Easy to Talk, Hard to Listen
December 21, 2022 8:19 AM Subscribe
The Great Delusion Behind Twitter. "It is a failure of imagination to think that our choice is the social media platforms we have now or nothing. I keep thinking about something that Robin Sloan, a novelist and former Twitter employee, wrote this year: “There are so many ways people might relate to one another online, so many ways exchange and conviviality might be organized. Look at these screens, this wash of pixels, the liquid potential! What a colossal bummer that Twitter eked out a local maximum, that its network effect still (!) consumes the fuel for other possibilities, other explorations.”"
"We do not make our best decisions, as individuals or as a collective, when our minds are most active and fretful. And yet “active and fretful” is about as precise a description as I can imagine of the Twitter mind. And having put us in an active, fretful mental state, Twitter then encourages us to fire off declarative statements on the most divisive possible issues, always with one eye to how quickly they will rack up likes and retweets and thus viral power. It’s insane."
--
"Permit me a weird turn here. I became interested this year in how Quakers deliberate. As a movement, Quakers have been far ahead of the moral curve time and again — early to abolitionism, to equality between the sexes, to prison reform, to pressuring governments to help save Jews from the Holocaust. That is not to say Quakers have gotten nothing wrong, but what has led them to get so much right?
The answer suggested by Rex Ambler’s lovely book “The Quaker Way” is silence. In a typical Quaker meeting, Ambler writes, community members “sit in silence together for an hour or so, standing up to speak only if they are led to do so, and then only to share some insight which they sense will be of value to others.” If they must decide an issue collectively, “they will wait in silence together, again, to discern what has to be done.” There is much that debate can offer but much that it can obscure. “To get a clear sense of what is happening in our lives, we Quakers try to go deeper,” he writes. “We have to let go our active and fretful minds in order to do this. We go quiet and let a deeper, more sensitive awareness arise.”"
"We do not make our best decisions, as individuals or as a collective, when our minds are most active and fretful. And yet “active and fretful” is about as precise a description as I can imagine of the Twitter mind. And having put us in an active, fretful mental state, Twitter then encourages us to fire off declarative statements on the most divisive possible issues, always with one eye to how quickly they will rack up likes and retweets and thus viral power. It’s insane."
--
"Permit me a weird turn here. I became interested this year in how Quakers deliberate. As a movement, Quakers have been far ahead of the moral curve time and again — early to abolitionism, to equality between the sexes, to prison reform, to pressuring governments to help save Jews from the Holocaust. That is not to say Quakers have gotten nothing wrong, but what has led them to get so much right?
The answer suggested by Rex Ambler’s lovely book “The Quaker Way” is silence. In a typical Quaker meeting, Ambler writes, community members “sit in silence together for an hour or so, standing up to speak only if they are led to do so, and then only to share some insight which they sense will be of value to others.” If they must decide an issue collectively, “they will wait in silence together, again, to discern what has to be done.” There is much that debate can offer but much that it can obscure. “To get a clear sense of what is happening in our lives, we Quakers try to go deeper,” he writes. “We have to let go our active and fretful minds in order to do this. We go quiet and let a deeper, more sensitive awareness arise.”"
Robin Sloan's books are excellent: _Mr. Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore_ and _Sourdough, or Lois and her adventures in the Underground Market_.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 8:43 AM on December 21, 2022 [4 favorites]
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 8:43 AM on December 21, 2022 [4 favorites]
Silence doesn't work online because if you're not posting or talking, nobody knows you're there, and if you are there, whether you're paying attention or are actually in another browser window. That's why people who don't post get called "lurkers". It's not hard to put together a Zoom call where almost nobody is speaking, but it's not exactly social. It's sitting in front of a computer screen staring up a bunch of people's glum nostrils.
If a social space online somehow manages to fix this, it would be a genuine innovation.
posted by BungaDunga at 8:46 AM on December 21, 2022 [17 favorites]
If a social space online somehow manages to fix this, it would be a genuine innovation.
posted by BungaDunga at 8:46 AM on December 21, 2022 [17 favorites]
BungaDunga, I have given this about 30 seconds of thought, but the image that pops into my head is a little green dot for each person, with their name and a status - something like:
12K+ silently contemplating this question
° kristi is present and contemplating
° BungaDunga is present and contemplating
° Rex Ambler is away and contemplating
° entropone is present and contemplating
You could click a button to refresh your "contemplating" status to just renew your presence.
Again, just a very rough idea, but I think being present online together in a pleasant way is possible.
(The question of how present one is remains, but I often contemplate AskMes and MetaTalks even when I'm away from my computer, so ongoing contemplation is surely part of the deal.)
posted by kristi at 8:57 AM on December 21, 2022 [23 favorites]
12K+ silently contemplating this question
° kristi is present and contemplating
° BungaDunga is present and contemplating
° Rex Ambler is away and contemplating
° entropone is present and contemplating
You could click a button to refresh your "contemplating" status to just renew your presence.
Again, just a very rough idea, but I think being present online together in a pleasant way is possible.
(The question of how present one is remains, but I often contemplate AskMes and MetaTalks even when I'm away from my computer, so ongoing contemplation is surely part of the deal.)
posted by kristi at 8:57 AM on December 21, 2022 [23 favorites]
If a social space online somehow manages to fix this, it would be a genuine innovation.
A timer so it only allows one reply (from anybody) every X seconds -- if you have something important to say, you need to wait for your time to come. If someone has text in the comment box, the website says "fifteen people are waiting to reply".
Hopefully, theoretically, if someone has garbage to say they're not going to wait for their turn, they're going to give up or rethink what they're going to say.
But, I mean, social media is built around the deluge, fast, value-free replies are what they're built on. Discourse is not in their plan. Or, the garbage-slingers are going to build bots to game the waiting period, like auction sniping on eBay.
posted by AzraelBrown at 8:59 AM on December 21, 2022 [9 favorites]
A timer so it only allows one reply (from anybody) every X seconds -- if you have something important to say, you need to wait for your time to come. If someone has text in the comment box, the website says "fifteen people are waiting to reply".
Hopefully, theoretically, if someone has garbage to say they're not going to wait for their turn, they're going to give up or rethink what they're going to say.
But, I mean, social media is built around the deluge, fast, value-free replies are what they're built on. Discourse is not in their plan. Or, the garbage-slingers are going to build bots to game the waiting period, like auction sniping on eBay.
posted by AzraelBrown at 8:59 AM on December 21, 2022 [9 favorites]
How do you pay cat tax on this thing?
posted by Artw at 9:01 AM on December 21, 2022 [5 favorites]
posted by Artw at 9:01 AM on December 21, 2022 [5 favorites]
I mean, talking more than we listen has been a human shortcoming for as long as there's been humans around to be deficient at it. That isn't a trait that technology alone will ever be able to solve.
posted by Greg_Ace at 9:01 AM on December 21, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by Greg_Ace at 9:01 AM on December 21, 2022 [1 favorite]
what's Twitter?
posted by philip-random at 9:11 AM on December 21, 2022 [5 favorites]
posted by philip-random at 9:11 AM on December 21, 2022 [5 favorites]
°°°°° flabdablet is contemplating
posted by flabdablet at 9:17 AM on December 21, 2022 [35 favorites]
posted by flabdablet at 9:17 AM on December 21, 2022 [35 favorites]
I've done co-working, co-presence meetings that are camera-off Zoom meetings, silent except for greetings at the start and an occasional question.
I like the "contemplating" direction this is going in. I could get along with something that just reminds me that people are there. Living alone with a couple of cats in latter days, I think that reminder really helps.
A bit like chat away messages, I guess?
posted by humbug at 9:20 AM on December 21, 2022 [4 favorites]
I like the "contemplating" direction this is going in. I could get along with something that just reminds me that people are there. Living alone with a couple of cats in latter days, I think that reminder really helps.
A bit like chat away messages, I guess?
posted by humbug at 9:20 AM on December 21, 2022 [4 favorites]
MetaFilter: staring up a bunch of people's glum nostrils.
posted by loquacious at 9:20 AM on December 21, 2022 [4 favorites]
posted by loquacious at 9:20 AM on December 21, 2022 [4 favorites]
°°°°° flabdablet is contemplating
posted by flabdablet at 9:21 AM on December 21, 2022 [22 favorites]
posted by flabdablet at 9:21 AM on December 21, 2022 [22 favorites]
°°°°° flabdablet is contemplating
posted by flabdablet at 9:22 AM on December 21, 2022 [28 favorites]
posted by flabdablet at 9:22 AM on December 21, 2022 [28 favorites]
posted by flabdablet at 9:23 AM on December 21, 2022 [26 favorites]
If a social space online somehow manages to fix this, it would be a genuine innovation.
No, this is a Zoom disease. People share space with auditory cues, but these cues are removed by conferencing software.
Zoom, and other video services, actively throttles music in favor of voices.
It also actively throttles voices who are non hosts, in favor of hosts. It s very authoritarian and non Quakery in that way.
Just sharing "silence" means that you are sharing an auditory environment.current software absolutely squelches this sharing, but it could be changed more easily than most think---it takes a lot of programming to make videoconferencing emphasize the main speaker the way it does
posted by eustatic at 9:25 AM on December 21, 2022 [13 favorites]
No, this is a Zoom disease. People share space with auditory cues, but these cues are removed by conferencing software.
