Buck The Algorithm!
How Weird Old Books and the Wayback Machine can help us escape digital determinism.
A couple of weeks ago, a reader sent me a very interesting link: a book-finding app built by writer Clive Thompson. Before you object that such technology already exists and is known by the name, “Amazon,” get this: Clive’s app will only find you random scans of books written before 1925. As it turns out, Weird Old Books are fascinating cultural artifacts, and a few cursory keyword searches on the app led me down some interesting rabbit holes. There was a treatise on bathing written in 1807 that challenged conventionally-held wisdom (the author doesn’t believe in the practice of “wetting the head”). An 1893 guide on etiquette condemns the “barbarous mutilation” of shortening the phrase, “thank you” to “thanks.” A 1913 predecessor to The Hardy Boys mystery series features a trio called the Flying Machine Boys that fight crime through the use of a then-newfangled / now-primitive means of air travel.
Thompson was inspired to create this app as a companion to a piece he wrote, titled “Rewilding Your Attention.” This piece gives a bang-on description of the ways that current Big Tech trends are contributing to an overwhelmingly dull, deterministic environment online. For starters, there’s the “status and celebrity game” we play to increase follower counts on social apps, which quickly devolves into a feedback loop of unimaginative mimicry (see also: the lifecycle of TikTok dance crazes). There’s also the “recommendation engines” that succeed in giving us more of what they know interests us, forcing us into a feedback loop of…well, ourselves. I recommend reading the entire article; Thompson is a highly engaging writer and not only identifies the problem, but offers some prescriptive treatments on the individual level — Weird Old Books being one of them.
There is something magical about veering off the pre-ordained paths of travel on the Internet and stumbling across a gem hidden in plain sight like this. It hearkens back to the exciting days of the Weird Internet Era — a time when websites had page counters and guestbooks and animated GIFs that would reliably crash one’s browser. A time when parcels of internet real estate were freely given by mysterious, benevolent entities with names like GeoCities, Tripod and Xoom. In those days, the internet was full of mystery and promise and populated by the digital equivalent of ham radio broadcasters — each one sending signals into the Great Unknown, with no reliable road map to connect them to one another. I was but one such broadcaster in this glorious time, having built my own website that housed a collection of ‘90s hiphop instrumental MIDI files that I programmed in my spare time as a high schooler (read: when I skipped classes to play around with the keyboards in the music room). In keeping with the Weird Internet Era’s freewheeling ethos, I billed myself as the not-easily-contested “Only Creator of Rap MIDIs”— thus demonstrating an affinity for branding from a very young age.
The Internet Archive Wayback Machine offers those of us that remember this era a nostalgic trip down memory lane that is both humorous and tinged with a certain sadness. Fantastic ironies abound when tracing the history of certain web domains, such as that of www.iphone.com, which was once home to a remarkably quaint protest site that railed against ‘internet phone,’ on the grounds that such technology unfairly favored the rich. Somewhere around 2000 or 2001, said site was sold to Vonage — which used it for the expressed purpose of selling internet phone plans, of course — before ending up under the Apple umbrella as the landing page for their eponymous smartphone offering. Innovation drives progress, and the iPhone was clearly destined to be more than a fringe Luddite blog, but I can’t help but feel that this story is symbolic, and that a part of us has since been acquired by Apple, as well.
After all, it was Steve Jobs himself that, back in 2010, set the blueprint for the “Walled Garden” — the closed, interlocking system of hardware, software, and services that would go on to become the reigning paradigm of Big Tech. Jobs’ Walled Garden was the key to making the internet user-friendly for the non-tech savvy and a welcoming place for members of any generation. No longer were users forced to reckon with puzzling system incompatibilities, esoteric error messages, or other frustrating holdover from the early years of personal computing; these machines now worked for the user by incorporating an intuitive design and a complimentary suite of product offerings that spoke the same language. Put differently: the Walled Garden cut the failure-to-launch Weird Internet off financially and kicked it out of the house. Get a job, hippie.
