Fernando Gros's Blog, page 7

Books I Read In June 2022

I’m moving soon. That means a lot of my reading time was taken up with far less entertaining things than books full of stories and poetry and big ideas. Also, there was about 200 hours of Stranger Things to watch as well!

Anyway, enough with the excuses. Here’s my short reading list for June.

The Power of Fun: How to Feel Alive Again by Catherine Price

The basic premise of this book is that we’d all be better off prioritising fun in our lives rather than happiness, productivity, focus, or any of the other remedies suggested by self-help and productivity books for our current, digital-technology-fuelled, emotional malaise. It’s a good theory. Unfortunately, you have to embark on a very long, very slow, very drawn out journey through every self-help and productivity idea you’ve already read and forgotten about to get to the juicy new insights. And when you get to the practical suggestions, you end up feeling like the only way to be sure you’re having fun is to build spreadsheets and checklists to monitor your progress. An odd and frustrating book with lots of good ideas but one which leaves you hoping for a revised, much shorter version of the same material.

When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamin Labatut (trans Adrian Nathan West)

This is a history of science. Sort of. It tells true stories about 20th-century scientific breakthroughs in the same way biopics tell the story of famous musicians. All the important details are there, but the personal dramas are elaborated upon like works of good fiction. The result is a fascinating treatise on the nature of imagination and insight and the role that political forces and conflicts play in shaping scientific discovery. Nothing happens in isolation, least of all moments of genius. An odd but compelling book.

Other Books I’ve Read In 2022

Rather than use some other app or service I’ve chosen to collect all my reading here on the blog from now on. You can see my reading lists from other months here.
Books I Read In May 2022
Books I Read In April 2022
Books I Read In March 2022
Books I Read In February 2022
Books I Read In January 2022

The post Books I Read In June 2022 appeared first on Fernando Gros.

Better Every Day

“Mostly, it’s about doing it every day.”

When I’m asked about how to do something better, whether it’s playing guitar, learning a language, staying healthy, having a good sleep routine, reading more often – just about anything, really – I find myself talking about doing it every day.

At least, every day is the goal. Five or six times a week is great. Even four times a week is vastly superior to anything less.

Frequency generates momentum, which puts you on the path to mastery.

The Importance Of Moving The Needle Every Day

Momentum is powerful. That’s why I chose it as a yearly theme back in 2020. We often think of transformation in terms of big, decisive moments. Like earthquakes. But it’s better to think of change as something we do in small, consistent increments over an extended period. Like the way water and waves shape the coast and countryside.

I’m a big fan of the way David Sparks (of MacSparky fame) talks about “moving the needle”. Sparks rose to fame writing about tech news and especially about Apple products. He creates great courses and hosts popular podcasts. He does all that while working full time as a lawyer and helping raise a family.

As I understand it, moving the needle is about regularly making contact with the things you’re working on. Some days you don’t have a lot of time. But you can still do something that “moves the needle”.

Moving the needle helps prevent projects and passions going cold.

The Curse Of Overcommitment

As soon as you start thinking about doing things “every day”, something becomes obvious: you can’t. Most of us have too many commitments and responsibilities to do them “every day.”

Not everything needs to be done every day. You don’t vacuum your home or clean the gutters every day. You shouldn’t even be thinking about those kinds of chores all the time.

Unless they really are central to who you are!

The “do every day” stuff we’re considering here are the areas of your life where you want to improve, excel, and express yourself. Plenty of things we do every year don’t fit onto this list. There’s a limit to how many things you can do, or commit to, every day. That’s the point. Finding how this limit of things you can do in a day correlates to the limited number of things you can try to excel at in life (or at any given moment in your life) is the greatest value of the “every day” approach.

It’s a way to untangle yourself from the curse of overcommitment.

A Brief Comment On Privilege

When a dude says “do it every day”, it invites a lot of scepticism. This is especially true in the writing world, where there’s a long history of men who write every day because they don’t do a bunch of other things, like clean their home, cook their own food, or participate in raising their kids.

That hasn’t been my experience. I’ve written about that before – in terms of what the past few years have been like for me on the domestic front, and how my writing practice evolved in the spaces left over from being a stay-at-home dad.

My idea of “do it every day” doesn’t come from a place of liberty and absence of responsibility outside the work.

Rather, it comes from facing up to the limitations – especially the time constraints – that come from trying to stay faithful to the path of creativity and the world of family commitments.

How This Is Working Right Now

When I look at my time commitments right now, a few things demand to be looked at every day. Writing is my priority, the core of my work, and where I’m focussing the most time. Music is secondary, mostly playing guitar, which helps keep me balanced. Home and family still takes up a lot of time. Less than it did during the height of the pandemic, certainly, but it still feels like a huge focus and will until well after the upcoming move. Then there’s health, which means both exercise (Pilates and walking) and mental well-being (journaling, meditation, therapy). And finally, learning Japanese, which I recently restarted, in the hopes the country will reopen again by next year.

I still plan my weeks. Not everything gets a big block of time. But I visit the important things every day. Trying to make sure some progress, however small, gets made. All of them carry small sub projects, with entries in OmniFocus and my daily paper diary.

There’s a pretty big list of things that it matters to do but that I’m not doing anything about right now: photography, calligraphy, skiing, hiking.

Shrinking life down to what can be done every day feels right for this season. It’s helped me shed some of the guilt and frustration that comes from feeling I can’t focus on all my passions right now. It’s diverted energy away from railing against the circumstances that feel bigger than all of us.

Fun Every Day

Recently, I’ve become intentional about having a little fun every day. Following an idea in Catherine Price’s book The Power Of Fun, I’m micro-dosing on fun in between tasks.

There’s a big bench in the centre of my kitchen and I’ve commandeered a corner of it, near the big back door, in a position to catch the afternoon sun. I leave out something fun there. A Lego kit. Or some brushes, paints, and an art book.

A fun station.

During the day, between tasks, or after lunch or coffee breaks, I’ll stop there for a few moments to build, paint, or draw. Those projects move slowly. But efficiency isn’t the point. Fun is.

Doing something just for fun invites many of the same qualities we seek in creative work – concentration, focus, engagement, and flow – but with none of the pressure.

It’s like low-stakes creativity training. Being creative, every day.

Every Day Forces Prioritization

I wish I could offer more elaborate or more flexible advice. “Every day” can feel like an impossible goal. Sometimes we just don’t seem to have the energy to move the needle on anything much.