Zoom, and other video services, actively throttles music in favor of voices.
It also actively throttles voices who are non hosts, in favor of hosts. It s very authoritarian and non Quakery in that way.
Just sharing "silence" means that you are sharing an auditory environment.current software absolutely squelches this sharing, but it could be changed more easily than most think---it takes a lot of programming to make videoconferencing emphasize the main speaker the way it does
posted by eustatic at 9:25 AM on December 21, 2022 [13 favorites]
I could see a platform where there are various topics and a users could 'Contemplate' a limited number at a time (3?). They can only comment after they've complicated for at least 24 hours and read at least a dozen other randomly selected other comments? If their comment is a cut/paste of another comment it gets rejected.
Or maybe the character limit of your response is based on the length of time you've contemplated? 5 minutes gets you 2 characters. A day gets you 280. A week gets you 3000?
posted by Garm at 9:27 AM on December 21, 2022
Or maybe the character limit of your response is based on the length of time you've contemplated? 5 minutes gets you 2 characters. A day gets you 280. A week gets you 3000?
posted by Garm at 9:27 AM on December 21, 2022
i come from a tradition where silence is probably the most valued tool.
groups of us (internationally distributed) have sat on a zoom call quietly, until as noted, something that *needs* to be said comes up. it's not sociable in the popular sense; it's not meant to be.
seems to me, we could reflect for just a little bit (15 minutes??) to type a response to something we (supposedly) care about.
might reduce snark and argument and trolling if there were an enforced latency.
western culture intentionally disfavors something like this. It likes it's engagement heated, and now.
nice post, ty. off tortfa find a non-paywalled link.
posted by j_curiouser at 9:27 AM on December 21, 2022 [7 favorites]
groups of us (internationally distributed) have sat on a zoom call quietly, until as noted, something that *needs* to be said comes up. it's not sociable in the popular sense; it's not meant to be.
seems to me, we could reflect for just a little bit (15 minutes??) to type a response to something we (supposedly) care about.
might reduce snark and argument and trolling if there were an enforced latency.
western culture intentionally disfavors something like this. It likes it's engagement heated, and now.
nice post, ty. off to
posted by j_curiouser at 9:27 AM on December 21, 2022 [7 favorites]
In a way I think this is not so much a platform hack as a reflection of the performance nature of social media and its intrinsic weaknesses as a place for serious debate.
This occurred to me because I was in a meeting last week for a pretty serious volunteer project where we really do need to do what we say we'll do, and where everyone there is there because they concretely want to Do The Thing. I've been in a lot of volunteer project meetings over the years, and this was among the most focused and careful, and it was because the seriousness of the project was such that the kind of individually expressive politics that were a big part of a lot of my activist stuff in the nineties have fallen away. That is, people were doing better because the stakes were higher and they wanted the outcome more. When I was younger and doing lighter, artier stuff, we frivoled a lot more because a big part of the project for us was individual expression ("being cool", if memory serves).
My point being that the purpose of twitter (and mass social media) is primarily expressive - to create a public personality/brand and get attention for it. There are definitely people who want to get this public personality in order to achieve other things, but you get your audience through this expressive individual performance. There's no real way to hack that with timers, etc.
If you had a very small circle of people using twitter in order to achieve a concrete goal that they all wanted, they would be more contemplative and less expressive - twitter would be a horrible medium for this for other reasons (consider how signal threads are hard to use) but the seriousness would be there.
posted by Frowner at 9:33 AM on December 21, 2022 [11 favorites]
This occurred to me because I was in a meeting last week for a pretty serious volunteer project where we really do need to do what we say we'll do, and where everyone there is there because they concretely want to Do The Thing. I've been in a lot of volunteer project meetings over the years, and this was among the most focused and careful, and it was because the seriousness of the project was such that the kind of individually expressive politics that were a big part of a lot of my activist stuff in the nineties have fallen away. That is, people were doing better because the stakes were higher and they wanted the outcome more. When I was younger and doing lighter, artier stuff, we frivoled a lot more because a big part of the project for us was individual expression ("being cool", if memory serves).
My point being that the purpose of twitter (and mass social media) is primarily expressive - to create a public personality/brand and get attention for it. There are definitely people who want to get this public personality in order to achieve other things, but you get your audience through this expressive individual performance. There's no real way to hack that with timers, etc.
If you had a very small circle of people using twitter in order to achieve a concrete goal that they all wanted, they would be more contemplative and less expressive - twitter would be a horrible medium for this for other reasons (consider how signal threads are hard to use) but the seriousness would be there.
posted by Frowner at 9:33 AM on December 21, 2022 [11 favorites]
Just out in general in the wilderness of web, many are like lost children, often waiting to be heard as individuals, for the first time. Basically it's a Junior High School, dance, but run by the most profane, sordid, predatory interests on earth. There is no way to do it right. Metafilter is solid, hard working best of the web. Be the kind of folks you want to see.
My grandfather, a Dyar, told personal stories from the life of Mary Dyer, a Quaker, and the first woman to be hanged in the colonies. She was hanged for preaching Quakerism in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. However, the Quaker traditions were lost in that family, but highly respected by me.
posted by Oyéah at 9:35 AM on December 21, 2022 [6 favorites]
My grandfather, a Dyar, told personal stories from the life of Mary Dyer, a Quaker, and the first woman to be hanged in the colonies. She was hanged for preaching Quakerism in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. However, the Quaker traditions were lost in that family, but highly respected by me.
posted by Oyéah at 9:35 AM on December 21, 2022 [6 favorites]
What if it turns out that Zombo.com was the best platform for social media all along? Anything is possible at Zombocom.
posted by rikschell at 9:39 AM on December 21, 2022 [22 favorites]
posted by rikschell at 9:39 AM on December 21, 2022 [22 favorites]
I mean, talking more than we listen has been a human shortcoming for as long as there's been humans around to be deficient at it. That isn't a trait that technology alone will ever be able to solve.
Sure, but we have been fixing these problems culturally forever, and just need software engineers who understand and respect these different cultures and subcultures , and design online experiences accordingly.
If you never got a chance to witness the funeral procession for assassinated victims of the School of the Americas, I don't envy you. But it was regularly a procession of thousands of people in silence. Followed by the chanting of "Presente". It was an amazingly powerful silence of thousands.
I suspect we could look to Quakers, as well as many other religious cultural practices, for ideas on how to live in mass communion with multitudes, as this is kind of a basic function of religions.
The internet can be a firehose, and the zone is flooded with shit, as a bunch of the capitalists are driving us into fascism. But it can be organized along other lines. I do think metafilter is a great example of such.
I suspect audio quality can do a lot for sharing synchronous spaces online; there are many other ways for non synchronous text communication, as the article says.
I keep posting this video series on non-defensive communication I. Different metafilter threads, but I also feel it pertains here.
Anyway, great article.
posted by eustatic at 9:41 AM on December 21, 2022 [11 favorites]
Sure, but we have been fixing these problems culturally forever, and just need software engineers who understand and respect these different cultures and subcultures , and design online experiences accordingly.
If you never got a chance to witness the funeral procession for assassinated victims of the School of the Americas, I don't envy you. But it was regularly a procession of thousands of people in silence. Followed by the chanting of "Presente". It was an amazingly powerful silence of thousands.
I suspect we could look to Quakers, as well as many other religious cultural practices, for ideas on how to live in mass communion with multitudes, as this is kind of a basic function of religions.
The internet can be a firehose, and the zone is flooded with shit, as a bunch of the capitalists are driving us into fascism. But it can be organized along other lines. I do think metafilter is a great example of such.
I suspect audio quality can do a lot for sharing synchronous spaces online; there are many other ways for non synchronous text communication, as the article says.
I keep posting this video series on non-defensive communication I. Different metafilter threads, but I also feel it pertains here.
Anyway, great article.
posted by eustatic at 9:41 AM on December 21, 2022 [11 favorites]
The trouble with Twitter is that posts are too verbose.
I want to see a social network where on signup you get allocated one specific pixel in a 640x480 rectangle, and a post consists of making a colour choice for your own pixel and that is the only contribution a user can possibly make. In particular, pixels are not links to anything. They're just pixels. 8 bits of red, 8 bits of green, 8 bits of blue.
You don't choose which pixel you get, it's picked for you at random on signup and set to a random colour. You can't find out what pixel any other account has, unless you contact them out-of-band and ask. You don't even get told which pixel you got, you have to work it out by changing your pixel and trying to work out what difference that made.
You don't get a handle. You don't fill in a profile. You get nothing but a set of authorization credentials that unlocks the ability to change, at any time, the colour of your allocated pixel in whatever way makes the rectangle you're part of incrementally more pleasing to you.
Necessarily, each batch of 307200 signups would generate a new rectangle. New rectangles initially have a single randomly chosen default colour for pixels as yet not allocated to a user. Both lurkers and signed-up users would be able to browse all the rectangles. Signing up costs $5 and countermeasures against multiple active accounts with the same funding source are in place.
