Make no mistake — I did virtually nothing to create the following themes, nor do I know anything about Telegram theme development, generally. Frankly, I shouldn’t have even taken the time to whip *these* up, but I wanted to at least dip my toe in the experience for [a strangely sentimental essay I’ve been working on](https://github.com/extratone/bilge/issues/228) about the service’s service in my working life.
The one thing I *did* do is track down the most accurate translation of [iOS’ core system colors](https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guidelines/ios/visual-design/color/) in hex I could find, which I spammed in each reasonably-generateable format all over every dead end group chat and channel I once created and have (shamefully) subsequently neglected and forgotten on this service.
— color-pink: #ff2d55;
— color-purple: #5856d6;
— color-orange: #ff9500;
— color-yellow: #ffcc00;
— color-red: #ff3b30;
— color-teal-blue: #5ac8fa;
— color-blue: #007aff;
— color-green: #4cd964;
I originally started using the [Big Boy Editor](https://themes.contest.com) and immediately realized that there is no apparent means of translating the iOS themes I’d found recently into .tdesktop themes without 1.) implementing an unofficial, but highly tedious translation matrix between the entirely different formats, or just 2.) fuckin eyeballing it.
I started with [perhaps the best light theme for this app I’ve ever found](https://t.me/addtheme/tgbetacore) in terms of ultimate legibility in blinding sunlight, loading its (apparently early iOS-inspired?) style as a duplicate in the Bitch Mode “editor” found within the iOS app, itself. Then, I simply replaced its singular hex color asset with the equivalents you see above in the three classes to which it was assigned…
…and now I’m a real life Software Developer™! How amazing is tech in 2021, right???
Please do feel free to act upon literally any sort of compulsion to contact me however you wish. [This link](https://bit.ly/whoisdavidblue) will pull up my full VCF contact card on a mobile device.
in This Present Time I can have regular interactions with my adolescent celebrity crush that I *actually* would not be able to convince my 14-year-old self are real. not because of their significance but the opposite.
calling her mom is like... the only even remotely reasonable outcome, btw. she *is* a mom several times over, now. and 46.
and by "crush," i mean... at least 30% of my total cumulative mental energy was spent repeating "I am so in love with Sienna Guillory" for *years.*
imagine telling that person "one day, you're gonna wish her happy mother's day every year in a text box. she will call you 'bub.'"
I'm pretty sure it would make him suicidal.
(but the outfits would save his life at the last moment.)
Writing the Definitive Guide For Using an iPhone With a Bluetooth Keyboard
When I graduated high school in the Spring of 2012, my mom offered me a choice: I could go to Community College with a new laptop, or a new iPhone. I was still on the kick that’d started with my first-generation iPhone, four years earlier, and decided to take the bet. Instead of a new laptop, I entered my first vaguely-collegiate experience armed with an iPhone 4S and an original Magic Keyboard, beginning an experiment that’s more-or-less ongoing (there have been intermittent pauses, notably.)
Over the years since, I have accumulated a lot of evidence to suggest that number of iPhone users who’ve used a hardware keyboard with their phone is extremely tiny (which I believe to be entirely reasonable and inevitable,) but I think also believe it’s a dynamic that’s still worth documenting properly. Frankly, I can say definitively that it absolutely has not been, thus far.
As you may have observed, even the association of iPad and keyboard in the past few years has actually made it worse — lookup any given iOS app’s keyboard shortcuts and you’ll return a list for iPad and nothing else. Over the years, I’ve maintained a habit of going down the iPad list, testing each shortcut on iPhone, noting down which of the iPad shortcuts respond on the latter in a table, and then emailing said list to the app’s developers. (Naturally, they almost never respond. Shout out to Tapbots for being the only recent exception.) After refocusing the bulk of my attention back on iOS and its adjacent communities, this year, I’ve looked around and come to a conclusion: if ever there is going to be a consolidate reference for those who regularly use a bluetooth keyboard with their iPhones, I am going to have to write it, myself.
Currently, my end target draws influence from the ebooks published by the MacStories team — like Tim Nahmuck’s Drafts 5 “Review” (which is closer to a User Manual than an App Review) — but it’s most important that it be in the form(s) which add maximum value to readers/users. In that vein, I must acknowledge that I cannot accomplish it entirely on my own, yet am fairly inexperienced with the sort of collaboration I’d imagine will be involved.
So…
If anyone would like to advise on this in any capacity, I would very much appreciate hearing from you via any method you’d like (see the info below.)
Anyone who has used a Bluetooth keyboard with their iPhone at any point, I’d actually beg you to share any thoughts/requests/suggestions you may have.
Just FYI, this hyperlink is broken. We’re 8 days out and still haven’t heard back about downloading broadcasts. Sorry to be pushy but… I feel like nobody is watching this account and there are a lot of Periscope users with questions.
Reclaiming tastemaking for listeners in the Spotify era.
Last week, Spotify users were treated to the service’s annual “Spotify Wrapped” feature: a visual summary of an account’s listening habits throughout the year, including their most listened-to artists. New for 2020 are “in-app quizzes,” a chronological “Story of Your 2020,” and detailed podcast listening statistics. For premium users, “badges” will “crown listeners with various titles based on the ways they listened.”
For example, if a number of your playlists gained significant new followers, you’ll be a Tastemaker. If you listened to a song before it was cool (aka hit 50,000 streams), you’ll get the Pioneer badge. And based on the number of songs you added to playlists this year, you just might become a Collector.
Their use of the term Tastemaker is particularly interesting. “Tastemaking” — a function once relegated to magazines — has taken a concerning bent in the Algorithmic Age. Very much contemporary terms like “filter bubble” and “echo chamber” — applied more and more often to social platforms like Facebook and Twitter, now — can also be associated with music streaming services like Spotify, who’s “playlistification” of content has had a number of alarming effects on American culture.
New “badges” for Premium users.
In 2018, The Baffler’s Liz Pelly explored Spotify playlists’ gender bias in “Discover Weekly:”
On Today’s Top Hits, I found that over the course of one month, 64.5 percent of the tracks were by men as the lead artist, with 20 percent by women and 15.5 percent relying on collaborations between men and women artists. When all features were taken into consideration, I found that 85.5 percent of tracks included men artists, while only 45.5 percent included women. This was one of the highest percentages of women artists out of all the playlists I examined.
