8Sided Blog

the scene celebrates itself

We Would Call That a Demon

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On a fascinating episode of Douglas Rushkoff’s Team Human podcast, “technologist, futurist, inventor, and mage” Mark Pesce has a fascinating observation about social media’s knack for social engineering:

What is Facebook doing? It’s watching your responses to build a simulation – simulacra, really – of you and then it can check against that simulacra what your emotional state is. Okay, so, it’s built an A.I. that can essentially read and tamper with your emotional state. If this were the 14th century and I talked about evoking something that could then tamper with you emotionally and that you would feed energy that it would feed back to you in a different form – we would call that a demon.

There’s also a meatier-than-usual post on Kottke.org by Tim Carmody about where the web went wrong and how the spirit of blogging might point to the desired way forward:

A lot of the efforts to reshape social media, or to walk away from it in favor of RSS feeds or something else, are really attempts to recapture those utopian elements that were active in the zeitgeist ten, fifteen, and twenty years ago. They still exercise a powerful hold over our collective imagination about what the internet is, and could be, even when they take the form of dashed hopes and stifled dreams.

These days I’m thinking about this stuff all of the time. I know I’m hardly the only one.

🔗 → Ep. 116 Live at Civic Hall Pt. 2: A Demonology of Algorithms with Mark Pesce
🔗 → How to Fix Social Media by Injecting A Chunk of the Blogosphere

Idyllic Quiet and a Slow Pace

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I’m spending Christmas week in the country. I’m taking care of a family member (she’s doing well) and enjoying the idyllic quiet and slow pace of being away from home. You might think that I’d get a lot done in calmer surroundings but you’d be wrong. The hustle-and-bustle — and familiarity of my work environment — inspires productivity and busy-ness. Here I want to relax and let my mind wander. There’s something to be said for that, though — these breaks away from work are healthy and serve as a mental clearing house of sorts.

The main fear is routine-interruption. I’m getting up later these days, though my definition of ‘later’ is 7 AM-ish, so it’s not too terrible. I only have an iPad with me, and I haven’t experimented with it that much as a remote work computer, so there’s some trial-by-fire happening there. I’m getting by.

Mainly, I want to keep writing daily which I can do in an iPad environment. I’ve got a bluetooth Mac ‘Magic Keyboard’ so I don’t have to type on the screen. I use Ulysses (via Setapp) as the place I write, synced across all devices. I tested many different writing apps over the past year and Ulysses is the hands-down favorite. It’s the only app that is outstanding on its iPad, desktop, and iPhone versions. So there’s no excuse to not write every day while cold chilling in the country.

I am surprised there’s not a solid WordPress editor for the iPad. I haven’t found one. The WordPress iOS app seems fine but it’s limited — for example, I couldn’t find a way to center the Deep Purple photo in yesterday’s Xmas post from within the app. I ended up opening the site’s dashboard in Safari and editing from there. Go figure.

Anyway, I didn’t mean to get into app talk in today’s update, though I am planning a future post about work routines and techniques — including software — that I’ve found helpful. But, before I get back into country life, I’d like to give you a podcast recommendation.

Reply All is a consistently fantastic podcast, a deft mix of the entertaining and informative. Today I listened to episode #130, The Snapchat Thief. It details an investigation into a listener’s hacked Snapchat account to determine how it was compromised. The hosts’ discoveries are fascinating and a little terrifying. They shed light on a hacker underground that you know is out there but is still surprising once revealed. Let’s just say I’m looking into using Google Voice a lot more.

If Reply All is new to you and you like what you hear, then your next step is to listen to episode #102, Long Distance. Highly recommended — what a wild ride.

I hear trains blowing in the distance as the sun begins to set over rows of pine trees. I could get used to this.

