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mostlysignssomeportents · 4 months ago

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Pluralistic is five

I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me in SEATTLE TONIGHT (Feb 19) for with DAN SAVAGE, and in TORONTO on SUNDAY (Feb 23) at Another Story Books. More tour dates here.

Five years and two weeks ago, I parted ways with Boing Boing, a website I co-own and wrote for virtually every day for 19 years ago. Two weeks later – five years ago from today – I started my own blog, Pluralistic, which is, therefore, half a decade old, as of today.

I've written an annual rumination on this most years since.

Here's the fourth anniversary post (on blogging as a way to organize thoughts for big, ambitious, synthetic works):

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/20/fore/#synthesis

The third (on writing without analytics):

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/drei-drei-drei/#now-we-are-three

The second (on "post own site, share everywhere," AKA "POSSE"):

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/19/now-we-are-two/#two-much-posse

I wasn't sure what I would write about today, but I figured it out yesterday, in the car, driving to my book-launch event with Wil Wheaton at LA's Diesel Books (tonight's event is in Seattle, with Dan Savage):

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cory-doctorow-with-dan-savage-picks-and-shovels-a-martin-hench-novel-tickets-1106741957989

I was listening to the always excellent Know Your Enemy podcast, where the hosts were interviewing Chris Hayes:

https://know-your-enemy-1682b684.simplecast.com/episodes/pay-attention-w-chris-hayes-OA3C8ZMp

The occasion was the publication of Hayes's new book, The Sirens' Call, about the way technology interacts with our attention:

https://sirenscallbook.com

The interview was fascinating, and steered clear of moral panic about computers rotting our brains (shades of Socrates' possibly apocryphal statements that reading, rather than memorizing, was destroying young peoples' critical faculties). Instead, Hayes talked about how empty it feels to read an algorithmic feed, how our attention gets caught up by it, sometimes for longer than we planned, and then afterward, we feel like our attention and time were poorly spent. He talked about how reflective experiences – like reading a book with his kid before school – are shattered by pocket-buzzes as news articles came in. And he talked about how satisfying it was to pay protracted attention to something important, and how hard that was.

Listening to Hayes's description, I realized two things: first, he was absolutely right, those are terrible things; and second, I barely experience them (though, when I do, it makes me feel awful). Both of these are intimately bound up with my blogging and social media habits.

15 years ago, I published "Writing in the Age of Distraction," an article about preserving your attention in a digital world so you could get writing done. We live in a very different world, but the advice still holds up:

https://www.locusmag.com/Features/2009/01/cory-doctorow-writing-in-age-of.html

In particular, I advised readers to turn off all their alerts. This is something I've done since before the smartphone era, tracking down the preferences that kept programs like AIM, Apple Mail and Google Reader from popping up an alert when a new item appeared. This is absolutely fundamental and should be non-negotiable. When I heard Hayes describe how his phone buzzes in his pocket whenever there is breaking news, I was actually shocked. Do people really allow their devices to interrupt them on a random reinforcement schedule? I mean, no wonder the internet makes people go crazy. I'm not a big believer in BF Skinner, but I think it's well established that any stimulus that occurs at random intervals is impossible to get used to, and shocks you anew every time it recurs.

Rather than letting myself get pocket-buzzed by the news, I have an RSS reader. You should use an RSS reader, seriously:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/16/keep-it-really-simple-stupid/#read-receipts-are-you-kidding-me-seriously-fuck-that-noise

I periodically check in with my reader to see what stories have been posted. The experience of choosing to look at the news is profoundly different from having the news blasted at you. I still don't always choose wisely – I'm as guilty of scrolling my phone when I could be doing something more ultimately satisfying as anyone else – but the affect of being in charge of when and how I consume current events is the opposite of the feeling of being at the beck-and-call of any fool headline writer who hits "publish."

This is even more important in the age of smartphones. Whenever you install an app, turn off its notifications. If you forget and an app pushes you an update ("Hi, this is the app you used to pay your parking meter that one time! We're having a 2% off sale on parking spots in a different city from the one you're in now and we wanted to make sure you stopped whatever you were doing and found out about it RIGHT NOW!") then turn off notifications for that app. Consider deleting it. Your phone should buzz when you're expecting a call, or an important message.

Note I said important message. I also turn off notifications for most of the apps I use that have a direct-messaging function. I check in with my group chats periodically, but I never get interrupted by friends across town or across the world posting photos of lunch or kvetching about the guy who farted next to them on the subway. I look at those chats when I'm taking a break, not when I'm trying to get stuff done. It's really nice to stay on top of your friends' lives without feeling low-grade resentment for how they interrupted your creative fog with a ganked Tiktok video of a zoomer making fun of a boomer for getting mad at a millennial for quoting Osama bin Laden. There's times when it makes sense to turn on group-chat notifications – like when you're on a group outing and trying to locate one another – but the rest of the time, turn it off.