I’m not sure how much of this can be packaged neatly as self-help or productivity advice. My “do it every day” approach is largely the result of personal circumstances. Setting this up as a standard everyone should aspire to can be weird and unhelpful.

That said, forcing yourself to imagine the most frequent cadence possible for things that matter most to you can be a helpful exercise.

It pushes you to find your priorities. How will you find the space in your schedule to get good at something? What are you willing to give up?

Take writing as an example. If you aren’t going to write every day, then you’re going to have to write in larger and more concentrated blocks of time. So, while the writing habit might be less frequent, in some ways it might become more invasive. Writers who work in shorter bursts like this often retreat totally from the world in order to complete their work. This still requires you to make sacrifices and trade-offs.

The post Better Every Day appeared first on Fernando Gros.

Creation Matters More Than Curation

Do you remember SoundCloud? I was thinking about this platform recently. I was such a fan. Hosting community meetup days, endlessly talking up the platform… So much so, that some people thought I might be an investor or even one of the founders. I wish.

The platform felt like exactly what independent musicians needed. It was pretty, it worked well, and it made music easy to share. Social music. Wonderful.

At first, SoundCloud was massively popular with people who made music. But this was too small a user base for a startup. So, Soundcloud faced a challenging choice. They decided to push for growth. This would help them attract more investment. It was also the beginning of their undoing.

When Curation Crushes Creativity

What SoundCloud had was a great player and a cool way to add social comments to music. What it didn’t have was a good search function or the will to distinguish between original music and curated music.

I recall doing a search for “jazz”. Everything that came up was DJ sets. The algorithm saw “jazz” and interpreted it as “jazz-tinged electronica”. So a search for jazz gave you resampled jazz, not jazz made by jazz musicians. But if fans couldn’t find the genre of music I make, then what hope was there they would find my music?

A lot of the music I posted to SoundCloud was experiments. I was always unsure about posting my “best” music. Early on, there wasn’t any way to make money there. And it didn’t seem like discovering new music was getting any easier.

The more SoundCloud became a platform for DJs and their listeners, the less it became a platform for songwriters and instrumental musicians and their fans.

This is inevitable when platforms prioritize curation over content creation.

The True Role Of Curation

This week I had the chance to visit MoMA in New York for the first time since October 2019. One of the exhibitions was devoted to Matisse’s 1911 painting The Red Studio. Two rooms full of art and notes and history, which helped us understand the famous painting. This included everything from the other art Matisse chose to include in the frame, to the architectural plans for the studio where the work was made, to details about the early collectors of the artist’s work.

This is one of the most important roles of curation – providing context. Curation in this sense is what we find in galleries and museums and other libraries. The curator selects the best and most important work and then surrounds it with other work that provides context and helps us understand more deeply.

Curation also has another important role – it creates markets. Gathering together similar items feeds demand and increases the likelihood we will buy. If you walk around a department store and keep seeing green t-shirts, then you’re more likely to think green t-shirts are a thing and you need to buy one.

As a kid I used to think record stores were great because they had “all the music”. Of course, even the biggest stores didn’t have “all the music”. They had the music that was likely to sell because it was popular, or well reviewed, or famous in some other way.

In Sydney, there were three famous record stores.
Birdland had the best jazz. Red Eye was renowned for its selection of alternative and indie rock. Utopia was the place for heavy metal.

This is the ultimate economic role of curation – defining a specific market segment.

Why Curation Become So Popular

As the internet and then social media took off, it was relatively easy to gain some sort of online following, especially if you got onto platforms early. But it wasn’t always easy to make money from this.

If only there was a way to turn online influence into cash. Klout became popular for a minute based on the idea that the size of your online following qualified you for discounts and other benefits.

A popular idea back then was that content was king.
It didn’t matter if you made the content. Or curated other people’s content. People only cared about content.

To make things worse, so many grifters and social media gurus were selling the idea that curating content and creating content were roughly equivalent.

If all that matters is clicks and shares and “eyeballs”, then a list of ten songs you found online and a list of ten songs you wrote and recorded is equivalent.

“Everything is a remix” was the zeitgeist back then.
Why create something when you can just steal or borrow it?

The answer is because creation operates on a higher level.
Some curation functions on a high level of engagement, like a gallery or a great record store. But most curation is dispensable.
We can all name our five favourite films. But can we name our five favourite film listicle articles or any other online clickbait?

The Promise Of A Creator Economy

When I quit SoundCloud back in early 2019, I wrote “…everything SoundCloud tried to do someone else now does better.” The services I mentioned as being better alternatives for musicians, like Bandcamp, DistroKid, and Patreon, were built specifically for creators to thrive.

It seemed as though SoundCloud had come into the world at just the right time.
We needed a better online music player. We understood social media enough to recognize how it could work with audio. But I’ve increasingly come to wonder if SoundCloud’s problem was it came too early. SoundCloud would’ve been a very different thing if it had been built from inception as a way for music creators to be paid.

Back when SoundCloud was launched, the idea of musicians getting paid was going out of fashion. This was, after all, the same moment that gave us Spotify and tragically low streaming revenues for songs.

The idea of creators being paid for their work is entrenched now. Forms of direct payment have appeared on platforms like Twitter and YouTube. Same with storefronts for merchandise and other products. And direct support, thanks to platforms like Patreon, is also popular. And this is before we get to platforms sharing ad revenue or other inducements to creators, like creating special funds to attract them.

Music fans need musicians to be paid.
If not, there’s no new music. That’s why a platform like Bandcamp today is far better for musicians and music fans than SoundCloud ever was.

Too often, we think the right time for an innovation is when the technology is ready. But it might be better to think of the right time as when the ideas and culture and shared understanding is sufficiently well developed.

Creation Rules In The End

No one equates curation and creation anymore – not since creation started to look like a real business. Curation is still a nice hobby, popular on platforms like Pinterest, and useful for personal use. We still have clickbait curation on various websites. But, even then, to get noticed, something original in presentation or writing and commentary is required to get our attention.

We’ve come to appreciate creation more deeply in the past decade. And we’ve got used to rewarding creators directly for their work.

A recent report from VidCon suggests the future looks challenging for the creator economy. Rising costs will make it harder to support the creators we love.

But, hopefully, we’ve turned a corner on the idea that curation is the same as creation. Or that creators don’t deserve to be paid for their work.

The post Creation Matters More Than Curation appeared first on Fernando Gros.

Books I Read In May 2022

May found me travelling again, with long flights to and from Australia. This gave me a chance to do a little more reading than normal.

