Each morning, I brew myself a cup of coffee using a Chemex, a coffee maker that I love for the bright flavor profile that it imparts, but even more than that for its ritualistic temperament. Turn on the kettle, fold open a conical filter, grind up some light-roasted beans from the neighborhood coffee shop, unleash a slow stream of 200° water. As the coffee slowly collects at the bottom of the beautiful glass hourglass silhouette, my mind often wanders to Gabriel Kahane’s haunting song Chemex, whose 2-minute, 23-second runtime lasts roughly as long as my brewing ritual.

Chemex is the fifth song on the album Magnificent Bird, written during the final month of a year that Kahane spent entirely offline in an attempt to escape his filter bubble and connect with people at a deeper level. Four months later he was confronted with a global pandemic. “I had imagined that project as a more public-facing inquiry,” said Kahane, “but with quarantine, that year became much more of a monastic, inward-looking journey. It was not what I signed up for.”

In Chemex, the coffee filter becomes a foil to the frail filter of Kahane’s experiment in logging off, as the quiet mundanity of caffeine rites is instantly punctured all at once by current events, the wandering mind, political turmoil, the broken healthcare system, and climate catastrophe.

We attribute our anxieties to our machines, and entertain intrusive Walden-wanderlust fantasies of dissolving both simultaneously. Maybe if our dominant thumbs can retire from running long enough to feel the warm touch of brown-filled ceramic mugs, maybe. Maybe then we will be at ease.

The antique window whose fashion has come back into vogue, the wife you met on Bumble, the politicians that continue to fail you, the borders that hold you in and shut you out. Weren’t these all predestined by some great force of technology or system of power, an executive in a room or a social script, a recommendation algorithm or mighty gatekeeper? Were you not beguiled by a barrage of beautiful rule-of-thirds-obeying images to buy that coffeemaking device in the first place?

I first discovered Gabriel Kahane’s music through complete algorithmic and nominative accident. Fifteen years ago I saw a vertical banner ad, the kind that used to hang absentmindedly alongside a blog post or web forum, touting his self-titled album. I only clicked because I went to high school with a different singer-songwriter — Gavriel Kahane — that I would have been shocked to learn had found enough success to fund a marketing budget. I discovered the one-letter difference almost instantly, but from the first listen — if I remember correctly, it would have been a 30-second iTunes preview of the raucous, strangely metered North Adams — I was completely transfixed, and fifteen years later I (along with the music nerd high school friends that I subsequently infected) count myself among those changed by Kahane’s music.

Dispose of your spent filters, if you must. But they will only be replaced with filters that you do not know, filters you’ve forgotten how to notice. Or perhaps, instead, pause long enough to thumb the levigated paper skin. Pay attention, honor the ceremony of it all. There is freedom there.

Escape the Algorithm is a newsletter about taking control of our attention and finding a more human side of the internet. After you subscribe, you can make me feel supported by performing a tiny act of codependence: mail me a gift or a postcard, take me out for coffee in person, contribute a story to the newsletter, or become a paid subscriber. Learn more about becoming a ᵐⁱᶜʳᵒsupporter.

Header photo by romboide

Escape the Algorithm is a newsletter about taking control of our attention and finding a more human side of the internet. After you subscribe, you can make me feel supported by performing a tiny act of codependence: mail me a gift or a postcard, take me out for coffee in person, contribute a story to the newsletter, or become a paid subscriber. Learn more about becoming a ᵐⁱᶜʳᵒsupporter.

Since we last spoke: my essay “The New Turing Test” was included in the Internet Phone Book, now in its (sadly sold-out) second reprint through Metalabel, and I spoke to Willa Paskin about artisanal white noise for Slate’s Decoder Ring podcast.

You haven’t heard from me in a little while because I was spending time with a longer term writing project(!) as well as my new baby(!!).

Today I’m excited to debut Anti-viral, a new series where I talk to creatives about the meaningful work that algorithms overlook, and what they would do more of if attention was no object.

My first conversation is with food and culture writer Alicia Kennedy. She writes the newsletter From the Desk of Alicia Kennedy, and is the author of No Meat Required. Her forthcoming book On Eating: The Making and Unmaking of My Appetites will be out in April.

What’s your relationship with the Algorithm?

Complicated. I love the internet. The meme that’s like, “Ever since I was young I knew I wanted to be on the computer” — that is me. So it made sense that I made my career in digital media. I had this very utopian, idealistic relationship to the internet when I was younger.

It’s degraded over time. The algorithm becoming the mode of finding other people has made it unpleasant to be online. It’s hard to detach because most of my money comes from paid subscriptions to my newsletter or people signing up for workshops that I teach. I have to try to sell those, and those are the hardest things to get eyeballs on.

It creates an agitated relationship with the internet. I don’t do brand deals, which is how most people — especially food people — make money. I find it harder and harder to be seen without having to be abnormal about it, playing a game to make people see me when they’ve already opted in.

I find it very depressing that I’m not supposed to appeal to my own audience. I’m supposed to appeal to everybody. I don’t appeal to everybody, and I never wanted to.

What is something you’ve worked on that’s meaningful to you but didn’t succeed in the marketplace of attention?

Every time I do an interview.

I did over 100 episodes of a podcast. I’ve done a series called How Do You Eat, where I asked people in different cities around the world how they get their groceries. Food media is often aspirational, and I think we can learn a lot from talking to people about their daily life.

Now I do a Salon series where I talk to different food/culture writers or other people that make stuff. I had a panel on whether cookbook criticism is possible. I had two great cookbook authors talk about plant-based recipes for the holidays.

They do well with my core audience. But I’ve found that it’s really difficult to get people’s attention for an hour-long conversation about someone’s book, and that’s depressing to me.

It’s hard to convert — to use the newsletter business word — the free people to paid people without appealing to them with something very digestible. I had the most paid subscribers when I was publishing recipes regularly. Deciding that I would not do recipes regularly but would instead focus on more community-oriented and conversational things was a big shift.

I’m trying to break down the perceived walls that people have. If you can hear an author talk about what it was like to research and investigate their book and what the financials were, demystifying this whole world while bringing people into contact with authors — especially folks who live outside of major urban areas — that feels important.

The individualization of media means there was so much attention on me. The way for me to feel like I was opening up my world was to talk to people in spaces that were not a TikTok or Instagram video, but where people have chosen to come specifically to have these conversations.

That has proven more difficult to make appealing than just publishing recipes or just publishing screeds. People love a screed. They love a polemic. And I can’t do a polemic every day.

If I am putting things out in the world, I want to feel confident that there’s something decent about them. I would rather focus on having conversations and reading books and sharing things with other people than making a living off my righteous rage — which I could do, I know that would be possible, it’s just not appealing to me.

When you say that the status quo draws people toward more individuated, personality-driven work, what do you think is causing that, both culturally and mechanically?

Platforms in general make you focus on individuals. And then the shifts in platforms and algorithms mean your visibility is suppressed if you share links. I want to share other people’s work and books. But I save that energy for my newsletter because if I post it on the semi-public web, it’s going to get suppressed. Fewer people will see my stuff.

So the mechanics of the platforms and the algorithms force you to be selfish. If you start sharing other people’s work, fewer people are going to see your work. It becomes this self-perpetuating cycle of self-centeredness.

It’s also this individualized system of attention where people really latch onto an individual creator. I’ve had people say in event spaces that they buy cookbooks because they like the person online.

People will buy the book simply because you please them on the internet, and that’s terrifying to me. It’s antithetical to how I’ve thought about being a journalist and a writer in the world. The platforms feed into it, but people have been really eager to go this route. They don’t question it. They say, “Oh, this is how I get ads for olive oil from different people I follow. That’s how I figure out which olive oil to buy.”

Brands know this. I feel it very strongly working in food. If you reject, say, the ethos of Graza olive oil and you don’t share the Graza or have it on your counter, you’re alienating yourself from something you could be making money from.

People are unwilling to question how much they love that parasocialness and whatever it alleviates in them. They’re deeply uncritical of that. I think that’s very strange.

I want to follow people who are going to alert me to cool stuff: good movies, good books, good music, cool clothes. I have a very boring lifestyle-magazine approach to what I want from being online. I want it curated; I want an editorial perspective.

I’m used to hearing the critique that platforms suppress people sharing their own stuff. But what you’re saying is even more problematic: that it promotes fundamentally antisocial behavior where people can’t engage with each other’s work. Or when they do, it’s at this performative, brand-pandering level.

In the food media and culture space, which aspects of this feel new and which feel like they’ve been around for a long time?

Going back to James Beard and Julia Child and Martha Stewart and Ina Garten and Giada De Laurentiis and Rachael Ray, food has always been ripe for personality-driven attachment.

But with fragmentation and algorithm-driven social media, it’s gotten weirder. You have so much access to people, and they’re advertising directly to you. Even if you’re a food person, you might be advertising clothing to people. You’re advertising an entire aesthetic, which isn’t new, but it’s much more direct.

When Martha Stewart went to the courtroom, she had an Hermès bag, but she wasn’t advertising Hermès to you directly. Now, because of social media, you have to be selling at every stage, every aspect of your being. The fork and the sweater and the plateware and the olive oil are all for sale.

I think it’s dangerous because it gives no room for honesty in food media and critique. Recipe people occupy a completely different space from anyone who would be critical.

There’s this algae oil. Everyone’s using the algae oil now. Nara Smith did a collaboration with the algae oil.

There’s not even one inkling of curiosity about how algae oil is getting made and bottled. The only place you’re reading about it is maybe Bloomberg or the Wall Street Journal, that no one in food has read. It’s this individualized, uncritical, “everyone has to be happy and love each other” machine that cuts off any possibility of real conversation in food. You can’t say anything bad, and if you ask a question you’re being mean.

I’ll tweet about a chef who is against ending the tipped minimum wage, for example, and I’ll get a death threat in my inbox. People think they have a personal relationship with that chef or recipe developer.

There’s no room anywhere in this system to give a critique. Food media has shrunk the way all media has shrunk. It’s everyone fending for themselves. It’s not like Bon Appétit is going to go deep on the algae oil. No one does any reporting anymore.

It seems like there’s a line to be drawn from this desire you have to capture conversations, which are inherently relational, to what I think of as one of your central projects, which is refocusing attention in food away from just escapist content — recipes and restaurant travel logs — towards food systems. In both cases the system is constantly shunting attention back toward the individual.

Yeah. And the buying.

And the buying, yes. What’s interesting though is that even when your work touches on the personal, I think of your camera as primarily facing outwards towards systems. The implication of what you’re saying — which I see as almost tragic — is that no matter what you do the audience is always going to turn the camera back at you.

Yeah, absolutely. People love it when they feel like they’re getting a piece of you personally.

I’ve had comments from people saying, “I was wondering if you would ever write explicitly about your mixed identity. Will you write explicitly about being childfree?” (which is a label I’ve never taken for myself).

If these things make their way into a piece, it’s going to be because I’ve done a lot of work on them, not because I’m writing some xoJane-style “This Is Why I’m Childfree” post. I really push back on that easy discourse type of writing because I find it facile, banal, boring, speaking only for clicks and likes. It’s so antithetical to what I wanted to do with my life.

I can see in the data that people just constantly want you to talk about yourself. But they don’t like it if you turn the mirror and say, “What you want from me is parasocial bleeding out onto a page.” But it is what they’re after.

I’ve even had the thought: “If I had a kid, people would really like that.”

That’s dark.

It’s so dark. But I’m like, “Oh, people would like that. It would make me legible and softer to them in a certain way.”

This is almost the tritest example of this, but in your piece “The Algorithm of the Mind,” you wrote that Instagram showed your selfie to more of your followers than it has ever shown any of the work that you do. That was about the cult of personality among those accounts already following you but not yet paying or subscribed. But there’s also this circle beyond that — the TikTok and Instagram Reels environment — where people are suddenly scrolling into something you made with no idea who you are and maybe no interest in who you are. What do you make of that aspect of the ecosystem?

It’s terrifying. To appeal to people who don’t know anything about you… I’ll never take off on Reels beyond my own followers because I don’t let people comment if they don’t follow me. That’s to save my sanity from bad-faith lunatics.

I also don’t let people DM me who I don’t follow. I shut off story replies when I was on vacation; I think I’m never going to turn them back on. I use Opal to block social media most of the day. I have a ton of boundaries in place so that I’m using it as data, not as a way of losing myself or getting too attached.

When I was posting pictures from my trip to Copenhagen, I realized that if I was like ”Here’s where I ate in Copenhagen as a food writer,” and then posted the images, that would have done better than me just posting my photos. But I don’t want to do that. Why am I trying to appeal to people who wouldn’t really like my work anyway but do want easy, consumptive food content?

It’s depressing to know what I could do to appeal to people outside the realm of those who already know who I am, and to refuse to do it.

The closest I’ve come recently is making some Reels. I made one when Eleven Madison Park — a fine dining restaurant in New York that had gone vegan and then went back to serving meat this year — made that switch. It got me a lot of followers and decent views. I can’t manufacture that kind of shit every day.

What the algorithm wants is for me to feel frazzled by the need to perform that expertise on a daily basis.

What would an internet look like that valued this kind of more critical, more systemic, more community-oriented work more highly?

Oof. I don’t even ask for much. The mediation has always been there — it’s not like Twitter in 2008 was good and neutral — but I miss finding people and ideas without being fed them. I miss when being on the internet felt like flipping through a magazine: “Let me see what’s over here.”

Substack means anyone can start one of these blogs, including Lizzo and Charli XCX. That’s cool to an extent. At the same time, because of the way it works, of course Charli XCX is going to get more attention than a 22-year-old who just graduated from NYU, even if that 22-year-old is doing really good work. No one will see it.

It’s really hard to find it unless they decide to write something freaking weird about plastic surgery or gender politics. The ways to get attention are so obvious: already be famous, say something outrageous, or be appealing in the same way as everyone else who’s ever become famous.

It’s hard to imagine getting back to a time where — I don’t think the internet was ever a meritocracy — but where discoverability of people’s work and ideas was possible in a way that I don’t think it is anymore.

The only way I find people to read anymore — and I hate it — is if they read me, and then I start reading their work because they’re commenting or sharing. I find more new stuff in actual magazines now. I’ve gone full circle: the internet is no longer a way for me to find new stuff, it’s just a place where stuff is.

The Frieze magazine gift guide I really like actually. It actually shows me new shit I could get into. Last year it introduced me to Worms Literary Journal in the UK. The internet is never going to show that to me.