She also quotes a LinkedIn post by “Jerry Daykin, the Head of Media Partnerships at Diageo,” in which he observes, “The most popular tracks on Spotify get featured in more playlists and become even more popular as a result.” In January of the same year, the online music magazine Pitchfork published an op-ed by musician Damon Krukowski entitled “How to Be a Responsible Music Fan in the Age of Streaming,” which provided concrete statistics on this phenomenon (emphasis mine:)
According to the data trackers at BuzzAngle Music, [on Spotify,] more than 99 percent of audio streaming is of the top 10 percent most-streamed tracks. Which means less than 1 percent of streams account for all other music.
“While streaming media is pitched to us as tailored to our taste, or at least to our browsing history,” Krukowski goes on to note, “the business of it is in fact closer to one-size-fits-all.” Clearly, this is an issue, but technically only insofar as Spotify advertises itself as a means to discover new music, which it does consistently.
The company has faced criticism in other areas, most recently by The New Yorker’s Alex Ross in a widely-read review of “Decomposed: The Political Ecology of Music,” a new book by University of Oslo professor Kyle Devine, entitled “The Hidden Costs of Streaming Music.” Ross first cites a statement by Spotify CEO Daniel Elk, “The artists today that are making it realize that it’s about creating a continuous engagement with their fans,” arguing the true meaning of his words to be “to make a living as a musician, you need to claw desperately for attention at every waking hour.” His most original (as in, yet to be considered in the mainstream discourse) argument, though, involves the service’s environmental impact. He cites Devine’s depiction of a profound cultural delusion surrounding the consumption of music, suggesting that music is “seen as a special pursuit that somehow transcends the conditions of its production.”
In a chapter on the digital and streaming era, Devine drives home the point that there is no such thing as a nonmaterial way of listening to music: “The so-called cloud is a definitely material and mainly hardwired network of fiber-optic cables, servers, routers, and the like.” This concealment of industrial reality, behind a phantasmagoria of virtuality, is a sleight of hand typical of Big Tech, with its genius for persuading consumers never to wonder how transactions have become so shimmeringly effortless.
Also noteworthy are questions of Spotify’s viability as a business, which Ross includes by citing a July article in Barrons quoting Spotify Technology’s second-quarter earnings report: “The streaming music company lost $418 million, or $2.24 per share, versus analysts’ expectations for a 41-cent loss.” Spearheading this year’s news conversation surrounding the company, though, were its widespread acquisitions in the Podcasting industry, including Anchor, Megaphone, Gimlet Media, and — most controversially — the exclusive rights to the most listened-to property in the medium, The Joe Rogan Experience. Though details of their implications are beyond the scope of this essay, it is reasonable to assume its concerns — if not its proposed solutions — should apply to the future of podcasting as well.
Responsible Curation
For solutions to address Spotify’s overwhelming skew toward rewarding popular music with even more popularity, we can first look within its own history to just a few years earlier, when human curation was more equally matched in its fight against algorithmic curation. In 2015, the company claimed that “Half of Spotify users stream from other users’ playlists at least monthly.” Pitchfork’s Marc Hogan profiled a number of “power users” within the upper percentile in terms of followers and personal playlist popularity. Notably, all of his examples are male.
Generally, human curation should hypothetically combat its algorithmic counterpart in terms of favoring already commercially successful content, if not its gender disparity. The industry’s other biggest player, Apple Music, has invested heavily and successfully in the former. (Disclosure: I have been an Apple Music subscriber since its launch.) Fast Company addressed this contrast in a 2018 long read entitled “Spotify’s $30 billion playlist for global domination:”
Cook’s words embody Apple’s longstanding critique of Spotify, which is that its algorithms are eroding music’s spiritual role in our lives. Cook doesn’t mention Spotify by name but says, “We worry about the humanity being drained out of music, about it becoming a bits-and-bytes kind of world instead of the art and craft.”
Then again, the same article also quotes Tim Cook — the CEO of the most valuable company in the history of the world — as insisting “We’re not in it for the money.” In turn, Daniel Elk is quoted, saying “Music is everything we do all day, all night, and that clarity is the difference between the average and the really, really good,” though what exactly he is quantifying as “really, really good” is not entirely clear. In context, the words of both leaders seem untrustworthy — vague, at best.
In tremendous and relevant contrast to the voices of these CEOs is that of Ethan Diamond, CEO and co-founder of Bandcamp, a music streaming service unlike any other. In an interview with Music Tech Fest director Andrew Dubber this May, Diamond exemplifies an entirely different mentality in running a for-profit service for independent music artists.
In 2007, Diamond and former colleagues Shawn Grunberger, Joe Holt, and Neal Tucker set out to build the equivalent of blogging services like Blogger, WordPress, MovableType, etc. for musicians. As Holt bemoaned in a 2008 interview with The HTML Times, creating an online presence for one’s music had long been “a pain in the ass:”
You need to find a place to host it, you’ve gotta get the metadata right, it’s just hard. So we just decided we would do that hard part for musicians so that they didn’t have to be so nerdy.
We keep your music streaming and downloading quickly and reliably, whether it’s 3am on a Sunday, or the hour your new record drops and Pitchfork gives it a scathingly positive review. We make your tracks available in every format under the sun, so the audiophilic nerderati can have their FLAC and eat mp3 v2. We adorn your songs with all the right metadata, so they sail into iTunes with artwork, album, band and track names intact. We mutter the various incantations necessary to keep your site top-ranked in Google, so when your fans search for your hits, they find your music long before they find bonkersforlyrics.com or iMyFace. We give your fans easy ways to share your music with their friends, and we give you gorgeous tools that reveal exactly how your music is spreading, so you can fan the fire.