I was also able to finish some books that had been on my reading pile for quite a while.

Art & Energy: How Culture Changes by Barry Lord

We’re accustomed to thinking of art as evolving through different historical stages. Sometimes we connect that to broader cultural and political trends. In this highly original book, we’re encouraged to see art as a product of society’s relationship to its sources of energy and power. Water, steam, coal, oil… all begat different ways of organizing society, and art changed to reflect and challenge these changes. By positioning art at the intersection of economics and technology, Lord manages to create one of the most original and compelling arguments for how we should understand the way art shapes and influences culture. A fascinating book.

Crying In H Mart by Michelle Zauner

This memoir follows the author as she deals with the untimely death of her mother from cancer. Food – and especially recreating her mother’s favourite dishes – becomes central to this story of grief, coming of age, and reconciling mixed racial identities. Zauner is also the lead singer and guitarist of Grammy-nominated band Japanese Breakfast and proves herself here as a talented memoirist. One of the best books I’ve read this year.

Highcastle: A Remembrance by Stanisław Lem

My unfulfilled “lockdown project” was to read through the work of Lem, which had recently been released in new translations by MIT Press. Highcastle is a part memoir, part literary autobiography that opens a window into the origins of Lem’s imagination. Unfortunately, the prose is sometimes hard to take. Is a phrase like “…I wisely remained conservative as to content” meant to be witty and playful or pretentious and obtuse? Highcastle is at its best when Lem describes the world he grew up in. It’s there where Lem’s humour and creativity shine through, but the book is almost impenetrable when he takes us deep inside his own thoughts and theories.

How To Build A Healthy Brain by Kimberley Wilson

We are starting to learn more about the way diet affects our mental health. In this book, Wilson, a clinical psychologist with a master’s in nutrition (and a former finalist on The Great British Bake Off), unpacks a wealth of academically supported knowledge on how our bodies process food and how that shapes our brain and impacts our mental well-being. There are no fad diets or weird food trends here, just lots of detail and explanation and clear guidance on how to improve your health. Highly recommended.

The Trees Witness Everything by Victoria Chang

Waka is a set of syllabic forms used in the Japanese court during the Middle Ages. Here, Chang uses the forms along with titles from the work of W.S. Merlin to create a stirring collection of nature poems. Chang has quickly become one of my favourite contemporary poets. I read an earlier collection of hers, Obit, in XXXX. Both are exceptional pieces of work.

We Are The Words: The Master Memoir Class by Beth Kephart

I wasn’t looking to read another book on the craft of writing, but Kephart is such a prolific writer and highly regarded teacher of writing that I relented. I’m glad I did. The best parts of this book are brilliant, full of clear practical ideas for improving your writing. If you’re trying to become better at crafting words at any level, there’s something here for you. But especially if you’re working on memoir, creative nonfiction, or any kind of biographical writing, then this book is full of suggestions that will make your work richer and a more rewarding read.

Some Are Always Hungry by Jihyun Yun

Nothing is as it seems and everything tells a story in this collection of poems. Like Crying in H Mart, this book excavates the Korean-American experience through family story and culinary culture. But in place of memoir and personal experience, we have daring poetry and intergenerational trauma. My favourites were the poems that played on the form of a recipe, with cooking instructions becoming unmoored from the kitchen and taking on a transcendent quality.

Other Books I’ve Read In 2022

Rather than use some other app or service I’ve chosen to collect all my reading here on the blog from now on. You can see my reading lists from other months here.
Books I Read In April 2022
Books I Read In March 2022
Books I Read In February 2022
Books I Read In January 2022

The post Books I Read In May 2022 appeared first on Fernando Gros.

Sympathetic Magic

Every year, New York artist Tom Sachs leads a mission into space. After extensive training and technical preparation, the crew don their NASA spacesuits and, under orders from mission control, head out to visit the asteroid Vesta.

Except they don’t actually leave the ground. Space Program is an exhibition, a massive piece of performance art. The space suits are simple, stitched-together garments. The mission control is all made of plywood.

But the experience feels real.

This year, one of my favourite YouTubers, Laura Kampf, took part in the mission. Laura normally does DIY projects in Germany. She makes art out of leftover industrial products. Her craft is a kind of engineered alchemy, or performative bricolage.

As I watched Laura participate in Tom Sachs’s Space Program, it was clear the event was much more than elaborate cosplay. Something about the mission felt very real. You can get a sense of the scale of this project by watching the trailer.

The Power Of Sympathetic Magic

Tom Sachs calls this sympathetic magic. The mission is performed as if it were real. Though it is an imitation, or simulation, it can still be a transformative experience for those who participate.

The ideas behind sympathetic magic are ancient and appear in all sorts of religious and shamanistic beliefs. Joseph Campbell believed a kind of sympathetic magic was behind cave paintings. The images were created in a trance-like state as people relived the “magic of the hunt”.

Participation in the ritual, in the process of making the art, made the experience of a new reality possible.

Everyone Is In Drag

Masterclass is a somewhat absurd learning platform. But there are gems of wisdom to be found. Perhaps the most surprising “class” I’ve joined so far comes from famous drag queen and TV star RuPaul.

Mostly, the class is about learning to be yourself. Drag becomes a metaphor for all the ways we construct our identity, sense of self, and define our place in the world.

“Everyone is born naked and the rest is drag.”
– RuPaul

I love this idea. To me, it makes a lot more sense than the notion that some people dress up and others are just “normal” – whatever normal is. Rather, we’re all making choices; we’re all dressing up and creating an image of how we want to be seen.

Our identity is a performance we enact every day through the ritual of becoming who we are.

This Isn’t a Fake It Till You Make It Grit

I’m not suggesting some kind of “fake it till you make it” philosophy here. It takes a lot of work to put on Tom Sachs’s Space Program. Sure, in one sense, it’s “fake.” But, in a more important sense, it is full of art and industry.

RuPaul’s idea of drag takes work. It’s a journey into authenticity and vulnerability. Clothes and make-up are only part of the story. Discovering a deeper sense of self requires introspection as well.

I’ve written before about my dislike of the “fake it till you make it” idea. IL2 I like the way Joshua Medcalf puts it in Pound The Stone: 7 Lessons To Develop Grit On The Path To Mastery:

“The irony is that this ‘fake it till you make it’ tactic is the exact opposite of how truly successful people live. They live with authentic vulnerability because they know that the world always connects more with your grit than your shine. They might show up for the shine, but they will stay because of your grit.”
– Joshua Medcalf

I Made You A Camera

When my daughter was young, she made me a camera. She glued and stuck pieces of cardboard together and labelled all the controls you’d find on a DSLR camera. It even had a slot where you could insert a memory card.