It sounds like you want more work that is contextual and curated, where in order to enter a particular world, you consciously have to decide to go to that world, and it’s a world shaped by actual people. Instead of things being inserted in random order based on opaque incentives.

Yes. That’s what I miss about my youth.

Even on LiveJournal, people had tags. Going back to AOL profiles, where you could search for people who liked the same bands as you or the same authors — even that felt more human than the way we use the internet now. In my early 20s, from being on Twitter or reading the alt-lit blog HTMLGiant, I started to copyedit different literary magazines. I found people that way, did work that way, made connections that way. It was so much more organic. People were putting things out in the world that were real.

Now it’s so hard, especially because money is… it used to be easier to live. The incentives are different because it costs so much to do anything normal. The stakes are different for everything you do, even if it’s just posts on the internet.

To tie this back to our conversation about conversations…that’s part of why I interview people: it’s interesting for my readers, but it’s also an excuse for me to engage with people whose work I admire. I’ve made friends and found collaborators through this format. It’s unfortunate if that’s not what people want.

Exactly.

If people don’t actually want — I’ll use the word “authentic” — people authentically engaging with their colleagues’ and friends’ work, then what do they want?

The relational aspect of it — the book club, the events, the Discord — is that people don’t want to have a stake. People talk about the loneliness epidemic, but I think people can be afraid or intimidated even by the idea of showing up to a book club.

I just want to cultivate the space that I actually want in the world. Whether people are into that or not is up to them. The challenge is figuring out how to make it enticing without giving my soul up to the algorithm gods.

There’s risk, but there’s also reward. At the last book club I ran, two people found out they live close by, went out and hung out, and now they’re friends. That’s the kind of thing where I’m like: okay, this is why I’m doing this.

Escape the Algorithm is a newsletter about taking control of our attention and finding a more human side of the internet. After you subscribe, you can make me feel supported by performing a tiny act of codependence: mail me a gift or a postcard, take me out for coffee in person, contribute a story to the newsletter, or become a paid subscriber. Learn more about becoming a ᵐⁱᶜʳᵒsupporter.

Escape the Algorithm is a newsletter about taking control of our attention and finding a more human side of the internet. After you subscribe, you can make me feel supported by performing a tiny act of codependence: mail me a gift or a postcard, take me out for coffee in person, contribute a story to the newsletter, or become a paid subscriber. Learn more about becoming a ᵐⁱᶜʳᵒsupporter.

In late March, and I wrapped up our Gift Interfaces class at the School for Poetic Computation. Over the course of 10 weeks, we immersed ourselves in gift-giving cultures and practices to imagine design behind scale, questioned the norms of what shape a gift can take, and most importantly, gave and received: to and from each other, our loved ones, and our communities.

For our final class, we held a potluck and gift wrapping party where we “wrapped” (documented) all the gifts given throughout the class, uploaded them to a gift interface, and took turns opening each others’ gifts. The resulting website represents the archive of our work together:

This is the letter we wrote to our students:

Dear Gift Givers,

The very first day that we met, we shared stories of meaningful gifts we've received. Elan told of the many summers that his mom spent weeks pre-cooking and individually wrapping a month's worth of kosher meals so that Elan could attend sleepaway music camp. Spencer spoke of a group living experience in which gifting was permanently in the air --- communal meals, skill shares, handwritten notes.

We couldn't have known it at the time but it feels obvious now that in those very first 10 minutes we were already casting a powerful spell, manifesting the kind of learning that can only come from gathering, and the kind of gathering that can only come from learning, and that in so doing, this gift of gatherlearning would be reflected back to us tenfold.

You attended to each other as strangers, in your strangenesses, and then unfolded the ones you thought you knew best, only to love them in their unknowability. You made instruments that measure the color of the sky. You hid poems in flower petals, wrote letters to trees. You saw as much of god in mosquitos as in artichokes. You implored us to imagine a large wide-mouth jar, wrapped extremely tightly with duct tape around the top so it won't leak, weighing about a pound, sour mango deliciousness.

We channeled into you the words of : "The line between gift to the other and pleasure for the self is always blurred and shifting. The gift goes back and forth a thousand times a day. It's a kind of game." Little did we know how short and blurry the day would be, that the game had already well begun. We channeled into you Robin Wall Kimmerer's story of a hunter who, when asked by an anthropologist why he shared surplus meat instead of storing it for lean times, simply replied "I store my meat in the belly of my brother." All the while, you were already filling our bellies to the brim.

After we prompted you to give gifts, we requested gift interfaces: rituals and tools that create the context for giving. And in the resulting exchange, in between the literal responses to our query, a preposterous glimmer. Tacky! Inevitable! Exquisite! You were the gift interface the whole time.

Thank you for all your propositions, questions, and stories throughout our time together. We cultivated generosity materially in our gifts but also spiritually in our mutual attention. Exploring these questions so core to our identity as a people together, we hope you have found a few ideas about the mystery of giftmaking. We hope the seeds you have planted (and will continue to plant) grow beyond us. We hope they gain lives of their own, sow seeds of their own. And we hope those seeds eventually find their way back to you, like a long lost classmate, again and again and again.

Love,
Spencer and Elan ~ May 19, 2025

Visit the website to peruse the wonderful gifts, view our syllabus, sift through inspiration, listen to the class playlist, and add a thank you note.

Enter the gift interface

🏃 Escape attempts

Acts of algorithmic resistance

rithm.love is a dating app where your profile is just a screenshot of your instagram explore page

Abandoned blogs is a collection of abandoned blogs

The Rent Reducer 9000 is a little free library that passively monitors nearby open houses and triggers a gunshot noise to bring down rent prices

Internet Roadtrip is a crowdsourced Google Street View roadtrip

hear to there lets you can travel to places through voice memos and field recordings

seven39 is a social network that only works for three hours a day

Library Spy is a scraped feed of books that are checked out of the New York Public Library

🌸 Screenshot garden

Souvenirs from my internet travels, presented without context

📬 Mailbox

letters and ephemera from ᵐⁱᶜʳᵒsupporters

This month, I received this delightful postcard from London, sent by Escape the Algorithm’s newest ᵐⁱᶜʳᵒsupporter, Janis:

I hope this card has safely crossed the Atlantic!!

When I saw the opportunity to be a minor supporter of your newsletter, I immediately thought of this (post) card as I think it symbolically & timelessly met your newsletter is about. The painting by Monet was part of an exhibition at the Courtauld on Monet's works in London. He was there for a short period, staying and perched at the fancy Savoy Hotel across the corner, looking southwards across the river to capture the views in painting. The challenge, and charm, was that Monet liked the short one hour window before what we now know as "golden hour" — mist, fog & pollution smog, which gave the sky & river different hues.

And so Monet sat at the hotel window every day for months to capture various iterations of the same view.

In many ways, to me, this feels like escaping the algorithm, like treasuring the brief moments with friends, like finding your own enjoyment of (weirdly) specific niches, and documenting small acts of daily occurrence, object & observation for mostly personal or occasionally public pleasure. At least that’s what your newsletter & essays feel like to me.

Thank you for your writing & sharing your curiosity with us!

Janis
May 2025

Escape the Algorithm is a newsletter about taking control of our attention and finding a more human side of the internet. After you subscribe, you can make me feel supported by performing a tiny act of codependence: mail me a gift or a postcard, take me out for coffee in person, contribute a story to the newsletter, or become a paid subscriber. Learn more about becoming a ᵐⁱᶜʳᵒsupporter.

Escape the Algorithm is a newsletter about taking control of our attention and finding a more human side of the internet. After you subscribe, you can make me feel supported by performing a tiny act of codependence: mail me a gift or a postcard, take me out for coffee in person, contribute a story to the newsletter, or become a paid subscriber. Learn more about becoming a ᵐⁱᶜʳᵒsupporter.

David Zvi Kalman is the inventor of 20-sided dreidels. He is the world’s foremost expert on how Judaism has reckoned with advancements in timekeeping throughout history. His publishing house prints, among other volumes, the most definitive anthology of queer Jewish texts. roughly once a year he posts to Facebook (of all places) a hauntingly beautiful original Borgesian vignette about the ritual hut known as a Sukkah. His recent podcast guest is a theologian whose church in Lucerne, Switzerland uses AI to guide people through prayer. He has convened poetry slams for sermons, and written Talmudic exegesis on “Good Night Moon.” You can see more of David Zvi’s work by subscribing to his newsletter, Jello Menorah, or his podcast, Belief in the Future.

David Zvi and I spoke about our experiences of Shabbat, and why disconnection remains so elusive despite our societal obsession with it.

There’s a truism among Rabbis that no matter how many sermons they give, they all essentially boil down to a single sermon with a single message. You aren’t a Rabbi, but you are an appreciator of the sermon as an art form. What would you say is your one sermon?

A lot of the work that I do is around what I call Jewish Futurism, which is the idea that the Jewish people ought to be looking at the future as not just a burden that we need to extrapolate ideas from the past onto, but as a place for real innovation, excitement, and development that are unlike anything that has happened before.

I wanted to talk today about Shabbat. Maybe we can start with the simple question: how would you define Shabbat, and how has that definition evolved over time?

What’s interesting about Shabbat is that it is always defined in relation to what work looks like in the surrounding society. So when people are mostly doing agricultural work, Shabbat is about ceasing physical labor. It’s about literally giving your muscles a rest. That’s the version of Shabbat that the Bible mostly understands. In the rabbinic period, abstaining from commerce becomes a much larger part of the Shabbat experience. And there’s also the introduction of the water mill, which is important because it’s one of the first times that people are able to get work done without human or animal muscle. And over the centuries the Rabbis start thinking in larger and larger ways about what it means to cease working when the work is not necessarily physical but is delegated, especially to machines.

Following the Industrial Revolution, work starts to be something that doesn’t have a necessary stopping point. You can work 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And factories are often optimized for working as much as possible. So Shabbat starts to be this kind of intentional ceasing of labor that stands in contrast to the push towards eternal work that you see in the rest of society. And then that again shifts in the 20th century to this philosophical idea of work not just as a thing that we do, but also as a way to move humanity forwards. Shabbat is where we de-center ourselves and stand against civilizational progress, at least for one day a week.

So there is a way in which Shabbat is more philosophically important now than it has been in previous centuries. And of course, there’s also the secondary element, around 100 years old, of Shabbat being defined by the kinds of technologies that we do not engage in on that day, which was not something that Shabbat was designed for. Shabbat took on this additional characteristic of being a place where it was actually okay to say no to technologies or to pause and think about how it should be integrated into daily life. Even though it was kind of accidental, that has made Shabbat one of the very few areas in American culture where there is a muscle for people to say, actually, “I have agency over my own use of technology,” at least for this limited period of time.

One thing that has dramatically shifted recently is that we do free labor all the time for the productivity of tech companies. When we post on Instagram, most of the time the only one profiting is the platform. How do you understand Shabbat in the context of that kind of labor?

Computers are tricky to regulate because they can be used for both work tasks and personal tasks, and it’s often unclear where one begins and the other ends. That blurriness makes it hard for computers to exist in a Shabbat environment. So sometimes the solution is just to say don’t use them at all, which seems kind of impossible to people. I know there is a phenomenon of “technology fasts,” but it's a lot harder to do if it’s not supported by a community that is doing the same thing. In that way, one of the things that makes Shabbat very interesting is that it exists not just within the context of law, but also within the context of community.

Those communities play a critical role in responding to technological development because they make it easier to counter whatever network effects make people feel compelled to engage with the technology of the day. At least in American society, many of the structures between the family unit and the state have fallen away. Because of that communal structure, Shabbat is able to draw people into a different relationship with technology than they would be able to accomplish as individuals.

In practical terms, how would you describe your personal Shabbat practice?

I don’t drive or use electronics on Shabbat. And Shabbat typically means spending the day with family, with friends, in synagogue, and a lot of reading books. As I've grown older, I’ve started informally thinking of Shabbat as “book day,” because it is much harder for me to actually read through a book on the other six days of the week, when my attention is fragmented.

If it’s true that “the purpose of a system is what it does,” then what is the purpose of Shabbat for you in particular?

I find that it is a very helpful reset to the week. I can feel it on Fridays when it’s getting close to sundown. It’s physically hard to actually put my phone down down and turn it off and start Shabbat. And by the time Shabbat is over 25 hours later, I feel that I’m in a different place. My ability to focus has returned to some kind of baseline.

Of course it changes over the course of the next six days. But I find that reset incredibly helpful in regulating my own life, my own existence. I also see it in my family. I see the way that my kids will store up things over the course of the week that get released on Shabbat, because that is the day when there is more space. And there are activities like spending hours talking with friends, reading, or resting that don’t fit into the rest of the week. So the ability to exist in more than one mode, not just on occasion, but on a weekly basis, I find incredibly valuable.

The truth of the matter is, I think everyone would find this valuable. It just happens to be that American society is not set up to support it. One of the things I find very striking every year is that the best parallel to Shabbat is actually Christmas. Christmas is one of the few days in the secular calendar in which the national culture galvanizes around not working. There are all these rituals, family gatherings, and communal meals, and songs written about how it’s the most wonderful time of the year. A century ago, there was a movement to codify Sabbath into American culture. But the idea ultimately lost. It persists in a subset of Jewish society in part because it is a minority religion only trying to regulate itself and not society as a whole. So ironically, because of American Jewish status as a minority, they were able to hold onto something that the rest of society ended up letting go.

You talked a bit about technology fasts. And as a Shabbat observant person myself, I’ve long been fascinated with this sort of fixation or fetishization of Shabbat that I’ve seen over the past decade or two. I see it in unplugging stunt journalism, in tech detox movements, and in digital wellness spaces. What do you think these conversations understand or misunderstand about Shabbat?

The difficulty in sustaining these practices really speaks to the lack of communities that are available to support them. It’s hard for a single person to say “I’m not going to use my phone for 24 hours” if they are not part of a system that supports that kind of activity.

When I think about my Shabbat practice, the things that I think about are hosting meals, gathering, and performing rituals. And although of course the way I’m abstaining from technology is a cause that is enhancing those experiences of community, it also feels like an ancillary effect of that community and not like the main thing that’s happening.

It’s interesting that Shabbat has become an “anti-technology” day, despite the fact that when Shabbat was first legislated, it literally was not thinking about machines at all, because there were no machines to legislate.