In the years since, Bandcamp has demonstrated time and time again the sincerity in its commitment to artists through programs like “Bandcamp Fridays,” when the service waives its cut of artists’ revenue (ten percent on physical releases, fifteen percent of digital.) In 2017, the company donated a Friday’s share of proceeds to the Transgender Law Center in response to the Presidential Administration’s proposal to ban trans people from serving in the U.S. military. This year, throughout the Coronavirus pandemic, the company has repeatedly brought back the program in recognition of its impact on independent artists, and the results have been profound. On March 20th, for a specific example, $4.3 million worth of purchases was distributed.
Unlike Spotify, Bandcamp is a profitable company, and has been for nearly a decade. In Dubber’s interview, Diamond explains their financial origins:
In 2007/2008 we took a little bit of VC funding and then focused on getting to profitability. So we did that and got there in 2012, and that’s helped us maintain the mission, maintain the vision that we’ve had for the company for a long time.
Also in contrast to Spotify, Bandcamp explicitly invests in less popular, fringe content, through its online publication the Bandcamp Daily:
The mission of the Daily, it’s our editorial arm, and it’s just to highlight this incredibly diverse world of music that’s on a site where anybody can upload anything. And the result of that is that you have weird subgenres and a lot of music, I think, that wouldn’t necessarily be covered anywhere else.
Bandcamp has long demonstrated an anthesis to the business models technology companies have been so criticized for upholding and has done so in relative obscurity from the media. In his interview, Dubber asks Diamond one of the primary questions prompting the creation of this essay: “how come Bandcamp doesn’t get mentioned in all these press articles about music services?” In answer, Diamond offers his own business decisions out of “[his] personal preference:”
I like the idea that Bandcamp hangs out in the background and just makes all of this stuff work, and also, hopefully, helps the artist promote themselves, and it’s not about “Bandcamp, Bandcamp, Bandcamp.”
As a Tastemaking enterprise, Bandcamp has combined magazine-style editorial publishing with user-created content in the form of Collections — which allow listeners to display music they’ve purchased on a customizable web page — and Artist Recommendations, which extend from a creator’s Collection to those who follow them. This system has demonstrably lead to community and cultural wellness by genre via responsible commentary and selection from curating creators with authority, while still profiting its parent company tremendously. Bandcamp has grown from four to seventy employees in its 13-year lifespan, while helping artists earn $634 million as of December 2020. In the music industry, it is unquestionably an outlier. Diamond inadvertently explains Bandcamp’s success in response to a question from Dubber on the company’s comparatively slow pace in terms of technological features (emphasis mine:)
Deciding what to work on next, that has always felt like the easiest part of the job because it’s whatever benefits artists the most. Because the way Bandcamp makes money is if artists make a lot more money, so that’s what we try to spend every day doing.
The solution to the “debacle” of streaming music, then, is not necessarily charity or socioeconomic revolution. It would seem that all it takes is a sincere investment in the real people who create music.
I am so fucking sick of Freedom. Freedom sucks. Freedom doesn't work. I'm tired of trying to figure out what I'm supposed to be doing. PRISON would be refreshing!!!
swap me out for a family of immigrants. it is long past my turn to serve some time.
you are all screaming about how you feel your "Freedom of Expression" is in danger so much that it has become the entirety of what you have to express. am I really gonna have to be the one who shuts you up?
here's a VC pitch that actually aligns with the public interest: give me $20 million and I will erase the digital presence of hate groups on the web within 18 months via weaponized DDoS. the free exchange of ideas has fucking failed dude. it's time to try a muzzle.
the UK doesn't have these issues. their response to the WBC? *banning them from the country and blocking their website* cbsnews.com/pictures/banne…
somehow "Personal Freedom" equates to "you must give me what I want or you're breaking the law."
sorry I'll stop...
i just don't know how folks continue to dwell on these ridiculous abstracts from 250 year old documents. they should have been allowed to turn to dust.
Notably missing from both the film and this interview: not only have these issues been discussed and researched for decades, now, but a biome of alternatives to EVERY SINGLE CRITICIZED COMPANY/SERVICE EXISTS and HAS EXISTED for years. bit.ly/3fd3Xxn
there is a search engine that is basically just Bing except most of the profit generated by the adtech goes to PLANTING TREES. (Ecosia)
there are decentralized social networks (Mastodon, Diaspora) that often OUTPERFORM the proprietary big boys because they're still incentivized to craft the HIGHEST QUALITY experience rather than the most lucrative.
the only reason you haven't heard of them is that the Big Bad Monopolistic Incs OWN AND OPERATE the tools you'd normally rely on to search them out and Tech Journalism has literally moved in with the people they're needed to keep in check. (they all live in California)
it's ridiculous that we're still listening to the people who created the problem as they ruminate on solutions to the problem. (I would've just commented on Medium, but OneZero is paywalled so... sorry.)
and uh yeah... once again, I did my best to articulate these arguments and more in my most recent Post. bilge.world/the-social-dil…
The pop culture discussion of tech’s greater issues missed in (at least) two major ways
For those of us who’ve written about technology, generally, for quite a long time, any injection of the broader metaphysical/”ethical” conversation regarding the impact the industry has had/is having/is expected to have on our species into popular culture is inevitably an emotional event. The Social Network had an almost comical disregard for any potential function as a substantial critique of its subjects. Not that it’s particularly supportive of that argument, but Mark Fuck, himself, recently said in court, essentially, that he didn’t know what the movie was about. I’m not particularly sure, either. I suppose the dramatic film industry has no particular obligation to be critical of the times, but documentaries certainly should, in my estimation, and The Social Dilemma could’ve done better, in that regard.
First, the actively misleading: As thoroughly as I enjoyed Peter Campbell’s casting as the master-manipulating triplets behind the dramatized young man’s screen, the film’s depiction of this very human invasion of privacy is blatantly false imagery. The Privacy Problem is not that Facebook or Google employees are directly and actively viewing and manipulating your use of their services in real time. In fact, it is ridiculously unlikely that human eyes will ever see your individualized information. One could go so far as to describe the whole film as “ridiculous,” as did one of my favs, Casey Newton:
The dramatized segments include a fictional trio of sociopaths working inside an unnamed social network to design bespoke push notifications to distract their users. They show an anguished family struggling to get the children to put their phones away during dinner. And the ominous piano score that pervades every scene, rather than ratcheting up the tension, gives it all the feeling of camp.
