Substrate

How to manage your attention without smashing your smartphone or retreating to a log cabin

“Wu continues the thought: “At stake, then, in the allocation of one’s attention is something akin to how one’s life is lived.” Wu draws a bright circle around practices and promises of the attention merchants, and the bargains that have been struck, asking as baldly as perhaps has ever been asked, “Is this worth it?”” “It seems as though every other day a new article on unplugging or screen-fasts or the risks of hyperconnectivity goes viral, preaching (ironically) against the very platform that delivers it to those valuable eyeballs.”

“That was always my dream of this city, watching it from a fire escape, in it and not in it.” “To be loved, one must be self-sufficient, whole in oneself, needless. Neediness is something anyone can smell coming off of you like the stink of unwashed clothes; love is guaranteed only by not needing love, maybe by not even wanting it, by turning and walking fast in the other direction.” “New York, for all its well-worn jokes and pretensions, is much America as anywhere. The skyscrapers of the wealthy stand in for wide open fields. Here, if you can afford it, you can live in a rooted glass spaceship so far enough off the ground that you never have to notice that you owe anyone anything. You can float in an uncaring cloud city, with everything you need delivered to the door, a transactional life broken up into clean and independent pieces.” “The next day there was the same list of things that had to be done, small graces and details, mistakes and apologies, threads to tie to one another.“

“Lol Krug family holidays be like:”

“As I said last year, I have no idea how what I make compares w other writers. I'm sharing bc I think writers should be talking more about $$$ and finances and the realities of writing, because these realities affect who can afford to write, and whose voices are heard.”

“in underground sunlight”

“That seems like a simple idea, but when I first sobered up, I was enraged about other people’s seemingly casual relationships with alcohol, a relationship I could never master within myself. I wasn’t mad at them, but I was painfully jealous and ashamed about what I assumed was a character flaw that only I possessed, in that I couldn’t drink just one or two beers and socialize. No, instead I needed to know there would be a steady supply of alcohol and a party atmosphere so no one noticed how many times I went back to get another one.”

“This is something you really shouldn't do. But I'm 23, so it had to be done.”

“But in the end we did my actual favorite thing, which is staying in the city over a major holiday weekend. Staying here over Thanksgiving or Christmas is the closest you will ever get to seeing a private New York, a New York as a small town, the bare, dead, and wonderful skeleton that remains when scrubbed of both transplants and tourists, when divested of anyone with anywhere else to go.” “We filled our apartment with loud, bright, sincere, concerned people being loud and bright and sincere and concerned at one another.”

“Identity was no longer assigned but became a project for individuals to realize. It became an opportunity and a responsibility, a burden. You could now fail to become someone.” “This is the context in which social media have thrived: They solve the problem of the self under neoliberalism, extending a platform for human capital development while still offering a seemingly stable basis for “ontological security.” It may seem that social media, by making social interaction asynchronous, shifting a portion of it online to an indefinite “virtual” space, and subjecting it all to constant monitoring, measurement, and assessment would not be a recipe for producing a sense of personal continuity. The way our self-expression gets ranked in likes and shares in social media would seem to subordinate identity to competition over metricized attention, dividing peers into winners and losers. And the creation of identity in the form of a data archive would seem to fashion not a grounded self but an always incomplete and inadequate double — a “self partially forced from the body.” You are always in danger of being confronted with your incohesiveness, with evidence of a past self now rejected or a misinterpreted, misprocessed version of one’s archive being distributed as the real you. If Laing is right about ontological insecurity, then social media seem designed to generate it: They systematically impose a sense of insubstantiality on users, turning identity into incoherence by constantly assimilating and demanding more data about us, making our self a vacuum that never fills, no matter how much is poured in. Our identity is constantly being recalibrated and recalculated, and we can forever try to “correct” it with more photos, more updates, more posts, more data.” “...other forms of micro-recognition” “The profile takes over for the old identity stabilizers (family, geography, religion, etc.) and becomes the sturdy blank slate on which various roles can be inscribed while we remain open to the saturation of as many different influences as possible. It can hold our lives while we are busy constantly reinventing ourselves for labor markets. Social media exacerbate ontological insecurity while masquerading as its cure.”