Shabbat is understood within Jewish communities as representing a certain set of values about community, about spiritual connection. Whenever some new technology comes along, the question is always how that fits into the Shabbat day. An example that I often use is the Shabbat lamp, which is a very strange device that allows you to block light from coming out of a lamp without actually turning the lamp off, because you’re not allowed to close or open a circuit on Shabbat, but you are allowed to block a light source.

The person that helped me understand this is Lindsay Ems, a scholar who writes about Amish communities. There are Amish communities in which people take devices that would ordinarily be plugged into a wall and power them using batteries: battery-powered lamps, battery-powered photocopy machines, battery-powered fans. Replacing batteries constantly is annoying, but within the context of the Amish community, it makes internal sense because what they actually care about is not being connected to the grid. The loophole is helpful because in Lindsay Ems’ words it acts as a kind of “speed bump.” It’s a way to harness electricity while reminding yourself that you are separate from a society governed by electricity.

Similarly, the Shabbat lamp is a way of preserving the values of a day in which the relationship to labor is different. There’s a lesson there about responding to technology. We need communal understanding of what it means to live a good life. What kinds of relationships do we want to have: to each other, to work, and to our local and global communities? The more a community understands its values, the better it can respond to change. When communal values are obscure, technology is much more likely to win immediately.

I want to return to the resistance you feel to separating from your device going into Shabbat. It’s funny, I think a lot of people assume that if they were just able to develop a routine of taking a break from technology once a month or once a week, they’d suddenly be cured of something. But I don’t feel any more enlightened. The second Shabbat is over, I'm just as addicted to my phone as anyone else. I really experience Shabbat as a sort of separate timespace in the way that you describe.

You know, I think about all the Shabbat-observant engineers in Silicon Valley whose observance doesn’t actually have a major impact on the kinds of values that they bring to the technology they’re developing. It stays within the context of that one particular day. I don’t quite know why that is, why it doesn’t have a kind of broader impact.

What advice would you give to someone who wants to learn something from Shabbat and apply it to their relationship with their technology?

I would say start by imagining what it means to say no to a technology that is already in your life. For a lot of people there is a visceral fear associated with stepping outside of productivity. But people are also becoming increasingly skeptical of the nebulous, quasi-religious goals that many tech outfits claim for their own work.

The first step in being able to resist damaging technologies is to pull on that thread: Why do we want technology to keep progressing? Only then can you start thinking about what values you’re trying to preserve, and in what situations technology is actually useful for advancing those values.

My family’s choice of where to live required a lot of prior planning and is tied up in my desire to observe Shabbat and be able to step away from technology once a week. If a person’s sense of connection is tied to virtual space more than physical space, then they will be in for a huge shock when they step away for 24 hours and find their physical environment to be quite diminished and impoverished and less than they want it to be.

In your ideal world, what does the future of the internet look like?

I am increasingly nervous about the future of the internet because of AI’s involvement in it. I worry about people being able to trust the kinds of material that they see online as emanating from human beings, and what it means to spend most of your day in an environment in which you’re never sure whether you’re surrounded by people or bots.

That will ultimately lead to people devaluing humanity. And what’s actually going to be important is to make sure that we value physical reality properly. I have been starting to think about what it means to talk about shared physical reality as a value in and of itself, as a place where it’s easier to interact with other human beings, and not impossible but more difficult to deceive people.

There’s also a thread to be drawn from what you said about literally having to decide where to live based on an intention towards your relationship with technology. A natural consequence of that, in my experience, is that you then need to participate in that community at a local, physical level to allow it to continue to exist and thrive.

When you spend a lot of time online, physical reality feels incredibly inefficient. Talking to people in the physical world is inefficient. Physical gathering is inefficient and at times boring, and it’s messy and you can’t extract yourself easily when things aren't going well. That is hard when it seems like there's an alternative. I think it's actually good to live in that inefficiency.

There’s this thing that happens with Shabbat where you're trying to meet up with someone at a particular time, and there’s no way to contact them on the day itself. So you communicate a plan before sundown. And you have to trust that they’ll be there, and then be okay if they’re not. That fundamentally changes the experience of the day.

I think about it also in terms of what it means to have mindfulness. Often, one of the first pieces of mindfulness is simply situating yourself properly in your own environment. What is physically in the room with me? What are the sounds that I am hearing? What are the smells that I am smelling? Shabbat is in some sense an extended experience of groundedness, because there’s nothing else available to you. You just have to be in that space.

Response to the ᵐⁱᶜʳᵒsupporter program so far has been absolutely overwhelming. Once a week I get to open my mailbox and be confronted with evidence of a relational space between myself and all of you. It’s a real gift! I am slowly working through the pile, gifting subscriptions, and adding photos/scans to my ᵐⁱᶜʳᵒsupporter archive. Today, I’ll highlight a postcard from Eva in Spain, and a jar of raw honey from Preben in Denmark. I plan on slathering the Danish honey on some challah on Shabbat morning and topping it off with gruyère :).

Escape the Algorithm is a newsletter about taking control of our attention and finding a more human side of the internet. After you subscribe, you can make me feel supported by performing a tiny act of codependence: mail me a gift or a postcard, take me out for coffee in person, contribute a story to the newsletter, or become a paid subscriber. Learn more about becoming a ᵐⁱᶜʳᵒsupporter.

Subscribe now

Become a ᵐⁱᶜʳᵒsupporter

Here’s the problem: I have no aspiration for all of you to become my main source of income. I am privileged to have a full-time job that I enjoy and no offense but I’m pretty sure that if writing a newsletter was my full-time job I would hate it!

I don’t covet the economic pressures of paid subscriptions, but I do covet the mutuality: giving readers a way to say “we care about and value your work.” Money is only one way of doing that, and it may not even be the best way.

So starting today, if you would like to become a ᵐⁱᶜʳᵒsupporter of Escape the Algorithm, you can do so by performing a tiny act of codependence:

• Send me a gift (something you’ve made, something with a story, or something you think I in particular would enjoy)

• Write me a thoughtful postcard

• Take me out for a cup of coffee in person when you’re in Philly

• Contribute a guest post to Escape the Algorithm (pitch me!)

• Support Escape the Algorithm financially, either through Substack or Buy Me a Coffee

• A secret sixth thing (email me an idea, I’ll probably be down)

No matter which of the above you choose, I’ll mark you as a paid subscriber in my mailing list.

For now, the perks of support are simple:

• Soften the para part of our parasocial relationship

• Support my commitment to only sending out emails when 1) it brings me joy and 2) I have something to say

At some point I’ll take a ᵐⁱᶜʳᵒsupporter pulse check to see if there should be any other benefits (group chat? escape the algorithm workshops?).

All Escape the Algorithm posts will remain free.

If you’re new to Escape the Algorithm, here are some nice things that people have said about it:

Escape the Algorithm is a newsletter about taking control of our attention and finding a more human side of the internet. After you subscribe, you can make me feel supported by performing a tiny act of codependence: mail me a gift or a postcard, take me out for coffee in person, contribute a story to the newsletter, or become a paid subscriber. Learn more about becoming a ᵐⁱᶜʳᵒsupporter.

This piece is a dream collaboration with Are.na Editorial, edited by the wonderful Meg Miller.

Subscribe to the Are.na Editorial newsletter here. In my experience, purchasing Are.na Annual and reading it over a cup of coffee with a pencil in hand is a powerful trans-algorithmic spell.

Maybe you were drawn in enough to click this headline because you feel it too: a latent unease with how the world is being fed to you, and how you are being fed back to it — a feeling that researcher Shagun Jhaver calls “algorithmic anxiety.” If I linger on this video of a power wash too long will I be confused for a power washing enthusiast? Did I buy that skirt because it suits my form of self expression, or because I was manipulated by effective ad targeting? Do I actually believe what I believe? Or am I just a product of what platforms show me?

The most common prescribed cure to algorithmic anxiety is control and abstinence. Reduce the number of hours you spend on Instagram each week. Create barriers to opening Instagram in the first place. Better yet, delete Instagram entirely.

If you've found that this strategy doesn't work for you, that receiving your weekly Screen Time report feels less like moderation, more like self-flagellation, there are good reasons for that. The first is that even if you delete Instagram, you still live in an Instagram world, in which, for example, the aesthetic possibilities, pathways to fame, and social dynamics are all profoundly influenced by the platform.

But the second is perhaps even more sobering. I write a newsletter, teach a course, and run workshops all called “escape the algorithm.” The implicit joke of the name’s particularity (not “escape algorithms” but “escape the algorithm”) is that living outside of algorithms isn't actually possible. An algorithm is simply a set of instructions that determines a specific result. The recommendation engine that causes Spotify to encourage you to listen to certain music is a cultural sieve, but so were, in a way, the Billboard charts and radio gatekeepers that preceded it. There have always been centers of power, always been forces that exert gravitational pulls on our behavior.

The anxiety isn't determined by the presence or absence of code. It comes from a lack of transparency and control. You are susceptible whether or not TikTok exists, whether or not you delete it. Logging off is one tool, but it will not alone cure you.

Instead of withdrawing, I encourage my students to dive deeper, engaging with platforms as if they were close reading a work of literature. In doing so, I believe that we can not only better understand a platform's ideological premises, but also the inevitable cracks in a rigid software logic that enables the surprising, delightful messiness of humanity to shine through. And in so doing, we might move beyond the flight response towards a fight response. Or if it is a flight response, let it be a flight not just away from something, but towards something.

Do your research

The first step is to deeply understand the algorithms of the platform you’re trying to escape. Use the platform with a lens towards what makes them tick and why. Form your own hypotheses about these questions:

• What are some of the contexts that might influence the creation of its algorithms?

• How do its algorithms work?

• What are some biases that its algorithms might hold?

• How do those biases manifest on the platform?

• What are some outcomes those manifestations might have on its users or culture at large?

Then, get to work researching. How does the platform make money? What is the mythology around the company’s founders and origins? What is its corporate culture? When have there been accusations of bias, privacy violations, dark design patterns, or censorship? Has the platform ever been under investigation? Does any documentation exist of its design philosophy or how it ranks certain pieces of content above others?

Make a map

Next, exhaustively document every possible path a user can take on the platform. It doesn’t matter how — you can use a sketchpad or folder full of screenshots. Pay extra attention to the user behaviors you usually ignore, and to these more oblique paths:

• Settings page + advanced settings

• About pages

• Paths that you take to end up on the platform in the first place (for example, from a Google search)

• Behaviors that you might take when first creating an account

• Advanced search operators or advanced search pages

• External tools for searching the platform

• External tools for navigating the platform

• Sitemaps

• Ways that the platform might be navigated “randomly” (has anyone built a random navigator?)

• The urls of the pages you visit (does their structure reveal anything that can open doors to navigating by direct url entry?)

Write your own algorithms

Now the fun part! Using your research and your map, write your own algorithms for your platform. These should be a set of simple instructions for a user to take to navigate the platform.

The goal should be to uncover some less trodden paths that will help guide your target user to places they wouldn’t otherwise discover. These detours might reveal:

• Content outside of your usual location/interests/social network

• Content with little engagement

• Deleted content

• Old, forgotten content

• Glitches in the platform

• Invisible labor that powers the platform

• People misusing the platform

• People vandalizing the platform

• Anything that typically goes unnoticed

Once you've written your algorithms, have some friends test them out and keep a record of what they find. Iterate; try again. Document the things that feel most surprising or compelling.

Release

Resisting the paths most traveled invites us to look at the platforms we use with a critical eye, leading us to new forms of critique, making visible parts of the world and culture that are out of our view, and inspiring entirely new ways of navigating the web.

Take Andrew Norman Wilson’s ScanOps, a collection of Google Books screenshots that include the hands of low-paid Google data entry workers, or Chia Amisola’s The Sound of Love, which curates evocative comments on Youtube songs. Then there’s Riley Walz’s Bop Spotter (a commentary on ShotSpotter, gunshot detection microphones often licensed by city governments), a constantly Shazam-ing Android phone hidden on a pole in the Mission district. Or consider my own experiment, IckTok, in which I trained a TikTok account to show me videos I would hate, in order to better understand what it means to confuse engagement with user interest. A similar spirit of inquiry led to The Man Cave Up in the Sky, where, entranced by photos of man caves unearthed by students in my workshop, I attempted to search for a liberatory gender politics within them. Exhausted by Spotify’s constant pandering to their existing tastes, another group of students designed an app specifically focused on discovering new genres of music. Other projects are as unserious as they are evocative, like EyeChat, a Chatroulette clone but only for eyes. There are also full standalone products like Marginalia, a search engine specifically focused on non-commercial content.

Not all of these projects follow the exact set of methods described, but they all represent a level of attention and intentionality that navigating the internet doesn’t usually afford.

If the most common metaphor for algorithms is following a recipe, then the goal shouldn’t be to stop making food, but to become so attuned to the shape of cooking that we can make substitutions and eventually, our own recipes. If we’re bold enough to question the maps we've been given, we may discover a world richer, stranger, and more alive than anything an algorithm could drop at our feet.

Escape the Algorithm is a newsletter about taking control of our attention and finding a more human side of the internet. After you subscribe, you can make me feel supported by performing a tiny act of codependence: mail me a gift or a postcard, take me out for coffee in person, contribute a story to the newsletter, or become a paid subscriber. Learn more about becoming a ᵐⁱᶜʳᵒsupporter.

Header art by me, using images by Albert Bierstadt (The Met) and David Grandmougin

Plenty of conflicts of interest here, but only because I tend to turn people I admire into friends/collaborators. The denizens of the poetic web are like mosquitoes that have learned to turn on lamps to attract other mosquitoes. Here goes!

“The Cantor in the Brothel” and “The Secret Synagogue Tapes”: A two-episode podcast series from David Zvi Kalman, a historian of religion and technology, about efforts to archive cantorial singing. Part 1 is about taking cantors out of the synagogue and putting them in the recording booth; part 2 is about sneaking recording devices into the synagogue on shabbat to illicitly record. Listen to this while pondering what it means to capture moments of culture expressing itself (even when they resist capture), and how the shift in context changes the experience of that culture. I think you’ll find it apt to many of the internet age’s biggest questions.

Bop Spotter: Speaking of musical archives! If you recognize Riley Waltz’s name, it might be because earlier this month Riley accidentally found himself in the position of Foremost Expert in Real-Time Citibike Location Data after the United Healthcare CEO assassin allegedly fled the scene on a Citibike. But I prefer his earlier work.

