:0 It all Started with an iPod As I write this, I'm sitting in my favorite locally-owned coffee joint, and Morrisey is whining about something over the speaker. Full battery, full coffee cup and an everything bagel, I sit and ponder my journey into Gopherspace and the smol internet. ***Background*** I've always been a technically driven person. I still remember the day that my uncle showed my his first home computer - a Texas Instruments TI-99/4a. I couldn't have been more than 5 years old, but I still remember it was the coolest thing I'd ever seen. In lieu of babysitting, i remember he gave me a book full of BASIC games that you could program and play. He left me to it, and I diligently followed along with the line-by-line instructions, and marveled at the primitive sprites and beeps that the computer made. Fast forward to high school, and I met my circle of friends on a local BBS system - (shout out to the sysop of Boot Hill BBS in the 610 if you're still out there!) -- I even met my high school girlfriend on there. She lived 2 school disctricts away... the other side of the planet to someone without a drivers' license yet. I felt like that 1200-baud Sportster opened the entire world up to me - even it was just within Bell's "local calling" radius. We formed our own little group - spending our weekends at the roller rink, and shit-posting at each other on the "board". I remember one of the guys giving me an Information Society CD - the one with the analog modem message at the end - and it blew me away! *** University Tech Shenanigans *** By the time I hit college, I decided to try my hand at working in the Technology center as an intern until I completed my degree in Education. I really discovered the world of the internet back then! One night some guys put up and anonymous ftp server, and advertised it on an IRC channel. the 3GB drive was full the next morning, and the IT director paid us a visit - telling us we got an email from Sony music... this was 1997. Whoops! ..but we had a full hard drive of mp3s that we happily passwed around to anyone who actually had a big enough drive to receive them. During my time as the night manager, I ran a little Slackware-based icecast server that just played music from that drive at random and anyone who tuned in could listen. Iremember getting emails from PhD students thanking me for casting such a great playlist, while they pulled all-nighters and toiled away in their science labs. For those who had the pivilege, participating in the Academic Internet scene in the late 90's was truly a fun time. Sure, there were thousands of people, at that point, but people knew each other by what servers they frequented. And it still felt like an exclusive club. Conversations in real life would be "Are you on bugs.cs? No? Oh you're on yosemite.. yeah that's a good one too! My buddy runs quimby, and the ftp on there is awesome!" *** Moving Along *** What was to come, I dont think anyone would have ever imagined. The years passed, bandwidth got bigger and cheaper. The number of users absolutley exploded, and tech monoliths like Google, Apple and Meta sprouted up. When the iPhone came out, there seemed to be a philosophical shift in computing. The economics became centered around attention. Keep the users engaged! USERS!!! We were always users of these systems. But we were also the creators, and contributors. Instead of passively holding our little black mirrors, we would - hands on keyboards - create our own folders, text files, jpgs - all of it. Now, you can take a photo and within the camera app, hit share, and your little photo is available to Hundreds of millions of people instantly. Of course the filtering algorithms will ensure that only a handful of people will see it. They make take 2 seconds to send you a heart back, and then never think of it again... and neither will you. You've just contibuted your milliseconds of attention to the attention economy. Sadly, the same thing has happened with Music. The rise of streaming and curated playlists has removed all intentionality behind our listening. Spotify has helped make our daily listening habits thoughtless and automatic. The algorithms distill your listening down to a handful of songs and repeat them to you endlessly so that you never stop streaming. Example: If you read the above, you know that I'm from the 90s, and it's a safe inference that I love 90's music. One of my top albums is "New Miserable Experience" from the Gin Blossoms. Every track on that album is great... but there are 4 big hits - Hey Jealousy, Until I Fall Away, Found Out About You, and Allison Road. Want to guess how many times Spotify played me those 4 songs last year? I didnt count, but