Now, there are people I need to hear from urgently, who do get to buzz my pockets when something important comes up – people I'm working on a project with, say, or my wife and kid. But I also have all those people trained to send me emails unless it's urgent. You know the norm we have about calling someone out of the blue being kind of gross and rude? That's how you should feel about making someone's pocket buzz, unless it's important. Send those people emails.

I visit my email in between other tasks and clear out my inbox. If that sounds impossible, I have some suggestions for how to manage it:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2010/dec/21/keeping-email-address-secret-spambots

Tldr? Get you some mail rules:

add everyone you correspond with to an address book called "people I know"

filter emails from anyone in the "people I know" address book into a high priority inbox, which you just treat as your regular inbox

look at the unfiltered inbox (full of people you've never corresponded with) every day or two and reply to messages that need replying (and those people will thereafter be filtered into the "people I know" inbox)

filter any message containing the world "unsubscribe" into a folder called "mailing lists"

if you're subscribed to mailing lists that you feel you can't leave because it would be impolite, filter them into a folder called "mailing lists" unless the message contains your name (so you can reply promptly if someone mentions you on the list)

The point here is to manage your attention. You decide when you want to get non-urgent communications, and mail-app automation automatically flags the stuff that you are most likely to want to see. For extra credit: adopt a "suspense file" that lets you manage other peoples' emails to you:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/26/one-weird-trick/#todo

Now, let's talk about algorithmic feeds. Lots of phosphors have been spilled on this subject, and critics of The Algorithm have an unfortunately propensity to buy into the self aggrandizement of soi-dissant evil sorcerer tech bros who claim they can "hack your dopamine loops" by programming an algorithmic feed. I think this is bullshit. Mind-control rays are nonsense, whether they are being promoted by Rasputin or a repentant Prodigal Tech Bro:

https://conversationalist.org/2020/03/05/the-prodigal-techbro/

But I hate algorithmic feeds. To explain why, I should explain how much I love non-algorithmic feeds. I follow a lot of people on several social media services, and I almost never feel the need to look at trending topics, suggested posts, or anything resembling the "For You" feed. Sure, there's times when I want to turn on the ole social TV and see what's on – the digital equivalent of leaving the TV on in a hotel room while I unpack and iron my suit – but those times are rare.

Mostly what I get is a feed of the things that my friends think are noteworthy enough to share. Some of that stuff is "OC" (material they've posted themselves), but the majority of it is stuff they're boosting from the feeds of their friends. Now, I say friend but I don't know the majority of the people I follow. I have a parasocial relationship (these get an undeserved bad rap) with them.

We're "friends" in the sense that I think they have interesting taste. There's people I've followed for more than a decade without exchanging a single explicit communication. I think they're cool, and I repost the cool stuff they post, so the people who follow me can see it. Reposting is a way of collaborating with other people who've opted into sharing their attention-management with you:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/27/probably/

Reposting with a comment? Even better – you're telling people why to pay attention to that thing, or, more importantly, why they can safely ignore it if it's not their thing (what Bruce Sterling memorably calls an "attention conservation notice"). This is why Mastodon's decision not to implement quote-tweeting (over a misplaced squeamishness about "dunk culture") was such a catastrophic own-goal. If you're building a social network without an algorithmic suggestion feed (yay), you absolutely can't afford to block a feature that lets people annotate the material they boost into other people's timelines:

https://fediversereport.com/fediverse-report-104/

Remember how I said the affect of going to read the news is totally different (and infinitely superior) to the affect of having the news pushed to you? Same goes for the difference between getting a feed of things boosted and written by people you've chosen to follow, and getting a feed of things chosen by an algorithm. This is for reasons far more profound than the mere fact that algorithms use poor signals to choose those posts (e.g. "do a lot of people seem to be arguing about this post?").

For me, the problem with algorithmic feeds is the same as the problem with AI art. The point of art is to communicate something, and art consists of thousands of micro-decisions made by someone intending to communicate something, which gives it a richness and a texture that can make art arresting and profound. Prompting an AI to draw you a picture consists of just a few decisions, orders of magnitude fewer communicative acts than are embodied in a human-drawn illustration, even if you refine the image through many subsequent prompts. What you get is something "soulless" – a thing that seems to involve many decisions, but almost all of them were made by a machine that had no communicative intent.

