I recently watched The Year The Earth Changed, a nature documentary that details the ways in which our planet’s natural ecosystems flourished during the lockdowns. It was remarkable to see deer venture beyond the temples in Nara and turtles being able to nest on otherwise overcrowded beaches. When humans took a step back, stayed indoors, off the streets, nature bounced back and thrived.
But I also realized that because of our travel bans and work from home and isolations, humans assumed a new normal throughout the pandemic - one that is extremely online. I don’t intend on calling for an upheaval of the way we exist online, but rather just fascinated by how the absence of something can indeed nourish it’s growth.
Hence the title of this post… less is better than more, or subtraction > addition.
In this post, you’ll find a handful of notes around this sentiment:
maybe there’s a case for less hypercuration in our digital consumption habits
facebook marketplace is a habitat for emotional release
acknowledging the nicotine of the digital world: short form video
a friendly accountability service that might not be for everyone
i’m feeling lucky
Zoooooo wee mama! I’m 10 days late to sharing this, but I can’t wait to listen to this month’s playlist on repeat. Soft snares and spring rhythms alike, this month we’re manifesting happier times via the music.
[Archive playlist can be found here, and in my spotify bio]
on hypercuration
I’ve written a lot about curation, personal algorithms, and intentional consumption. And now my mind runs amock with thoughts in the opposite direction: consuming whatever comes your way, instead of designing your feed.
I feel like part of our challenge, in this era of social media and digital consumption, is to discern what’s good and bad consumption. And we’re given all the right tools to modulate the means and quality of consumption: follows within our feeds, email subscriptions, curated playlists. At the very least, we have freedom of choice. But I fear that there comes a point where we’ve narrowed down too far - the filters are no longer doing us any good but actually creating echo chambers of thought, opinion, and creativity.
In some way, it feels like intelligence isn’t about a well-manicured feed or creating some “smart” aesthetic, but instead about the quality of contextualization. How well can we relate two ideas together and find a shared thread? How well can we pull insights from what you experience? How many niche situations can we survive in?
Being a smart person requires that you increase the surface area for widely unique experiences throughout your lifetime, and then deeply engage with these experiences in a learnable manner. And then being able to access buried parts of your human hard drive to contextualize, empathize, and gather insights into forming an understanding of how the world works on a granular scale. That’s intelligence. Or at least one definition of it.
on facebook marketplace
As someone who is abandoning social media altogether and instead turning to NYT Games and other non-social media methods, Facebook Marketplace has been my addiction relapse of sorts. At times, I gamify my browsing experience, hypothesizing unique reasons for why someone would give up a pair of boots or vintage speakers.
Are they simply moving? Did they get new boots? Are they going through a breakup? Each item was embedded with some human intention, transition, release. Each one had a unique story. I almost wish I could message some people to hear their story, but I’m sure my question would get lost in their inbox full of lame one-liners: “Is this available?”
Then I came across Elan’s post:
If you’ll allow me to romanticize a reseller platform operated by a publicly traded company for a moment, I’ve come to see Facebook Marketplace as a catalog of human transition. An object up for resale is its owner trapped between a life lived and a life to be lived. A set of nesting measuring cups is the mourning of a dead relative, a twin bed the welcoming of a new lover. The crab cannot leave its almost-vacant shell until someone new agrees to fill it with life. - The Real Divorcees of Facebook Marketplace by Elan Ullendorff
What a beautiful way to visualize this capture of human operation. Facebook Marketplace is absolutely a catalog of human transition, and one that is absorbed in emotional release. Almost in an anthropomorphic lens, these items are just free agents, waiting to be traded from a familiar home to a new one.
I’m wondering what other elements of human life can we capture through digital means. Ofcourse FB Marketplace isn’t and wasn’t necessarily built to be a social platform but it seems to tell us more about humans than an Instagram post might. Standard social platforms have become more about curation and performance, queueing up only the best images and the perfect captions. There’s no insight on the human condition or truth behind the friction. We never see true emotional release, unless it’s on the positive side of the scale.
But instead, people are posting their well-worn denim jackets, with disclaimers on all the scuffs and tears, as a proof of real life. And the caption means a whole lot too: “Asking $35, obo” - Oh, so it doesn’t mean that much to you.. not enough to fight for. You just want to get rid of it?
For some, it’s just a means of emotional release. For others it’s a means to an end. But for most, it’s just a state of transition - one thing out, one thing in, probably, eventually.
Exhibit A: The couch I’m sitting on right now is a vintage IKEA sectional I got for $370 on FB Marketplace from a family of 5 in South Austin. What was their story? Why did they sell it? What kind of couch do they have now? Do they know how much this couch has changed my life? I wish I could tell them.
on digital nicotine
I think we have to start acknowledging that short form video is the nicotine of the social media era. It’s highly addictive, we have immense difficulty in curtailing screentime on short-form-video apps, and it’s only getting worse.