This camera doesn’t make photos. But, on a purely philosophical level, “making a photo” isn’t the only purpose of a camera. The photographer is more than just a camera operator.

A camera is an excuse to observe the world. Or to create a vision of the world. A camera with no film (or memory card) still works.

I think about this every time I see people holding up their smartphones at concerts and other events. Do they ever rewatch those videos? How many times have you done that? Plenty, if you’re like me.

If a video is never watched after being filmed, then does it really exist?

Cinema As Participatory Magic

The Story of Film: A New Generation is Mark Cousins’ two-and-a-half-hour follow-up to the brilliant 14-part documentary series The Story of Film: An Odyssey. Watching this was a wonderful reminder of how many great films have been made in the past 20 years.

It was also a reminder of how magical the experience of cinema can be.

Great filmmakers don’t just tell stories with pictures and sound. They speed up and slow down reality, shift our perspective, challenge our way of seeing the world, and help us notice things about life that we might otherwise forget or overlook as we plough through our existence.

It’s a magical thing that we often make sense of our real life by embracing a made-up cinematic world.

Embracing A Little Magic

Too often our lives feel as flat as the screens we spend our days staring at. Repeatedly, we feel trapped, restricted, even repressed.
Maybe it’s time to embrace a little magic?

Let life enchant you again. Don’t just stop and smell the roses but let their smell take you on a journey. Dress up, dress down, or don’t get dressed at all.

Why not set out on your magical journey? Perhaps it’s not a mission to the distant asteroid like Tom Sachs’s Space Program. But there will be some area of life that could hold a spark of fantasy, imagination, or joy. We could all do with a little magic.

The post Sympathetic Magic appeared first on Fernando Gros.

Why You Should WOOP

The phrase “wishful thinking” is never a compliment. And whether unfounded optimism or outright delusional thinking, wishful thinking is never a sound strategy.

And yet, we all have things we wish for – hopes, dreams, and desires.

What if wishes were grounded in some sort of evidence-based mental model? And what if that model were shown to be good for our emotional and mental well-being?

Wouldn’t that be magical?

This is why we need to talk about WOOP: Wish, Outcome, Obstacle, Plan. WOOP isn’t some random life hack. WOOP is a mental model, a strategy, supported by empirical research.

What Is WOOP?

Wishing doesn’t change anything. The WOOP model connects wishes to action. It has four components:

Wish – what you’d like to see happenOutcome – the consequences of the wish happeningObstacle – what’s holding you backPlan – how you will overcome the obstacle

Let’s say you want to cook a meal for your loved ones. That’s the wish. The outcome might be everyone enjoys the food. But maybe food isn’t the point. Perhaps the best outcome is everyone has fun. Or maybe relationships are strengthened, important conversations are had, or time is spent together.

The obstacle might be your cooking skills or getting all the right ingredients. But consider the best outcome. If it were something relational, then do people really care how good your cooking is? If the goal is to have fun or to deepen personal connections, then maybe the food is secondary.

And maybe the obstacle is your own fear of being judged?

So, your plan might be to take the focus off the food, off your own feelings about cooking, and redirect them onto some other aspect of the gathering. Maybe cook something simple, order a delivery, or turn the event into a games night.

Now, instead of just having a vague wish, you actually have a plan, designed to help you overcome the obstacles you’re likely to face and a clearer sense of what you really want.

Why Does Mental Contrasting Work?

WOOP was developed by Gabriele Oettingen, the author of Rethinking Positive Thinking: Inside the New Science of Motivation. Oettingen is a professor of psychology at New York University, and her work focuses on the relationship between emotional self-regulation and goal setting and how this relates to health and relationships.

I first encountered WOOP in the Science of Well-Being course. That ten-week course, created by Laurie Santos, a professor of psychology at Yale, explores how changing our habits can literally rewire our brains. WOOP is offered as one of the strategies you can experiment with to see how it affects your mood and overall happiness. In a previous post, I mentioned that WOOP has been called “science’s #1 tool for habit change and goal achievement.”

WOOP is based on the idea of “mental contrasting”, which involves reflecting on both your goals and the possible obstacles you’ll face in attaining them. It’s a tool for assessing which goals you can reach and also what’s holding you back.

Studies suggest that mental contrasting works because of the way it changes the energy levels in your body. When we focus on a goal, our systolic blood pressure rises. Focussing on a goal without contrasting creates too much of an increase, more than seems ideal for translating ideas into action. With mental contrasting, the change is subtler and better suited to having the stamina to bring the desires to reality.

To put it another way, wishful thinking is exhausting.

Fantasizing leaves us depleted and unable to think creatively or adapt to challenges as they arise. Mental contrasting puts us in a more efficient physical mode, which conserves more energy for the small decisions and course corrections we need to make on the way to our goals.

The Research Behind This

Several studies support the effectiveness of WOOP for addressing habits like smoking or unhealthy eating, or increasing levels of exercise, having more helpful behaviour patterns and improving academic performance.

WOOP seems to work best for people who want to succeed and are confident in their ability but often feel frustrated by their performance or results.

The academic performance studies illustrated this. The students didn’t just get better grades. They also made more time for revision and preparation and reconsidered their approach to study.

However, all the studies suggest having some level of confidence and self-belief is integral to the success of WOOP. It’s also not clear how much time you should spend doing WOOP or how often.

But there’s enough evidence here, along with a continually growing body of research, to suggest WOOP can help you remain more committed to your goals and more likely to reach them.

Can I Get A WOOP App?

Yes, you can get an app to help you WOOP (iOS and Android). This might be a handy way to keep your WOOP-based life strategies in one place.

Of course, you don’t need to use a specific app for this.

I don’t think of WOOP as a separate category of things. Rather, it’s part of my daily and monthly planning. So my WOOP is happening all the time as I run my daily paper diary, when I sit to journal, or as I use Omnifocus and MindNode to plan my life.

A WOOP-based Life

Wishing is never enough. We need more than just affirmations and positive thinking. A good mindset will help. As will taking care of your health.

But in the day-to-day challenge to live a healthy life, we need a strategy, especially since some of the obstacles – the ones that arise from our own fears and insecurities – aren’t always clear to us. This is why WOOP is so helpful. It’s a simple and effective mental model.