This is the definition of "uncanniness," which is "the seeming of intention without intending anything." Most of the "meaning" in an AI illustration is "meaning that does not stem from organizing intention":

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/13/spooky-action-at-a-close-up/#invisible-hand

The same is true of an algorithmic feed. When someone you follow – a person – posts or boosts something into their feed, there is a human intention. It is a communicative act. It can be very communicative, even if it's just a boost, provided the person adds some context with their own commentary or quoting. It can be just a little communicative, too – a momentary thumbpress on the boost button. But either way, to read a feed populated by people, rather than machines, is to be showered with the communicative intent of people whom you have chosen to hear from. Perhaps you chose unwisely and followed someone whose communications are banal or offensive or repetitious. Unfollow them.

Most importantly, follow the people who are followed by the people you follow. If someone whose taste you like pleases or interests you time and again by promoting something by a stranger to your attention, then bring that stranger closer by making them someone you follow, too. Do this, again and again, and build a constellation of people who make you smile or make you think. Just the act of boosting and virtually handling the things those people make and boost gets that stuff into your skin and your thoughts:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/31/divination/

This is the good kind of filter bubble – the bubble of "people who interest me." I'm not saying that it's a sin to read an algorithmic feed, but relying on algorithmic feeds is a recipe for feeling empty, and regretful of your misspent attention. This is true even when the algorithm is good at its job, as with Tiktok, whose whole appeal is to take your hands off the wheel and give total control over to the autopilot. Even when an algorithm makes many good guesses about what you'll like, seeing something you like isn't as nice, as pleasing, as useful, as seeing that same thing as the result of someone else's intention.

And, of course, once you let the app drive, you become a soft target for the cupidity and deceptions of the app's makers. Tiktok, for example, uses its "heating tool" to selectively boost things into your feed – not because they think you'll like it, but because they want to trick the person whose content they're boosting into thinking that Tiktok is a good place to distribute their work through:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

The value of an algorithmic feed – of an intermediated feed – is to help you build your disintermediated, human feed. Find people you like through the algorithm, follow them, then stop letting the algorithm drive.

And the human feed you consume is input for the human feed you create, the stream of communicative acts you commit in order to say to the world, "This is what feels good to spend my attention on. If this makes you feel good, too, then please follow me, and you will sit downstream of my communicative acts, as I sit downstream of the communicative acts of so many others."

The more communicative the feeds you emit are, the more reward you will reap. First, because interrogating your own attention – "why was this thing interesting?" – is a clarifying and mnemonic act, that lets you get more back from the attention you pay. And second, because the more you communicate about those attentive insights, the more people you will find who are truly Your People, a community that goes beyond "I follow this stranger" and gets into the realm of "this stranger and I are on the same side in a world of great peril and worry":

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/09/the-memex-method/

Which brings me back to this blog and my fifth bloggaversary. Because a blog is a feed, but one that is far heavier on communications than a stream of boosted posts. Five years into this iteration of my blogging life (and 24 years into my blogging life overall), blogging remains one of the most powerful, clarifying and uplifting parts of my day.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/19/gimme-five/#jeffty

#pluralistic

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lemonberry-syrup · 5 months ago

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Take the Cloakbrand fanfiction I wrote for example. I know for a fact it is BEAUTIFULLY written. I have gotten nothing but compliments from the few who actually read it and one of the comfort scenes nearly made one of my friends burst out crying at work - someone who notably struggles to cry in front of anyone, working in the middle of a mall. I take immense pride in what I created, knowing that I skillfully set the stage for platonic intimacy and platonic intimacy alone. I wrote Mark and Jack as siblings the way best friends become siblings. When the words "best friend" isn't enough to describe your connection anymore.

The androids from the New Misfits merch drop, with the only depiction of them being held hands and the promise to always find each other as they're being sent into the incinerator - I wrote that as PLATONIC.

And as grateful as I am for the one person who proofread it - the friend who works at a mall - because I was able to edit our anything that read as suggestive, I can't deny how it made my innards sink and twist every time they found a spot.

I can't deny that it hurts knowing there are people who will read things like that and be wildly upset that there's no "payoff". That just because they don't make out and bang that means all of this was wasted and for nothing.

The behavior of the characters was modeled off their real life counterparts, sure, but also off of the most intimate relationship I've ever had. And no, it wasn't the one time I tried dating someone (every moment after the initial agreement felt like I was in panic mode trying to find a way out. It was terrible and I'm never doing it again).

That was a friendship where they've fallen asleep in my arms, where we'd cuddle for hours without shame, where we'd talk every day and everything was just simply better when we did it together.

I never once wanted to kiss him. I've never once wanted to get high and fuck the night away.