The Verge’s official review of the film — written by Adi Robinson and as cited by Casey — is an important read, as well. Robinson makes use of some very intelligent language and cites some very interesting bits (including a Wikipedia article about a series of Hogarth paintings?) for The Verge’s audience, who already knew all of this. What I hoped to do by writing about this at all was speak to those distinctly separate tech media — grandmothers, retirees, etc. — who are both directly affected by the subjects covered by The Social Dilemma and particularly susceptible to its delusions about “privacy” — a term which I would argue is not particularly relevant to the conversation. Personally, I define my privacy in a way that is not violated by the simple collection of “my data,” regardless of how detailed said collection may or may not be, but would be by individual examination with human eyes, which — while possible — is extremely unlikely if for no other reason than a lack of business incentive. While Google may have access to the data it would need to determine whether I am currently showering or not, there is absolutely zero monetary gain to be had in one of its employees (or outsourced contractors) knowing this.
Now, on to the notably missing: Perhaps most important to note before I go on is that the film was produced by — and directly promotes on several occasions — one particular organization, called the Center for Humane Technology, which notably has a .com rather than a .org domain… hm. Immediately after watching the film, I complied with its direction to its website, where I was specifically looking for “solutions” to the issues it presented. Aside from Wikipedia (sortof,) it neglected to mention the abundance of alternative organizations and projects who’ve been building against the adtech-funded web for ages — some for decades. Unfortunately, neither the organization’s website nor the film’s webpage list any of these alternatives, whatsoever, which personally leads me to believe the whole thing is bullshit, for lack of a better term.
The film essentially argues for a single choice: using social media and other adtech-sustained services, or not using them. What I’m here to tell you: you have a choice of services. For every single individual service criticized in the film, I guarantee there exists at least a handful of alternatives across a spectrum of sin. If you’ve followed my work for any length of time (you probably shouldn’t still be reading,) you know I’ve advocated exhaustively for Mastodon — the open web, decentralized social network outpacing Twitter in every single way. Two years ago, I spent an entire summer arguing that Bandcamp is the only music streaming service who’s business model benefits both platform and artist. I’m still finishing up a massive essay that discusses alternatives to Facebook, which has been an exhausting but educational journey, as you can probably imagine, namely that leaving a platform as all-consuming as Facebook for an open-source and/or federated alternative requires a certain amount of bravery. Essentially, the evidence suggests that the alternatives discussion is a particularly important one to me, as is finding a way to evangelize it that isn’t immediately off-putting to “the average person.”
Poke around the film’s official website a bit and you’ll discover a variety of heavily-branded “resources” for “taking action,” all awash with a certain irony, including a fucking Bingo game (hosted on Google Drive, no less,) which the site actually suggests you post on your Instagram story! Also under the “Take Action” vertical are links to Moment CEO Tim Kendall’s tips for reducing your screen time, the “Data Detox Kit,” which advocates for Firefox as the private browsing solution (among an indigestibly huge link tree,) a “Join Now” button, and — most ironic of all — a link to download the “Ad Observer plugin,” in order to “share with researchers the ads you see on social media as they work to expose micro-targeting techniques & hold political advertisers accountable.” In other words, the very same data collection the film condemns, albeit for the “Online Political Transparency Project” instead of the greater adtech monstrosity.
No, it’s not a scam. Using The Markup’s shiny new Blacklight tool, I found thesocialdilemma.com to be entirely free of any malicious tracking aside from the inevitable accompaniment to their Google Drive embeds. (Here’s the report in full.) All at once, we can be virtually certain there is no malice in this particular destination, at least, which leaves… incompetence? I’m afraid so. It is not revolutionary to suppose that the people who conceived of these ruthlessly effective systems of adtech and figure out how to implement them in the real world — regardless of what they believe now, or then — that these folks should not be our first call when we’re searching for “solutions.” You know this, they know it, and they explicitly acknowledged it at least twice in the film, itself, and yet the fact of it remains.
Would you care to guess what Chapter 1 of the Digital Detox Kit is about? I can’t imagine you’d be correct… Under the heading “CONTROL YOUR SMARTPHONE DATA,” step 1 is literally just renaming your phone:
At some point, you may have “named” your phone for Wi-Fi, Bluetooth or both — or maybe the name was automatically generated during setup.
This means that “Alex Chung’s Phone” is what’s visible to the Wi-Fi network owner and, if your Bluetooth is turned on, to everyone in the area who has their Bluetooth on as well.
You wouldn’t announce your name as you enter a café, restaurant, or airport, so neither should your phone.
Now, I’ve always considered the ability to change a computer’s name an immense privilege. My first “real” computer’s name was Clementine, then there was Bertha, two Sophies (probably my favorite traditionally female name, so I excuse myself,) Silas, Linus, Uel, Jehoshaphat, Temba, Knot, and now Hildur. My iPhone 8 Plus’ name is Gravel. However, I realize that most users could care less, and I think that’s completely rational. Technically, suggesting you change your phone’s common name to that of “your favorite television character” (Hildur Odegard is my favorite character in Fortitude, so…) is not bad advice, even within its own privacy-centered argument, it’s just that it’s ridiculously low priority (or should be) compared with doing just about anything else along this vein. A conundrum is presented: I cannot imagine these people sitting down and seriously jotting down “change device name” as step 1 in their strategy, but I also cannot fathom an incentive for them to expend such effort facetiously or maliciously. Again, incompetence/ignorance is the only remaining explanation.
A notification I received while literally typing this out.
I have to backtrack, now, and confess that I did find an “Alternative Apps Centre” within the Data Detox Kit, which contains some genuinely smart recommendations like ProtonMail, Riot, Signal, and DuckDuckGo surrounding a bunch of privacy-enhancing browser extensions. However, the “detox” seems to have been lost at some point along the way. No amount of privacy (yes, I do think it’s hilarious that I can freely refer to “privacy” as a commodity with a positive quantity) can detoxify one’ social media addiction. The savvy reader notes the “Supported by Mozilla Firefox” badges all over the website and asks me “well, what did you expect?” My answer: something “more” than promotion, I suppose.