Ten years later, the wilds of the Weird Internet are but a distant memory. The Walled Garden model is no longer implemented solely by Apple, but by every tech company that aims to seriously compete in the online marketspace. Recommendation algorithms — the gentle, invisible hands that guide us through the Garden — now influence the behavior of not only consumers, but content creators, as well. These algorithms are quite extraordinary bits of code, and often very useful to us; after all, they know us better than we know ourselves. They help us select what celebrities to follow, what news to consume, and what gifts we should purchase for our loved ones. All things considered, they do a fairly good job at these things. The promise of the Walled Garden has been fulfilled; the Weird Internet has grown up to become a mature, clean-cut, and wildly successful adult.
However, every now and then, we catch a glimpse of the old Weird Internet peeking through, and it reminds us of the free will that we so rarely exercise in this tech-driven world. The free will that calls us to buck the algorithm; to assert our autonomy and venture forth without our artificially-intelligent guides. Creatively speaking, these are the moments that we feel the most alive. The moments when our own daemons take back the reins from the technocracy that swears to know our souls. The moments when inspiration strikes and there’s nothing to hold us back from staying up all night, creating a never-before-seen masterpiece. The moments when the rigmarole of updating multiple social media accounts and curating a personal brand — whatever that even means?! — seems to fade into irrelevancy, as exciting new ideas take hold within our minds; ideas that we are, for once, entirely confident are uniquely ours, and not instilled in us by some faraway server farm in Silicon Valley. These are the moments when artistry blossoms. These are the moments when the human spirit triumphs.
Practically speaking, most of the Weird Internet would be of little use to us today, just as most Weird Old Books are largely archaic and obsolete. Our current body of information is more comprehensive than ever before, and it’s always readily accessible to us. We may not be at the Singularity yet, but we’ve already made it to a day when the idea of carrying all the world’s knowledge with us as we take out the trash is no longer the stuff of science fiction. From here, our future struggle will be to nurture that same flame of creativity that Steve Jobs sparked when he envisioned the gray, clunky, Brutalist world of interfacing machines as a beautiful, well-manicured Walled Garden — the same Walled Garden that, in a cruel twist of fate, has dampened our own respective flames into tame, glowing embers.
We need not resign to be trapped in this hedge maze of digital determinism, however, for the key to our escape is embedded within our DNA; or, perhaps somewhere even deeper still. It’s that voice in our collective unconscious that compels us to action with the question, “What if it doesn’t have to be this way?” A voice that transcends all epochs of history — even future epochs that are still to be written. Indeed; the human spirit — the love, intelligence, and creativity that forms the purest expression of art — remains indomitable in any time: Present, Future, and Wayback alike.
-SB
2/20/22 — The reader’s mailbag was a little lighter than usual following last week’s musing about the media, which was a bit more wordy and a bit less optimistic than previous musings. Point taken. However, the mail I did receive came from folks of all age groups and backgrounds that had, themselves, reached similar conclusions.
The general consensus among readers was that media has historically always been biased, often even much more so than today (the early 1800s were wild, for example). The big shift as of late has been that biased reporting now often presents as fact. A reader with a background in media let me know that UPI and AP were once the only acceptable sources for reporters for much of the 20th century, which helped ensure that news was generally reported in the least-biased way. Nowadays, that standard has fallen by the wayside in much of media.
As for the “least dirty shirt in the laundry pile:” news from publicly-funded networks like PBS and the BBC received the most praise — although my UK readers were split over whether or not the latter had recently succumbed to the siren call of clickbait headlines. Lastly, one reader shared with me an interesting story about how Craigslist — the incredibly-useful-if-slightly-sketchy bulletin board site — accelerated the decline of trusted local newspapers by disrupting the classified ads industry.
Leaving the media aside for a moment and heading back to my “lane”: I’d also like to mention that we are currently in rehearsals for our next Postmodern Jukebox US Tour. The list of cities can be found here. I’ve been enjoying working with this insanely talented cast of singers and musicians so much, and they are beyond excited to rekindle their own creative flames onstage before such fantastic audiences. I may be biased (not unlike the media of the early 1800s), but I’m confident that PMJ fans are some of the warmest, kindest, and thoughtful folks around, and it remains an absolute pleasure to deliver a new show to them, year after year.
As always, feel free to write me directly by replying to this email. Word of mouth is the only marketing I do here, so please feel free to spread the word by forwarding this piece to anyone that you think might enjoy it. Believe it or not, there are now 9,000 of you on this list! I will have to think of something special to do for when we hit 10,000…
Enjoy your week,
Scott