The end.
posted by flabdablet at 9:47 AM on December 21, 2022 [4 favorites]
I want to see a social network where on signup you get allocated one specific pixel in a 640x480 rectangle, and a post consists of making a colour choice for your own pixel and that is the only contribution a user can possibly make. In particular, pixels are not links to anything. They're just pixels. 8 bits of red, 8 bits of green, 8 bits of blue.
You don't choose which pixel you get, it's picked for you at random on signup and set to a random colour. You can't find out what pixel any other account has, unless you contact them out-of-band and ask. You don't even get told which pixel you got, you have to work it out by changing your pixel and trying to work out what difference that made.
You don't get a handle. You don't fill in a profile. You get nothing but a set of authorization credentials that unlocks the ability to change, at any time, the colour of your allocated pixel in whatever way makes the rectangle you're part of incrementally more pleasing to you.
Necessarily, each batch of 307200 signups would generate a new rectangle. New rectangles initially have a single randomly chosen default colour for pixels as yet not allocated to a user. Both lurkers and signed-up users would be able to browse all the rectangles. Signing up costs $5 and countermeasures against multiple active accounts with the same funding source are in place.
The end.
posted by flabdablet at 9:47 AM on December 21, 2022 [4 favorites]
How do you pay cat tax on this thing?
Cats have their own accounts, and have a status of sleeping, cleaning, or talking to ghosts
posted by credulous at 9:47 AM on December 21, 2022 [14 favorites]
Cats have their own accounts, and have a status of sleeping, cleaning, or talking to ghosts
posted by credulous at 9:47 AM on December 21, 2022 [14 favorites]
Oddly enough, this feels like an inversion of how I've experienced social media. Twitter? Twitter's great for listening without saying much. I could find people who I wanted to hear from, & hear what they had to say. If I was really sure I had something to add which wasn't already being said by someone else, I could do so; but generally Twitter's been ~95% "listen to people, retweet things (even though I have effectively no audience, understandably *because* I'm not adding much beyond being an aggregator/filter of things)", 4% add a comment on occasion, 1% create a tweet of my own.
But now that I need to go where the people I like to hear from are moving to, it's harder. I really like Cohost so far, but there isn't the same flowing conversation I can listen to. If I want something to be out there, I have to learn to create that conversation myself. Mastodon seems similar as well so far. Metafilter's probably my most active spot I comment & post in, but it's still very listen-lopsided. Most of my posts are "Hey, look at this neat thing", using a quote from the piece, without much of any voice of my own added.
It's not a *terrible* lesson to learn (and probably one that's a bit needed career-wise), but it's tricky. Especially while trying to be mindful of not taking up too much space.
posted by CrystalDave at 9:55 AM on December 21, 2022 [10 favorites]
But now that I need to go where the people I like to hear from are moving to, it's harder. I really like Cohost so far, but there isn't the same flowing conversation I can listen to. If I want something to be out there, I have to learn to create that conversation myself. Mastodon seems similar as well so far. Metafilter's probably my most active spot I comment & post in, but it's still very listen-lopsided. Most of my posts are "Hey, look at this neat thing", using a quote from the piece, without much of any voice of my own added.
It's not a *terrible* lesson to learn (and probably one that's a bit needed career-wise), but it's tricky. Especially while trying to be mindful of not taking up too much space.
posted by CrystalDave at 9:55 AM on December 21, 2022 [10 favorites]
It would also be possible to migrate from your starting rectangle to any other of your choosing, as many times as you like, but each such migration would cost $10. And you still get no control over which pixel you end up controlling in your new country rectangle.
posted by flabdablet at 9:59 AM on December 21, 2022
posted by flabdablet at 9:59 AM on December 21, 2022
METAFILTER: fun and frustrating all at once
posted by philip-random at 10:05 AM on December 21, 2022 [4 favorites]
posted by philip-random at 10:05 AM on December 21, 2022 [4 favorites]
it would end up being a dick pic every time, yeah?
posted by j_curiouser at 10:08 AM on December 21, 2022 [5 favorites]
posted by j_curiouser at 10:08 AM on December 21, 2022 [5 favorites]
How do you pay cat tax on this thing?
Send your payment to the PIRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRS.
posted by amtho at 10:51 AM on December 21, 2022 [1 favorite]
Send your payment to the PIRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRS.
posted by amtho at 10:51 AM on December 21, 2022 [1 favorite]
overthinking a contemplate of beans
posted by chavenet at 10:53 AM on December 21, 2022 [4 favorites]
posted by chavenet at 10:53 AM on December 21, 2022 [4 favorites]
a-also: how do the Quakers feel about ungating content?
posted by chavenet at 10:56 AM on December 21, 2022 [3 favorites]
posted by chavenet at 10:56 AM on December 21, 2022 [3 favorites]
If I could have anything different from social media, it would be a space with more expressions of curiosity and less smugness. Metafilter does this really well at times. When I've engaged with knowledgeable folks on twitter by asking questions, I have had a ton of wonderful interactions. Especially when they are posting about issues I care about in our local government, social justice issues, or just interesting stuff they know about.
I don't need only that. Shitposting, memes, relatable complaining, making fun of the rich and powerful are all valuable too. But if it were up to me I could adjust my own personal algorithm to get a bit less one-shot commentary.
posted by mai at 11:01 AM on December 21, 2022 [1 favorite]
I don't need only that. Shitposting, memes, relatable complaining, making fun of the rich and powerful are all valuable too. But if it were up to me I could adjust my own personal algorithm to get a bit less one-shot commentary.
posted by mai at 11:01 AM on December 21, 2022 [1 favorite]
how do the Quakers feel about ungating content?
cf. Quadratic Payments: A Primer - "When we are talking about public goods, however, this kind of decomposition is not possible. When I write this blog article, it can be read by both Alice and Bob (and everyone else). I could put it behind a paywall, but if it's popular enough it will inevitably get mirrored on third-party sites, and paywalls are in any case annoying and not very effective. Furthermore, making an article available to ten people is not ten times cheaper than making the article available to a hundred people; rather, the cost is exactly the same. So I either produce the article for everyone, or I do not produce it for anyone at all. So here comes the challenge: how do we aggregate together people's preferences?"[1] (viz. fancy new governance mechanisms ;)
posted by kliuless at 11:34 AM on December 21, 2022 [3 favorites]
cf. Quadratic Payments: A Primer - "When we are talking about public goods, however, this kind of decomposition is not possible. When I write this blog article, it can be read by both Alice and Bob (and everyone else). I could put it behind a paywall, but if it's popular enough it will inevitably get mirrored on third-party sites, and paywalls are in any case annoying and not very effective. Furthermore, making an article available to ten people is not ten times cheaper than making the article available to a hundred people; rather, the cost is exactly the same. So I either produce the article for everyone, or I do not produce it for anyone at all. So here comes the challenge: how do we aggregate together people's preferences?"[1] (viz. fancy new governance mechanisms ;)
posted by kliuless at 11:34 AM on December 21, 2022 [3 favorites]
A Quaker Cat
"DARWIN, and naturalists who followed him, jarred man out of his supercilious classification of other forms of life
as "lower": Butterflies that fly thousands of miles, warblers, too, and birds who return to nesting places with infallible accuracy, and the wolf who, as a family man, is a model of loyalty, courage, and devotion.
Everyone who has had pets knows that they have definite personalities, and we have a Quaker Cat.
She came to us in the summer of 1969, when about eight weeks old, and announced that she had found the place where she wanted to live. This was demonstrated by every sign of affection and esteem. She succeeded, even
though there was a Resident Cat already with us. That cat has gone to Cat Heaven, and Squee now has the role of Chief Pet. From time to time she has taken a book from a shelf. We doubt that she has actually read the Queries (second shelf from the bottom on the left-hand side of the fireplace). She knows them by heart, however.
She has removed all war and the causes of war and therefore has never caught a bird. She has a working relationship with squirrels on the lawn, whereby she carries on the traditional stalking and creeping, but when the time comes for the charge, she runs only at half speed, and the squirrel, knowing she was there all the time, simply moves off. As a result, no squirrel has ever scolded her from a nearby branch or treetop. A cordial welcome (Query three) is accorded to every vsitor. There is no stranger within the gates, for all who come are immediately accorded a warm welcome and extra attention. She has never spoken or acted harshly toward any human or any higher animal. If she is accidentally stepped
on, she accepts the apology with good will, clearly indicating that she knew it was a mistake.
Living in a constant state of euphoria, she cannot imagine anyone who could be hostile. Once, when well up a tree, she regarded the banging on the branches by a little boy as simply a harmless manifestation of the exuberance
of the young, considering it in no way directed against her.
Like all cats, she occasionally sees and hears things far beyond the ken of human beings, and dashes off, suilfishing and bounding. Unlike other cats, who are sometimes embarrassed when observed in such actions, she does not sit down and wash in embarrassment. She expects others to be as understanding as she is. She faithfully meets all her responsibilities and chooses recreations that strengthen her physical and mental life.
She rarely looks at television, but she did watch "The Mohave Desert" (a worthwhile show) for almost half an hour. Jigsaw puzzles are of particular interest, and
when others are picking up pieces and moving them about, she feels that she should do the same. (A missing piece was found upstairs, in the study.) Asked to get off the table, she does so, but reluctantly, seeing no reason for not joining in the fun.