To try WOOP for yourself, I’d suggest picking something small and concrete, something you need to do in the coming week, maybe something you occasionally struggle to do as well as you’d like, or something you tend to procrastinate over. Choose a small project rather than a massive life goal.

Some of the things I WOOP include cooking and shopping for meals, travel preparations, exercise, reading more books, finishing articles and essays, and getting enough sleep – all building blocks of a good life. I’m not very systematic about the process. Sometimes the WOOP happens when I’m journaling, sometimes in the margins of my diary, sometimes in my head while I’m out for a walk.

The important thing is to articulate the wish, the ideal outcome, the obstacle, and the plan. Just expressing these things, in whatever way, is powerfully liberating.

The post Why You Should WOOP appeared first on Fernando Gros.

How To Think About New Technology

Apple just released a cool new computer, the Mac Studio. I want one. Every year, Apple launches some kind of tempting tech. I keep looking at the sleek and seductive Air Pods Max, for example, even though I already have too many headphone sets.

TikTok is the cool new thing in social media. I’ve always been up for experimenting on new platforms. MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, Vine, Periscope, Pinterest, YouTube, Instagram, 500px, and many more. Should I try TikTok?

We’re now on the verge of a revolution in digital technology. Virtual reality, augmented reality, web3, NFTs, cryptocurrencies, DAOs. Some of these might fizzle. Others won’t. The trend feels too big to ignore.

What are we to make of it? And how do we find the time to figure out what matters to us?

It’s tempting to just give up and go and live in a cabin in the woods.

But maybe we don’t need to do anything so extreme!

A Mental Model For New Technology

There’s a way you can think about new technology. It can help you figure out where to invest your energy and attention. The mental model has three parts:

1. Interest
2. Function
3. Sustainability

Anything can seem interesting, but it’s worth asking why. Is it just novelty? Some “Wow, that’s cool” factor? Are you frustrated with your life? Or bored? What is it?

Next, it’s important to ask if this thing solves a problem for you. Every new gadget promises to make your life better, but will it really make your life simpler? Will it solve a problem you’re currently facing or just create a new one?

Finally, it’s crucial to ask what environmental impact the new tech has. How sustainable are the products it’s made from? Can it be powered by renewable energy? Can it be recycled when it becomes obsolete?

Sustainability also matters on a human level. What are the potential consequences for our mental health of relying on the tech? What are the wages and working conditions of the people who make it? Does it raise privacy concerns? What financial or social risks does it invite? And, of course, do you have the time required to make it work or keep it running?

Reflect On Your Interests

The Weather is a large exhibition of work by Laurie Anderson. This mix of installations, planting, sculpture and video installation is currently on display at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington D.C. Walking around the displays, I was most taken with a large room, white words and drawings on charcoal walls, as if the artist’s notebook had exploded out into space. One phrase in particular caught my attention, especially since Anderson is a renowned innovative artist and one of the first to work with music tech like vocoders and CDs and media like virtual reality.

“If you think technology will solve your problems then you don’t understand technology – and, you don’t understand your problems.”
– Laurie Anderson

Almost universally, we believe that technology can fix our problems, whether it’s something practical, like being more productive at work, or existential, like feeling less lonely.

When a new tech story catches your attention, ask why.

It’s easy to use daydreaming about tech as a way of procrastinating. I love reading Apple gossip sites like MacRumors or music tech blogs like Create Digital Music. It can be a fun way to spend a moment. It can also be a waste of time.

Focus On Solving Problems

An obsession with every new piece of tech can amount to self-sabotage, robbing us of agency in what we do. The phrase Gear Acquisition Syndrome, or GAS, was coined to describe this. It’s not a medical term. Just something musicians coined to describe this phenomenon.

Maybe we can’t solve our problems unless we buy some new thing or sign up to some service. But chances are this isn’t true.

A good way to avoid this is to reflect on the challenges we face as part of some system, like journaling. For example, writing this piece is taking some time. Right now, I’m on my eleventh revision. It’s frustrating. Would switching writing apps change this? No, not really. The problem is me, or this piece, or something else.

When I first switched to Scrivener, I had problems with backing up my work properly, with apps like Pages or Word crashing, and with managing large writing projects. An app that approached these technical problems differently helped me overcome those challenges.

If your problem is specifically technological, then another kind of tech might be the answer. If your problem is something more existential, then a conviction that a new kind of tech is the solution might be masking the real problem.

Focus On Sustainability

Every new thing we buy or sign up for invites new commitments. Last year, my bank decided to issue me a new credit card for my “convenience”. I had to manually change my payment settings on every subscription service. It made me think about how much I spend each year on software and streaming and other services. But it was also a reminder of how much time it takes to maintain it all.

Sustainability has two components. The first, and most important, is environmental sustainability. Technologies like crypto currencies are massively resource hungry and there’s real questions over whether our planet can sustain their widespread adoption. Electric vehicles are probably the way forward for transportation, but there are also issues around how key components, like cobalt for batteries, are extracted.

We’ve long passed the point where we can just adopt any new technology simply because it offers some sort of benefit. We also need to weigh the cost as well.

Sustainability also relates to how tenable our human relationship is to the technology. There’s a widespread but misguided belief that we can infinitely expand our attention, focus, and time to accommodate every innovation. We can’t.

Prioritise Your Humanity

In airport security lines, you often encounter an automated machine where you have to stand, arms above your head, to be scanned for dangerous items. You can often ask to be manually screened instead. Writing in a recent Orion Magazine, musical artist Paul Keeling described why he always takes the “human option.”

Keeling suggests many new technologies end up limiting how much human interaction we have each day. Things like supermarket self-checkouts mean fewer opportunities for small talk and simple acts of kindness. Automation increasingly creaks human connection.

“I simply refuse to go along with the cult of convenience. I affirm the beautiful inconvenience of life. I stand up for my fellow humans.”
– Paul Keeling

This calls to mind the way the Amish approach technology. In popular culture, the Amish are depicted as being anti-technology. It’s not that simple. While we often assess new technology by the convenience it provides or the status it confers, the Amish look at the impact it will have on the community.

This reaction isn’t based on fear. It’s driven by values.

The “You Don’t Understand” Objection

Unfortunately, deciding for yourself which technology to adopt won’t do for some people. They’ll automatically accuse you of not understanding, of being like people who ridiculed the advent of the internet, or the computer, or even the printing press!

This isn’t an argument. It’s a reaction – the kind we expect from cult followers or religious extremists. Any doubt is a sign of apostasy. Better to burn the heretic than stop to ask if maybe they were onto something.