Positivity is Resistance

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I woke up early this morning to a wild amount of fog over our lake. I had never really seen anything like it in the 2+ years we’ve lived here. Beautiful and eerie. Here’s a video I shot from our dock at around 7:30 AM:

I listened to Basecamp’s Jason Fried on The Chase Jarvis LIVE Show podcast. There’s a lot of great advice in this episode. Jason has a knack for ‘duh, that makes perfect sense’ statements that I hadn’t thought of before — or, at least, considered in that way. His fantastic book Rework is filled with this type of knowledge.

In the interview Jason touches on the benefit of a news deprivation diet, a gospel I’m always glad to spread. Says Jason:

I think {constant news} is a way, unfortunately, for negativity to get in your brain and to get you upset about things. I don’t want to be that way. That’s one of the reasons I don’t really follow the news. I used to be a news junkie. {But} I don’t pay attention to the news at all anymore. Almost nothing really matters right now. Everything’s breaking news 24/7; everything’s a hot story. But none of this shit is a hot story that matters right now. If you’re in the path of a hurricane, you’ll want to know that, but a lot of other things can wait. I’m more a fan of things that can wait than right now.

This is my feeling, exactly, and it does take discipline to reach this no-breaking-news state. There’s so much pressure to keep up, to know every little thing that’s happening. FOMO (fear of missing out). But Jason espouses an alternative philosophy: JOMO — the joy of missing out.

I wrote an email the other day to a creative friend in Europe distressed by all that’s happening in France. I hoped to reassure with these words:

All these horrible things that are happening are ultimately a reaction to the way the world is changing. And it’s positive change these awful people are reacting to: inclusiveness, justice, expanded freedoms for everyone. As one can’t stop change, things will get better. But it’s going to be a rough ride for a while. It always is, as it always has been.

Our best way to make a difference in these times is to be productive, create, and do our best work. We can’t do that if we’re constantly distracted by ‘breaking news’ and all this mess. And, in my opinion, the people in power right now purposely create distraction and outrage to keep us from doing our best work — it’s intentional.

We can’t control any of this. But we shouldn’t feel defeated, as it was never our battle to begin with. Instead, it’s wise to concentrate on what we do have control over and brush off the rest. It’s not a head-in-the-sand attitude — it’s still healthy to be concerned and to engage in activism — but our preoccupations should be on what we can influence, whether it’s our work, our family and loved ones, or our local community. Positivity is resistance, and our work and change have the power to reverberate as we show our peers that we care enough to create rather than wallow, worry, and complain.

On another note, it looks like I’m going to SXSW next year. I’ll be there supporting Monta At Odds who are playing a couple of showcases. I’m excited to see and meet with a bunch of old friends and eat as much as possible of that fantastic food Austin has on offer.

What Am I Doing Now? (May 2018 Recap)

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What Am I Doing Now? (April 2018 Recap)

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‘Ways of Hearing’ Explores Listening in the Digital Age

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I’m excited about this new Radiotopia podcast named Showcase. Mostly because the first season consists of the six-part series Ways Of Hearing, hosted by Damon Krukowski who you may know as the drummer for Galaxie 500 and a member of Damon & Naomi.

Apparently inspired and culled from Damon’s recent book The New Analog, Ways Of Hearing explores how listening has changed as audio delivery moves from analog to digital. It looks to go much deeper than that, touching on subjects like modern changes in the sharing of information and how audio affects our sense of time. So far the podcast doesn’t go down the tired analog vs. digital rabbit hole, and I don’t expect that it will. Listen to the first episode HERE.

On a side note: certain bands or songs send waves of melancholy down the spine. For me, Galaxie 500 is one of those bands. When “Tugboat” starts playing in the first episode of this podcast I’m overcome with tingles. The song evokes a time and a place, an overwhelming nostalgia, a part of my life (my early 20s) filled with loneliness and sadness. I recorded a Galaxie 500 copycat song, complete with my imitation of Dean Wareham’s first album wail, and played it for a girl I liked. She asked me why I was so sad and then I never heard from her again.