This link has everything. Criticism of notoriously expensive and inaccurate police surveillance equipment. Archival of culture expressing itself. Sociology of a street corner. Reggaeton. A stupidly simple tech stack. Riley hid a solar-powered, constantly Shazam-ing Android phone high up on a pole in the Mission district and built a website to document any songs that it hears. The only thing that would make this better is if someone located the device and successfully executed a Rickroll Injection Attack on the target syste— [receives a transmission in my earpiece] I have good news.

Traffic Cam Photobooth: More surveillance, but make it cute. Load up the website, navigate to the nearest traffic camera, and take a self-portrait using a feed that your tax dollars helped fund.

“Are ‘Algorithms’ Making Us Boring?”: When I was in college, one of my many ideas of fun (I had others, I promise!) was to go down theory rabbit holes. I would do this while sitting in the library, searching the internet or culling citations for criticism of a piece I was researching, and walking to the shelf containing the identified book. If I found the book compelling enough, the process would repeat itself. In that time, inquiry was a visceral, physical process, requiring me to carry stacks of books up winding stairs and down hallways. The architecture of the library itself felt like a path to knowledge, and the path to knowledge like a piece of architecture. There’s nothing quite like the experience of opening your mind to a new way of thinking, only to immediately destabilize it.

On the internet, what passes for criticism often takes the shape of debate: a ping pong with two players held firm, trying to win, rather than an unfolding. But Max Read’s review of “Filterworld” by Kyle Chayka — a writer whose work I greatly admire — brought me right back to that library, to the heart-racing feeling of questioning my assumptions, and then questioning those questions.

The insights are sharp, but just as importantly, the block quotes and cited footnotes each send me on their own ontological tab-laden journeys (in particular, I’ll be thinking about the quote from Jeb Boniakowski’s “We Must Build An Enormous McWorld In Times Square, A Xanadu Representing A McDonald’s From Every Nation” for a very long time). It led me, as good criticism does, to resolve contradictions in my own thinking, and toward my own conclusions.

“The Algorithm of the Mind”: That’s all to say that these days, I find myself increasingly drawn towards an extrinsic rather than intrinsic understanding of algorithms. To borrow language from Ali Alkhatib’s musings on defining AI, we might do away with the idea that an algorithm is “a technological artifact with political features” and instead recognize it as “a political artifact through and through.”

One reason I love this piece by Alicia Kennedy is that it reckons with the very real anxieties of social media without fetishizing web algorithms as their sole arbiter. Instead, there is a curiosity for other systems that exert control, and existed before the internet: capitalism, consumer psychology, institutions, to name a few.

“Field Companions”: Over the past decade there has been nothing sexier from a consumerist perspective than turning objects into Smart Objects. But the vast majority have been, to my mind, completely empty of the magic that was promised. Connection without connectedness.

There is nothing particularly “smart” about Spencer Chang’s Field Companions. They’re rocks with a little hole carved out for an NFC chip. Put the rock near your phone, and it will play back an audio recording of the place where Spencer found it.

But with this simple idea, Spencer has imbued actions, objects, and memories with meaning. The creator’s travels are imbued with a deliberateness, attention, and resolve. Objects are capable of holding memory. Nature becomes an interface for gifting. Gifting is folded back onto nature. Your Wifi-connected fridge could never.

Quiet Posters: [Keep reading even if you don’t use Bluesky and never intend to use Bluesky] Quiet Posters is a custom installable Bluesky feed that highlights posts from people who post less often. It sounds like a gimmick, but I use it basically every day, and — in the way that a great conversation facilitator can encourage people who usually don’t take up much space to speak up and those that do to take a step back — it feels like a breath of fresh air. Some days it’s the only feed that I look at. A dozen or so posts, and then I’m caught up.

Even more than that, using Quiet Posters really unlocked for me the potential of decentralized social networks. Letting people install custom feed logic not only means algorithmic agency, but also means that the incentives for gaming the system to boost engagement becomes diluted.

Marginalia: I will never shut up about Marginalia, a search engine for the non-commercial internet. The internet is the primary portal to knowledge, and search engines are the primary portals to the internet. Right now we have very few search engines (and even fewer search indices), which means that one of the best ways to make money is to weasel your way to the top of the results page on Google, which makes Google terrible to use, which makes knowledge inaccessible.

I’m excited about Marginalia, and even more excited about the prospect of a large variety of folk search engines (that same kind of algorithmic diffusion offered by custom Bluesky feeds).

Next time you’re looking for a discursive experience of the internet (rather than to find something specific), fire up Marginalia.

Eyechat: One story you could tell about the internet is that it’s an answer to the question: what if we created a whole economy focused on competing to get as many eyeballs to look at your thing for as long as possible? Neal Agarwal’s Eyechat points the mirror back at this story. It’s Chatroulette, but just eyes (no audio). Spend time gazing into strangers’ eyes and bask in the knowledge that you’re robbing internet ad conglomerates of profit.

Caitlin and Elan’s Unread Picks of the Year

We have been trained to equate a work’s engagement or views with its value. Indeed, there’s a whole content playbook that pops up around the end of the year to promote “our most shared recipes,” “my most liked reels,” or “the most popular product picks.” But there are all sorts of reasons an email can go unread: subject line missed the mark, sent at the wrong time of day, conflicted with a major news event, didn’t get shared by someone with a lot of followers, too “political” for this platform, too much of a bummer for that platform, the list goes on.

Very often this says less about the stories and more about the information and attention apparatus that they operate in. So I asked Caitlin to select a story that deserves another look, and selected one from my own archives as well.

From Links I Would Gchat You: the surreality of writing an out of office message after a miscarriage.

And from Escape the Algorithm: reconciling Spotify Wrapped with my identity as a parent.

“Century-Scale Storage”: What’s this... a last-minute bonus link? I just pored through this magnum opus by Maxwell Neely-Cohen and I promise it’s not just recency bias that drives me to share it. What can I say, the Links never stop Linking, and this is a good one.

It touches on dozens of my hobbyhorses, (and gave me some new ones too!) including but not limited to: digital data is more ephemeral than we think! Passing on rituals of archival care and maintenance may be more important than the archive itself! Culture is a major driving force of hardware storage options! The relative strengths of centralized vs. decentralized protocols! The efficacy of piracy as a long-term preservation tactic! The world should probably be run by librarians! It’s just a fascinating undertaking to look at every possible angle of a single, simple question: if you had to store something for 100 years, how would you do it?

For all the divisions at our nation’s Thanksgiving tables this year, we can at least agree on these two things, per the recipe developers I follow on Instagram:

1. Pecan pies are a bit much.

2. They can be saved.

Claire Saffitz uses the form factor of a slab pie to give a higher proportion of topping and crust to filling, and tempers the flavors with notes of chocolate and coffee, all in an attempt to avoid a result that is “tooth achingly sweet.” Miso plays the role of sweetness mediator in Shuai Wang’s version, which takes inspiration from butter mochi cake. And Jesse Szewczyk tries to “convert pecan pie haters” by “[leaning] into the salt, the booze, and the nutty nut flavor” (Jesse himself admits not liking pecan pie).

Why bother fixing something that was never good enough to be broken? And why do we — the audience — devour the Sisyphean struggle? As someone who has always liked the idea of pecan pie more than pecan pie itself, I too fall straight into this attentional trap, tasting the novel flavor combinations with my eyes. And the pattern extends beyond pastry. I see it in our collective rush towards a buffet of Twitter replacements, and I see it in the democratic yearning that flutters amidst the mere hint of a taste of political progress. The hunger is almost anachronistic: an imaginary past projected onto an impossible future.

Perhaps this is what appeals to online engagement: the promise of a perfect bite, a perfect life. Or perhaps the need is deeper, more ancient, more innately human.

In Jewish midrashic folklore, God originally created the sun and moon as twin celestial bodies, equal in both size and luminosity. God eventually asked the moon to diminish itself, and upon seeing that the moon could not be comforted, marked the diminishment as a mistake requiring atonement.

Each lunar month, there is a ritual of going outside and gazing upon the first signs of the new moon, and praying for the reversal of this original sin. “May the light of the moon be as the light of the sun… as it was before it was diminished.”

The moon will never become as big as the sun. But I guess what I’m saying is that there is beauty in longing, that perhaps, the longing is the only thing that matters at all. It’s a mass delusion that binds us like the Karo-brand corn syrup for which we forever seek substitutions. Time after time, we’ll gaze at caramelized slivers — in the pie or in the sky, we aren’t sure — and goad them into wholeness. Time after time, we may find that the only thing that will be goaded is our appetites.

🏃 Escape attempts

Acts of algorithmic resistance

(Bluesky omnibus edition)

Firehose: Every post, emoji, swear, I am verb, and image (NSFW) uploaded to Bluesky.

Quiet posters is a feed that features posts from your quieter follows (this is what unlocked the power of decentralized social media platforms for me).

And a few feeds of my own:

• cyansky is posts without the letter ‘e’

• nobody liked this is posts with no likes or reposts

• chamber of echoes is just posts about echo chambers

📜 Finite scroll

Ripples beneath the interface

Surveilling babies. Pinterest clones and the death of the artist. AI and the death of the folk artist. Threads and the death of the posting middle class. How the New York Times beat the algorithm. Translating PDFs to Brainrot, animal to human, and the dark forest internet to the forest internet.

I’ll be co-teaching a virtual class called Gift Interfaces this winter at School for Poetic Computation with the wonderful (who you may remember from his guest essay on tiny tools, and also for his ceramic web objects):

In this class, we’ll immerse ourselves in gift-giving cultures and practices to imagine design beyond scale. We’ll question the norms of what shape a gift can take, partake in existing folk gifting practices, design gifting rituals and interfaces, and explore how a gifting ecosystem begets interdependence. Most importantly, we will give and receive—to and from each other, our loved ones, and our communities. As the audience for our gifting grows, we’ll explore how personalized design might extend to a group of people and a network of communities. How can we defy the norms of “design” to attend to care at scale?

Applications are closing very soon!

Apply to Gift Interfaces

Relatedly I’ll be teaching another semester of my Escape the Algorithm course at UPenn starting in January. Tell all of the cool/thoughtful Penn students you know to register.

I spoke to ’s about the method to my madness.

I am helplessly addicted just like anyone else, and I spend time on the same platforms that make everyone depressed and they also make me depressed. There's a lot of discourse now about platforms making our kids anxious, and I think there's nothing inherently anxiety-inducing about the internet. Like when I'm doing my Escape The Algorithm work, and I'm doing that very active work of trying to see all these possibilities on this platform, and finding surprising, interesting things, that is really invigorating to me. That feels like a completely separate thing from mindless scrolling down my Twitter feed. I definitely pay attention to movements to this app or abstain from using this app, but as far as my Escape The Algorithm project, I'm less interested in abstinence. I don't think it's ultimately possible, even if I delete my TikTok account, I'm still living in a world that's supremely influenced by TikTok. Yeah. So I'm more interested in algorithmic agency and intentionality. 

Read more here:

Embedded

"I can navigate to places that I'm not supposed to go"

Embedded is your essential guide to what’s good on the internet, written by Kate Lindsay and edited by Nick Catucci…

Read more

a year ago · 40 likes · kate lindsay

Howdidyoufind.me, my website that tells the story of how people found the website, continues to bloom. I’m enjoying watching the shape of the submissions slowly mutate as as the website spreads — from newsletters, to mastodon, to discord, to are.na — like watching the tides. They give me a sense of humanity that Google Analytics would never be able to replicate. This one gave me chills:

Visit howdidyoufind.me

🏃 Escape attempts

Acts of algorithmic resistance

Deletions lets you wave goodbye to deleted Bluesky posts before they’re gone forever (also hi I’m on Bluesky now).

Daily Random is a Spotify playlist that updates daily with 30 random songs from across the platform.

A Realistic Day in my Life Living in NYC is a piece of art by Maya Man that runs every hour on the hour on the Whitney Museum website. It excerpts text mentioning specific hours of the day from publicly posted “day in my life” TikTok videos.

eink.cam is an experimental digital camera with a color e-ink display.

Redact-A-Chat is an online chat platform where every word can only be used once a day.

The Golden Dryer Sheet is an award granted to great journalism published on days when the world was preoccupied, judged by .

Cherished Files is a collection of files that hold particular meaning to Irawo Ajasin.

📜 Finite scroll

Ripples beneath the interface

Uber and Lyft are stealing from drivers. Google is stealing from Reddit (consensually). Synagogue music is being stolen from the synagogue. Geopolitical transformation is stealing from domain name owners.

The internet loves to hate women, loves to appear in novels, and loves to love restaurants in Austin that don’t actually exist.

🌸 Screenshot garden

Souvenirs from my internet travels, presented without context

I made a new weird website, a website that tells the story of how people found it. By definition, since you’re some of the first people I’m sharing this with, it’s pretty sparse right now. So please visit and add to it.

howdidyoufind.me

This is the website’s invitation:

If this website was tracking you (it isn’t), it would purport to tell me where you came from, or more specifically, the last website you were on before you were here. But trackers only tell the story of the last mile of travel: a bit like saying that a handmade quilt you ordered online came from FedEx.

This website wants to tell a different story, a deeper story. How did you come to find yourself here? If you clicked on a Facebook link, what prompted you to click? If it was shared by a friend, how did you meet that friend? If you were searching Google, what were hoping to find? Why did you decide to check your email at the moment that you did? What did an algorithm see in you when it chose to place this in your newsfeed? When did you come to follow the account whose post caught your eye? Who were you trying to flirt with when you first downloaded that messaging app? If you could trace back the chain of circumstances and relationships that brought you here, to the paragraph you are reading right now, what story — short and simple, or long and winding — would you choose to tell?

Visit howdidyoufind.me

Once you visit, share to become part of someone else’s journey.