I bring this up because Substack recently introduced reels to their app experience, as a “tool for creators to maximize the mediums in which they can share their work.” In theory, this makes sense. The creator economy on Substack has grown to include more than just writers, and ofcourse it makes money when us creators make money.
But the masses on Substack are upset and the Substack team is firm in their new rollouts. A lot of people are upset that their beloved reading&writing platform is now integrating short-form video. Some people are just now realizing that Substack is a social media platform and will do what all good social media platforms do: incentivize growth and monetize efficiently.
While I agree that giving creators a multitude of tools to engage audiences uniquely and to do it all under one roof is extremely enabling, I also disagree that short-form video is not inherently evil. We’ve come to make it such that it is. Substack isn’t inherently evil, but we have to recognize that what Tiktok and Reels and Shorts have done to us digital abuse. Ofcourse, we’re products of our own doing. It’s like a chinese finger trap, of sorts.
Short-form video is vilifying. It’s a medium for slop, for advertising, and for cheap, wave-a-dollar-in-my-face type marketing. Short-form video is not inherently evil, but we’ve made it evil as fuck. We’ve created dependencies around it: it’s literally the dopamine of the digital world.
We might not realize it at a glance but the relationship have with short-form is extremely addicting and net-negative. The quick-release dopamine we receive from scrolling and reel-like video formats is deeply embedded in our consumption mechanisms. I don’t think a wake up call of any size will help at this point - and I don’t mean to be extremely dismal about it, but it’s very very sad. And scary.
Nowadays I’m torn when looking at a reel or tiktok, I’m not sure whether to indulge in the content or to feel disgusted by the time wasted on a little 22-sec video. And there’s some GREAT content out there that takes less than a minute to consume. Some of the great vines of 2016 live rent-free in my head! And some of the short stories or comedy skits are incredibly creative. But that’s a tiny fraction of what I’d consume - and that’s not an issue with the algo or my curation, that’s just the statistics on quality vs. slop and how short-form video is increasingly evil.
But our relationship with this medium has to change.
on accountability
I saw a post the other day where someone offered an ‘accountability service’ for their friends for $20/month. They would check-in on their friends daily or weekly to ensure that those friends were working hard towards their goals/dreams/careers. And they claimed that this would result in one of two ways: (1) the friends all achieve their goals with great efficiency, (2) the friends are no longer friends.
And then I did some digging and found a couple more things that offer similar incentives:
Stickk allows users to create commitment contracts with financial stakes. And users can designate friends as “referees” to monitor progress, adding a social accountability layer.
Boss as a Service offers paid accountability coaching, where "bosses" check in on your progress and provide motivation to keep you on track.
Why are we so obsessed with accountability but can’t fathom a self-directed mechanism? I’m a little conflicted on these mechanisms because on one hand, I’d love the extra nudge or reminder to get shit done, but also I don’t think everything needs to have such a level of accountability.
Filing taxes, buying birthday gifts, getting your oil change - all examples of things that are tied to a timeline and need a sense of immediate accountability. And for the most part, people don’t need friendly services to remind them of these things. Most of us use calendars to remember important birthdays; the IRS is scary enough to remind us to file taxes on time; And oil change happens every few thousands miles or when you get a little reminder from your dashboard warning lights.
I’d argue that the tasks that call for ‘accountability services’ are not meant to be finished on such rigid timelines. Some things just take time because they are meant to take time. This newsletter is late by two weeks but that’s because I literally had nothing to write about - no amount of accountability could have forced it out of me. And if it had, it would have been lackluster and not of a certain quality.
Accountability can be a boon in many situations and can urge heightened efficiency, but let’s not wrap every task in accountability and let’s definitely not ask our friends to be our parents.
link dump
the marias tiny desk concert, a must watch
a cool, curated page of vintage furniture, tech, and decor
bernie sanders has something to say
a huge report by Mattel, on the state of play
Whoosh! This one felt like spring cleaning for the mind. A lot of complaining, and some hot takes sprinkled in there - I’d love to hear what you have to say. Or think. Part of where I’d like to function as a social media, is in the comment section. Make a bold statement, call me out, bring up a counter-argument.
I look forward to digging into some bulkier topics in the coming months and spend time writing outdoors as the Austin summer turns the corner from hot to hotter. Next week: a special poem!
have a lovely april, folks.
or whatever is left of it
my last post was silly, check it out:
Obsessed with the Marias tiny desk
You’re completely right that short form video is not inherently evil. Cause how can a 6 sec video of Jus Reign impersonating a Punjabi uncle be illegal?
But we’ve turned into something pretty ugly since then.