upwards of 100 or more times. **** Algorithms make everything a bit shit! ~Unknown tech pundit These algorthims are designed to do 1 thing... Capture attention. The best way to hold attention is to figure out what people like (or don't click away from) and use machines to find things similar enough that people keep looking at that new stuff too. Eventually you get recycled, flattened content that isn't very compelling to anyone, but is still massively consumed. I'm not going to shit on "new music" I really enjoy some of it! But somehow Spotify's algorithm even made my hate listening to Allison Road. I fucking love that song! ...Somthing needed to change, but I didn't know where to start. *** Changes *** One day, my wife and I were talking, and both lamenting our Spotify subscriptions. Spotify was announcing another price hike (after laying off a huge amount of staff) and she asked me: "Weazl, what are we actually paying for? Don't we still have like 300 CDs in the closet? I think I'm gonna get an old iPod and start using that instead!" My wife's prized possesion, when we met, was her 30GB iPod. By the time she was done with it, it was scratched, the headphone jack was loose, and the drive made the click of death... I couldn't disagree - it was a solid plan. Use the music we already paid for, and listen to what we actually like. I dug through the CDs and found a disc that was an album that Spotify had pulled from their catalog due to a licensing dispute between publishers.... yeah we're on the right track I think. That Saturday, we went to our favorite coffee joint, and planned out what CD shops we wanted to visit. We ended up leaving with a bag full of new and used CDs. It was engaging, social, and fun. Remember when you could have fun? She built up her iPod with a new face, back and SD card slot (512GB) and loaded the firmware that supports FLAC. Now she walks around smiling with her massive AKG headphones. La musique sans l'algorithme! Me? I'm a couple years older, and the pinnacle of music tech for me was the Sony Minidisc. So I jumped on eBay and found my old recorder. A few days later, I was cloning my CD collection to those little plastic rectangles. I had no idea how much I had lost my attention span to social media, and the algorithms. The act of sitting and listening to a disc from start to finish is actually difficult for me.... that's not to say I don't enjoy it. I'm realizing that the addiciton, and the pull of the algorithms is so much stronger than most people realize. *** The Tip of the iceberg *** iPod and minidisc in hand, my wife and I started discussing what else we don't need. First under the guillotine was tv streaming. Netflix was a no-brainer. Unless you want to see the new programs, it's very hard to find anything to watch. Two weeks ago, we planned a dinner and movie night. We planned to see The Wedding Singer. It's been pulled from all the platforms we subscribe to, and we were offered to purchase or rent it from Amazon.... We have the blu-ray. Why do we need to buy it again - because the studios negotiated a new rate with a different platform? *** More Cuts *** My puppy, in a moment of over-enthusiasm, broke my phone. Knocked it out of my hands, and stepped his 50lbs onto the OLED screen. While I was reloading my new phone, I stopped on each app, and asked myself - "Do I need this?" I reloaded Instagram and Messenger. Nothing else. I do photography gigs, and book them via Insta, and I have international friends who I message thorugh messenger. Spending less of my time on apps, and Social media has absolutely been rewiring my brain.... I even read a book for the first time in a few years. *** Smol Internet *** I rediscovered Gopher a few weeks back - I hadn't seen it since my days in the university library. It became immediately apparent that the smol internet is, indeed, small. And it demands that its users aren't just users, but contributors and creators. There aren't algorithms feeding distilled garbage to us. Instead there are real people, writing real posts, and putting out their intentions. In the time I've been writing this, the coffee shop's playlist has restarted, and the tables have turned over twice. In that time, I've looked at social media zero times, and only looked up from my text editor to greet people that I know! I'm not a philospher. I'm not a great thinker... hell, I'm not your dad.... but be intentional. Ditch the algorithms. Say hi to people. and Be Excellent to each other. Who knows... an iPod could change your life! _____ _ _ |_ _| | | | | | | |__ __ ___ _____ __ _ ___| | | | | '_ \ / _` \ \ /\ / / _ \/ _` |_ / | | | | | | | (_| |\ V V / __/ (_| |/ /| | \_/ |_| |_|\__,_| \_/\_/ \___|\__,_/___|_|