I suspect this is another case of don’t go to those who created the problem for the solution. More privacy is a more tangible vector upon which to “innovate” than simply putting down the fucking phone, but the interviewees in the film at least touched upon a very important insight in that regard: turn off all your notifications. I genuinely believe turning off all notifications is a good way to proceed, especially if this film (or anything else, for that matter) has made you feel uncomfortable about your relationship with your phone. I realized that I’d somehow allowed YouTube to clutter my notifications unconsciously for years, which is disturbing. In general, the apps who’s notifications I’d probably value the most (Bandcamp!) are the ones who use the feature the least/the most subtly.
Leaving your phone in a different room while you sleep is a good idea, though it seems a bit excessive when you could just turn it off, instead. (Displaced from your bed or stone dead, your chances of making use of your handset in an emergency are about the same, I’d wager.) I suspect it’s long overdue for a reboot, anyway. As far as “Email Addiction” goes, I suggest you first take an afternoon to go through your inbox and make use of GDPR’s greatest gift: the single-click opt-out, most often found in very small text in a given email’s footer. If you’re really serious, unsubscribe from even the newsletters you do read and make yourself resubscribe to them. Make use of your preferred email platform’s archives feature — or don’t — but clear everything from your inbox itself. Mark it all as read. Then, you’ll be ready to seek out other Email Wellness methodologies like the recently-trendy Inbox Zero.
If quitting social media cold turkey is not viable in your personal or professional life, a set daily time to check your notifications is a very good start. Yes, it’s okay to announce on Facebook that you’re taking a break from Facebook. There is a very good reason: accountability, to both yourself and your friends. If you are interested in the alternatives I mentioned before, genuinely contact me literally any time. My personal phone number is (573) 823–4380. I would be elated to discuss some of the services I’ve discovered with you.
My own advice on “privacy:” don’t worry about installing browser extensions, or using a different browser for that matter. Aside from a password manager, there is no need to download or install any additional software to protect your information. All the “privacy tools” you need are already present on your device, and they mostly consist of geolocation settings. If you’re an iOS user, you’ve already been confronted with them in the past few months. If you are still genuinely bothered by automated data collection unseen by human eyes, your only next step — if we’re really honest with ourselves — is figuring out how you’re going to go without the internet. Untracked browsing is no longer a realistic option.
still working on my post about Facebook. it's over 7500 words now...
sorry.
so far, I've used the word "Facebook" 135 times.
I'm pretty sure I'll have it up before the end of the week. and then I will never have to write about Facebook again...
10,000 words now... I think I need to take a break. definitely should be able to wrap up, polish, and publish tomorrow.
I COMPLETELY missed the Twitter hack... guess this means I'm already doing much better about not getting distracted.
well... I forgot to discuss VK, so it might actually be tomorrow before I get it up... I know hundreds of thousands of you were counting on this essay... I know you've spent three whole days now just refreshing my blog... I'm so sorry.
update:
so I was just about ready to conclude what I had to say about VK when it occurred to me that I should try searching for the original Russian expression of the word (ВКонта́кте,) which revealed a whole new story...
turns out, the only conversation about VK in American media, at least, is as a haven for Nazis who've been banned from Facebook. apparently their pilgrimage began around 2016. theatlantic.com/technology/arc…
this investigation by bellingcat (which is absolutely CHOCK FULL of Nazi imagery - please take care) examines a whole host of neo-Nazis who maintain profiles on both sites, and are just way more explicit about their ideology on VK. bellingcat.com/news/2020/02/1…
imo, the fact that NONE OF THIS was visible in search results for "VK" and "VKontakte" indicates that search engines are still kindof dumb.
to be honest, I have no idea what to do now. literally all of the Facebook alternatives I've argued for have an association with terrible people for one reason or another.
in some cases, it's the fault of the services, I agree. VK should definitely not be allowing some of those fucking images.
in Mastodon's, though, articles like this really let it down. Gab stole the PLATFORM - the SOFTWARE, not the network. the vast majority of instance admins came together within hours of the announcement to make sure their servers didn't federate with Gab. vice.com/en_us/article/…
and yet the headline still uses the term "home." something like this would've been way less misleading: "The Biggest Far-Right Social Network Moves to Nazi-Free Twitter Alternative's Platform."
very discouraged. as of this moment, retirement looks great.
what is the best answer, going forward, to combat the tendency for alt-right, neo-Nazi, and other hateful groups to seek refuge on "alternative social media?"
well, I took a break from writing about Facebook... to write about why I'm taking a break from writing about Facebook. extratone.vivaldi.net/covering-faceb…
WELL. I do love the burn in this comment:
"Complaining about how it operates is a little like going to someone’s house party because all the cool people were there and then complaining that the bathroom isn’t ergonomic or you wish their pool was deeper and had a diving board."
With Anima Mundi, Vril departs from his Berghain roots and delivers an introspective exploration of his eternal soul.
If I’m allowed to have favorites, I would claim Vril, the German DJ and Resident Advisor Lieutenant, as mine among his genre, which shouldn’t mean anything to the longtime techno connoisseur (who should probably find themselves skipping this review and moving on,) but does lend me to evangelize to those who’ve been deprived of positive exposure to the culture. Most any electronic music can be transportive and my own affection for it can no doubt be attributed at least in part to my near-total isolation from its community. I have never been to a proper club (the only offering in the setting of my young adulthood has never aspired beyond squishy DJs who are now somehow 100% content describing their scene as “EDM,") and I’ve only had a few friends with whom I could share significant interest, though their knowledge was extraordinarily extensive. It takes incisive wisdom to cut through “Techno” as the misnomer it has become in today’s America - a subject deserving its own, more deliberate discussion - but for the moment, let’s consider a single record which manages to exemplify the potential of this historically-niche medium.
For years, I’ve been one hundred percent sure that “Vril” is a proper noun, but I could very well have gone on living the rest of my life never deciding between whom or where. Up until Anima Mundi’s release on October 15th (technically it was released last year, but exclusively on cassette,) his catalog was consistently Vril - on-brand, you might say - though in the most respectable sense for a dance DJ, I’d imagine. I can’t quite recall the moment of discovery, but I do know that the dozen or so of his live mixes available on Mixcloud caught my attention immediately afterward. There’s something magic in the layers that grabs an unnamed rhythmic organ of mine in a way that cannot be expressed in written form without experience I do not have. What I can provide is the most comprehensively concise example I can find: a live set from the infamous Berghain in 2014.