Never once. And that was the strongest connection I've ever had with someone.

And it's devastating that connections as wonderful as that are boiled down to being "just" friends.

Currently reading a neat book called Becoming Dangerous that's a collection of essays on queer community, witchcraft, and rebellion, and I just. Pretty much every single essay so far focuses on sex in one way or another.

And I get it, that's a core aspect to the lives of a *lot* of people, no hate to them, but I think the problem for me is that sexual relationships are taught to really be the only way you can be emotionally close to someone. It's the only way community can really happen.

For all the love of found family tropes, people in the wild will always be assumed to be dating, if not fucking, if not relatives, all before they're possibly considered friends.

And being friends is treated like the budding flower of "something more". I can still remember how it stung to know that one of my incredibly queer friends admitted to struggling with understanding platonic relationships and intimacy. I remember the surging frustration and anger when my mother told her boyfriend I was having a sleepover and the boyfriend asked if it was a sleepover or a Sleepover wink wink nudge nudge.

Because you're never "just" friends, right? It always has to be the groundwork for "something more".

Storms forbid you enjoy the company of someone you're not romantically and/or sexually involved with.

Storms forbid you're fulfilled by it.

#aroace #apothisexual #apothiromantic #asexual #aromantic #cloakbrand #jse #markiplier #jacksepticeye #PLATONIC septiplier #fanfiction #new misfits #found family #the future was now #project synthesis #program fallen

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thefloatingstone · 5 months ago

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Nobody was with Shepard when she confronted the Reaper AI. Nobody was there to know the exactly details beat for beat on how she caused Synthesis and saved the galaxy. Nobody was there to see exactly what happened.

Do you think there is any possible way for something, some remnant of the Reaper programs to be able to tell others the exact events of what happened?

Do you think there would be any way for Garrus to be told?

Do you think he ever found out Commander "yelled at a war until it stopped" Shepard saved the galaxy by getting face to face with the highest function of the Reapers and literally argued with it until the galaxy was saved?

Do you think he would laugh?

#Mass Effect #Garrus Vakarian #Commander Shepard #Shakarian #Spoiler #spoilers

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mesetacadre · 5 months ago

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I think a lot of aspects of praxis comes down to a question of objectivizing the subjectivity of either the working class, a mass of people, or individuals, in questions of convincing people of your program as a communist but also in questions of problems arisen from the subjectivity inherent to each individual's conception of the collective leadership's objective attributes, a sort of contradiction that should be constantly solved via synthesis to ensure a correct and healthy function

#seriousposting

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bmpmp3 · 2 years ago

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speaking of synthv its 2 am and you will listen to my half finished asterian hirari hirari cover (svp by ioliite)

#vocal synth wip #<- made this tag now because i do love posting my half finished covers LOL #im pretty satisfied with most of my parameter and vocal mode shenanigans #but the pitchbends and voicing and all that are just the programs auto generated ones rn #so i still wanna get in there and get wacky with it #but it sounds nice so far! i did buy asterian's full voicebank btw LOL #luckily i found a coupon code because the usd cad exchange rn is...................................painful #BUT NOW i can have him sing all my favourite vocaloid classics with the cross language synthesis GFHJDKSHDJFKS #i listen to a lot of j music what can i say #ALSO i have. been trying to finally. learn about mixing covers properly #did u know. reverb exists? i forgot. it can do a lot HJHFJKDHJD #still barely know what im doing. but i am LEARNING and having fun :)

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feminist-space · 2 days ago

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Excerpts:

"The convenience of instant answers that LLMs provide can encourage passive consumption of information, which may lead to superficial engagement, weakened critical thinking skills, less deep understanding of the materials, and less long-term memory formation [8]. The reduced level of cognitive engagement could also contribute to a decrease in decision-making skills and in turn, foster habits of procrastination and "laziness" in both students and educators [13].

Additionally, due to the instant availability of the response to almost any question, LLMs can possibly make a learning process feel effortless, and prevent users from attempting any independent problem solving. By simplifying the process of obtaining answers, LLMs could decrease student motivation to perform independent research and generate solutions [15]. Lack of mental stimulation could lead to a decrease in cognitive development and negatively impact memory [15]. The use of LLMs can lead to fewer opportunities for direct human-to-human interaction or social learning, which plays a pivotal role in learning and memory formation [16].

Collaborative learning as well as discussions with other peers, colleagues, teachers are critical for the comprehension and retention of learning materials. With the use of LLMs for learning also come privacy and security issues, as well as plagiarism concerns (7]. Yang et al. [17] conducted a study with high school students in a programming course. The experimental group used ChatGPT to assist with learning programming, while the control group was only exposed to traditional teaching methods. The results showed that the experimental group had lower flow experience, self-efficacy, and learning performance compared to the control group.