🐌 Snail mail

Replies from readers

had this to say about befriending neighbors and beneighboring friends:

I’ve started to feel that everyone I know with a satisfying social life puts a LOT of energy into reaching out, planning events, trying intentionally to incorporate other people into their lives—and it seems especially important to have that intentionality as people couple up, have kids, &c. for me and my girlfriend, it’s especially important to have a life that is not purely based around the very normative heterosexual nuclear family setup, but one where other people are near-family and are very much present in everyday life! so I’m fascinated especially by multi-family setups and people choosing to live with close friends as well, not just a partner + kids

☣️ Algorithmic detritus

Side effects of a world driven by software logic

on why people are committing crimes against midcentury homes:

Aesthetically it creates a cycle of uniformity. With the “right” furniture, a home sells for more money. And selling a home is the only real way to make money. Homes are investments, homes stay staged—in the photos we see—and seem to eternally be for sale. And so taste, downstream, has oozed and devolved to a reality in which many think staging furniture is actual furniture. And while there is better furniture out there, definitely, buying it signifies, to me anyways, that you are living in your home and not flipping it.

argues that our subservience to the Cloud is a full-circle moment:

We spend every waking moment shoveling packets of data, an endless stream of zeros and ones, up into the sky. Our messages to friends and family? To the CLOUD. Our work emails? To the CLOUD. Our GPS data, willingly given and tracking our every movement? To the CLOUD. Our money — and I mean real, fiat money, not the cryptobro’s wet dream? It’s in the CLOUD. Our photos and TV shows and biometric data and news and banking and memories and the curated exhibitions of our boring lives — all are offered up to the CLOUD. It is He, *Dyēus Himself. He has returned.

🏃 Escape attempts

Acts of algorithmic resistance

Traffic Cam Photobooth is a website that allows anybody to locate their nearest publicly available traffic camera and use it to take pictures of themselves.

The pleasure gallery is an archive of sexts sent and received by a group of friends.

Survival printouts are at-risk materials printed from the internet for safekeeping (by ).

A delightful story about hijackers of One Million Checkboxes.

How to monetize a blog shows and tells the absurd incentives of web advertising.

Greenwich lets anyone discover and contribute related links for any webpage.

Every Outdoor Basketball Court in the U.S.A. is documenting the stories behind 59,507 courts using satellite imagery.

📜 Finite scroll

Ripples beneath the interface

Can’t wait 6 months until every single human interaction is replaced with AI? Then this app may be for you and only you. The future is summaries, or maybe even AI summaries of AI summaries of AI summaries. Here’s what happens when the snAIk eats its tAIl. On the bright side, maybe we’ll also get some rickrolls and Chinese content creators delightfully imitating AI videos out of it.

Is it possible to create anticapitalist work on social media? Is it possible to create an anticapitalist messaging app?

Also: The fraught world of branding cultural food products. The negative effects of legalizing sports betting. The Internet Archive lawsuit and the privilege of information access.

🌸 Screenshot garden

Souvenirs from my internet travels, presented without context

Last week I mentioned my favorite Live Near Friends anecdote, from a minihood endearingly nicknamed “Radish” in Oakland, CA. There, a community of 20+ friends rent or own homes within a few blocks of each other and share a large communal kitchen and backyard on the largest property, eschewing the algorithms of rugged individualism.

When Carmen and Osman built their house, they chose to install casement windows that open out from the kitchen, just behind the sink, to the outdoors. What seems like a simple architectural decision reveals itself to be a powerful magnetizing force for community.

Opening the casement windows, says Carmen, is a “signal to the community that we’re open for socialization.” Sometimes Osman will put on an apron and play barista or bartender, serving lattes, cocktails, or dog treats. Other times, dubbed “baby happy hour,” Carmen will steam milk for the neighborhood kids while their parents collectively watch over them.

To me, these windows represent some simple, broader principles for inviting community into your life:

1. Build community into the bones: Carmen and Osman built their aching for codependence not only into the location of their home, but into its very foundation. If that’s something you want, you may need to choose to prioritize it over lower rent, convenience, or a kitchen renovation.

2. Speak your intentions: Simply installing the windows isn’t enough. Carmen and Osman needed to communicate to their neighbors that an open window was an invitation to mingle.

3. Cast a wide net: Building meaningful relationships is all about maximizing the opportunities for serendipitous, deep interaction. Opening a window is a gesture that is quite literally within reach, which means that it will be opened more often. And by communicating the signal to a large group of people rather than just one or two, they expand the likelihood that someone will be there to see it.

4. Reduce social friction: Carmen and Osman never need to ask themselves “is it too soon to invite these friends for coffee again?” Their neighbors never need to wonder “do Carmen and Osman even like hanging out with us?” Nobody needs to coordinate the where or when. The casement windows themselves hold all of the emotional labor of the interaction, making room for connection.

The casement windows are a charming image. But not everyone has the resources to make physical changes to their home. Here are some lighter-lift tools I’ve used to install figurative casement windows into my life:

Invite friends to live near you

When my partner was almost finished with her medical residency in Pittsburgh, we for the first time had the power to decide for ourselves where to live. We knew that directionally, we wanted to live closer to family in New York, but otherwise we wanted to prioritize community. So we sent an email to a large group of friends that we thought might be open to doing the same.

What we learned is that most of our friends hadn’t yet thought about settling down somewhere for good. But many had Philly, a city that was a top contender for us, on their shortlist. So we took the gamble and moved here a year ago, and we never stop reminding our friends to follow suit.

Not sure where to start? You can find an email template (and some additional tips) here:

Start a neighborhood group chat

When we moved to our new home this past December, we met a few of the neighbors on our block here and there, but I was itching to accelerate the process of nesting into our neighborhood. So I wrote up a flier inviting people to a WhatsApp group, printed out a stack of copies, and went door-to-door with my toddler dropping them in mailboxes. Forty people eagerly joined, and now we have a thriving culture of grabbing each others’ packages, sharing ingredients, and asking for advice.

A nice bonus: neighbors started going out of their way to introduce themselves to me when they saw me outdoors. (I also keep a running Notes app doc where I jot down the names of people I meet and how I met them.)

Not sure where to start? You can find a flier template (and some additional tips) here:

Foster a culture of last-minute plans

On a whim during the time we lived in Pittsburgh, I started a WhatsApp group called “last-minute kiddie plans” and invited a few friends with kids. The idea of the group was simple: if you’re doing an activity with your kids, and would welcome company, send a message to the group saying so. Basically, a group-chat-based casement window. Even though I was the one who started it, I was shocked by the exponential effect it had on our interaction with friends. Every visit to the playground became an opportunity to commune with other parents, every trip to the pizza store a potential playdate. The group also became a broader source of community support — people asked for parenting advice, or dropped off meals for parents that were recovering from surgery. The straightforward name and purpose of the group chat had a powerful grounding effect that unlocked a collective care. To date, the group has over 50 members and has exchanged over seven thousand messages.

When we moved to Philly, I missed the group so much that I started another one in my neighborhood here.

While this group focused on kids and parenting, I see it as a model that can just as easily be applied to other relationships: “last-minute friend plans,” or “last-minute co-working plans,” or “last-minute drinks.”

Not sure where to start? You can find an invite template (and some additional tips) here:

🐌 Snail mail

Replies from readers

, founder of Live Near Friends (which I wrote about last week), had this offer for Escape the Algorithm readers:

Happy to help any of your readers if they are serious about buying homes near friends. In particular, we are piloting a new service for folks in the SF Bay Area or LA that helps them identify properties that are a particularly good fit for friend compounds. People can DM me if they want to be added to that pilot.

☣️ Algorithmic detritus

Side effects of a world driven by software logic

on the rise of online news hustlers:

The blue checkmark: meaningless. The bio: nondescript. The shaky, handheld video itself: unsourced, uncited and presented without comment. Googling “Faytuks News” turned up nothing. The inside of the Discord was a jokey, memey mess. Meanwhile, NBC didn’t yet have the video: A news hustler can travel halfway around the world while the mainstream media is still fact-checking him.

During the Olympics, map apps are intentionally giving people in Paris bad directions:

I had heard rumors about this change, which is designed both to enhance the system’s capacity and keep riders comfortable. But I learned about it the hard way. Leaving the men’s rugby quarter finals last week at the Stade de France, Google Maps led us on a 20-minute walk to a train station on the D line, rather than the 10-minute walk to the B line from which we’d come. Both trains run at the same frequency and go to the same place. Why had we gotten there faster on the way up? Because we’d been guided by a Parisian rugby fan who makes the trip often. None of us had even looked at our phones.

🏃 Escape attempts

Acts of algorithmic resistance

Eyechat is chatroulette but just eyes.

PySkyWifi gives you “completely free, unbelievably stupid wi-fi” on long-haul flights by tunneling data through the airmiles "first name" field.

The Internet Phone Book is a physical directory for exploring the vast, poetic web.

Push Off is a battle-royale-style game where you compete to tap the push notification as quickly as possible.

Spencer’s latest tangible computing project is a ceramic pillow for your phone that triggers do not disturb mode.

📜 Finite scroll

Ripples beneath the interface

J.D. Vance left his Venmo public. A cafe in Thailand unintentionally hijacked the TikTok algorithm. AI Hell Is Begging a Chatbot for a $5 Discount on a Light Fixture. Everyone is a DJ now, and Spotify is quietly killing the concept of albums.

🌸 Screenshot garden

Souvenirs from my internet travels, presented without context

Do you have any scripts for befriending neighbors or beneighboring friends? Let me know by replying, commenting, dming, or emailing me.

The premise of Live Near Friends is simple: enter your address and receive a link that you can share with friends, who can then opt to be notified when any homes meeting their preferences are available within walking distance of you.

Live Near Friends is sufficiently on-brand for me that whenever I have shared the website with others, they’ve assumed that I built it. But surprisingly, the most enjoyable thing about LMF has been their infrequent emails: case studies with groups of friends who have developed their own “minihoods.”

A marketing email may seem like an odd place to seek algorithmic respite. But these are stories about people who have not only looked beyond Zillow filters (number of bathrooms, neighborhood “safety,” “good” schools), but beyond the endless default desire paths of everyday life: societal expectations of what roles friends should play, NIMBY zoning laws, relationship escalators, retreats into domestic solitude, financial coordination, formulaic architecture, career prioritization, expectations of good parenting, and privatization of space.

These case studies contain something that is so difficult to come by: scripts for a different way of living.

On initiating the conversation of co-living

Joel and Sophia live in a small duplex/house cluster with friends and siblings in Fort Collins, CO:

Well before they formed the Neighbormune, [they] acted as the glue for their social group, constantly organizing ways for their friends to socialize. Between regular potlucks, dinners, and coffee shop hangouts, the same rotating cast of characters got together in person around three times per week. 

“If you want to find out who will want to live with you, start organizing ways to have a constant high touch of seeing those people,” Sophia said. That way, when they started floating the idea of coordinating their living situations, the high baseline level of comfort and familiarity made the conversation feel natural. 

In addition to these conversations, they sent their friends case studies of friends living near each other to help flesh out what living together might look like. 

On talking money

Will lives in a two-building parcel with 15 friends and their kids in San Francisco, CA:

The building had a purchase price, and each unit is unique, so we couldn’t just divide the purchase price by 8 units and call it a day. This was a potential deal killer–can we figure this out in a way that means we stay friends, and that works as a process?

One of the guys is an accountant and built a spreadsheet with all the units on the x axis and everyone’s names on the y axis. We sat in Ed’s office around a giant conference table, with the shared spreadsheet projected on the wall, and had sort of a silent auction.

We sat there for 2-3 hours, chatting with partners or amongst ourselves a little bit, slowly putting in the prices that we would be willing to pay for the units we liked…

At the end of the night, everybody had an apartment and was happy with the amount they were paying. Being able to figure this step out was the first indicator that we would be able to figure out complex problems together.

On mutual reliance

Alex and Jilli live in the same minihood as Will:

We don’t get babysitters. If you wanna hang out in the real world, you gotta get the babysitter. Here, you’ve just got your monitor on and go upstairs and hang out with your friends. I could leave tomorrow and leave my boys for 3 days and the community would absorb them. I don’t need to get clothes out, or tell them where the toothbrush is. It’s so much simplicity.

Someone’s always there. To sign for your package, check on your fire alarm. There are helpers around who know you, your family, your apartment.

On architectural affordances that invite community

Carmen and Osman’s “Radish” community consists of 20+ friends who rent or own homes within a few blocks of each other in Oakland, CA:

When we built our house, I chose those casement windows that open out. It’s such a signal to the community that we’re open for socialization. Whether that's a latté, an ice pop, a cocktail, or a dog treat. It’s our little version of “make believe.” We put on a soundtrack you might hear at a cute café. Osman puts on an apron and plays barista.

I think of these casement windows more than anything: not just as a literal structural feature, but as a metaphor for relieving social pressure in order to better blur the lines between neighbor/friend/family.

Next week, I will provide a few casement window scripts of my own—ways that I created structures in my life for befriending neighbors and beneighboring friends.

🐌 Snail mail

Replies from readers

Should this be a map or 500 maps climbed to the top of Hacker News, where it sparked many lively conversations about standardization, including a particularly rich side quest about the pitfalls of using Google Maps, which mainly optimizes for quickest route, for cycling.

The user sandworm101 went down the rabbit hole of naming some alternate modes of optimization.

Sportbike mode: route with least likelihood of speed traps, plus 1-minute warning ahead of known trap locations.

No-selfies mode: route with least cellphone coverage.

Horsebox mode: route with fewest intersections and the most sportbikes.

I count three map apps. I’ll leave it for someone else to come up with the other 497.

☣️ Algorithmic detritus

Side effects of a world driven by software logic

A habit journaling app accidentally spawned an esports league for pomodoro-based time tracking battles:

a bunch of weird shit started happening where, because this city is so fixated on the pomodoro technique, they started immediately using Futureland to track pomodoros, it was really weird, and kind of fucked too, like they started organizing into teams and 1v1s and shit to battle each other through tracked pomodoros, like now people are battling in coffee shops, restaurants, company offices, from home, from parties, it's like this city wanted to do this the whole time and we just accidentally provided the software to enable all this shit, and now like, this new underground local esport to starting emerge, and we've just been trying to keep up with and understand this new dynamic, whole thing makes no sense cause like we thought we were just showing people an app that they could use to track anything, and now we are like managing this toronto based esports league for battling through tracked pomodoros

on tattoo regret in an age of TikTok:

The difference is, tattoos aren’t a pair of Susan Alexandra martini olive earrings you can take on and off. They’re permanent (basically). And if you make a high-commitment body art decision off of a trending aesthetic, you might end up regretting it. The more tattoos permeate fashion and become covert status signals, the more susceptible they are to the inevitable trend death traps of fast fashion.

In The Atlantic, Zoë Schlanger wrote about the climate apocalypse as told through push notifications:

I took a screenshot of that push alert—a memento from this moment in which extreme weather is increasing. Climate change is here; these are the emergencies that come with it. Each push alert marks the distance we’re closing between the previous range of normal activity and the future that scientists warned us of.