Regardless if I’m writing, walking(?,) or chasing gravel apexes, these mixes always kick me into another plane, where the panning high hat halos are biased astray by a fraction of a degree, delaying a false local disorientation akin to the sound of a dozen choreographed kindergarten tap dancers' feet next to one’s head, mildly duration-compressed. Techno as a whole has become quite comfortable with the practice of orbiting high frequency percussion in elongated ellipses around the stereo picture, which I’ve adored and defended since day 1. My hypotheses: it’s actually a cheap shot for the psyche’s potential desire for justification of their club experience as something transcendent. It’s a pretty easy cheat to keep the listener’s immediate environment feeling expansive, reflective, and therefore meaningful. I, myself am probably drawn to its threatening aura of imminent contiguous industrial emergency, but again, I’ve never been to Berghain, London, or Stockholm, nor has my adult nightime recreation ever found me in any venue to which one could attribute the term “club” without immediately ``chuckling. This music has not traditionally found its place among lives like mine, and nobody even seems interested in figuring out why.
It seems like there was a big thirst for these kinds of intentions. But the more attention we get, the harder it gets to keep those intentions up and not get washed away by the perception of others. Who are maybe searching for something that sometimes seems impossible to deliver.
For the hell of it, let’s begin by removing one of techno’s most notoriously-defining categorical descriptors: “dance music.” I’ve done this personally - aside from moderate head-bobbing - but I’ve already got a bad habit of miscontextuallizing music, so let’s focus on our hypothetical technovirgin, Gavin, who thought Bassnecter was amazing in 8th grade, can “sometimes fuck with” run-of-the-mill dubstep, plays college football, and is generally more serious about schoolwork than the trashy campus bars he visits every other weekend out of a vague desire for female attention. Let’s have faith in Gavin and assume that he doesn’t need perspective-altering narcotics to be introspective, but we’ll wait until he’s alone in his shitty dorm in the early morning hours, typing out an American History essay on his MacBook. He’s in his bed, earbud-equipped noggin propped uncomfortably against the wall, machine resting on his diaphragm. It’s streaming fucking Aphex Twin from some stranger’s Spotify playlist, which we’ve hacked. Just after “Windowlicker"’s last, foul moan, we’ll covertly begin this involuntary acquaintance with “Manium"’s simple fade-in.
It’s sincerely serious, contemplative, science fiction-esque, but certainly not even as manic as the tasteless breast-obsessed number one hit he’s just heard. In fact, the contrast is so sharp that his attention is agitated away from his sentence, and he looks off the screen across the room to the door’s electronic knob. According to whomever wrote Delsin’s description of the album, Gavin has just unwittingly set upon “a deep excursion for mind and body” - a phrase which would no doubt make him a bit uncomfortable, yet here, alone, or perhaps in the back seat of the right friend’s car on a long drive, its acute caution compels his mind to consider the heaviest possible question of the moment: something about finals, I would guess. His brow slowly scrunches in the Word document’s soft white glow. The unchanging dissonance from the background synth’s single chord grows louder and louder, gradually, before dropping briskly, allowing for the similar successive fade-in of “Statera Rerum.”
Layer number one is surely a four-second sample of a dot matrix printer’s operation, slowed and pitched-down thirty or so percent - reminiscent of the phenomena to which shopping cart castors are commonly subject: a certain speed’s vibration triggers a sort of resonant buzzing freakout. Vril’s simplistic construction continues with another mechanical layer, then panned pulsar synths which ebb and recede in lazier loops across the spectrum. By now, Gavin is on his way back to reality and has finally begun alt-tabbing by the last few seconds of track 2. Just as he finds and restores his Spotify window, it has ended, and the album’s title track begins. His investigation is stymied for a beat by the identical track and album metadata, but he’s still curious enough to search the album out after figuring it out. Since this is a hypothetical world, let’s make it just a bit better and assume Anima Mundi’s Bandcamp page is the first result returned by Gavin’s search engine with its brief, but gorgeous motion graphic promo video, which he allows to play parallel with track 3 on Spotify since it’s less than 30 seconds.
The resulting cacophony is unlike anything he has ever heard, and - probably in reaction to his essay topic’s inability to stimulate him whatsoever - its somewhat extended battle cry elicits sufficient intrigue to keep his attention from straying further. It’s a lucky thing, too, because the rework of “Riese” (literally “giant") is up next, and it’s the most profound and unexpected groove on the whole record. It’s rhythmless, reflective, and very cinematic in a similar (but far far superior) doctrine to Hans Zimmer’s use of simplistic, swelling harmonious chords to blast audiences' emotional intelligence to smithereens behind films like Michael Bay’s Pearl Harbor and J.J. Abrams' Star Trek. According to Inverted Audio’s review, its notes “lose their dissociative feeling for something a bit more intimate and in turn gain even more emotional power over the listener.” Essentially, it’s real gorgeous, though Gavin’s not quite in a vulnerable enough state to be moved to tears. So far, Anima Mundi has been almost entirely separate from “techno” as it is commonly defined, but it’s clear to even the most casual fan of the scene that it’s definitely an addendum, not abandonment. I could be wrong, but as a fan of Vril’s, I’ve found the four tracks Gavin’s heard up to this point feel almost like the endnotes to the more brisk, purposeful melodic and rhythmic identities formed in Portal, his first album, along his years of live club arrangements. If I were to be a bit bold, I’d surmise that Vril could consider Anima Muni an artistic declaration: just so you know, I am a lot more than just the guy behind the booth - I am a “world soul."
