as a human, my tastes, interests and attention are shaped by what is put in front of me. I’ve seen my 3-year old granddaughter, on her way to do one thing, decide she wants to do something else, simply because the button for it appeared in her vision cone. I know I’m not so different. I want to stop being constantly bombarded by the click-me... See more
"It’s up to us whether or not we care about the shades of distinction between human and machine choice, or indeed if we care about fashion at all. Maybe taste is the last thing separating us from the Singularity"
To return to a theme around here - these videos are the product of incentives, and though they’re extreme manifestations of those incentives, they’re hardly unique in being shaped by them. One commonplace that’s found among Reels that have some purpose and some plausible entertainment value is the “wait for it” thing, artificially delaying the... See more
“The web promises to make our world bigger. But as it works now, it also narrows our exposure to ideas. We can end up in a bubble in which we hear only the ideas we already know. Or already like.”
― Sherry Turkle, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age
Independent creators today, consciously or unconsciously, subscribe to a kind of algorithmic polytheism. If you publish words on Twitter, you're doing proof-of-work sacrifices to honor one unknowable god; if you publish videos to Youtube, you're doing different proof-of-work sacrifices to honor a different unknowable god. And so on.