Email is dying. So many people never see the emails I send them, only paying attention to Signal, Slack, SMS, and other messaging services. Who could blame them, with all the promotions, feedback requests, privacy policy updates, and other junk we receive in our inboxes?
I've written before that AI could be used to produce new Beatles albums, and now Sir Paul McCartney says artificial intelligence has enabled a 'final' Beatles song.
As harmful as TikTok and YouTube shorts can be, in terms of spreading misinformation, shortening attention spans, and so on, I really love Mark Rober's new short video explaining why Earth's rotation does not affect airspeed. I linked to an article that discusses this in earlier post, but as usual, Mark's demonstration is much more clear.
Conversation is not performance. Performance is not conversation.
Every so often, I'm reminded that the web is almost unusable without an ad blocker. I'm amazed anyone can tolerate it for more than 10 seconds.
Use an ad blocker.
I recommend AdGuard because it's thoughtfully designed. It has the user interface I've always wanted from an ad blocker, where the user can select broad categories of ads and annoyances to block or pick and choose from more specific filters, which are hidden by default. uBlock Origin is more popular with technologists, but I find its settings UI to be overwhelming.
I genuinely believe in supporting publishers, but not through modern advertising. If a website you like offers an ad-free experience for some price, consider paying for it. Otherwise, I think you're more than justified in using an ad blocker to protect yourself from the sludge being thrown at you. Doing so is arguably an ethical obligation. Online advertising has completely run amok, harming our privacy, our digital security, and our sanity. The attention economy it fuels has tremendously harmful downstream consequences—addiction, misinformation, political extremism—that threaten society at large.
Use an ad blocker.
I know I'm late to the party, but Cory Doctorow's essay on “enshittification” is brilliant.
Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
—Cory Doctorow in Tiktok's enshittification
“Social media users see affirmation when they receive a thumbs-up or a heart. But that's not really why we're sending them.”
—Chris Taylor in The 'Like' doesn't mean what you think it means
“I want to leave the world better than I found it.”
I used to say that, but I've come to appreciate that many things are not within my control. Through no fault of my own and despite my best efforts, the world may very well worsen in the future. Society may be devastated by climate change, nuclear war, artificial intelligence, or social media. Would that be a personal failure? Of course not.
I later settled on alternative wording: I want to leave the world better than it would have been without me. Even that sometimes seems impossible, given my contributions to pollution and my consumption of limited resources, given the number of ants I've inadvertently stepped on, and so on. Still, it seems like a more reasonable goal.