All household activities receive her careful attention.
The morning mail she examines with interest. If left outdoors longer than she thinks right, she may mention the fact when she comes in, but only to get it on the record, and she manifests, as always, a forgiving spirit. Such is this Quaker Cat, a comfort to a household."
(Friends Journal, 1971)
posted by clavdivs at 12:11 PM on December 21, 2022 [10 favorites]
"DARWIN, and naturalists who followed him, jarred man out of his supercilious classification of other forms of life
as "lower": Butterflies that fly thousands of miles, warblers, too, and birds who return to nesting places with infallible accuracy, and the wolf who, as a family man, is a model of loyalty, courage, and devotion.
Everyone who has had pets knows that they have definite personalities, and we have a Quaker Cat.
She came to us in the summer of 1969, when about eight weeks old, and announced that she had found the place where she wanted to live. This was demonstrated by every sign of affection and esteem. She succeeded, even
though there was a Resident Cat already with us. That cat has gone to Cat Heaven, and Squee now has the role of Chief Pet. From time to time she has taken a book from a shelf. We doubt that she has actually read the Queries (second shelf from the bottom on the left-hand side of the fireplace). She knows them by heart, however.
She has removed all war and the causes of war and therefore has never caught a bird. She has a working relationship with squirrels on the lawn, whereby she carries on the traditional stalking and creeping, but when the time comes for the charge, she runs only at half speed, and the squirrel, knowing she was there all the time, simply moves off. As a result, no squirrel has ever scolded her from a nearby branch or treetop. A cordial welcome (Query three) is accorded to every vsitor. There is no stranger within the gates, for all who come are immediately accorded a warm welcome and extra attention. She has never spoken or acted harshly toward any human or any higher animal. If she is accidentally stepped
on, she accepts the apology with good will, clearly indicating that she knew it was a mistake.
Living in a constant state of euphoria, she cannot imagine anyone who could be hostile. Once, when well up a tree, she regarded the banging on the branches by a little boy as simply a harmless manifestation of the exuberance
of the young, considering it in no way directed against her.
Like all cats, she occasionally sees and hears things far beyond the ken of human beings, and dashes off, suilfishing and bounding. Unlike other cats, who are sometimes embarrassed when observed in such actions, she does not sit down and wash in embarrassment. She expects others to be as understanding as she is. She faithfully meets all her responsibilities and chooses recreations that strengthen her physical and mental life.
She rarely looks at television, but she did watch "The Mohave Desert" (a worthwhile show) for almost half an hour. Jigsaw puzzles are of particular interest, and
when others are picking up pieces and moving them about, she feels that she should do the same. (A missing piece was found upstairs, in the study.) Asked to get off the table, she does so, but reluctantly, seeing no reason for not joining in the fun.
All household activities receive her careful attention.
The morning mail she examines with interest. If left outdoors longer than she thinks right, she may mention the fact when she comes in, but only to get it on the record, and she manifests, as always, a forgiving spirit. Such is this Quaker Cat, a comfort to a household."
(Friends Journal, 1971)
posted by clavdivs at 12:11 PM on December 21, 2022 [10 favorites]
CrystalDave: "Oddly enough, this feels like an inversion of how I've experienced social media. Twitter? Twitter's great for listening without saying much. I could find people who I wanted to hear from, & hear what they had to say."
Hah! Thank you for saying this - it made me realize that that is exactly how I engage with Twitter, because I have never had a Twitter account.
I OCCASIONALLY visit the Twitter pages (these days, via the nitter alternative) of people whose voices I value: Dr. Bob Wachter, Lin-Manuel Miranda, some of my elected representatives. I appreciate getting to hear what they have to say - but I CAN'T reply, and I don't miss that at all.
Similarly (or corollarily?), I've had comments turned off on my various blogs for years, because I don't have the time to moderate comments.
It's not VERY social, but I get to comment on other people's thoughts on my blog, if I want, and they get to comment on mine over on their own blogs.
But conversations - even among people who are all acting respectfully and in good faith, which are few and far between on Twitter and Facebook - take time ... something many of us find in very short supply these days.
posted by kristi at 12:23 PM on December 21, 2022
Hah! Thank you for saying this - it made me realize that that is exactly how I engage with Twitter, because I have never had a Twitter account.
I OCCASIONALLY visit the Twitter pages (these days, via the nitter alternative) of people whose voices I value: Dr. Bob Wachter, Lin-Manuel Miranda, some of my elected representatives. I appreciate getting to hear what they have to say - but I CAN'T reply, and I don't miss that at all.
Similarly (or corollarily?), I've had comments turned off on my various blogs for years, because I don't have the time to moderate comments.
It's not VERY social, but I get to comment on other people's thoughts on my blog, if I want, and they get to comment on mine over on their own blogs.
But conversations - even among people who are all acting respectfully and in good faith, which are few and far between on Twitter and Facebook - take time ... something many of us find in very short supply these days.
posted by kristi at 12:23 PM on December 21, 2022
On the internet, nobody knows you're a Quaker.
posted by thecincinnatikid at 12:34 PM on December 21, 2022 [10 favorites]
posted by thecincinnatikid at 12:34 PM on December 21, 2022 [10 favorites]
If there's a "questioning his life decisions" status, I'll just leave that sucker on perpetually.
posted by Halloween Jack at 12:41 PM on December 21, 2022
posted by Halloween Jack at 12:41 PM on December 21, 2022
i think it actually is deterministic. the internet was designed to be commercialized and relatively unregulated, far more than any other medium. corporate consolidation was inevitable. you can wax poetic all you want about distributed x or federated y; regardless the intent, given enough time the outcome will be the same. if we want better we have to understand our systems and how they work, and just maybe, put a little bit of thought into designing them with an outcome in mind. nobody really did that with the internet, and here we are.
techno utopianism will result in the same bad end over and over again.
posted by AlbertCalavicci at 1:18 PM on December 21, 2022 [1 favorite]
techno utopianism will result in the same bad end over and over again.
posted by AlbertCalavicci at 1:18 PM on December 21, 2022 [1 favorite]
Are we doing one of these a week now or what
posted by ominous_paws at 1:21 PM on December 21, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by ominous_paws at 1:21 PM on December 21, 2022 [1 favorite]
Eustatic: It was an amazingly powerful silence of thousands.
"speak through the earthquake, wind, and fire, O still, small voice of calm!" ♬ ♫ ♩ ♪
John Greenleaf Whittier 1807-1892, Quaker poet, built on I Kings19:11 where Elijah hears the signal in the true voice of god after a LOT of bloody noise.
posted by BobTheScientist at 1:27 PM on December 21, 2022
"speak through the earthquake, wind, and fire, O still, small voice of calm!" ♬ ♫ ♩ ♪
John Greenleaf Whittier 1807-1892, Quaker poet, built on I Kings19:11 where Elijah hears the signal in the true voice of god after a LOT of bloody noise.
posted by BobTheScientist at 1:27 PM on December 21, 2022
I'd sign up for a Quaker social media service
Funny you should ask. (It's a Mastodon instance, btw)
posted by Cash4Lead at 2:07 PM on December 21, 2022 [3 favorites]
Funny you should ask. (It's a Mastodon instance, btw)
posted by Cash4Lead at 2:07 PM on December 21, 2022 [3 favorites]
I remember apas (paper collections of zines which were collected and mailed out at intervals ranging from once a week to once a year, though every month or two was more common). The pauses did not prevent flame wars, though they were probably less common.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 2:12 PM on December 21, 2022 [3 favorites]
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 2:12 PM on December 21, 2022 [3 favorites]
clowder of bats is contemplating this on the tree of woe
posted by Clowder of bats at 2:28 PM on December 21, 2022
posted by Clowder of bats at 2:28 PM on December 21, 2022
> Silence doesn't work online because if you're not posting or talking, nobody knows you're there,
I wake up, check my new social media site. Nothing!
Next day, also nothing!
Next two weeks, still nothing at all!
This is the awesomest social media site of all time, say I.
(Only partly kidding. It's very true that a lot of us would be a lot happier if our social media consumption were literally zero.)
posted by flug at 3:44 PM on December 21, 2022 [1 favorite]
I wake up, check my new social media site. Nothing!
Next day, also nothing!
Next two weeks, still nothing at all!
This is the awesomest social media site of all time, say I.
(Only partly kidding. It's very true that a lot of us would be a lot happier if our social media consumption were literally zero.)
posted by flug at 3:44 PM on December 21, 2022 [1 favorite]
> Silence doesn't work online because if you're not posting or talking, nobody knows you're there,
On a more practical note, when social media first got started - both twitter & facebook, for example, if memory serves - a lot of what they had in mind is that people would regularly post their "status".
Meaning, not my latest trenchant opinion about Trump or whatever, but more mundane and - dare I say - silent type things like, "Enjoying a cup of coffee," "Sleeping in late this morning," or "Finishing up a big project at work!"
Or maybe, if you were really ambitious, a photo of your cat or a flower.
This, maybe, is the digital equivalent of silence. Just normal, everyday, rather boring stuff and no "opinions" or anything "important".