I quit Facebook in 2009. I gave it a try. I had hundreds of “friends”. But it was clear then the platform wasn’t offering me anything I wanted in my life. And I didn’t trust the company either. Since then, nothing has happened to change my mind.

Once again, either/or thinking doesn’t help us. The equation that says you’re either onboard with every new innovation or you just don’t understand because you’re a luddite is senseless.

You can both understand new tech and be interested in innovation and fresh ideas AND believe not every new technology is good for you, or for us in a collective sense.

The Myth Of The Printing Press

Before books, people barely read or weren’t allowed to. Then a dude invented the printing press and overnight the world changed. Literacy rates shot up as everyone started reading books. Some people didn’t like it, saying the new technology would undermine society, but everyone quickly adapted.

This is the way the story of the printing press is commonly told. It’s used as a cautionary tale whenever anyone criticizes a new piece of technology. “They said the same thing about the printing press” is the common refrain.

But the problem with this story is that it’s almost completely untrue.

First, Johannes Gutenberg didn’t invent the printing press. The technology to print words was developed in China, Korea and Japan and had already been around for a long time. Even the problem of Moveable Type, which Gutenberg is commonly claimed to be the first to solve, had been unlocked in Korea 150 years before the German’s work.

What Gutenberg did was create the first commercially viable bookmaking process. Investors had been looking for a design for bookmaking. Others were trying at the same time. Gutenberg got there first.

But literacy levels didn’t dramatically change as a result. To say they did is to collapse a hundred or more years of history into a lifetime.

The advent of the printing press initially did little to change literacy rates for farm and manual laborers or for women. As late as 1630, a third of grooms and two thirds of brides couldn’t sign their own marriage register in Amsterdam, despite a flourishing local print industry.

What The Printing Press Really Did

What really changed was the shape of literacy. Books allow greater standardization of language, grammar and idiom. They lend themselves to sharing complex ideas and scientific knowledge. A translation reproduced in a book is consistent, unlike translations made by monks or other individuals that vary every time a document is copied.

The effect of these changes is seen most clearly in the shape of religious debates at the time. What were once closed door debates between church scholars became a matter of public interest. As books about new theological ideas became more commercially popular, printers were inspired to make more books. Although many were censored, presses flourished in places like the Netherlands, where there was no censorship and a strong merchant class.

The change that doesn’t get enough attention is the role of printing technology in the growth of education. The rise of a new social class made up of artisans, merchants, and other professions was changing Europe. This created a massive demand for new schools to educate the young in new scientific and religious ideas.

So, while the printing press did change the course of history, the change was slower, more complex, and intertwined with other historical forces than the simple version of the story suggests.

Society had generations to adapt to the technology of the printing press and the cultural changes it made possible. Many of the scientific works that we associate with the advent of printed books were published centuries after Gutenberg fired up the press.

Technology Exists Within History

By contrast, the internet has changed our lives within one generation. The way we work, shop, learn and travel has all fundamentally changed. We’ve barely had time to figure out what it all means.

This alone should be enough to make us pause to consider how we are changing our culture.

One way in which digital technologies are fundamentally different is the trail of data they create.

Recently, we looked at Twitter. One challenge Twitter would face if it tried to verify more users is creating a rich target for hackers. We’ve all had emails saying our data may be subject to a leak.

But a lot of user data is readily for sale. The dating app Grindr has been selling user data since 2017. Back in 2018, it was reported that period tracking apps were selling data about women’s health to marketers.

SafeGraph is a company that sells smartphone-user data. It reportedly sold data to the CDC that could be used to monitor pandemic guideline compliance. And they are selling data of people who visit abortion clinics. This New York Times article explains how this works.

Given what is happening in US courts right now, it’s not surprising many are suggesting full deletion from period tracking apps unless that data is sold for possible future prosecutions.

We have to weigh the social implications of the technology we use. Innovation doesn’t automatically lead us towards better social outcomes.

Avoiding Drama Is a Superpower

Back in 2014, I wrote about Why Pros Don’t Always Upgrade. I described visiting a graphic designer’s studio and seeing them doing great work on an old computer running outdated software. That pro had done what many pros do – prioritize productivity and stability over using the latest cool tools.

To put it another way, they’d decided to avoid the drama.

Richard Rohr writes about how, as we get older, we often want less drama in our lives. This is true of the people we associate with and the places we want to be. Less noise, less distraction, less emotional cost.

These tendencies suggest the desire to put new technology in context is a natural consequence of taking our professional and personal lives seriously. If you know what you want from life, you’re better positioned to decide if some new thing can help you get there.

This involves understanding why stuff triggers your interest, being able to answer whether it will help you solve your problems, and whether or not it’s sustainable.

So, am I buying the new Mac Studio? Yes, probably, but only after I have a new studio to use it in. Not while I’m packing, and moving, and facing all the uncertainty of this present year. For now, everything I need to do can be done with my 2011 Mac Mini.

The post How To Think About New Technology appeared first on Fernando Gros.

Books I Read In April 2022

Here is this past month’s reading, with a mix of poetry, ancient and mediaeval philosophy, nature wiring, mindfulness, and even a comic!

Old Growth by Orion Magazine

Orion Magazine is a beautiful publication, rich with art and photos and fantastic nature writing. Old Growth is a collection of essays and poems that highlights Orion’s best contributions about trees. Mixing history, journalism, memoir, and science, this wonderful edition features writers as diverse as Alison Hawthorne Deming, Michael Pollan, and Ursula K. Le Guin.

The Book of the Body Politic by Christine de Pizan

There were no female thinkers or historical references in my undergraduate degree. Writing during the Hundred Years War, de Pizan outlines a powerful philosophy of education grounded in social responsibility. In our era, when political leadership has taken a turn towards demagoguery and cruel elitism, de Pizan’s ideas about the role of philosophical reflection in shaping our character feel as urgent as ever.

Crystal Planet #3 by Joe Satriani

Sci-fi and superhero themes have been constant inspirations for Joe Satriani’s music. Now he’s reversed that flow to create a five-episode comic that is drenched in time travel, space intrigue, and even intelligent storms. Crystal Planet is a beautiful passion project, pushing the limits of Satriani’s Space Rock vision. Produced with vivid foil-enhanced graphics, it’s a unique and unusual bit of comic art.

Migratory Sound by Sara Lupine Olivares

The poems in this collection are like little linguistic dioramas, rich in detail and evocative in ways that ask us to consider how we observe and listen to nature. These are also stories full of movement, which remind us that boundaries are, in nature, such fluid things. The patterns of travel we see, like the migration of birds, are, perhaps, totally different to creatures that do not see boundaries the way we do.

