This song is all over my Instagram Reels for some reason and it is such a vibe I can’t get enough of it.

Derek Thompson goes into the history of the “flow” concept, and how tech and entertainment companies learned to simulate it without any of the substance psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi originally had in mind:

Algorithmic flow is flow without achievement, flow without challenge, flow without even volition… To be lost in the lazy river of algorithmic media is to be lost the current of life without a mind. Zombie flow.

Ten years ago the question was how to get into flow more often. Now it might be how to get out of the fake version fast enough to remember what the real one felt like.

Eli Stark-Elster has a piece that reframes the “kids and screens” debate in a way I haven’t seen before. The usual narrative blames addictive tech design, but he offers an alternative:

Why do our children spend more time in Fortnite than forests? Usually, we blame the change on tech companies. They make their platforms as addicting as possible, and the youth simply can’t resist — once a toddler locks eyes with an iPad, game over.

I want to suggest an alternative: digital space is the only place left where children can grow up without us.

The argument is that kids have always needed spaces away from adult supervision. We’ve just paved over the forests and creeks where they used to find it.

What makes this more than speculation is the research he cites: 72% of 8 to 12-year-olds say they’d rather spend time together in person, without screens. 61% wish they had more time to play with friends without adults around. The kids don’t actually want to be on screens all day. They’re looking for something we’ve taken away.

It seems like what they want is to wander together in a forest. But they can’t. So they boot up Fortnite or TikTok instead.

I’m still sitting with this one. It doesn’t let tech companies off the hook, but it does suggest that “just take away the iPad” isn’t addressing the real problem.

Robin Sloan discusses Substack, and platforms in general, in another excellent post:

Expect enclosure; expect a few big winners; expect advertising, with all the attention-hacking that will demand. Expect, also, that writers will con­tinue to mold their work to fit Sub­stack’s par­tic­ular ecology, rather than “merely” use the tools to pursue their inde­pen­dent visions and ambitions. We learned this about plat­forms a long time ago.

→ Platform reality

I was all in on Reddit for a few years, but that stopped after the Apollo app got nerfed. I think I need to invest some curation time in the site again—this is a lovely essay:

The only two questions that people ever really ask on Reddit, if you think about it, are these: Am I alone? Am I okay? And after all these years, in subreddit after subreddit, no matter what the topic at hand is, the same answers keep coming: You aren’t alone. And you might not be okay. But we’re here.

As someone who runs a Discord server for some close friends, this rings (sad but) very true:

Closed communities are the only safe spaces left which contain productive, valuable, inspiring content, where sharing for the sake of helping someone is natural, where you can still make meaningful connections, and where you can have productive discussions.

When Andrew Liptak writes about Lord of the Rings, I pay attention. This is one of his best yet, drawing a line from Tolkien to our present-day world in an incredible way:

A critical theme throughout Tolkien’s work is the decline of a once-great people, with weak men failing to live up to the lives and stories of their predecessors.

But we should not despair:

Tolkien isn’t throwing up his hands and pointing out that the world is terrible: he’s explaining that there are ways to avoid falling into despair: sticking to one’s morals, distinguishing the things that are objectively good and bad in the world, and recognizing how to move on those instincts to do good in the world. It’s an inherently optimistic story that serves as an excellent guide for us in the dark times ahead of us.

Also see his piece Corruptibility for more thoughts in the same vein:

The core thing that I take away from Tolkien’s work is that power is dangerous to work with, and that very few who encounter it come away unscathed.

I finally had a chance to make my way through Liz Pelly’s Spotify exposé that’s been making the rounds, and it is so infuriating. Definitely worth reading the whole thing, but the short version is that Spotify is seeding their most popular playlists with generic “background music” that they pay even lower royalties for. A good summary of the issue:

A model in which the imperative is simply to keep listeners around, whether they’re paying attention or not, distorts our very understanding of music’s purpose. This treatment of music as nothing but background sounds—as interchangeable tracks of generic, vibe-tagged playlist fodder—is at the heart of how music has been devalued in the streaming era. It is in the financial interest of streaming services to discourage a critical audio culture among users, to continue eroding connections between artists and listeners, so as to more easily slip discounted stock music through the cracks, improving their profit margins in the process. It’s not hard to imagine a future in which the continued fraying of these connections erodes the role of the artist altogether, laying the groundwork for users to accept music made using generative-AI software.

I’ve been on the fence about streaming services for a while, but I think going forward I want to use both my Kindle and Spotify in the same way. Sample a book/album to see if I like it, and then buy it in physical form (or Bandcamp!) if I do. Like when we used to listen to CDs in the record store to decide if it’s worth spending that precious music budget on.

This post about news feeds by Lauren Goode at Wired resonated with me a lot:

For those of us who came of age on the internet some 20 to 30 years ago, the way these recommendation systems work now represents a fundamental shift to how we long thought of our lives online. We used to log on to tell people who we were, or who we wanted to be; now the machines tell us who we are, and sometimes, we might even believe them.

I just can’t get comfortable with algorithmic feeds. I know it’s likely a me problem and I need to get with the times, but that’s the curse of (some of) my generation, I guess. I just want to choose what I want to see online—even if it’s way more work—because I don’t to be told who I am by a social media company.