Being Fed Content
From an interview (gift link) with Don Hertzfeldt, creator of World of Tomorrow:
Not to sound like a curmudgeon, but when I was a teenager, I took the train to go to the record store to find rare stuff. Spotify is way more convenient, but that wasn’t the point. The point was to get out and to feel like you’re hunting, to feel like you’re living your life. I’m going to the movies, I’m going to this show. What streaming has done—it’s very convenient, but it’s taken the feeling of going hunting and turned it into we’re all just being fed. We’re all farm animals that are just being fed, and we’re being fed content. You can just stay home. Just stay home. We’ll just feed it to you. No wonder everyone’s depressed.
I feel like Xochitl Gonzalez’s piece on robotaxis, People Who Don’t Like People Are Making All of Our Decisions, rhymes with Hertzfeldt’s comments:
For two decades, I have watched us blindly fall for one sales pitch after another. Every app and advancement comes shrouded in promises of “progress” and “connectivity” and “convenience.” And in many early cases — such as the invention of ride-sharing apps — Silicon Valley truly did deliver a better mousetrap. But we’re getting diminishing returns. We are living in Silicon Valley’s future now, and we are lonelier, more anxious, and more polarized than ever before.
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Hertzfeld's piece reminds me a lot of this short book "On Browsing" by Jason Guriel which focuses on the act of browsing (physical media) versus searching, or worse, being spoonfed. https://www.biblioasis.com/shop/new-releases/on-browsing/
(Slate gift link didn't work for me, btw)
On Browsing is an excellent book.
And it could be social in a different way. Took the train to the city a couple of times with a friend who’s now got a few Grammys to his name. Bought things that the Sam Goodys at the mall would never have had (and cheaper too!). Good times.
This speaks to me, for me it was hunting record stores for the version of Metallica's Kill 'em All that had "Am I Evil?" and "Blitzkrieg" on it. The joy of finding it was incredible.
I liked this comment from @neil21.bsky.social:
I have been developing a theory that much of the general crappiness of life today is about the removal of context. I started thinking about it when I realized that many of my students didn't act or talk (or maybe even think) any differently in my class than they did at home or at lunch or anywhere else. It was like they carried this bubble of sameness with them and everything had to fit that rather than them having to adjust to anything else. It feels the same for media: all media must adapt to me rather than me being willing to experience something on its terms.
Once you collapse context like that, everything becomes mostly the same. All movies are just stuff on Netflix, work and home life are really the same stuff, everything I read on the internet is just (mostly bad) stuff and all of it becomes equally important/unimportant because there's no way to distinguish any of it.
Side note: I'm also considering this in light of the Slate article on the kids watching gore/extreme violence. And the fact that some of them are watching it just because it showed up in their feed?
This is such an interesting theory. I had noticed a new awareness of ‘code switching’ and thought it some form of progress. Now your post makes me consider that the reason it’s talked about more is because it happens less; a workaday tool for moving through life’s varied contexts is now a special thing.
I think this is a great observation. I remember talking to a friend years ago about a parent who had been poisoned by Facebook (their politics shifted dramatically to the right) and their theory was that them seeing photos of their grandkid and the right-wing agitprop all jumbled together in the same feed made it all "equal" in a sense, in a way the boomer brain was not able to adjust for. Context collapse.
The way I keep reading the title of this post, it’s as “how to be at peace, in the way a central banker would be”. I think the capital F is throwing me off.
While I appreciate, relate to and agree with a lot of these comments, I can't help but think they're a bit rose-colored. Lots of people have VERY different experiences in these spaces, be they retail stores, shopping malls or taxis. This Bsky thread, in response to the same Xochitl Gonzalez piece quoted above, includes a lot of those other perspectives.
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