However you will note - all the social media outlets that thrived moved away from that type of focus PDQ. Apparently there is no money to be made there.
posted by flug at 3:50 PM on December 21, 2022 [2 favorites]
On a more practical note, when social media first got started - both twitter & facebook, for example, if memory serves - a lot of what they had in mind is that people would regularly post their "status".
Meaning, not my latest trenchant opinion about Trump or whatever, but more mundane and - dare I say - silent type things like, "Enjoying a cup of coffee," "Sleeping in late this morning," or "Finishing up a big project at work!"
Or maybe, if you were really ambitious, a photo of your cat or a flower.
This, maybe, is the digital equivalent of silence. Just normal, everyday, rather boring stuff and no "opinions" or anything "important".
However you will note - all the social media outlets that thrived moved away from that type of focus PDQ. Apparently there is no money to be made there.
posted by flug at 3:50 PM on December 21, 2022 [2 favorites]
I think the world needs something like a text version of Snapchat. The problem with the modern world is that everything is permanent (I feel like this may not be true for long, David Zaslav), but most things are not especially worth keeping around (you're not entirely wrong, David Zaslav!). There was a time when you said something, and the only people who ever heard it were the half dozen or so within earshot. Maybe what you said changed their lives; maybe what you said changed your life; probably whatever you said wasn't anywhere near as cool or funny or cringe as you thought it was, but there's no way to know! The moment, ephemeral, is gone. As well it should be.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 4:09 PM on December 21, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by kittens for breakfast at 4:09 PM on December 21, 2022 [1 favorite]
BeReal also seems to share that philosophy. I've never used it but according to its wikipedia page, it doesn't even show number of followers or commenting on non-friends' posts.
posted by meowzilla at 4:28 PM on December 21, 2022
posted by meowzilla at 4:28 PM on December 21, 2022
And to its credit, my instance of Mastodon has a built-in feature to delete old posts, with the shortest interval being a week.
posted by meowzilla at 4:29 PM on December 21, 2022
posted by meowzilla at 4:29 PM on December 21, 2022
Unidirectional, parasocial relationships are not the same thing as shared contemplative practice.
posted by eviemath at 4:42 PM on December 21, 2022 [3 favorites]
posted by eviemath at 4:42 PM on December 21, 2022 [3 favorites]
the internet was designed to be commercialized
designed to be leveraged by government and scientists for information sharing. coopted by commercial interests.
posted by j_curiouser at 5:38 PM on December 21, 2022 [10 favorites]
designed to be leveraged by government and scientists for information sharing. coopted by commercial interests.
posted by j_curiouser at 5:38 PM on December 21, 2022 [10 favorites]
Quakers can Whig out.
posted by clavdivs at 6:17 PM on December 21, 2022 [2 favorites]
posted by clavdivs at 6:17 PM on December 21, 2022 [2 favorites]
***several people are typing***
posted by Pyrogenesis at 11:45 PM on December 21, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by Pyrogenesis at 11:45 PM on December 21, 2022 [1 favorite]
Social media interfaces, at least for me, convey an expectation of participation.
I feel pressured to join in by the little empty text boxes.
If I set my preferences such that I see the contributions of more than a handful of other people, it's inevitable that I will feel like I'm a loud room, full of chatter. And in that environment, sometimes lack of participation feels like unbeing.
It's different with 1-way technology like radio, TV, newspapers.
It's different where the amount of participation is time-rationed or otherwise limited.
But for everything modern, the interface is always looking at me, and I'm trapped in room of shouting voices.
Social media is really not great for my brain.
posted by allium cepa at 12:55 AM on December 22, 2022 [1 favorite]
I feel pressured to join in by the little empty text boxes.
If I set my preferences such that I see the contributions of more than a handful of other people, it's inevitable that I will feel like I'm a loud room, full of chatter. And in that environment, sometimes lack of participation feels like unbeing.
It's different with 1-way technology like radio, TV, newspapers.
It's different where the amount of participation is time-rationed or otherwise limited.
But for everything modern, the interface is always looking at me, and I'm trapped in room of shouting voices.
Social media is really not great for my brain.
posted by allium cepa at 12:55 AM on December 22, 2022 [1 favorite]
I feel pressured to join in by the little empty text boxes.
Little boxes on the website
Little boxes made of texty prompty
Little boxes on the website
Little boxes all the same.
There's a fink one and a preen one
And a spew one and a bellow one
And they're all made out of texty prompty
And they all work just the same.
posted by flabdablet at 2:09 AM on December 22, 2022 [12 favorites]
Little boxes on the website
Little boxes made of texty prompty
Little boxes on the website
Little boxes all the same.
There's a fink one and a preen one
And a spew one and a bellow one
And they're all made out of texty prompty
And they all work just the same.
posted by flabdablet at 2:09 AM on December 22, 2022 [12 favorites]
As always, this friend speaks my mind.
posted by johnxlibris at 7:40 AM on December 22, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by johnxlibris at 7:40 AM on December 22, 2022 [1 favorite]
Is being a Quaker why I lurked on Metafilter for 15 years before making an account? Lol.
Quakerism has a history as the tokenized ethical voice of the Atlantic Anglo elite, with predictably bad consequences. It’s also a living tradition of spiritual and moral inquiry. The silence may bring focus, but it is the discussion (and conflict!) of being in community through which we find direction.
Too often, non-Quakers come to a Friends Meeting seeking the ease of a quiet space where they aren’t judged and can feel morally superior just for showing up, or knowing that we exist. Please don’t be one of these people.
posted by Headfullofair at 7:48 AM on December 22, 2022 [8 favorites]
Quakerism has a history as the tokenized ethical voice of the Atlantic Anglo elite, with predictably bad consequences. It’s also a living tradition of spiritual and moral inquiry. The silence may bring focus, but it is the discussion (and conflict!) of being in community through which we find direction.
Too often, non-Quakers come to a Friends Meeting seeking the ease of a quiet space where they aren’t judged and can feel morally superior just for showing up, or knowing that we exist. Please don’t be one of these people.
posted by Headfullofair at 7:48 AM on December 22, 2022 [8 favorites]
This post annoyed me enough that I posted a rant on Facebook. Ezra Klein is a moron. Maybe he should wear a bonnet and read papyrus to candle light.
Kanpai Skroderider - The Revenge of the Trees in Wagons
I’m a bad programmer. I can’t program so much as I can *develop*. That means that when someone comes up with a library or a framework I can use it to, sometimes, make a web page. Or do something with python like read and write to a database. Obvious stuff that I wouldn’t pay me to do if I could. Optimizing a server to parse millions of incoming connections? Uh, no. What about the ability to, I don’t know, generate a novel architecture for a machine learning algorithm or, say, come up with a design pattern? Nope and no way. Create a language using parsers and interpreters? No and no. How about embedded systems? No. Hacking? I used Kali at a coffee shop once to break into the wifi network. I’ve used thepiratebay a couple times. I know how Tor works.
I’ve yet to buy drugs off the dark web.
The stupid thing is that optimization - what Silicon Valley engineers are paid to do - is relatively easy. Easy in the grand scheme of things. What’s much harder is coming up with ideas of what to do with computers that are worthwhile in any way that anyone would give a shit about. Facebook, where I’m posting this, is approximately the *dumbest* platform in the world. You post a stream of messages and then other people reply to them. It has a different way of connecting with users than Reddit does - where people post a stream of messages and then other people reply to them. Or 4chan, where people post a message and the other people reply to them.
These message boards are popular because a bunch of engineers make sure they don't have downtime and they were the first boards on the internet. "First mover advantage" in this case means that no one wants to go to some other platform because they're aren't enough people on it to make posting worth the first couple people's time. Definition of a bad Nash equilibrium, but not high praise for the system we have now.
So this was posted on metafilter.com (https://www.metafilter.com/197661/Easy-to-Talk-Hard-to-Listen) which links to this article (https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/11/opinion/what-twitter-can-learn-from-quakers.html) - use archive.ph to get around the paywall if you’d like (wow I’m some mad hacker over here).
It’s a rather stupid article from a rather stupid person. Ezra Klein in this case. The saying “being a leader by finding a parade and running in front of it” comes to mind. Or more long windily - “Everyone hates Twitter so maybe if I write something about how terrible Twitter is in the twee way that will make my 9 to 5 readers seem intelligent around a water cooler then I’ll make money.” I can just see it now - every VC nerd within 50 miles of the Golden Gate will have to go out and find their own copy of “How I committed to the Amish Diet and Lost 20 Pounds and My Dog Came Back Home.” Maybe the last bit is a subtitle. It’s much harder to imagine señor Klein adopting any of the more prosaic habits of the Amish, such as demanding their women wear bonnets or not using the internet at all let alone electricity.
Because again - moron. The solution to not liking Twitter is not to look to the Amish. It’s so hard these days to know if people are being jackasses on purpose. The article annoyed me enough I decided to share a way to make the next generation of internet interactivity as I see it. Maybe someone will build this, but in all likelihood it’s already in the works.
If I can think of it, then you can too.
