. it is compressible, confident, and it scans as insight. but it says nothing about whether this particular video is any good. they are measuring who is speaking and reporting it as a verdict on what was said. a category error wearing the costume of an opinion.

it’s a bit, and the audience is each other. a person performed a small piece of creative expression in order to mock people for creative expression, and got seven upvotes for it. both funny and stupid af.

what’s being punished is not incompetence. it’s being unembarrassed. nobody in that thread is angry about a factual error. they’re angry that a young woman talked about something she cared about for forty minutes with her face on camera and did not apologise for it. the crime is earnestness, which is the exact thing i’ve spent this whole note mourning in myself.

the part i did not expect

i had been reading that thread the way you read a verdict.

then i actually counted.

the top comment is hostile. so are the second and third. but sitting right behind them, with the same order of numbers:

169 upvotes: they’re all about stuff that people here would agree with if it was presented by someone they liked.

156: lol i actually liked that video.

113: you’re forgetting contrarianism is more popular in this sub than consistency.

it is for midwits who think others are midwits but wouldn’t say it because they will be perceived as midwits.

read that again. the room diagnosed its own bias, out loud, at volume, and kept going anyway.

the sample from the loudest bully in the room is not the true audience. most of them have become like me, they stopped writing and making.

and here is where the two halves of this note turn out to be the same half.

the feed showed me AI hype two hundred times and video essays twice, and i read that as this is what you are now. the thread showed me its six meanest comments first, and i read that as this is what people do to you if you speak.

both times i took the loudest available sample and promoted it to a population.

the imagined audience isn’t only harsher than the real one. it’s assembled entirely out of the worst available sample. that’s the actual mechanism. not cowardice. sampling.

i want to be fair, because the thread does contain a real argument.

somebody wrote that it’s about structure rather than content, that ‘packaging critical theory as bingeable background content’ reproduces the exact self-obsession the video is criticising, sponsor segment and all. that’s a serious point, made by someone who admitted they consume plenty of it themselves.

another said two minutes of information gets stretched to thirty. that’s a real complaint about pacing and it is often true.

genuinely fine. a form can develop tics. “everything you learned from english class, meme pages and video editing tutorials” is a mean sentence, but it is describing something that exists.

a description of a trope is not an evaluation of a work. noticing the pattern is where criticism starts. in that thread it’s where criticism stops, and the noticing gets to wear the costume of the judgement.

and more than that, a trope does not retire a passion.

there being a recognisable genre of young people earnestly working through philosophy on camera does not make any one instance of it worthless, or fake, or unfelt. the pattern existing says nothing about whether someone meant it. tropes don’t erase value. tropes don’t erase existence.

everything anyone has ever loved is, from far enough away, a genre with an obvious shape.

so maybe the notepad comes back, but as a third space. not complete silence, not direct exposure. somewhere in between.

let the good stuff happen there first, and only carry out what survives the walk.

the other half is that the crowd i’ve been hiding from is a crowd i assembled myself. and then swore in as a jury. the actual room was arguing.

what i want back is not less technology. i work in it, i dont know if i like it, i’m going to keep liking it.

so: i want the accidents back.

the only reliable way to get accidents is for somebody to make something without checking first whether it’s allowed.

which means somebody has to be the 20 somthn year old who talks for forty minutes about something obvious.

i don’t have a fix. i turned some notifications off. i’m writing this instead of scrolling, which is at least a different verb.

i still have that phone in a drawer somewhere. i should go and look.