“The poems offer a version of the world in which we might reach toward others’ joy in the same gesture as reaching toward our own, rather than dissecting faults and hoarding happiness.” “I am aware that this is a way of being bad at social media, just like insisting on joy is a way of being bad at poetry. I am aware that documenting my love is basic in the same way that O’Hara being my favorite poet is basic. But, at least for me, this obsessive documentation of the stupid, boring, repetitive things that string a life together is the place where social media aspires to the level of poetry.” “Love celebrates another person’s existence rather than their achievements.” “Look at this pattern of days, this holiday that means nothing outside itself.”

“To sum up - in 1978 a series of small mistakes created some characters out of nothing. The errors went undiscovered just long enough to be set in stone, and now these ghosts are, at least in potential, a part of every computer on the planet, lurking in the dark corners of character tables.”

“I don’t know, I think that this kind of email-based personal writing is like whispering when you’re the last two people left awake at a sleepover and you get to say the things you’d never say in a daylight conversation, one that actually counts.”

“Coding/life question: How do you appreciate cool things other people have done without also feeling like that you could have written it and that possibility is now closed off to you? Like I've just lost a race to Do That Thing somehow.”

this morningshaking off the rainof early winter— poem.exe (@poem_exe) December 20, 2018

“...and without the abstract episodes we’d be stuck in an endless loop of adding superficial niceties to our code that don’t meaningfully improve it in a significant way.”

“For a ‘book’ is just the endpoint of a latticework of complex infrastructure, made increasingly accessible. Even if the endpoint stays stubbornly the same—either as an unchanging Kindle edition or simple paperback—the universe that produces, breathes life into, and supports books is changing in positive, inclusive ways, year by year. The Future Book is here and continues to evolve. You’re holding it. It’s exciting. It’s boring. It’s more important than it has ever been.”

“My original sin wasn’t making a Facebook account, it was abandoning my own website that I controlled (the original site was hosted on Tripod, but if I had to do it all over again, I'd pay for web hosting.) All these years later, maybe it’s time to update Jason’s Site.”

Slack is where work flows. It’s where the people you need, the information you share and the tools you use come together to get things done.

“...the endlessly rewritable surface of the screen dispenses with that arrangement” “The distinct identity that a particular cover conveys has been traded for a standardizing consistency that unifies everything displayed on a screen as data flowing in a broader stream.” “The euphoria of endless choice and convenience is counterbalanced by a sense of anomie, in which things that used to matter — like taste — don’t seem to anymore and lack an obvious substitute. Meanwhile, the platforms themselves, in their totalizing ambition, take advantage of our disorientation and choose behavior for us.” “For centuries, the cover has functioned as the gateway to a work, priming us to receive what’s within.” “But another approach is to view infrastructure as context — that which establishes a relationship between one thing and other things. Infrastructure creates adjacency where it wouldn’t otherwise exist, frequently in the form of a physical connection. For instance, the massive Denver International Airport, opened in 1995, put an otherwise relatively remote city at the doorstep of the world, replacing a small regional airport with a major international hub. Urban street systems link houses, stores, and workplaces, defining neighborhoods and cities as coherent entities. Airports and roads, however, are only the most tangible examples of infrastructure. Organizational schema like geographic coordinates or the Dewey Decimal System are also infrastructure, as is the internet and everything it comprises, at a global scale.” “The platform’s huge selection doesn’t overwhelm us because we believe more choice is good for us whether we can handle it or not. Regardless, we never have to face the blinding totality of that variety all at once.” “Legible, contextualized environments are something humans deeply desire. Urban theorist Kevin Lynch, in his 1960 book The Image of the City, called this “imageability.” He argued that “a vivid and integrated physical setting, capable of producing a sharp image, plays a social role.” Such a setting provides “the raw material for the symbols and collective memories of group communication,” which in turn “gives its possessor an important sense of emotional security.” So a bookstore, from this point of view, is not just a place to find books, but a place to confirm a sense of belonging, one rooted in a shared sense of how things are categorized and organized.”