Here’s an excerpt from a book I read. Vernor Vinge’s A Fire Upon The Deep. It’s a book where different areas of the galaxy have different levels of cognition, and the closer to galactic center one is the less “realistic” one thinks. It’s a strange concept and I’m not doing it any justice. But here’s a bit about one of the alien races in the novel -
“The twitterer looked like a small ornamental tree sitting in a six-wheeled cart. The cart was marked with cosmetic stripes and tassels; its 150-by-120-centimeter topside was covered with a cargo scarf in the same pattern as the signet flag. The creature was a Greater Skroderider. Its race traded through much of the Middle Beyond, including Sjandra Kei. The Skroderider’s high- pitched voice came from its voder. But speaking Samnorsk, it sounded homier than anything she’d heard in a long time. Even granting the mental peculiarities of Skroderiders, she felt a surge of affectionate nostalgia, as if she had run into a old classmate in a far city.”
Excerpt From
A Fire Upon the Deep
Vernor Vinge
Maybe it’s just me, but I read “twitterer” and immediately thought of Twitter. Maybe someone read this and decided to make a computer company where people post messages and then other people reply to them. Or maybe someone’s fucking with me and just decided to put in a random word in a downloaded book again. Whatever. The point here is that if the former is the case, then they have seriously misread the book and they could do so much more with the concept. They weren’t inspired in the way that a good science fiction story is meant to inspire.
So here’s what I would build instead if I had the intellectual cohones.
First you would find a programming language to build all of this on. I would choose Rust, because among other things Rust is a type safe version of C++ and Servo, which is the engine that powers Firefox and Google Chrome’s web browser, is written in Rust. Then I would find a frontend to display a bunch of buttons. I would use Rust/ice over GTK because it looks cooler, but what do I know. Next I would use Rust Servo/IPC_channel to communicate between Rust/ice and a webview instance.
So what is this in translation?
You have two executable programs. One that has a bunch of buttons and text boxes and whatnot, and one that can use the default browser engine on your computer to open a webpage and display the content. It uses channels through the kernel ports to share information between the two.
That would be all the technical innovation I would do. Taking two libraries and gluing them together with a third. Wow, look at me, so smart.
So why should you care?
Here’s how search engines work. There are a bunch of different strategies but the most famous one, the one that made Google so popular, is what is called “page rank.” It ranks pages as useful by how many pages back link to that page to be ranked. It uses robots to crawl through all the pages of the internet one at a time and monitor how many of these backlinks are. There are more sophisticated algorithms today for determining how good a web page is most likely using fancy ML algos I’m not intelligent enough to understand let alone build. But the dynamic is the same. You have only a handful of companies that are able to search the internet because of how complex and algorithmically intensive this is.
At the same time you have a couple of “walled gardens.” Places like Reddit and Facebook where users can look at what each other have written from within a platform that has its own rules for how it sorts and displays content.
Because both models are centralized within a small number of firms with lots of money there are the problems associated with that. The firms are eventually sued if they don’t conform to the mainstream of what is socially acceptable, even if that hurts the little guy. Walled gardens have large amounts of overhead to keep the robots running that moderate the site and provide the most clever algorithms to keep users engaged. Google et al have to spend billions just to prevent SEO (search engine optimization) of websites from putting useless junk at the top of Google search results. There is a whole industry of people (SEO optimizers) that are paid a respectable salary to game the search results ranking of Google.
From a societal point of view that seems both completely inefficient, a waste of human potential, and just downright silly. Not ha ha silly, more, what are you doing silly.
Here’s what the companies should do instead.
Take this simple browser engine I’ve outlined above and on one side put a chat box where there’s a chat room (using sockets) that pings to some central server somewhere. Some Big Tech company would host. What a socket is is a way for messages to go from one computer to another in real time. Each chat room would be based on a website domain. So a user would go to a website and there would be a socketed chat room where all the users could message each other.
So for example, when someone navigates to https://ft.com there would be a chat room where everyone could text each other about the news article they’re reading.
There wouldn’t be any moderation because there wouldn’t need to be. Again, the fanciest thing I’ve done so far is take the concept of “people posts a message and other people respond to it” and put a website on one side of it. That’s a bit lame.
So what I would do to make this interesting is I would have it so that the only way that a person could respond to another person is if both people agreed to be friends with a friend request from one person to another. Everyone could write a message, but replies would be locked to between friends. And people could ban or ignore people in a chat with a list saved in their browser.
A little more interesting, but not quite there yet.
The way to make this super interesting is to have it so that the way that I search is based on searching for websites between those people who I have listed as my friend. So if I wanted to search for “computer parts” the crawler would look through my friends and friends of friends information. Maybe even friends of friends of friends, but a depth search much more than of order three is probably unnecessary. And what is more it could do this in interesting ways. It could do this by searching for what websites they’ve bookmarked and then crawling through the html of that looking for key words. Or, it could do this by searching through *what they’d written.* If there was a discussion about computer parts that had happened to be on a page that was tangentially related to computers, but say, a news article about activist blogging, then that search result would come up.
What this would mean in practice is that the search results that would be displayed to the user would be based on who their friends are and the results would be tailored to what their friends are interested in. Every person’s search results would be radically different depending on their curated list. *And* it would cut down on people talking shit on the internet because it would make it more difficult to find things because you would have fewer friends or friends that believed as you do.
You could fund the whole thing by paying some celebrities to be “influencers” for products so that if someone signs up to follow them they’ll every now and again have ads come up in their search results from traditional big box retailers. But the users would have the choice of whether they follow these people or not, so the ads wouldn’t be intrusive.
If you have cool friends you can now see a bunch of Indie websites you may never have heard of before. If you have lame friends or are you yourself “super uncool” you’ll see the same ol’ shit as everyone else.
Furthermore, because the number of websites to crawl would be so much smaller than having to crawl the *entire* internet, each of the programs (see the Rust example above) would have it’s own indexing bot. There would be no need for a high amount of overhead, other than running a socket layer which is rather easy to do at scale with something like Elixir. And there would be little to no law suits nor complaining about the "algo did this" or "the algo did that" because the way that the content is distributed is socially determined and not algorithmically. Your mother-in-law would also know she wasn’t talking to a robot by calling you up and asking what your handle was so she could friend you and look at the websites you visit.
OK, that last one may be a potential downside. But I’m not the sharpest crayon in the box. If I’ve thought of this than other people have to.
The people over at https://obsidian.md/ have half the problem right what with the linking of content. But doing all that work in your own backyard doesn’t seem like it would attract a large user base. How many people need to make an image cloud of their notes? And then you have Discord where the socketing is amazing and the moderation sucks. And then you have Mastadon, the most creative of the bunch!, but the servers themselves are self hosted and a bit flaky.
At some point some people are going to take a bunch of these company concepts and put them together in much the same way that I outlined how I think of putting technologies together. It’ll happen because computers are fast enough now to do the indexing, the Rust code is mature enough that the dumb devs like me can start grokking how the pieces are put together, and people are tired of boring search, boring “walled gardens,” boring comments replying to comments.
Oh yeah and there are a couple companies where you can post videos. Most of it is porn or cat videos.
Anyway, I was rereading A Fire Upon the Deep because talking Christmas trees in space wagons (’tis the season) and then saw "twitterer" and then read some Elon Musk stuff. And then I saw this metafilter piece linking to a post of Ezra Klein with a serious case of not getting it.
So I wrote this. Merry Christmas from the future.
posted by peterweyand at 6:57 PM on December 22, 2022 [1 favorite]
Kanpai Skroderider - The Revenge of the Trees in Wagons
I’m a bad programmer. I can’t program so much as I can *develop*. That means that when someone comes up with a library or a framework I can use it to, sometimes, make a web page. Or do something with python like read and write to a database. Obvious stuff that I wouldn’t pay me to do if I could. Optimizing a server to parse millions of incoming connections? Uh, no. What about the ability to, I don’t know, generate a novel architecture for a machine learning algorithm or, say, come up with a design pattern? Nope and no way. Create a language using parsers and interpreters? No and no. How about embedded systems? No. Hacking? I used Kali at a coffee shop once to break into the wifi network. I’ve used thepiratebay a couple times. I know how Tor works.
I’ve yet to buy drugs off the dark web.
The stupid thing is that optimization - what Silicon Valley engineers are paid to do - is relatively easy. Easy in the grand scheme of things. What’s much harder is coming up with ideas of what to do with computers that are worthwhile in any way that anyone would give a shit about. Facebook, where I’m posting this, is approximately the *dumbest* platform in the world. You post a stream of messages and then other people reply to them. It has a different way of connecting with users than Reddit does - where people post a stream of messages and then other people reply to them. Or 4chan, where people post a message and the other people reply to them.
These message boards are popular because a bunch of engineers make sure they don't have downtime and they were the first boards on the internet. "First mover advantage" in this case means that no one wants to go to some other platform because they're aren't enough people on it to make posting worth the first couple people's time. Definition of a bad Nash equilibrium, but not high praise for the system we have now.
So this was posted on metafilter.com (https://www.metafilter.com/197661/Easy-to-Talk-Hard-to-Listen) which links to this article (https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/11/opinion/what-twitter-can-learn-from-quakers.html) - use archive.ph to get around the paywall if you’d like (wow I’m some mad hacker over here).