🏃 Escape attempts

Acts of algorithmic resistance

ABC Glossary Questionnaire is an invitation to revisit your relationship to the internet and to reimagine how we collectively web through language.

The Locavore Guide is a directory of NYC mom-and-pop shops that its creator is building by visiting all 17,000 on foot. (I recommend her interview with ).

MSCHF Plays Venmo is a massive online Survivor-esque game that takes place over Venmo.

📜 Finite scroll

Ripples beneath the interface

404 Media tried to replace itself with AI, and Nikhil Suresh will fucking piledrive you if you mention AI again. Now more than ever, we need more curators. Counterpoint: beware the curators. Faceless Instagram accounts are on the rise. Algorithms were invented in 825 AD by scientist Mohammed Algorithm. Sounds made up but isn’t.

🌸 Screenshot garden

Souvenirs from my internet travels, presented without context

Did you turn friends into neighbors? Neighbors into friends? What advice do you have for others trying to do the same? Let me know by replying, commenting, dming, or emailing me.

Images c/o Live Near Friends

Twice, I should say.

In my defense, the Apple Store in question is no stranger to theft, in that it a) pillages the transient beauty of Grand Central by suspending the motion of humans traveling to and from money/love/death with its commercial siren song, and b) actively conceals the labor mechanics that enable the illusion of everything in our pockets.

So what I’m saying is that even if my theft wasn’t commonplace, it was at the very least appropriate: when I plugged my lifeless iPhone into one of the laptops on display, I was only stealing power from a company that had sucked the power out of mostly everything around it.

My first theft.

Because this robbery was going to take some time and I didn’t want to draw suspicion, I played the part of interested consumer, double checking that the computer did indeed have a dictionary, a calculator, a camera, and assuring the concerned Apple employee that no, they couldn’t help me find anything and that I knew perfectly well where to access the internet and how to ask it questions like “where is the nearest exit” and “can you get in trouble for plugging things into other things” thank you very much.

These escapades led me to open the Mail app, which one would expect to be empty (seeing as this was a computer that did not yet have a human counterpart), but for the fact that Apple profits off of the complete and utter obfuscation of emptiness. We are not empty, we say along with rectangular pieces of glass. See here? Red circles, feeds to refresh, the past to dwell on. We do not even have time to consume this tiny black box, let alone the world. We are stuffed, fat, living, happy.

So the inbox was happy too, full of emails about the lives of fictional characters, presumably written by Apple marketing executives, nay, Apple marketing staff, nay, Apple marketing interns, presumably working in prim white rooms with no windows or doors, the kinds that served as backdrops for early-aughts Apple commercials.

I thought about these interns, about how while their colleagues were creating Super Bowl commercials or at the very least, copy for the Apple website — work that would be seen by millions of people, would manipulate millions of people — they were to deal only in the margins of our desires. No one would read their writing. Tech bloggers would not read their writing; Tim Cook would not read their writing; even the very people they were writing for — the consumers — would not read their writing. We would only double check to make sure that there was writing, the promise of movement, life, and that we could acquire this promise in exchange for money. The emails say “no emptiness here” and nothing more. They are chimeric holograms, pools that disappear the second you dive in. But you will never dive in.

I dove in. 

More than anything I felt like I had been airlifted into a surreal parallel universe, in which everyone is wealthy and on vacation and having beautiful children who go on field trips to aquaria.

The inbox in question belongs to Jane Appleseed, and one wonders whether Jane knows her private life is being used to sell hardware and promises.

Utopia. Geoffrey went to Thailand and “couldn’t have asked for better weather.” Q4 sales are outperforming expectations. Lily’s soccer team finished the year in second place.

Everything is second place. Nothing goes wrong, nothing exceptionally well. The world is quasi-infra-ordinary. Everything is perfectly imperfect. 

Something else to know about Jane’s friends and coworkers is that they all use two spaces after periods.

I paused. There was somewhere I needed to be. I do not remember where — this was over ten years ago — but if I am anything like Jane, someone invited me to brunch. We made reservations.

I closed the Mail app but then hesitated, opened it again, exported the entire inbox, zipped it up, and emailed it to myself. An email full of emails.

My second theft.

You were expecting something sexier, I know. I baited your click with promises of a fast-paced heist. A box of iPhones under my jacket, a car chase, a furtive alleyway black suitcase handoff.

Now let me bait you again: this is only half the story.

I get home and I read more emails. A full year later, I go back to a different Apple Store and download the emails again. I missed some. They are still there where I left them; nobody bothered to change anything. Jane hasn’t sent or received any more messages. I hope she is okay.

I take notes on Jane. I am a little obsessed. As far as I can tell, her job is to receive pie charts and Keynote presentations. She went to college with Elliot Page (not that one). A dog named Sissy. A child named Katy. 

Then things get stranger: 

Ms. Barnes sends an email in June inviting Jane to a science fair in May. 

Curtis emails that he will be in town for the weekend and does everyone want to go to a basketball game? A full two years later, Kirk responds by suggesting they go to a dinner after the game.

Nina sends Jane an email about brunch. “If you're interested, let me know so I can talk to the other Dads and start looking into restaurants,” Nina says. “Maybe we could give the moms some time together and take the kids to the park.” Do Nina and Jane identify as dads? Were Apple’s notoriously strict brand standards, in pre-marriage-legalization 2012, cool with this?

I think about what it all means as an Apple marketing strategy. I realize the strategy doesn’t matter. And this is why it all matters to me: it was someone’s job to write this nearly invisible copy. It is not contrived in the ways everything else is contrived. Someone in a room was given the opportunity to write and they did. They created a fucked up universe and that’s okay because nobody will read it and because the universe is fucked up. This is real. Blissfully mundane but expressively important. They left extra space between the sentences for you.

In April 2011 something interesting happens. Jane Appleseed receives an email… from Jane Appleseed.

I double check the email addresses. They match. A resume is attached.

Nothing of this sort for a while. maybe it was a fluke, Jane was having a confusing day. But 2 months later:

The saddest email I have ever read.

I still think about Jane and her emails. I think about Jane’s children. Have they grown up? Moved out of the house? Do they check in on her? Are they looking at the same moon as me?

But most of all, I think of the intern that wrote Jane into being. About whether they have freckles, whether they were promoted to an office with windows. Maybe they know a Jane? Maybe Jane and the intern went ice skating once, maybe on their way out they didn’t want to take off their skates because it would mean they would need to stop holding hands, maybe they never stopped holding hands, maybe it took the intern weeks to finish these emails because they only had one hand to spare and maybe two pairs of feet grew numb under shoelaces under a desk in a white room without windows and maybe the numbness and absence of windows didn’t matter because they were in love. 

I think they were. I see it in the late night emails about camping trips, in the school supplies list, in the spreadsheets. Most of all, I see it in the spreadsheets.

I am projecting. Does it matter? Project with me.

🐌 Snail mail

Replies from readers

In response to Should this be a map or 500 maps?, reader Thomas shared this lovely map of their childhood town outside of Lyon, drawn from memory. “It was nice to remember the world as I saw it as a child.”

☣️ Algorithmic detritus

Side effects of a world driven by software logic

Kevin Nguyen’s oral history of the media industry apparatus that sprung up around Game of Thrones really struck the chord for me, someone who truly bafflingly (my job title was “product designer”) had a regular appearance as an in-memoriam violinist on a Game of Thrones Facebook Live show:

As much of a singular phenomenon as Thrones was, it was the focus of a brief era when Facebook was sending a flood of traffic to publications, and nearly every major media company sold out the things that differentiated its publications in order to take a sip. I don’t think there was any illusion about how precarious a reliance on social media would be, but it was surprising just how quickly that source evaporated. Internet platforms shifted away from distributing articles, the page view boom times ended, and still today, publications are reeling.

Elizabeth Goodspeed on what happens to creatives when their style becomes a trend:

Style without context always risks falling into the uncanny valley — as styles are removed from their origins and mass produced, they become unmoored from the contexts that gave them meaning, leading to a cultural and personal disconnection. If a style born from the underground music scene or a specific social movement is adopted broadly in corporate advertising, does it retain any of its original rebellious spirit or cultural significance through aesthetics alone? I don’t think it does; looking punk is meaningless if you’re not actually rebelling against anything.

🏃 Escape attempts

Acts of algorithmic resistance

This cute nameless device is a distraction-free digital sidekick.

Search the Market is a user-curated feed of personal and private Google searches.

Tech Guilt Absolution Day is Kevin Purdy’s ritual for investing in the creators he passively enjoys.

📰 Newsfeed

News that I feed to you

Perplexity is a bullshit machine. Generating AI children to cope with grief. Evidence that the early web was not “read only.” Rainbolt (of GeoGuessr fame) logging off and exploring the world in person [from the archives: How competitive Google Street Viewing makes the world feel seen]

🌸 Screenshot garden

Souvenirs from my internet travels, presented without context

Do you have any illicit files on your computer? Let me know by replying, commenting, dming, or emailing me.

The story goes something like this:

At the end of the 18th century, Spain's official geographer, Tomás Lopez, was asked by the King to create an accurate map of the kingdom. In an attempt to delegate the herculean labour required, Tomás drew a series of circles, picked the town in the center of each circle, and asked the local priest to answer a questionnaire and draw up a map of their province. The goal was to amalgamate the responses into a single map. But none of these priests were trained in cartography, and many of them would have had limited access to maps at all.2 Nonetheless, 500 of them tried. In one map, the entire region is represented simply by a series of letters (“A” for church, “B” for hermitage, “C” for house, “D” for tree, and so on). Another represents the surrounding villages as if they are orbiting planets. In some, the handwriting forms the topographies. In others, descriptive columns of text take center stage, as if the language itself is a landmark. Each priest implicitly reveals how they see the world around them, and the relative importance of its constituent parts: nature or people, religion or trade, architecture or landscape, precision or vibes.

Tomás tried for years to reconcile these mosaic shards with each other:

He died, exhausted, in 1802, after trying in vain to coordinate hundreds of maps that were inconsistent with each other. When, half a century later, the first Spanish geographical dictionary was published, it did not contain a single map. (B H Vayssiére, “Cartes et Figures de la Terre”)

There are many things to take from this story — about beginner's mind, the diversity of human experience, and the interoperability of language. But what stood out to me most was two opposing lessons about shared protocols and modularity. Tomás' experiment failed. It failed because each amateur cartographer injected their own methodology and process, resulting in incompatible maps. But in another sense, Tomás succeeded. Sure, maybe this collection of artifacts would be useless for military strategy or commerce, but on the other hand... LOOK AT THESE MAPS, THESE MAPS RULE. Imagining a world in which Tomás successfully imposed a protocol and stripped these maps of their individuality feels... tragic? Dystopian?

I'm obsessed with this story because it gets at a dynamic embedded within everything designed that we rarely think about. Once you notice it, it is present in almost every conversation, at every aperture and zoom level: modularity is inversely correlated to expressiveness.

If I were to design a personal map of my neighborhood, it would include the potholes I swerve by on my bike rides, the neighbor’s sweet precocious 4 year old that is always on the front stoop and wants to tell me about her day, routes that have small patches of grass to the right of the sidewalk and end near a public trash can (suitable for walking my right-side-only peeing dog), the schedule and trajectory of shade during the summer, homes with potted flowers hanging off their railings, restaurants that closed ages ago, the playgrounds where we are most likely to run into parent friend crushes, and the street with the best view of the skyline at night.

It probably would not look like this:

Let me give you another example. Close your eyes and picture the design of a news article on the web. You're probably imagining something like looks vaguely like this:

All of these stories, while sharing an interest in gastropods, have different subjects, tones, audiences, and takeaways. And yet, they look basically the same.

When you see a slightly generic news story design, you're seeing the solution to the problem: how do I make this work for any headline, any image, any tone, any audience? How do I make this as adaptable as possible? The question of “what does this story want?” becomes subsumed into the larger goal of malleability and efficiency. A template, not a story. A map, not 500 maps.

In an alternate universe, stories about snails could be much more visually diverse:

The downside, of course, is that approaching each story from scratch would require a lot more time and attention.

I don't want this to be mistaken for a story about web design. If you squint, you will find the same set of tradeoffs in all manner of creative work and systems thinking: think cookie-cutter suburban development, standardized testing, internet platforms, fast fashion, AI therapists, and multi-purpose kitchen tools. All of these opt for the flexibility of the generic over the expressiveness of the specific.

I am someone that preaches expressiveness to a fault, but the truth is that I make decisions to scale all the time. I don’t necessarily see this as a compromise of values. There is beauty in trying to express something specific; there is beauty too in finding compromises to create something epic and collective.

My only concern is whether we are considering the question at all. We have a whole host of platitudes for people in romantic relationships about give and take: “bend, but don’t break”; “compromise, but don't compromise yourself”; “meet halfway without losing your way.” But as participants in a designed world, it’s easy to forget that there is color lost when a system tries to be comprehensive rather than specific in the same way that a dish from a good local restaurant feels like a map of much more specific context than a TV dinner.

So when you see a map, ask yourself: how many maps could this have been?

☣️ Algorithmic detritus

Side effects of a world driven by software logic

Google's AI answers said to put glue on pizza, so of course Katie Notopoulos obliged: “No one with three brain cells would actually do this…but we can assume that AI also gives answers that are less obviously wrong but still wrong.”

Looking for oxy and escorts? Visit Eventbrite: “Eventbrite didn’t just publish these user-generated event listings; its algorithms appeared to actively recommend them to people through simple search queries or in ‘related events’… a search for ‘opioid’ in the United States showed Eventbrite’s recommendation algorithm suggesting a conference for opioid treatment practitioners between two listings for ordering oxycodone.”

🏃 Escape attempts

Acts of algorithmic resistance

&udm=14 is a tool for searching Google without generative AI answers

SmallStack is a newsletter that curates Substacks with fewer than 1,000 subscribers

The Tiny Awards celebrate “people making stuff on the internet for the fun of it and the love of it and the hell of it”

genderswap.fm is gender-swapped song covers

on scrolling is an infinite scrolling essay about infinite feeds

🌸 Screenshot garden

Souvenirs from my internet travels, presented without context

What would your personal map include? Where do you see one map where there should be 500? Let me know by replying, commenting, dming, or emailing me.

Leave a comment

Do you remember which identity you telegraphed that year? Were you feeling Good as Hell, or like a Bad Guy? Were you Fetch[ing] the Bolt Cutters, or keeping it Juicy? Not to brag, but mine was quieter, harder to describe, genre defying. You’ve probably never heard of it, a track titled “Shhhh Peaceful Shushing Mother’s Voice (Loopable)” by the artist Baby Shushing ft. Baby Sleep.

