For the first episode I would like to re-introduce a guest i recorded with last year. I am joined by podcaster, film maker and all round great friend George Chachanidze.
We talk all things in life including his thoughts on being really close to the current Ukraine war.
Check out his videos on SnappyTech.
Despite me applauding myself, I don’t think I have broken the cycle completely. Sure, the urge to scroll through Twitter every brief break in activity has subsided somewhat, but there is still work to do in getting my attention back. The truth is, for me to completely do as I intend scares me more than a little because I don’t know what I would have left.
I have posed myself several through experiments recently. Trying to work out what is sucking my attention away and what is a valuable resource. Twitter, for example, still offers me quite a lot of value and I like sharing things and having the odd rescission. I don’t know why I do. Logic would tell me that there is absolutely no reason for me to post half the things I do, yet I enjoy it, and sometimes logic and reason don’t win.
Instagram occupies a little less space in my life, but arguably should be held a little higher. However, the app and service are so toxic to attention span, I simply can’t use it very regularly. Of all the time sucking, manipulative apps that I still have accounts on, Instagram is the worst by a mile. Yet, I still feel like I have to use it. Despite me still learning, I like to call myself a photographer, but the question comes who am I a photographer for?
The fear comes from honesty. If I am completely honest with myself, and I were to go through with the things that I want to do. Such as deleting my instagram account, I am genuinely worried I wouldn’t want to take pictures any more. Which partly answers my question about whom I take them pictures for. Without the result, i.e. showing them to other people, there seems very little point.
Without question, I enjoy the process of capturing the shot, although I do hate editing because I am poor at it. So, the process does give me some satisfaction, but the result is really the reason for donging it. If it were not for Instagram, or other social media, I wouldn’t take the photo in the first place — I would just look. Meaning, I wouldn’t be a photographer at all.
Steven Lee Myers, Paul Mozur and Jeff Kao writing in Bots and Fake Accounts Push China’s Vision of Winter Olympic Wonderland:
While China’s control of what its domestic viewers and readers consume is well established, the country has spread its own version of the Games beyond its borders, with an arsenal of digital tools that are giving China’s narrative arguably greater reach and more subtlety than ever before.
When dealing with world events now one of the things you have to navigate is truthfulness. The article above is surrounding the reach of Chinas government and its ability to sway a narrative, but this could be about any government or private company.
The ability to dictate the way you want things to appear seems to be getting easier. You can lead people already in certain belief structures down any path you choose. It doesn’t matter if it is a tech review, voting strategy or as we are seeing now a war being waged. What some would refer to as PR spin, or to give it the correct term propaganda, is rife everywhere.
Thankfully we also live in a time where information is at our finger tips and the fast flowing, free publishing nature of the internet usually comes out on top. The issue is when some people can’t, or won’t, fact check the stories they read.
I feel the same stresses that many people seem to be experiencing at the moment. The pressure in your mind that nothing seems to fix. The inability to concentrate and the nagging idea that you might be depressed. At the point where all the issues that the previous two years brought should be subsiding, for many of us it feels worse.
Perhaps it is my health issues catching up with me, perhaps I am just getting old, but I can’t escape the feeling of dread. I simply don’t feel like the person I used to, as if something has been taken from me, and I am constantly searching to get it back. For weeks and months, having no clue what was missing in my life, until I stumbled on a podcast with Johann Hari and discovered it’s my attention.
During the pandemic, I have leaned on the online world to keep me going. Relying on my online friends and the ever-changing discourse to keep me entertained and engineer at least some kind of normality. For this, I am eternally grateful. Taking part in iMessage groups and Twitter rambling chats has been a godsend. Unfortunately, this has had such a detrimental effect on my mental health and general life enjoyment that it's hard to quantify it. An effect further exaggerated by my day job being constantly connected to the web.
This isn’t another downer post. I am not moaning about my impulses to open Twitter constantly. I am not berating the internet for doing something that makes good business sense. It is more of my admittance that I understand it now. I know where the itch comes from, and it is inside me. I am craving something else. An escape, some company, or simply a distraction from something that I don’t want to do, and the apps or services created to gain your attention are always willing to give me whatever it is you need.
They, of course, will keep serving you whatever you require. Through algorithms and machine learning, pulling in manipulative design and gaming our system — they will always know what you require even if you don’t. Each time you log on the battle commences to keep your attention, but you don’t have to let it. It sounds simple, but it takes effort and understanding coming to terms that the motivation is in you.
I have too long been blaming everything else but myself for this. Only now after I have broken the cycle, I can see that the issue was with me all along. The internet is not at fault, it has been the support network for us all. Working, interacting and playing online has got us through, but it’ hurting us to continue this reliance, don’t let it keep you down.