I’m afraid it would be dishonest of me to extract a happy ending from my derriere for this hypothetical of ours because of a single word in track 5’s title with truly awesome power among the Youth of Today: anime. In Spring 2017, I recorded Futureland’s most entertaining episode with my good friend Tevin, who happens to be a beautiful bridge between fraternity culture and Japanese Animated Video Content, yet lacks faith in the former’s chances of progressing much at all, going forward. Gavin has probably been exposed to anime once or twice, but for him, it’s unlikely to ever become anything but a punchline. “Infinitum Eternis Anime” means (roughly) “infinite eternal soul,” and it’s the record’s first amalgam of recognizably techno elements (for which I do not know any of the industry/jargon terms, so do forgive my lack of detail.) It’s a shame Gavin won’t give it a chance because it’d likely serve as an effective gateway drug for a more sophisticated nightlife, but I’m sure you were getting awfully tired of him, anyway. To cite Inverted Audio’s Will Long once more:
Each one of the tracks from the ‘Haus’ EP works even better in the context of the full record. “Haus” gets an even smoother, more melodic rework; “Riese” is also more melodic in construction with the beat stripped away in favour of more reverb and sustained notes. They lose their dissociative feeling for something a bit more intimate and in turn gain even more emotional power over the listener.
Though his comparison of Anima Mundi to Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey was quite crude, I can obviously concur with some of his other language, like “future classic,” and “buy on sight.” As much as I’d like to further indulge my own analysis of the rest of the 80 minute work’s tracks, one-by-one, let me just conclude by doting on my personal favorite track, “Sine Fine.” Without resorting to the word “ambiance,” I can’t say much, but - above all - it’s Track 10 that takes me to The Vril Place in which I have always felt so intrigued and comfortable. Buy Anima Mundi right fucking now.
Extratone will be refocusing as a dedicated electronic music magazine with print issues on hand before 2018 is out.
It’s been far too long since I last came to you with compelling news truly worthy of anticipation, but I’m relieved to do so today in a somewhat-epiphanous certainty that the past two and a half years of my very meticulously-documented struggle to give this project a clear direction will soon feel well worth the experience for all involved.
This week, we’re inaugurating our new top-shelf Music section with a comprehensive tour throughout the history of the streaming platforms who’ve both nurtured and ripped off the voices from an entirely new generation of artists followed by an album review which will be sure to blindside you in your kidneys with a fundamental truth I know you’ll love, (but could never guess.) Don’t think we’re crying wolf (or is it “passing go?”) this go-around: /music is going to become the singular subject of our attention for the foreseeable future.
We’re going to take Extratone full circle and make an Electronic Music magazine for the new underground (who are more logged on than they are subterranean.) The online community of friends who’s talents have continued to compel me to figure this thing out have only become more and more extraordinary in their crafts, pushing the whole network further and further upward toward its inevitable penetration of the churning, relentless surface discourse in what has become an awkwardly treacherous Indie Ocean. While a few flagships of the American underground techno magazine like Trax have managed to remain afloat, they’ve been worn down into complacency by the mellowing of their scene and unavoidably shifting priorities after the years they’ve got on us. It’s been alarmingly apparent since 2012 that music journalism would be totally unequipped to spot the heroes of the genre and DAW busting Twitter gang in the crucial moment.
For this moment, suffice it to say, the destiny of our music is at hand, and I’ve happened to acquire just about got all we need to build a big fucking boat.
Here’s what the rest of 2018 is going to look like.
For the next two months, I’ll be combing through the entire King James’-worth of stories we’ve published since launch and meticulously arranging the best of them in a hefty, visually-unbelievable sort of print anthology, which you’ll soon be able to preorder. This issue will represent the whole of my being’s effort for like… half my 20s (if you’re rounding up,) and I know getting my hands on the first proof is gonna make me cry like a toddler, so you can be damned sure it’s going to be something very special and you’d better feel damned guilty if you pass it up.
However, it’s also not something I intend to do on my own. I will undoubtedly be paying for art, illustration, and help with print design, so do please email me with your favorite pitch for magazine art and/or that secret masterpiece of an InDesign template you’ve been sitting on. (Cover art is way more difficult than I expected. Please help me.) Don’t be afraid to join in the novelty of seeing a message (or dumb anime reference) of your own in print — I plan to pepper the issue with little messages, so stop by our Discord and chat me up.
In the meantime, you can help tremendously by forgoing just one soda every four weeks for a hardcore cause to subscribe for $1 via Patreon. As of today, our new support goal is to raise $30 to pass immediately along for a single freelance album review per month.
By winter, we’ll be set to hose down the server in digital baptism so that we may start anew on the future from the best possible foothold when 2019 rolls around. I’ll be in touch with regular updates and more specific calls for freelance art very soon.
Update: I was much too hasty in this proclamation.
Having now pounded through a few thousand words with LibreOffice Writer running on Linux Mint 19, I must now follow up soon in one form or another. This isn’t a “night mode” function by name, but it may as well be: it takes just 30 seconds to search out and change color settings across the whole application.
Percy Hole, Editor at The Sun, Dies Pursuing Rock Springs Story
Percy Hole, who in his seven years at The Sun contributed in no small part to its resolute commitment to the Superior community throughout a key period of change and transition, died nobly on Wednesday in Rock Springs while pursuing a story fraught with sensitive historical currents to which he had committed himself for the better part of the past year. He was 29.
Stuart Stud, the Editor-in-Chief of The Sun, announced the death to the staff Thursday morning. Mr. Hole, who had moved to Superior after being scouted by the paper upon receiving his bachelor’s degree in fly fishing from New York University, succumbed to a catastrophic failure of his liver after allegedly “consuming a far greater-than-recreational quantity” of alcohol during an informal interview with an auxiliary source, according to someone familiar with the matter within the Sweetwater County Coroner’s Office.
In title, Mr. Hole climbed quickly from Sports Editor to Executive Daily Editor, but colleagues cited several integral, unpaid roles beyond his official functions in the newsroom.
“He was a real winner,” said Hilary Hutch, who Hole had groomed personally to replace him as Sports Editor, “by far the sexist human being to grace this pokey office. An impossible talent. We were so lucky to be work alongside him for so long. There was no better wordsmith in the whole industry. He definitely deserved a huge raise. A true legend.”