Philosophy of Plato and Aristotle by Alfarabi (trans Muhsin Mahdi)

Back when I was a know-it-all undergrad studying philosophy, my constant complaint was that our reading lists, full of the predictable Greek, German, British, and American men, were just so, well, “white”. Thankfully, universities today are questioning that tendency. Alfarabi was a towering figure in Islamic philosophy and also a huge influence on political thought in Spain. What surprised me most about his writing was the witty way he wrote about the game of governing. I only wish I’d read this book decades ago.

Postcolonial Love Poem by Natalie Diaz

Wisdom and strength drip from every page of this fierce collection of poems. Diaz challenges the standard picture of American colonialism as well as the simple labels we use to describe people. The result is a rich treatise on holding space for your personal story, for your collective experience, and for the scar that is colonialism, which still shapes us today.

The Practice of Not Thinking by Ryunosuke Koike (trans Eriko Sugita)

We often take up meditation and mindfulness because our brains feel full of thoughts. But the practice seems at first to amplify the problem, making us more aware of our runaway minds. This slender book, from a former Zen monk, addresses this by discussing the way we experience the world and how our habit of assigning emotionally laden ideas to our senses fills our heads with unnecessary thoughts.

Other Books I’ve Read In 2022

Rather than use some other app or service I’ve chosen to collect all my reading here on the blog from now on. You can see my reading lists from other months here.
Books I Read In March 2022
Books I Read In February 2022
Books I Read In January 2022

The post Books I Read In April 2022 appeared first on Fernando Gros.

Daddy’s Home By St. Vincent

St. Vincent is my favourite contemporary pop artist. It’s not even close. There’s no point pretending this is any kind of objective music criticism.

I like pop music to be stylistically bold. St. Vincent is the boldest of the bunch. Sonically and visually. The music, and the music videos, always feel smart, sharp, and well crafted – brilliant lyrics, emotive vocals, rich but uncluttered arrangements, and full-on guitar god antics.

Masseduction was easily my favourite album of 2017. By the time I saw St. Vincent live at Summer Sonic on a sweaty August evening, the songs had all been re-arranged. YouTube videos of the tour made it clear the songs were reworked again and again. Then, in 2018, St. Vincent re-recorded the whole album as an acoustic vocal and prepared piano set, called it MassEducation, and managed to make the songs even more sensual and compelling.

But something more important than amazing musicianship caught my attention. Nothing sounded retro. Nothing looked retro. Everything St. Vincent did felt fresh, new and future-oriented.

It stood in stark contrast to a lot of other pop music from the mid- to late-2010s, which seemed to bask in an odd, back to the roots, misguided sentimentality. The hipster aesthetic had taken over not just our coffee shops but also music libraries. IL1

Then along came St. Vincent’s album, Daddy’s Home.

The Knowing Retro of Daddy’s Home

On Daddy’s Home, there was no pop-futurism. The album dug into the past, the early ʼ70s in particular, for inspiration. The David-Bowie-meets-Tom-Waits vibe felt comfortable, familiar, even nostalgic.

This bugged me.

We are drowning in nostalgia. From the artisanal homesteading nostalgia of hipster culture, full of Edison bulbs and home ferments, to the relentless needle drops in movie trailers, where a few bars of something familiar, like a Guns and Roses track, aims to be enough to lure us to the movie theater.

Of course this nostalgia works. The science of music cognition describes what we already know – that old songs from youth can hold a powerful sway over our emotions.

And given how much digital technology pervades every aspect of life, it’s not surprising so many pine for an age of paper, pen, and pickles.

But perpetually looking backwards is also a way of avoiding looking too closely at our present. Rolling back the clock on culture and music also means rolling back the clock to a time when we had less diversity and inclusion.

To me, nostalgia – especially manufactured nostalgia – is like candy. Fine in small doses. Maybe even fun. But not something you should build your diet around.

So I initially resisted Daddy’s Home and its knowingly nostalgic soundscape.

History Keeps Happening To Us

The Jewish scriptures, or the Old Testament, as Christians call it, is full of stories: the slaves in Egypt, Moses and the Red Sea, the Promised Land. These stories beg the question, “Did it really happen?”

There’s a saying in midrash, the tradition of interpretation, that suggests the important question isn’t “Did it happen?” but “Why does it keep happening?” People keep being enslaved. They still seek salvation. They find a reason to hope they lose their way.

The stories from an ancient past can help make sense of recent history.

During the most restrictive parts of the pandemic, I found myself suddenly, almost alarmingly, nostalgic. Eddie van Halen passed away, and I listened to songs I hadn’t heard in decades. I picked up a guitar and could remember riffs and solos. My voice rose effortlessly to find melodies and harmonies.

Studies suggest that music-evoked nostalgia might even be good for us. It can evoke more than just joy. It can bolster optimism, self-esteem and social connectedness, especially during moments of sadness. This use of nostalgic music to regulate emotion might have been even more important and prevalent during the pandemic.

Listening Afresh To Daddy’s Home

So, I decided to reconsider my stance towards nostalgia, at least for now. I listened to Daddy’s Home with fresh ears. Instead of asking why St. Vincent had dived into the past, I started to ask why the past, the glamorous squalor of the ʼ70s, felt so relevant now.

In so many ways it feels like we’re going backwards now. We’re re-prosecuting ideas we’d settled on a generation ago, ideas from gender and reproductive rights to racial equality, the need to avoid environmental catastrophes and species extinctions, the provision of education, economic justice, and health care for everyone. We’re even facing inflation and global supply issues like we did back in the ʼ70s!

Why does this keep happening?

Suspending my prejudgments about the album loosened my perception of what was going on musically. Instead of a wash of nostalgic timbres, I could hear the space and inflection in each beat. I could feel the way discontent and cultural strife skips across generations like a stone skimming a lake.

If you push past the comfortable embrace of nostalgia, you encounter history. You start to ask questions like why did gospel and soul music become so political? Why was pop art and glam rock so flamboyant and transgressive?

And you start to feel like those questions are just as important today.

Daddy’s Home wasn’t the album I wanted. But in the strange psychological drama we’ve just lived through, it became the album I needed.

When I listen to Daddy’s Home in years to come, I’ll remember this time, the loneliness and uncertainty of it all, and be thankful that this album reminded to dance a little, to look past first impressions and listen to what a great artist was gently whispering in my ear.