It’s a rather stupid article from a rather stupid person. Ezra Klein in this case. The saying “being a leader by finding a parade and running in front of it” comes to mind. Or more long windily - “Everyone hates Twitter so maybe if I write something about how terrible Twitter is in the twee way that will make my 9 to 5 readers seem intelligent around a water cooler then I’ll make money.” I can just see it now - every VC nerd within 50 miles of the Golden Gate will have to go out and find their own copy of “How I committed to the Amish Diet and Lost 20 Pounds and My Dog Came Back Home.” Maybe the last bit is a subtitle. It’s much harder to imagine señor Klein adopting any of the more prosaic habits of the Amish, such as demanding their women wear bonnets or not using the internet at all let alone electricity.
Because again - moron. The solution to not liking Twitter is not to look to the Amish. It’s so hard these days to know if people are being jackasses on purpose. The article annoyed me enough I decided to share a way to make the next generation of internet interactivity as I see it. Maybe someone will build this, but in all likelihood it’s already in the works.
If I can think of it, then you can too.
Here’s an excerpt from a book I read. Vernor Vinge’s A Fire Upon The Deep. It’s a book where different areas of the galaxy have different levels of cognition, and the closer to galactic center one is the less “realistic” one thinks. It’s a strange concept and I’m not doing it any justice. But here’s a bit about one of the alien races in the novel -
“The twitterer looked like a small ornamental tree sitting in a six-wheeled cart. The cart was marked with cosmetic stripes and tassels; its 150-by-120-centimeter topside was covered with a cargo scarf in the same pattern as the signet flag. The creature was a Greater Skroderider. Its race traded through much of the Middle Beyond, including Sjandra Kei. The Skroderider’s high- pitched voice came from its voder. But speaking Samnorsk, it sounded homier than anything she’d heard in a long time. Even granting the mental peculiarities of Skroderiders, she felt a surge of affectionate nostalgia, as if she had run into a old classmate in a far city.”
Excerpt From
A Fire Upon the Deep
Vernor Vinge
Maybe it’s just me, but I read “twitterer” and immediately thought of Twitter. Maybe someone read this and decided to make a computer company where people post messages and then other people reply to them. Or maybe someone’s fucking with me and just decided to put in a random word in a downloaded book again. Whatever. The point here is that if the former is the case, then they have seriously misread the book and they could do so much more with the concept. They weren’t inspired in the way that a good science fiction story is meant to inspire.
So here’s what I would build instead if I had the intellectual cohones.
First you would find a programming language to build all of this on. I would choose Rust, because among other things Rust is a type safe version of C++ and Servo, which is the engine that powers Firefox and Google Chrome’s web browser, is written in Rust. Then I would find a frontend to display a bunch of buttons. I would use Rust/ice over GTK because it looks cooler, but what do I know. Next I would use Rust Servo/IPC_channel to communicate between Rust/ice and a webview instance.
So what is this in translation?
You have two executable programs. One that has a bunch of buttons and text boxes and whatnot, and one that can use the default browser engine on your computer to open a webpage and display the content. It uses channels through the kernel ports to share information between the two.
That would be all the technical innovation I would do. Taking two libraries and gluing them together with a third. Wow, look at me, so smart.
So why should you care?
Here’s how search engines work. There are a bunch of different strategies but the most famous one, the one that made Google so popular, is what is called “page rank.” It ranks pages as useful by how many pages back link to that page to be ranked. It uses robots to crawl through all the pages of the internet one at a time and monitor how many of these backlinks are. There are more sophisticated algorithms today for determining how good a web page is most likely using fancy ML algos I’m not intelligent enough to understand let alone build. But the dynamic is the same. You have only a handful of companies that are able to search the internet because of how complex and algorithmically intensive this is.
At the same time you have a couple of “walled gardens.” Places like Reddit and Facebook where users can look at what each other have written from within a platform that has its own rules for how it sorts and displays content.
Because both models are centralized within a small number of firms with lots of money there are the problems associated with that. The firms are eventually sued if they don’t conform to the mainstream of what is socially acceptable, even if that hurts the little guy. Walled gardens have large amounts of overhead to keep the robots running that moderate the site and provide the most clever algorithms to keep users engaged. Google et al have to spend billions just to prevent SEO (search engine optimization) of websites from putting useless junk at the top of Google search results. There is a whole industry of people (SEO optimizers) that are paid a respectable salary to game the search results ranking of Google.
From a societal point of view that seems both completely inefficient, a waste of human potential, and just downright silly. Not ha ha silly, more, what are you doing silly.
Here’s what the companies should do instead.
Take this simple browser engine I’ve outlined above and on one side put a chat box where there’s a chat room (using sockets) that pings to some central server somewhere. Some Big Tech company would host. What a socket is is a way for messages to go from one computer to another in real time. Each chat room would be based on a website domain. So a user would go to a website and there would be a socketed chat room where all the users could message each other.
So for example, when someone navigates to https://ft.com there would be a chat room where everyone could text each other about the news article they’re reading.
There wouldn’t be any moderation because there wouldn’t need to be. Again, the fanciest thing I’ve done so far is take the concept of “people posts a message and other people respond to it” and put a website on one side of it. That’s a bit lame.
So what I would do to make this interesting is I would have it so that the only way that a person could respond to another person is if both people agreed to be friends with a friend request from one person to another. Everyone could write a message, but replies would be locked to between friends. And people could ban or ignore people in a chat with a list saved in their browser.
A little more interesting, but not quite there yet.
The way to make this super interesting is to have it so that the way that I search is based on searching for websites between those people who I have listed as my friend. So if I wanted to search for “computer parts” the crawler would look through my friends and friends of friends information. Maybe even friends of friends of friends, but a depth search much more than of order three is probably unnecessary. And what is more it could do this in interesting ways. It could do this by searching for what websites they’ve bookmarked and then crawling through the html of that looking for key words. Or, it could do this by searching through *what they’d written.* If there was a discussion about computer parts that had happened to be on a page that was tangentially related to computers, but say, a news article about activist blogging, then that search result would come up.
What this would mean in practice is that the search results that would be displayed to the user would be based on who their friends are and the results would be tailored to what their friends are interested in. Every person’s search results would be radically different depending on their curated list. *And* it would cut down on people talking shit on the internet because it would make it more difficult to find things because you would have fewer friends or friends that believed as you do.
You could fund the whole thing by paying some celebrities to be “influencers” for products so that if someone signs up to follow them they’ll every now and again have ads come up in their search results from traditional big box retailers. But the users would have the choice of whether they follow these people or not, so the ads wouldn’t be intrusive.
If you have cool friends you can now see a bunch of Indie websites you may never have heard of before. If you have lame friends or are you yourself “super uncool” you’ll see the same ol’ shit as everyone else.
Furthermore, because the number of websites to crawl would be so much smaller than having to crawl the *entire* internet, each of the programs (see the Rust example above) would have it’s own indexing bot. There would be no need for a high amount of overhead, other than running a socket layer which is rather easy to do at scale with something like Elixir. And there would be little to no law suits nor complaining about the "algo did this" or "the algo did that" because the way that the content is distributed is socially determined and not algorithmically. Your mother-in-law would also know she wasn’t talking to a robot by calling you up and asking what your handle was so she could friend you and look at the websites you visit.
OK, that last one may be a potential downside. But I’m not the sharpest crayon in the box. If I’ve thought of this than other people have to.
The people over at https://obsidian.md/ have half the problem right what with the linking of content. But doing all that work in your own backyard doesn’t seem like it would attract a large user base. How many people need to make an image cloud of their notes? And then you have Discord where the socketing is amazing and the moderation sucks. And then you have Mastadon, the most creative of the bunch!, but the servers themselves are self hosted and a bit flaky.
At some point some people are going to take a bunch of these company concepts and put them together in much the same way that I outlined how I think of putting technologies together. It’ll happen because computers are fast enough now to do the indexing, the Rust code is mature enough that the dumb devs like me can start grokking how the pieces are put together, and people are tired of boring search, boring “walled gardens,” boring comments replying to comments.
Oh yeah and there are a couple companies where you can post videos. Most of it is porn or cat videos.
Anyway, I was rereading A Fire Upon the Deep because talking Christmas trees in space wagons (’tis the season) and then saw "twitterer" and then read some Elon Musk stuff. And then I saw this metafilter piece linking to a post of Ezra Klein with a serious case of not getting it.
So I wrote this. Merry Christmas from the future.
posted by peterweyand at 6:57 PM on December 22, 2022 [1 favorite]
"I have given this about 30 seconds of thought, but the image that pops into my head is a little green dot for each person, with their name and a status - something like:
12K+ silently contemplating this question
° kristi is present and contemplating
° BungaDunga is present and contemplating
° Rex Ambler is away and contemplating
° entropone is present and contemplating
..."
This is part of what XMPP does. It stands for eXtensible Messaging and Presence Protocol, aka Jabber, Google Talk (old version), Google Voice (ditto), and part of WebRTC, which makes things like Jitsi (and probably zoom) work.
XMPP is built into modern browsers, and is a mature and well-understood tool set.
Not long ago, "modern" browsers also supported XSLT, which is a programmatic way to transform XML into different formats- for example, it could transform XMPP messages into HTML and the reverse. Combining the two could make a bridge between a presence-aware "chat" thingy and a web-based "social media" thingy.