Academic self-efficacy, a student's belief in their "ability to effectively plan, organize, and execute academic tasks"

', also contributes to how LLMs are used for learning [18]. Students with

low self-efficacy are more inclined to rely on Al, especially when influenced by academic stress

[18]. This leads students to prioritize immediate Al solutions over the development of cognitive and creative skills. Similarly, students with lower confidence in their writing skills, lower

"self-efficacy for writing" (SEWS), tended to use ChatGPT more extensively, while higher-efficacy students were more selective in Al reliance [19]. We refer the reader to the meta-analysis [20] on the effect of ChatGPT on students' learning performance, learning perception, and higher-order thinking."

"Recent empirical studies reveal concerning patterns in how LLM-powered conversational search systems exacerbate selective exposure compared to conventional search methods. Participants engaged in more biased information querying with LLM-powered conversational search, and an opinionated LLM reinforcing their views exacerbated this bias [63]. This occurs because LLMS are in essence "next token predictors" that optimize for most probable outputs, and thus can potentially be more inclined to provide consonant information than traditional information system algorithms [63]. The conversational nature of LLM interactions compounds this effect, as users can engage in multi-turn conversations that progressively narrow their information exposure. In LLM systems, the synthesis of information from multiple sources may appear to provide diverse perspectives but can actually reinforce existing biases through algorithmic selection and presentation mechanisms.

The implications for educational environments are particularly significant, as echo chambers can fundamentally compromise the development of critical thinking skills that form the foundation of quality academic discourse. When students rely on search systems or language models that systematically filter information to align with their existing viewpoints, they might miss opportunities to engage with challenging perspectives that would strengthen their analytical capabilities and broaden their intellectual horizons. Furthermore, the sophisticated nature of these algorithmic biases means that a lot of users often remain unaware of the information gaps in their research, leading to overconfident conclusions based on incomplete evidence. This creates a cascade effect where poorly informed arguments become normalized in academic and other settings, ultimately degrading the standards of scholarly debate and undermining the educational mission of fostering independent, evidence-based reasoning."

"In summary, the Brain-only group's connectivity suggests a state of increased internal coordination, engaging memory and creative thinking (manifested as theta and delta coherence across cortical regions). The Engine group, while still cognitively active, showed a tendency toward more focal connectivity associated with handling external information (e.g. beta band links to visual-parietal areas) and comparatively less activation of the brain's long-range memory circuits. These findings are in line with literature: tasks requiring internal memory amplify low-frequency brain synchrony in frontoparietal networks [77], whereas outsourcing information (via internet search) can reduce the load on these networks and alter attentional dynamics. Notably, prior studies have found that practicing internet search can reduce activation in memory-related brain areas [831, which dovetails with our observation of weaker connectivity in those regions for Search Engine group. Conversely, the richer connectivity of Brain-only group may reflect a cognitive state akin to that of high performers in creative or memory tasks, for instance, high creativity has been associated with increased fronto-occipital theta connectivity and intra-hemispheric synchronization in frontal-temporal circuits [81], patterns we see echoed in the Brain-only condition."

"This correlation between neural connectivity and behavioral quoting failure in LLM group's participants offers evidence that:

1. Early Al reliance may result in shallow encoding.

LLM group's poor recall and incorrect quoting is a possible indicator that their earlier essays were not internally integrated, likely due to outsourced cognitive processing to the LLM.

2. Withholding LLM tools during early stages might support memory formation.

Brain-only group's stronger behavioral recall, supported by more robust EEG connectivity, suggests that initial unaided effort promoted durable memory traces, enabling more effective reactivation even when LLM tools were introduced later.

Metacognitive engagement is higher in the Brain-to-LLM group.

Brain-only group might have mentally compared their past unaided efforts with tool-generated suggestions (as supported by their comments during the interviews), engaging in self-reflection and elaborative rehearsal, a process linked to executive control and semantic integration, as seen in their EEG profile.

The significant gap in quoting accuracy between reassigned LLM and Brain-only groups was not merely a behavioral artifact; it is mirrored in the structure and strength of their neural connectivity. The LLM-to-Brain group's early dependence on LLM tools appeared to have impaired long-term semantic retention and contextual memory, limiting their ability to reconstruct content without assistance. In contrast, Brain-to-LLM participants could leverage tools more strategically, resulting in stronger performance and more cohesive neural signatures."

#anti ai #chat gpt #enshittification #brain rot #ai garbage #it's too bad that the people who need to read this the most already don't read for themselves anymore

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