Jordan Pearson writing in Bored Apes, BuzzFeed and the Battle for the Future of the Internet:
What is manifesting is not a world where middlemen are deprived of their share and data brokers are cut out of the action due to clever, privacy-protecting protocols, but rather a new online world in which seemingly anything can be financialized thanks to blockchain technology, which creates a digital infrastructure in which “every product is simultaneously an investment opportunity,” as Bloomberg’s Matt Levine has put it.
This sums up the biggest reason I can't get behind all the talk around blockchain and web3. Every single application that is outlined (none of which work in practice) is to sell you something. Investment into any blockchain is purely for monetary gain, and there is nothing wrong with that, but there needs to be a major use case outside this.
I do admit, we need cryptocurrency adoption, perhaps for no other good reason than to allow people to send money to whomever they like without governments and companies getting involved. Yet, I haven’t seen anything serious behind web3 apart from monetising everything.
You can scream and shout about decentralisation and freedom all you like, but the amount of grifting going on — and the excuses that are made that this is something that just happens — puts it in the same league as the dark web.
During the past few weeks, I have bene leaning on my Apple Watch as my primary device. It has become the answer to most of my distraction problems, and in many ways the most important in my life. Taking a step back and thinking about the use case for all of my devices has proven to be an interesting experiment, and I have come to some differing conclusions than those I may have done before. I truly now think it’s time to break away from the smartphone and introduce more add on devices.
When I am sat at my desk, much of the time I do not know where my phone is. Not because I am so pretentious I just don’t care, but because I don’t need to. Apple has done a remarkable job of making all of their products so integrated that often my phone goes missing for hours. Anyone texts me it pings my Mac (iMessage or not) when they call I can answer hands free or use AirPods for a little more privacy, meaning I never miss a thing.
This, of course, happens with an iPad just as seamlessly, with everything synced across devices for good measure. This isn’t perfect, but the vast majority of the time, I frequently wonder why I have a phone at all. Alas, Apple place so much emesis on the iPhone that I couldn’t do this without it acting as a relay. They seem dead set on never freeing the Apple Watch from its grasp, and perhaps they should reconsider.
Granted, to live a completely free life it may take more investment. However, I would much prefer for another device to take over as the fulcrum and make everything else add-ons. The most obvious of these would be the Apple Watch. Picture a world where this is your ‘main’ device. You can pick up and put down devices as you choose, and they can action anything you need.
Using your iPad, it becomes just like a big phone. Have a smartphone with you, then it works as it does now but when you don’t need it, you just turn it off. Require a smaller phone for the weekend away? This becomes much less hassle if your phone is a satellite device for something else.
This is without thinking about the rest of the add-on devices that could be possible, or simply work better once it breaks free. Mixed reality and potentially virtual reality devices will be launched by Apple soon, so I could envision a world where all I require is my Apple Watch and some glasses. It makes perfect sense for the ability for my Apple Watch to be everything because it’s always strapped to my wrist. It's time for it to break free and become a device in its own right and work better with everything else.
The Tim Ferriss Show 477 with Yuval Noah Harari:
the way that we will get so used to having these computers and robots that are very attuned to how we feel that we might become even more irritated with the humans who don't feel who don't react, who don't understand how we feel it don't reacting in the right way.
For the longest time I have been trying to figure out why people don’t seem to be able to take up opposing views but still communicate well. Discourse seems to break down far to quickly into name calling and there is a complete intolerance to other sides of arguments. TO put things simply we don’t know how to argue correctly any more.
I’ll say it before and I will keep saying it, the most important conversations in my life, those that have taught me the most are with people that don’t think the same way as me.
And then part of the problem is that so many people like everybody, often self centered. So I don't get what my husband is feeling because I'm too focused on my own, my own feelings. One of the reasons that computers could be better than humans in this is that they don't have feelings.
Unfortunately tech creates safe spaces to limit integration with apposing view points as little as possible. The mighty algorithm creates a feed where everyone reacts the way you do to everything. Limiting your understanding of other points of view. Becoming used to social friendships built on the back of shared interests and dedicate less and less time to those that don't behave as we think you should behave. There is no time for people that we have to make an effort to understand.
But there is no problem with this because it makes us feel great inside, we rate ourself higher because the AI understands us better and gives us the things we need. Keeps us happy, but destroys real community with it.
Dan Counsell writing in I Will Not Buy Another iPhone:
Doing whatever they can to get my attention. The trouble is, I'm a sucker.
Whilst I get it. The natural response is to blame someone else for the things that are wrong. The alternative, as Nir Eyal highlights in Indistractable, is to feel shame in your weakness of not being able to resist temptation. The reality is that many of us are welcome aware of the manipulation going on, so are more than able to resist.