His responsibilities as Executive Daily Editor included arranging the entirety of The Sun’s print edition singlehandedly every morning, answering every staffer question with heroic brevity, captaining the paper’s infallible ethical prestige, editing all copy with an eye matched by not a one of his contemporaries, lifting and carrying all materials and equipment over 150 lbs. along with the entirety of the office’s championship-winning, regionally competitive basketball team as point guard.
“I’ve never seen anyone move like that,” said Ms. Hutch of her experiences playing on the team, “it was like he was some kind of super-evolved proto-human. We were really just baggage, mostly — decoration — but he was generous and humble about it. He never hogged the glory even though he almost always had every right to.”
Mr. Hole’s colleagues also described his stellar performance and natural talent as generally unappreciated in bolstering The Sun’s late entrance into digital publishing and web 2.0.
‘Mom and Dad’’s Discrepant Defense Against Stale Industry and the Population Problem
A “fun” movie.
The Earth will reach its maximum occupancy load (12 billion) when I am in my mid-fifities, meaning there’ll be more than twice as many gorging, shitting, shooting, complaining, and lying human beings than there were when I started, and perhaps Brian Taylor’s Mom and Dad is in fact a reasoned argument for a particular solution to our inevitable plight. I’m still not sure what a “cult” movie is, precisely, but I can’t imagine what sort of cult could possibly sustain itself around the ethos of this film alone, despite its concise, agitating, at once lighthearted, yet genuinely-disturbing trip. No, it is probably not propaganda. From the experts, you’ll get precisely the same review, varying only in length. The New York Times’ Glenn Kenny couldn’t be bothered with more than 250 words, but RogerEbert dot com’s Simon Abrams shelled out a whole 1000. They are suspiciously close to these big round numbers — perhaps each was written to respective quotas, and perhaps you could say all that could reasonably be said in 10, but I don’t care.
The tropes here are polished to a miraculous sheen — two emotionally-stunted, middleaged, overly preoccupied-with-their-lost-youth suburban parents (Nicolas Cage and Selma Blair) who’s existing envies & irritations regarding their own classically bratty teenage girl (Anne Winters) and her mischievous little brother (Zackary Arthur) is merely agitated by a sudden TV static-bound killer instinct into bloodlust, not originated. I’m not sure any pill dealer would actually flip off their customers after a fair buy — even in high school, but drugs, a black boyfriend, and a stinkbomb? in the old Trans Am!? I’m going to kill you!
Somebody, somewhere knew all the best sources on suburbia and how to put them to good use. The Camry, the golf bag, ping pong smashing, sweat-stained Big Sur tee, and Dr. Oz, for Christ’s sake! Granted, talking to your girlfriend/boyfriend on the phone at all is a bit dated — especially while riding a BMX — and I don’t think Froot Loops are generally accepted middle-class chow anymore. These are staples from my youth, and I am very old. Technically, the iMessage bubble graphics are more chronographically appropriate, but with great consequence, I fear — if we’re going to accept them once and for all as authentic mechanisms for telling stories set in the present, they are going to age faster than Nick’s new jowls (unless we’re all soon killed by our parents.) It’s been two years since I knew anything about music, but I seriously doubt even the gothest fifteen?-year-old girls are listening to Father-esque post-Memphis horrorcore in class — there’s something about SoundCloud that really clashes with chokers.
If there was ever a film in which to use grimy dubstep-influenced electronic slaps, buzzes, chirps, and great grating clanking, it’s this one. It’s a terrific disappointment that Hollywood feels so timidly about their use of the most intimate medium. One forgets its potential to control the nuances of an audience’s fear, anger, discomfort, and panic beyond cheap jump scares until they experience an irritating, distressing, ghastly gross, all-possessing feat of accentuating audio production such as that of Mom and Dad. If you want to judge Academically the effectiveness of a nominee’s work for an award with a title like Best Sound Editing (as opposed to whatever the hell criteria was met most fully by Skyfall,) you must give the little golden man to these folks, whoever they are.
When’s the last time you saw a truly, believably shitty modern parental pair on a big screen? I really can’t remember, myself. Brent and Kendall Ryan are masterpieces of character craft — both a perfect précis and thoroughly-defined exploration of miserable white suburbanites. They’re even named unimprovably, which reflects a quality in care and attention to detail that I very much appreciate. They are vain, vulgar, impatient, selfishly afraid, and careless, freely feeling and saying it all directly in front of their children. I love being told explicitly which characters to hate (no joke,) and in this case it’s the whole damned lot. Brian Taylor and Nicolas Cage scream it over and over (as I’d like to imagine) a single afternoon of one-take filming, considering that the latter took it upon himself to first memorize the entire screenplay and its prose, vanilla to perfection, before photography began, and I hope it all stays with him forever, especially “my mom is such a penis.”
Mom and Dad could conceivably be Nicolas Cage’s I Am Legend if for no other reason than the total lack of possible stand-ins for Brent Ryan — even the standard by which all white suburban Dad performances have been measured in the 21st century, Jason Bateman. Nick himself described it as “punk rock, rebellious, irreverent, original, badass,” and the “number one” movie he’s made in the past ten years (disqualifying National Treasure, in case you were worried.) No surprise, I must agree — this one is a wonderfully raucous and feral thing, but the scene involving the attempted murder of a newborn by her mother (Kendall’s sister) came very close to crossing the line. However, I am old and the intensity of my paternal instincts has probably outpaced my understanding of them. You could also argue, of course, that pushing such boundaries is a core function of a film like Mom and Dad. Nobody ended up vomiting or anything.
This fun thing shouldn’t feel as foreign as it does in cinema, but you already knew that. With all its implicit grapples with overpopulation, kids and gun violence, class, and racism — truly, this is a film charged electrically with current issues. Or maybe not. Ultimately, I can at least tell you for certain that Brian Taylor made exponentially better use of his resources (I couldn’t find a solid number for its production budget) than the Fucking Spierig Brothers did with Winchester (just so you know what a disaster looks like,) and managed to be refreshingly original (astonishing that nobody’s had this specific idea before.) A spectacular riot, Mom and Dad does all you could possibly want it to do. With just eighty-three minutes to lose, it’s worth the commitment just to hear Nicolas Cage whimper and say “anal beads.”