And if you’d like to read the harrowing tale of a great band dissolving then you should check out this oral history of Galaxie 500 on Pitchfork.


Update: If you’re having trouble listening from the player on the show’s site then try this player on PRX’s page.

Hitting the Links: Music’s Technological History, Repetitive Pop Lyrics, and Peter Saville

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Technology In Music: A Chronological Playlist Through History:

Let’s start from from the beginning, in 1937: a timeless feel – eerie and alienating at times, permeates ‘Oraison’ by French composer Olivier Messiaen. The song was originally written for an ensemble of early electronic musical keyboards called Ondes Martenot. The Ondes Martenot is a very expressive instrument, meeting Messiaen’s avant-garde composition techniques. If you’re expecting beat drops you may want to keep in mind the release date.



Peter Saville On His Album Cover Artwork:

{Saville on New Order’s Technique cover:} It was a garden ornament and we rented it for the shoot. It’s a very bacchanalian image, which fitted the moment just before the last financial crash and the new drug-fuelled hedonism involved in the music scene. It’s also my first ironic work: all the previous sleeves were in some way idealistic and utopian. I’d had this idea that art and design could make the world a better place. That even bus stops could be better.



Are Pop Lyrics Getting More Repetitive?:

In 1977, the great computer scientist Donald Knuth published a paper called The Complexity of Songs, which is basically one long joke about the repetitive lyrics of newfangled music (example quote: “the advent of modern drugs has led to demands for still less memory, and the ultimate improvement of Theorem 1 has consequently just been announced”). I’m going to try to test this hypothesis with data. I’ll be analyzing the repetitiveness of a dataset of 15,000 songs that charted on the Billboard Hot 100 between 1958 and 2017.



Forgotten Tributes: 25 Monumental Relics of Yugoslavia:

If you were to travel today through the area that was once Yugoslavia, you would come across some incredible massive objects that allow an unexpected look directly into the area’s past. Before dissolving into several smaller countries in the 1990s, Yugoslavia became home to a number of large-scale futuristic monuments.



Gary Vaynerchuk on Impact Theory (Podcast):

I think that Steve Jobs came along {and} became an icon, but the sad part of that narrative was he did not treat his employees well. He became an icon and the narrative became he got the most out of people by being a jerk, and that became romanticized. And a lot of people in Silicon Valley today run companies where they’re mean because they think that’s the right thing to do because they put Steve Jobs on a pedestal. I want to become that big {but} what I want to come from that is that kids that aren’t even born today think that they can build a five billion dollar company and {still} be a great guy or a great gal. I want to build the biggest building in town ever by just building the biggest building in town, while I think most people try to tear down everyone else’s building.

DJ Shadow Dissects “Mutual Slump”

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The often excellent Song Exploder podcast has dropped an episode featuring DJ Shadow pulling apart his seminal 1996 track “Mutual Slump”:

It’s difficult to overstate just how much of a creative gut-punch DJ Shadow’s early recordings were to those of us producing electronic music at the time. I remember how the pre-Entroducing singles on Mo’Wax – such as “Lost & Found (S.F.L.)” – totally blew my mind and forced me to raise my studio game. I know I wasn’t alone.

I met Josh Davis / DJ Shadow at a record show in Austin in the early 2000s before one of my gigs. After introducing myself he laughed and said, “ohhh, now I know what my friend meant when he told me DJ Q-Bert was in town.”

Cory Doctorow on Writing and the Influence of Science Fiction

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The always thought-provoking Cory Doctorow recently appeared on the London Real podcast, and I enjoyed his thoughts on the process of writing and how good science fiction is influential rather than predictive. These are the kinds of words that help me realize I should get up right now and start making new stuff. Click on the image below to listen from the point he starts talking about these subjects and, if you’re into it, be sure to listen to the rest of the podcast.

“Talent is just not realizing that you’ve practiced.”

— Cory Doctorow on London Real