I was three months into the life of my first child, living many a parent’s worst nightmare of watching all the facets of their selfness become subsumed into parenthood. The baby was swaddled in a bassinet right beside our bed. The Sonos speaker played the track on a loop, and when that wasn’t enough, we frantically Googled “how loud can white noise be before it breaks tiny ears” and found a slew of SEO-optimized blogposts confronting the inadequacy of language to describe volume. The baby, frustratingly resistant to outsourced labor, seemed to react better to our own shushing, so we joined in on the chorus, half asleep.

It began to feel like I was part of a clonal colony of quaking aspen trees, ostensibly disparate but connected underground through a shared root system. Now I’m the baby. Now I’m the parent. Now, my parents, every parent who has ever lived. Now, the Sonos speaker. Now, Baby Shushing ft. Baby Sleep. A single exhaling organism, desperate and failing to lull and be lulled.

After one particularly sleepless night, I fired up GarageBand and layered a looped recording of myself shushing on top of a heartbeat on top of undulating white noise. I exported goodnightari.mp3, which was to work as a mirror self, staying awake and salving any sleeplessness. The world’s most absent, soothing DJ. For a time, it was enough.

In 2023, Bloomberg reported that Spotify was demonetizing white noise podcasts from its platform because they reduced its profits by as much as $38 million annually.

It’s interesting to think that, for a brief period between 2018 and 2023, we might have been living through a golden age for white noise that paralleled the golden age of symphonies. In the 18th century, a system of wealthy patrons bankrolled composers in Europe, and in the 21st, a corporate patron paid out as much as $18,000 a month to white noise podcast creators through algorithmic accident and opportunism. And here I was, unbeknownst to me, tapping into the zeitgeist with my homegrown, grass-fed, soporific beats.

It’s strange the lengths we’ll go for love, stranger still the lengths we’ll go to fall asleep.

This past month, Stability AI released Stable Audio 2.0, an improvement to its AI song generator. I gave Stable Audio 2.0 the prompt “looped recording of a parent making a shhhhhhh noise to calm a baby to sleep over the sounds of a heartbeat and white noise, calming track for falling asleep,” and it generated what can only be described as foley artist b-roll for a horror film:

These models are presumably trained and tested on songs. But one can imagine a future in which an AI could create a decent doppelganger of my hush. Would my child be able to tell the difference? Would you fault me for sleeping like a baby?

☣️ Algorithmic detritus

Side effects of a world driven by software logic

Jason Koebler on the uncanny valley that is post shrimp jesus Facebook: “I do not think Facebook is the dead internet. Instead, I think it is something worse. Facebook is the zombie internet, where a mix of bots, humans, and accounts that were once humans but aren’t anymore mix together to form a disastrous website where there is little social connection at all.”

🏃 Escape attempts

Acts of algorithmic resistance

･ ･－･ ･－ ･･･ ･ －･･ is an artist on Spotify whose name and songs are virtually unsearchable. As Casey Newton posited: “a kind of anti-SEO rebellion against the moment? is this punk rock??”

Other orders is a set of algorithms for sorting text-based feeds, including alphabetically, by Kafkaesque-ness, and by “approximate quantity of shame expressed.”

Snail is Inevitable is a browser extension in which an invisible snail slowly chases your cursor, leading to your inevitable death.

🌸 Screenshot garden

Souvenirs from my internet travels, presented without context

On Monday, April 8, the moon will pass almost surgically between the earth and the sun, completely obscuring the solar body and presenting a unique cosmic phenomenon to viewers along a thin strip of the continental United States: the opportunity to be completely obnoxious about witnessing it.

But while eclipse chasers, the media, and the pinhole-camera industry all agree that totality is worth the hype they helped manufacture, you may have better things to do than schlep down to Carbondale, Illinois—like saving up your few remaining vacation days for Burning Man.

Fear not. It’s possible to be intolerable without driving 600 miles, investing in protective eyewear, and craning your neck uncomfortably for several minutes. Here are some concrete steps you can take—without ever leaving your home—to make sure everyone knows that you witnessed the spiritual event of the century.

Study up

There will come a time after Monday when you meet someone at a party—let’s call him Paul—who has not seen the eclipse, and asks you a few too many pointed questions about it. Stay strong: Paul is not suggesting that you’re lying about seeing the eclipse (that’d be wild). He’s simply jealous and wants to soak up every bit of your experience, to live vicariously through you.

Use this as an opportunity to build an audience. Look Paul calmly in the eye and speak just loudly enough that a small crowd of admiring onlookers gathers around you. There is nothing to worry about, as long as you prepare. Here are some questions that you can expect to be asked, as well as suggested responses:

When did you see the eclipse?

Monday. You definitely saw it Monday, though the exact time is a bit hazy to you. For a few moments the earth stood still and day was night. Or maybe night was day. Time is but a delusion of the unenlightened.

Where did you go?

Raise your right pointer finger above your shoulder and let it linger until your audience is transfixed on it. Good, you have their attention. Now slowly and deliberately move your hand down towards your left hip, drawing a diagonal path through the air. It’s important here that you indicate that the line curves a bit, but the direction and angle of the curve are irrelevant.

“This was the path of totality,” you should say, as they hang on your every word. “And this“—here you point to an arbitrary and indiscernible point in the middle of the path—”this is where my life changed forever.”

Make eye contact here, as if to say “this is where your life could have changed forever,” but don’t actually say it. If you execute the above choreography properly, they’ll feel it.

Shy away from specifics. Under no circumstances should you name a city that you were in. The last thing you want is for someone to say, “Oh my friend was in Falls City, Oregon!” Or, “That’s strange, I heard the sun took a detour around Dycusburg, Kentucky, and all they saw was a few dimly lit clouds.”

Instead, talk vaguely about how you drove for a dozen hours. About seeing some cows along the way. About being stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic and taking a detour as if pulled by some great invisible force (the force of less traffic, sure, but also something greater). About how good it is that you did so: Your final viewing place was stunning, and you had it all to yourself. Alone with the sky and your thoughts.

If you find yourself starting to sweat, turn the tables and start asking them questions: ”Do you know which state has the highest ratio of cows to people?”

Gee, I’ve never thought about that. Wisconsin, maybe? Hey Sheila! Which state do you think has the most cows —

Excuse yourself for a refill while they think it through. By the time they figure it out (South Dakota), you’ll already be air-tracing the path of totality for someone on the bathroom line.

What was it like?

The hard part is over.

Your goal here is to make people bend over backwards trying to relate to you. While you, of course, can relate to no one. In fact, the single most important thing to remember while speaking to people who haven’t seen the total eclipse is that they are mere mortals and you are transcendent, a god. Never say this outright, of course; communicate your absolute superiority by communicating absolutely nothing. Channel the worst spoken-word poetry event you’ve ever been forced to attend. You are Werner Herzog on psychedelics; you’re ChatGPT responding to a simple question by glitching. You have seen past, present, and future before your eyes. You know how The Masked Singer ends and how the universe began but you sure as hell can’t be expected to explain it all in coherent English.

Tell them the eclipse was like your first kiss. Nay, your last kiss. Nay, it was like your first and last kiss simultaneously. Have they ever been in love? It’s nothing like that. It was very bright, that’s for sure. Well really it was dark. But like a really bright dark, you know? You heard it more than you saw it, really. Tasted it even. Touched it. You felt like you were on the surface of the sun. You felt the interconnectedness of all living things. For a moment you, still an atheist, were certain of the existence of a higher power. You heard a chorus of crying, which is strange because you were alone with the sky.

Pepper into your musings some choice ecliptic vocabulary: corona, penumbra, chromosphere, obscuration. If you see someone nodding along, you’ve done it all wrong. Words are insufficient, and utter bewilderment your guiding light.

There will come a time in your ramblings when someone interjects: Although they did not make the trek you made, they were able to spot a glorious partial eclipse. Do not fall for this; it is simply another attempt to relate to you. As are stories of seeing a lunar eclipse or (eyeroll) the Northern Lights. If this happens, throw your hands up and say, “I just can’t explain, but it’s different.” They will bow their heads, frustrated but appeased. They have not seen a total solar eclipse; they do not know.

Of course, you don’t know either. But by this point reality is nebulous. By this point, there is no difference between seeing and not seeing the eclipse. Or is it the blurring between seeing and not seeing that begets the eclipse? Really makes you think.

Document

Sharing a photo of the eclipse is a delicate business.

On the one hand, the photo is the crux of the entire ordeal. If you didn’t snag a fake picture, were you even not there? On the other hand, this is a terrific opportunity to maintain your luddite superiority even among the ranks of the eclipse-chasers, by insisting that you did not take a photo because you were too busy “living in the moment.”

What is a liar to do?

The answer, of course, is to concoct a scenario in which your phone went off without your intervention. Maybe you set up an automatic camera timer, or more likely, a desert squirrel, as if possessed under the soft glow of the eclipse, wandered over to your face-down phone and managed to tap out the precise combination of keys that set it off. Any story will do, as long as you were far enough from the screen to affirm the purity of your viewing experience.

And once you’ve cooked up a good story, go ahead and cook yourself some eggs. You heard that right—you don’t have a blotted-out sun at your disposal, but you sure as hell have half a dozen eggs in your fridge. Throw one into a well-oiled pan and you have your accidental-photography subject.

We’ve seen many methods, but maintain that a dead-simple sunny-side-up will yield a better total solar eclipse than poached (which leans a little lunar) or uncooked (a little light on the corona).

Open the photograph in your favorite image-editing software, invert and desaturate the colors, add an outer glow to your yolk, and voila! You’re one Instagram filter away from an eclipse shot just amateurish enough to fool your most discerning followers.

Wait about a week until the hype has died down, then upload your masterpiece, captioned with an enigmatic quote from a book you haven’t read. Or perhaps a proverb you don’t understand, written in a language you don’t speak. Or better yet, a proverb that doesn’t exist, written in a language that doesn’t exist. The moon doesn’t come with a translation and neither should you.

Et Beyond

You may think at this point that your work is done. But in order to truly convince people that you have seen the greatest spectacle of the millennium, you must never let anyone forget. Every time the moon is out is an opportunity to talk about the time it masked the sun. Every time someone sends you a cover of a song is an opportunity to ask: “are you familiar with the cover of the sun?”

If you think creatively enough, there’s really no moment too inappropriate to remind people of the grave error they made in simply going to work on the 8th of April, 2024 AE (After Eclipse).

And remind you must, else your plan will be spoiled. In pretending to have seen the eclipse, you have entered into a lifelong contract. You chose to lie, and now you must take it to your grave. Your prewritten obituary, replete with a poor scan of an egg sun, will read:

Don’t know if you know this but saw the sun be eclipsed—now it’s my turn. 

Escape the Algorithm is a newsletter about taking control of our attention and finding a more human side of the internet. After you subscribe, you can make me feel supported by performing a tiny act of codependence: mail me a gift or a postcard, take me out for coffee in person, contribute a story to the newsletter, or become a paid subscriber. Learn more about becoming a ᵐⁱᶜʳᵒsupporter.

This piece was originally published in Kyle Chayka’s One Thing.

Imagine for a moment that Google Search is seized by a benevolent government. Under its new management, it has no profit motives. Its only directive is to help people find what they are looking for.

By the most basic laws of Cory Doctorow’s “enshittification,” in which platforms start good and then slowly degrade in quality, squeezing more value out of their users in order to benefit shareholders, the nationalization of Google Search would free it to be good again. But that ignores a second vector of deterioration: its users.

Here’s how a well-intentioned search engine decays: First, a novel algorithm is developed. It’s effective at helping people find what they are looking for, so they begin to rely on it. Then, the owners of the websites that are being found notice the search engine sending them traffic. They investigate or otherwise toy with the algorithm to see if they can appear higher in the rankings. Those who are best at this gain power, influence, or money.

Then, a cottage industry develops to help websites compete. The search engines adjust their algorithms to penalize bad actors that game the algorithm. Those bad actors become even more sophisticated. They scale their efforts, whether through automation or cheap labor. Finally, in order to be seen at all, good actors bend over backwards to cater to the algorithms, too. Participate or perish. Authenticity becomes not only silenced, but perverted.

The resulting product, despite its good intentions, is a search engine that surfaces websites that were written to be optimized for a search engine. You are not the audience; the algorithm is.

We don’t need a better large search engine. Instead, we need to cultivate what I would call “folk search algorithms,” a set of tools and practices that, whether by chance or design, are not influential enough to move markets:

1. Use small, alternative search engines. You be familiar with some less popular search engines, but the reality is that the vast majority, including DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, and AOL, are built on top of the webpage index of the big three search engines—Google, Bing, and Yandex—which themselves all have very similar logic for ranking webpages. So even many of the non-Googles are susceptible to secondhand enshittification. But there are some niche efforts to reimagine what searching can be. One of my favorites is Marginalia, a search engine created by a Swedish software developer that surfaces non-commercial websites. Another is an AI search engine called Exa. If a general purpose LLM works by predicting what text will come next, Exa works by predicting what links might follow your search query. (If you’re curious, I maintain a collection of other alt search engines here).
   
   If I ask Google about the concept of “folk,” the first five results are all search engine-optimized dictionary websites. If I ask Marginalia or Exa, I am presented with a rich tapestry of rabbit holes to descend into (folk horror, folk interfaces, folk metal, folk tales) from a variety of sources (libraries, forums, artist journals, personal catalogs, niche newsletters, faculty pages, and academic articles).

2. Search with something other than a search engine. Sites like Reddit, Facebook Groups, Discord, and TikTok may technically have search functionality, but search is not their primary purpose. As such, the content maximizers focus their attention elsewhere, and search can still yield helpful results.

3. Use Google unconventionally. Long ago there used to be a stronger culture of sharing “Google hacks,” tricks for using advanced search operators to bend Google to your will. As Google search has gotten “better” at interpreting our intentions, this exchange of tips has quieted. But searching in ways that are, if not surprising, at least unconventional, can help evade the tactics of SEO specialists. Filtering my search for chana masala recipes by “.edu” domains, for example, may not make much intuitive sense, but does have the accidental effect of returning recipes that were not optimized within an inch of their life.