If you have lots and lots of money, you could hire a doofus like me to build such a thing. Or, you could ask around, maybe you know someone who works for a foundation that provides such tools...
posted by Rev. Irreverent Revenant at 2:26 PM on December 23, 2022
12K+ silently contemplating this question
° kristi is present and contemplating
° BungaDunga is present and contemplating
° Rex Ambler is away and contemplating
° entropone is present and contemplating
..."
This is part of what XMPP does. It stands for eXtensible Messaging and Presence Protocol, aka Jabber, Google Talk (old version), Google Voice (ditto), and part of WebRTC, which makes things like Jitsi (and probably zoom) work.
XMPP is built into modern browsers, and is a mature and well-understood tool set.
Not long ago, "modern" browsers also supported XSLT, which is a programmatic way to transform XML into different formats- for example, it could transform XMPP messages into HTML and the reverse. Combining the two could make a bridge between a presence-aware "chat" thingy and a web-based "social media" thingy.
If you have lots and lots of money, you could hire a doofus like me to build such a thing. Or, you could ask around, maybe you know someone who works for a foundation that provides such tools...
posted by Rev. Irreverent Revenant at 2:26 PM on December 23, 2022
There wouldn’t be any moderation because there wouldn’t need to be.
Uh, why not? What stops it devolving into the worst combination of YouTube comments and 8chan, except with even more spam?
posted by BungaDunga at 9:45 AM on December 24, 2022
Uh, why not? What stops it devolving into the worst combination of YouTube comments and 8chan, except with even more spam?
posted by BungaDunga at 9:45 AM on December 24, 2022
What stops it devolving into the worst combination of YouTube comments and 8chan
Too often, non-Quakers come to a Friends Meeting seeking the ease of a quiet space where they aren’t judged and can feel morally superior just for showing up, or knowing that we exist. Please don’t be one of these people
my uncle was sort of one of these types, he even moved to Lancaster pennsylvania. my maternal side of the family comes from a long long line of Quakers primarily from Lancaster Pennsylvania. from family letters going back to 1867 you can derive a sense of freedom to break away from traditional values for example my family became Unitarian universalists and my great-grandparents became Presbyterians. another interesting example is my great great grandmother who is Quaker and married a distant cousin from Lancaster Pennsylvania who encouraged her to write poetry of which only two poems survive. her parents didn't write poetry, they farmed and became staunch abolitionists. It was precisely within a 10-year span that mere contemplation became political action.
posted by clavdivs at 10:24 AM on December 24, 2022 [1 favorite]
Too often, non-Quakers come to a Friends Meeting seeking the ease of a quiet space where they aren’t judged and can feel morally superior just for showing up, or knowing that we exist. Please don’t be one of these people
my uncle was sort of one of these types, he even moved to Lancaster pennsylvania. my maternal side of the family comes from a long long line of Quakers primarily from Lancaster Pennsylvania. from family letters going back to 1867 you can derive a sense of freedom to break away from traditional values for example my family became Unitarian universalists and my great-grandparents became Presbyterians. another interesting example is my great great grandmother who is Quaker and married a distant cousin from Lancaster Pennsylvania who encouraged her to write poetry of which only two poems survive. her parents didn't write poetry, they farmed and became staunch abolitionists. It was precisely within a 10-year span that mere contemplation became political action.
posted by clavdivs at 10:24 AM on December 24, 2022 [1 favorite]
Too often, non-Quakers come to a Friends Meeting seeking the ease of a quiet space where they aren’t judged and can feel morally superior just for showing up, or knowing that we exist. Please don’t be one of these people
/raises hand
/is recognized by the clerk
/waits for microphone bearer to bring microphone, because some Quakers figured out a few years ago that there are deaf and hard-of-hearing people among us who would like to hear the vocal ministry being offered
When I attended my first Quaker meeting, almost 30 years ago, I was a young adult with a lifelong, untreated anxiety disorder. For me, for quite awhile, it was enough to have one hour a week when I sat quietly, with no responsibilities and no to-do list. It took awhile—years, maybe—for the worship part of silent worship to begin working on me, for the religious part of the whole thing to take root. When it did, I said wryly, "I guess if you sit around waiting on God long enough, God shows up."
Flannery O'Conner wrote, many years ago, "Most of us come to church by a means the church does not allow." Whatever might bring you to a Quaker meeting, let it bring you. It's not your job to decide whether your motivation is worthy enough. It is, however, your job to come prepared for the ways it might change you.
/hands microphone back to microphone-bearer
/biz meeting continues
When Covid hit, some of us Quakers discovered that worship online can be surprisingly deep and engaging. Or course, we've been practicing a long time. Whether you're in the meetinghouse or on Zoom, distractions abound within and without. Ask any Quaker whether they've ever spent a meeting for worship studying the pattern in the rub, or tallying up how many Friends are wearing Birkenstocks, or running over the grocery list. Ask any Quaker whether they've ever dozed off. Zoom is more difficult, but it's not entirely uniquely difficult.
That said, worship over zoom didn't work at all for some people.
What I'm finding very difficult is my meeting's current experiment with hybrid worship, where some people are in the meetinghouse and some are online. We have a couple of medically-fragile people who cannot get vaccinated and cannot risk an infection, so they worship from home. I do, too, because I often have the energy to log on but not the energy to drive to the meetinghouse and get myself from the car into the building.
Our meeting bought some fancy hardware to make hybrid meetings work better. We own something called an OWL, that sits in the middle of the room and automatically turns its camera and microphone toward whoever is speaking. It's pretty amazing. But when I attend a hybrid meeting virtually, it's hard for me to feel like part of it. I feel like I'm at the kids' table at Thanksgiving, or watching through the window as people eat a delicious meal I can't afford.
Quakerism has a history as the tokenized ethical voice of the Atlantic Anglo elite
Headfullofair, this is so well put and so true to my experience.
It’s also a living tradition of spiritual and moral inquiry. The silence may bring focus, but it is the discussion (and conflict!) of being in community through which we find direction./em>
Not long after I started attending Meeting for Worship, an older Friend said to me, "You should start coming to Business Meeting. That's where you'll really see what we're all about." She was right.
On the internet, nobody knows you're a Quaker.
So true. I'm always delighted when another one unlurks here at MetaFilter.
posted by Well I never at 4:42 PM on December 24, 2022 [4 favorites]
/raises hand
/is recognized by the clerk
/waits for microphone bearer to bring microphone, because some Quakers figured out a few years ago that there are deaf and hard-of-hearing people among us who would like to hear the vocal ministry being offered
When I attended my first Quaker meeting, almost 30 years ago, I was a young adult with a lifelong, untreated anxiety disorder. For me, for quite awhile, it was enough to have one hour a week when I sat quietly, with no responsibilities and no to-do list. It took awhile—years, maybe—for the worship part of silent worship to begin working on me, for the religious part of the whole thing to take root. When it did, I said wryly, "I guess if you sit around waiting on God long enough, God shows up."
Flannery O'Conner wrote, many years ago, "Most of us come to church by a means the church does not allow." Whatever might bring you to a Quaker meeting, let it bring you. It's not your job to decide whether your motivation is worthy enough. It is, however, your job to come prepared for the ways it might change you.
/hands microphone back to microphone-bearer
/biz meeting continues
When Covid hit, some of us Quakers discovered that worship online can be surprisingly deep and engaging. Or course, we've been practicing a long time. Whether you're in the meetinghouse or on Zoom, distractions abound within and without. Ask any Quaker whether they've ever spent a meeting for worship studying the pattern in the rub, or tallying up how many Friends are wearing Birkenstocks, or running over the grocery list. Ask any Quaker whether they've ever dozed off. Zoom is more difficult, but it's not entirely uniquely difficult.
That said, worship over zoom didn't work at all for some people.
What I'm finding very difficult is my meeting's current experiment with hybrid worship, where some people are in the meetinghouse and some are online. We have a couple of medically-fragile people who cannot get vaccinated and cannot risk an infection, so they worship from home. I do, too, because I often have the energy to log on but not the energy to drive to the meetinghouse and get myself from the car into the building.
Our meeting bought some fancy hardware to make hybrid meetings work better. We own something called an OWL, that sits in the middle of the room and automatically turns its camera and microphone toward whoever is speaking. It's pretty amazing. But when I attend a hybrid meeting virtually, it's hard for me to feel like part of it. I feel like I'm at the kids' table at Thanksgiving, or watching through the window as people eat a delicious meal I can't afford.
Quakerism has a history as the tokenized ethical voice of the Atlantic Anglo elite
Headfullofair, this is so well put and so true to my experience.
It’s also a living tradition of spiritual and moral inquiry. The silence may bring focus, but it is the discussion (and conflict!) of being in community through which we find direction./em>
Not long after I started attending Meeting for Worship, an older Friend said to me, "You should start coming to Business Meeting. That's where you'll really see what we're all about." She was right.
On the internet, nobody knows you're a Quaker.
So true. I'm always delighted when another one unlurks here at MetaFilter.
posted by Well I never at 4:42 PM on December 24, 2022 [4 favorites]
The Quaker world is a small one. That Mastodon instance listed above is run by a dear friend of mine, though this is the first I've seen of it.
posted by Well I never at 4:43 PM on December 24, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by Well I never at 4:43 PM on December 24, 2022 [1 favorite]
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