Marketing is not “too good”, you are not a “sucker”, and are more than able to take back your attention that has been stolen. Yet you must shoulder some of the blame to begin to do so, as bad as the internet is, it’s your fault too.
Nick Heer writing in Trust in Google Search Is Dying:
Big publications are all trying to do their own take on the Wirecutter for home goods, and results for software are mostly marketing disguised as informative articles. Perhaps declining trust in Google’s results may be better attributed to an overall decline in the quality of what is on the web. Websites are increasingly optimized for revenue generation on their own terms, so marketers desperate to get on the first page of Google results have broken it as a search engine.
Search results now are absolute trash so it’s no wonder trust in results is failing. You have to dig through ads and SEO inflated adverts in disguise to find anything useful.
As thankful as we should be that good search exists, algorithms have made almost everything bow to the Google overlords and you can blame them. If you don’t rank you don’t matter. You don’t need to be the most trustworthy, or even present things correctly. Just just have to know how to game the search.
This started off life as a link post to an interesting video on Matt Birchlers writing set up. However, it quickly spiralled out of control into me writing regular expressions, editing javascript and spending two days making this set up my own. If you’re into doing anything like this, then the best place to start is his excellent video below.
I’ve been using Obsidian for a while and created quite a robust set-up for tasks, notes, and everything else. This lasted a while but started to fall away the longer it went on because I still had to use other apps to get things done, such as Ulysses. The thing I have found about being consistent is to remove as much resistance as possible. Cutting down on the chance that the idea will slip away, or the task just won’t be completed. So transferring fascinating links in Obsidian and then then into a writing app or Ghost was untenable.
So, thanks to Matt, and a few tweaks I have found something that really works and in the process I have even moved reading apps!
Despite being in the beta testers since really early on, Matter never really stuck with me. I was a hardcore Upnext user and nothing could tear me away. That was until the team kept updating and improving things to a point I had to go back. Matter allows me to read all the articles I want, highlight them, make notes on them and then push them straight into Obsidian (and Notion too is thats your thing).
By installing the Obsidian plugin, all of my notes and highlights are pulled in and displayed for later reference. I use this to refer to things, link notes together, and research some topics that come up whilst digesting my reading list. To make this my own, I had to edit the javascript to display things exactly as I wanted. My biggest desire was for the highlighted quotes to appear as markdown quotes and a title at the top. Matt walks you though how he did his, my changes are made in the same place as follows.
# ${feedEntry.content.title}
${this._renderMetadata(feedEntry)}${annotations.map(this._renderAnnotation).join(“n”)}
.trim();
}
_renderMetadata(feedEntry) {
if (feedEntry.content.publication_date) {
const publicationDate = new Date(feedEntry.content.publication_date);
const publicationDateStr = publicationDate.toISOString().slice(0, 10);
metadata += Published Date: ${publicationDateStr};
}
if (feedEntry.content.author) {
metadata += Author: ${feedEntry.content.author.any_name};
}
metadata += "n";
return metadata;
}
_renderAnnotation(annotation) {
return > ${annotation.text}${annotation.note ?
* **Note**: ${annotation.note} : “n”} `.trim(); } };
If I decide that the quote, and my thoughts are interesting enough for a link post on my blog, then the second step is to get that into Ulysses. To achieve this, I use the MacStories Shortcut Launcher Obsidian Plugin and link this to my Link Post Apple Shortcut.
With thanks to Matt once agin for sharing his Shortcut with me, he got me quite far down the road. Due to me messing around with the way I wanted the information to be displayed in Obsidian, his regular expressions didn’t work, so I had to customise this quite a bit.
This Shortcut looks for the title, URL, and Author. There’s also some customisation with the option to select the quote you wish to use and then the facility to add a different title to your post. It works on Mac and iOS; however text input is a bit finicky on macOS (as all Shortcuts seem to be). Regular expressions are the key here, so the shortcut is pretty messy and probably could be better, but the elements are as follows.
(?<=Author:)(.?)(?=n) does the same but with author.
^(#)s?(.+)n{1,2} finds anything in the document that is H1, i.e. a title with a #.
>(.*?)(?=n) finds all markdown quotes in the document.
It is unusual for me to show more than one quote in a post as I try and pick something that sums up the whole point. Or sometimes pick up smaller sections that hit me personally but don’t necessarily reflect the whole post. If you wish to pull out all quotes then deleting the ‘select from list’ section will transfer all into Ulysses.
All of this is rearranged into my set-up I publish link posts in and then opened in a new Ulysses sheet. I promise not to spam everyone with loads of link posts. In fact I don’t post many of them, but this set up has already meant that I have referred back to what I have been reading a lot more. Obviously, your millage may vary.