The email that I receive from Substack whenever somebody signs up for my newsletter contains a referral source. And while I love and appreciate even those who find my work through Twitter, Google, or Facebook, it hits different when the reader came from an are.na channel called “words continuous reframing,” the blog of a French essayist, a discussion on a British comedy forum, or the personal website of a microbiologist phd candidate with “archival tendencies,”

These to me are the closest corollary to “someone mentioned your project while we were engaged in deep discussion” or “I found a piece you wrote in the footnote of a book that I admire.” In other words, it took effort for us to find each other. And much like an inefficient light bulb gives off heat, folk search algorithms have the byproduct of context.

In the end, maybe that’s the only definition of authenticity that doesn’t fall apart under close inspection: not a state of being, but a relational action, an interest in doing the hard work not just to find but to truly search, for each other, around each other, within each other.

I'm doomscrolling late at night when I come across my first Rainbolt video. He’s guessing where in the world pictures of completely nondescript dirt roads are located, and he's guessing correctly. It's a show of knowledge that strains credulity, and it's too late at night for me to start investigating. Can someone really tell the difference between a dirt road in South India and a dirt road in Brazil without other identifying features? I throw him a follow, determined to come back to this at another point and verify that it isn't a prank or gimmick. To my happy surprise, it's much more. 

georainbolt

A post shared by @georainbolt

Rainbolt started out competing in an internet game called GeoGuessr. On GeoGuessr, you are shown a random Google Street View image, and you have to guess where in the world it was taken. The closer to the real location that you drop the pin, the more points you get. Rainbolt is in the top echelon of players, and to say that he can easily locate a screenshot is an understatement. He tries his best to hinder himself, sometimes blurring the pictures, or making them flash for only a fraction of a second on the screen, to show just how thoroughly he knows the map. He does this while remaining cool, calm, and understated. "Nice," he characteristically says to himself, after guessing the location of a field of grass within 100 kilometers of its true location in Botswana. You get the sense that he holds himself to a high standard. 

There's a way in which the internet stifles creativity, boxing people into their original creative moment and fifteen seconds of fame. When people become internet famous, they tend to trap themselves into the bit that made them viral. But Rainbolt’s skills evolved in new and interesting directions. People started sending him old pictures, sometimes with loved ones who had since passed, and Rainbolt helped them identify the location of their photos. Sometimes he took music videos, or memes, or whatever else was meant to be background and bland and universal, and exposed precisely where the film was shot or picture was taken. He can take the most banal backdrop and make the world less flat. 

I don't think that's trivial, because lately I have been feeling that the more we travel and the faster we communicate, the more indistinguishable the world becomes. This feeling crystalized for me in my late 20s when I got on dating apps and found them shitty. They were shitty in a lot of ways but one of the most apparent to me was the steep education in signaling, the way you quickly learn to decode the universal dating app language of cultural and tribal affiliation. At the top of the pyramid were the terrible same-y travel cues: pose with an elephant, pose on a beach, pose in front of a landmark, Instagram highlights categorized by airport code. Hinge prompts were somehow worse “What do you most look forward to this year?”… “travel!” “I want someone to”… “plan my next trip with!” Travel was supposed to function as a symbol (disposable income with a veneer of sophistication, perhaps), and as the symbol ate the underlying meaning, the meaning became bland: restaurants in foreign cities identical to the ones here in New York, generic skyscrapers barely recognizable as from anywhere, Coldplay in an open air market in Hanoi. Somehow Rainbolt feels like the balm against all of this. He can’t reverse easy and empty status signals, but he can at least remind us how textured the world is. Even in the least distinctive photo, there are signs of specificity if you know where to look. 

Now, I know... if Rainbolt can do... shouldn't we be able to train a computer to do this as well? I'm not knowledgeable enough in the technicalities of what that would take, but based on recent developments in AI, I'd be surprised if you couldn’t. If I can imagine it, I suppose someone must be building it [editor’s note: they are]. We are probably more unsafe than we know on the internet. 

But for now there are moments of stunning humanity, a short term triumph even, of human over computer. Because what we are witnessing here is a reversal of the mold, in which humans input a massive amount of data into a computer that outputs something new and searchable. Here the computer is the input that the human scans, learns from, trains on, eventually outputting something magnificent. Because Rainbolt is just a human, we don't have to worry about the sad and bizarre and freaky edge cases. The humanity shines, whether through humor (schooling some rando who thinks they are "off the map"), love (locating the last place someone got a photo with their dog), or ego (proving he can also ID places if the picture is upside down and pixelated). His posts are never uncanny valley.

Lately, Rainbolt has been traveling the world, and is letting us in on the secrets he has seen in the data. Did you know that square stone fences with circle holes are only found in Chiang Mai, red stop signs with white font are only found in New South Wales, and the Wooden poles are cut in an octagonal shape only in Sydney? It's exciting to see him get off the computer and traveling the world in real life. Rainbolt is a modern explorer, an internet savant, and he’s been training at home so that his trip can be even more interesting. Maybe the internet won't just swallow us whole. Maybe we'll use it to appreciate just how distinctive humanity really is. In the meantime you can follow him on Instagram, and when the doomscrolling gets too much, maybe he’ll bring you back to the ground. 

Thanks to Adriel for writing! Subscribe to his newsletter here:

🐌 Snail mail:

Last week’s piece about Substack’s dubious network effects sparked a chorus of head nods from other writers who were wondering if it was all in their head, or had their own observations/insights to add.

From :

My anecdotal experience matches yours. The over-reporting tracks for me personally. Only the smallest sliver of new readers have come through Substack. Are there network effects? Sure. Are they remotely evenly distributed amongst comparable publications or approaching the level that Substack promotes? Nope. I've worked with online community/creator/small biz etc. for many years and the host platform is very, very rarely the thing that makes a successful product. Like Patreon before, Substack has a massive incentive (10% worth) to tell that story, but I don't believe it's true.

From :

the world of "network effects" is different for small newsletters compared to large newsletters. In case of many high profile newsletters like Lenny's Substack itself is putting great deal of work into promoting them. They [the newsletters] are featured on Substack's platform. The writers frequently give webinars to other writers, they are active on other social media. So those "network effects" for large newsletters are just that THEIR network effects rather than Substack’s.

From Sylvia:

I happen to have just commented to someone that I’m nervous about leaving because of the readership that Substack has brought me, exactly as you predicted. I've now set up on Beehiiv and intrigued to see what happens if I promote that link while still remaining active on Substack.

Welcome to our new readers, some of whom described their relationship with The Algorithm in one emoji thusly:

🦡 🎷 👀 🕌 🌇 👽 🦝 🪸

If you had Rainbolt’s super powers, how would you use them? I for one have always wished I was the kind of person who could locate myself based on the fauna.

The data point commonly known as the “referral source” contains the answer to one of the most basic questions: how did this person find me?

If you’re a writer on Substack, then the platform offers some basic information out of the box about where your readers come from. By default, Substack emails you every single time someone new subscribes to your publication, and includes in that email an estimated source: whether it’s Twitter, Google, someone’s personal blog, or Substack itself.

I had always assumed that when Substack lists itself (more specifically, “Substack Network,” “Substack App,” or “substack.com”), rather than a specific Substack publication, it means that Substack’s own algorithms — its suggested publications, or newsfeed — are delivering me readers.

But my newsletter has a small enough audience that I often get clear external signals of where my new subscribers are coming from. For example, I may notice an immediate bump in readers after a piece that I wrote gains traction on Twitter. And the strange thing is, the external indicators don’t always line up with what Substack is telling me. This is especially true when Substack attributes the referral source to itself.

Until recently, it’s only been a hunch. But this week, I emailed some of the few hundred people who subscribed to my newsletter in the last 30 days, asking them to describe their path to subscribing in their own words. I then cross referenced those responses with Substack’s own reporting. Of the 32 respondents whose estimated source was listed by Substack as itself (about half), the results were decidedly incongruent. Only 5 credited the platform with helping them find me. 84% of respondents attributed their subscription to something or someone other than Substack.1

Some examples: many readers read a piece of mine that was published in One Thing, and subscribed after clicking through the link in my bio. of the excellent Links I Would Gchat You If We Were Friends wrote about Escape the Algorithm in her list of favorite newsletters (it isn’t bragging if it’s for journalism!), and separately shared one of my pieces in a weekly link roundup. Another reader found me because they read Anil Dash’s piece in the Rolling Stone that cited me as an example of the human, personal, creative internet (also journalism!) and then searched for my name and signed up.

Many (but not all) of these are Substack publications. Is it technically a lie that someone who subscribes on the written recommendation of another newsletter writer came from the Substack Network? No. But is it meaningfully true?

Substack regularly and boldly touts its network effects. Its landing page boasts to potential writers that “more than 40% of all new free subscriptions and around 20% of paid subscriptions to Substacks come from within our network.” The implication here is that you should join Substack because something about Substack’s technology will unlock more growth for you than other platforms. But the important thing to note is this: most of these readers would be finding me even if I took my newsletter somewhere else.2

Now, any product analytics are by definition an oversimplification. And when traffic is coming from an external website, identifying referral sources is a notoriously difficult science.

But when the call is coming from inside the house, as it were, sources are quite easy to track. At a technology company with the size and funding of Substack, not keeping track of where traffic is moving within Substack would amount to analytics malpractice. I can assure you that Substack’s internal systems know that a reader clicked from a specific post before subscribing to my publications. In some cases, for reasons I can’t explain, Substack does properly attribute a source to the name of a Substack publication. So Substack is making a choice to elide the specific source in favor of a generic description that conveniently reflects well on their service.

The overall effect of looking at my Substack dashboard is “wow, Substack is really getting me an audience! If I leave Substack, half of my subscription channel will dry up.” It’s clear that this is the impression other writers, the media, and investors are getting as well, because they praise Substack about it all the time.

Again, it isn’t technically a lie to say that some of this traffic is coming from Substack, but it’s a bit like you telling a friend about my newsletter over Facetime, and Facetime taking the credit for growing my readership. The logical conclusion of my experiment is that my audience is not built on the power of Substack, but the power of people.3

Of course, I am just one writer and this isn’t a rigorous scientific analysis. But if you’re afraid that you’ll stunt your growth if you leave Substack for a platform with better service or fewer Nazis, I encourage you not to take Substack’s word for it.

The pdf begins:

My dick cannot lift the door. My dick can lift the white plastic end-table. My dick can lift the white plastic end-table stacked on the other white plastic end-table. My dick cannot lift the stacked white plastic end-tables together. My dick can lift the empty hsn.com cardboard box stacked on top of the stacked white plastic end-tables. My dick can lift the empty Dutch East India Trading Company box stacked in the hsn.com box.

You get the idea. The pdf is a giant wall of text: 113 pages long, no line breaks. Every single object in the poet Steven Zultanski’s home, and whether his dick can lift it.

Zultanski’s poem was sent to me (along with the rest of our class) over a decade ago by a college professor, Kenneth Goldsmith. Kenny is a self-proclaimed “uncreative” writer, most popularly known for being the first poet laureate of the MoMA, for reading transcriptions of New York City traffic reports to the Obama White House, for printing out the internet, for being Shia Labouf’s plagiarism scandal excuse, and most controversially, for reciting the autopsy report of Michael Brown as a piece of poetry.

He considers himself something of a provocateur both inside and outside of the classroom. On one memorable occasion our homework assignment was to “liberate documents that aren't meant to be liberated.” I attempted to hack into Kenny’s emails. He didn’t fall for my phishing scam (I suspect only because he was often unresponsive to emails in general), but I think he would have enjoyed it if he had.

Pad is not a poem that I particularly like, but because of an accidental alignment of its exhaustiveness with keyboard bloat, the poem is one that I am confronted with more than any other, and as such it is the first thing that I thought of when I encountered everything.can.be.scanned.

Everything.can.be.scanned is an Instagram account that does exactly what it says on the box, which is to say that it posts reproductions of toys, food packaging, tools, clothing, currency, electronics, government documents—anything, presumably, that can fit in the bed of a scanner.

Everything.can.be.scanned is part of a long lineage of what I would call “stunts of tedious comprehensiveness:” John F. Simon, Jr.’s 1997 Every Icon, Huang Qingjun’s series, beginning in 2003, photographing Chinese families with all of their belongings, Blendtec’s contemporaneous viral Will it Blend? marketing campaign, the litany of everyword bots on Twitter starting around 2007, and Sophie Calle calling every person in a random address book she found on the street in Paris, published in 2012.

Kenny’s work—especially at the time that we crossed paths—was also part of this cultural landscape. His schtick was retyping or recontextualizing an existing thing and calling the copy a poem. The result was not meant to be read but discussed, and when it was discussed, the emphasis was always on the every: every word of an issue of the New York Times, every movement his body made in a day, every word he spoke for a week, every radio weather forecast for a year, every page of the internet.

When his work was interesting, I would argue that it was not for its tediousness but for its attentiveness. When it wasn’t, it was because there wasn’t enough attention being paid, or because the attention was being directed towards the wrong thing.

At time of writing, everything.can.be.scanned has more posts (1,054) than it has followers (950), which is to say if it is trying to gain attention for itself, it isn’t doing a great job. Instead, it directs its attention towards the visual culture of the mundane. “Every single object,” its Russian creator writes, “is a result of one’s work, and it is essential for me to track the result, consider, and experience and enjoy it.” I recommend scrolling through the profile page, rather than simply clicking “follow” and waiting for it to be randomly injected into your feed. The effect is one of quiet awe: awe at the sheer magnitude of ephemera in existence, awe at the impossibility of scanning the whole world, and most of all, awe at the slow attention of the one who dared to try.

🪴 Screenshot garden

Internet diving hauls presented without context

📄 Plaintext

Word associations

A brief excerpt from the project I mention above, in which Sophie Calle attempts to interview every person in a stranger’s address book:

We meet in a bar in Montparnasse. I tell him that the name of the owner of the address book is Pierre D. Yes, they have known each other for a long time… through the film world.

He says, “He's an intelligent fellow; he is touching because he is lonely. No duplicity in his personal relationships. Deeply loyal to his friends. Unselfish…”

- Has he always lived alone? “I think so, I'm not sure.”

His tastes? “He loves minor literature, B movies, serialized 19th century novels…and also opera…”

Can he describe Pierre for me? “He's not very tall. He shows some signs of premature aging, like grey hair. He dresses negligently. One senses that he's really a caring person.”

It seems that two years ago Pierre may have confided in him about an unhappy love affair. Pascal does not have anything more to say. He really does not remember. Two days ago he had dinner at Pierre's. Beef and pasta.