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The Future Of Twitter

It started almost as a joke. For a long time, it felt impossible. But a few weeks ago, rumours started to circulate with increasing ferocity. Elon Musk was planning to buy Twitter.

This exchange continues to haunt me pic.twitter.com/W06oSqx0MR

— Dave Smith (@redletterdave) April 25, 2022

Most Twitter users could give you a list of things they’d like changed. The company has underperformed compared to other social media platforms. When Jack Dorsey stepped down as CEO, for the second time, Twitter failed to articulate a clear direction for the future. It’s easy to make a case for a change of ownership and a refreshed vision for the company.

But when Elon Musk stepped up as a potential white knight, Twitter users were sharply split. Actually, that’s kind of bullshit, the sort of both-sides argument that’s ruining our public discourse. The truth seldom lives in the middle. Almost everyone was apoplectic, with a few people taking a wait-and-see attitude and an army of Musk supporters jumping in to defend their hero.

I even got called a communist! Yeah, I know.

Anyway, it wasn’t just the issue of Musk the person, or his track record with his companies, although both are worth looking at. It’s what he specifically said needs to change at Twitter, and his attitude while making those suggestions.

What Will Musk Change At Twitter

So far, Musk has promised to (a) give users an edit button; (b) make Twitter more trustworthy and transparent by making algorithms open source; (c) authenticate most, if not all, users; (d) get rid of spam bots; (e) overhaul the business model: and (f) make content moderation radically less strict.

We don’t know if this list is comprehensive or whether it reflects Musk’s priorities. But this is where we have to start.

The edit button is something many users request but mostly in a joking sort of way. This feature might be nice. No one enjoys typos. But it also might embolden trolls to gaslight their targets or post without consequences. Twitter has been working on this feature anyway, and it’s not clear a change of ownership was required for it to happen.

The same is true for being more transparent. Twitter wasn’t exactly on a path to making its algorithms open source. But under Jack Dorsey, Twitter has been exploring how to make the platform more open and less centralised. The development of Twitter Space was an example of Twitter building in public. This was amplified by the many opportunities the roll-out gave to users to speak directly to developers, designers and people on Twitter’s safety and community teams.

Twitter was also doing a lot to deal with fake accounts and bots. A study in 2017 found that somewhere between 9% and 15% of all accounts were bots. That same year, a Pew Research Center study found that 66% of links shared on Twitter came from bots. In May and June 2018, Twitter removed 70 million fake and suspect accounts.

The problem is vast, and it’s complicated by the fact that many bot accounts are good and useful. Weather services use bots to run accounts that give local updates. Art galleries and museums use bots to share their collections. There was even a bot that exposed companies that made International Women’s Day pledges despite having a record of paying women less than men.

What's a bot and what's not? We're making it easier to identify #GoodBots and their automated Tweets with new labels.

Starting today, we’re testing these labels to give you more context about who you're interacting with on Twitter. pic.twitter.com/gnN5jVU3pp

— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) September 9, 2021

Changing the business model feels like a more urgent task. Twitter might be the best social media tech we have, but it’s always struggled to match the growth and revenue of other platforms. We’ll come back to this because Twitter’s business woes have begat so many problems, including the ones that might be addressed by authenticating more users.

We’ll also come back to the idea of changing content moderation practices. This is the biggest concern most Twitter users have with this potential change of ownership. The simplistic way the idea of “free speech” has been evoked raises a lot of concerns.

The Myth Of Twitter’s Failure

Most days, you’ll find someone describing Twitter as a “hell site.” The negative aspects of Twitter are real. The platform is full of trolls, reply guys and sea lions. And lots of hateful political shouting matches. Okay, those are everywhere online, but Twitter feels particularly susceptible to coordinated attacks and articulated hate. And for a long time, it felt like Twitter was doing little to protect its users.

This moral failure was directly tied to Twitter’s commercial underperformance. Twitter simply isn’t a great business. It never managed to match Google’s profitability or Facebook’s scale. Now Twitter is dwarfed by TikTok, which is nearly twice as big and growing fast.

A lot of Twitter’s failures – from its lack of safety to the mess it made of verification – stem from the need to answer to shareholders.

The company had to everything it could to look like it was growing, even if a lot of this growth hid fake and dormant accounts. It had to show high levels of engagement, even if much of that was actually enragement. Scratch the surface of any of Twitter’s woes and you’ll see a solution that was slowed down, or just avoided, for commercial reasons.

Along the way, Twitter changed from being a place to “Be authentic, be genuine, talk about what you are doing every day…” (Dorsey’s words) to a platform associated in most people’s minds with charged political arguments. Twitter did little to change this perception because it helped justify their ad-based business model.

Let’s Also Acknowledge Twitter’s Success

And yet, Twitter is influential in the public discourse. Twitter users are younger, better educated, and more cosmopolitan than the typical adult. Twitter is where the elites come out to play.

There is a massive demographic divide between those casually discussing how Twitter is a giant joke machine gone wrong, and those for whom Twitter as a functional platform has great significance for their work and communities – both in the US and elsewhere…

— emily bell (@emilybell) April 28, 2022

And also, Twitter is where “truth speaks to power”. Sixty-five per cent of the most active users are women. Twitter has vibrant activist communities working for greater inclusion of people with disabilities; recognition of people with life-long illnesses; and racial, gender and sexual equality.

I think we'll look back on the last decade as a time when social media gave previously marginalized groups the ability to speak directly to elites and, as a result, elites lost their minds.

— Michael Hobbes (@RottenInDenmark) April 27, 2022

Moreover, Twitter is an amazing professional platform. I’ve said many times that most of my best career opportunities and collaborations came via Twitter.

But it’s not just shitposting and slacking. For many people, especially women and people of color, Twitter has been instrumental to building professional connections and career growth without the gatekeeping that prevents them from getting those benefits elsewhere.

— Robyn Swirling (@RSwirling) April 27, 2022

Once we understand this, we can see beyond the clichéd critiques. The platform is vast and many of the most active users never tweet about politics or the trending topics of the day. They’re too busy tweeting about the latest research in their field of science and academia, or the progress of their latest book, the music they’re recording or listening to, their favourite Japanese mascots, the best food at football grounds, or just simply what they watched on TV last night.

What’s frustrating about Musk’s pronouncements is they never acknowledge these successes. If anything, he seems to be doubling down on the idea that Twitter is all about US politics, which is a tragic misrepresentation of reality.

Twitter’s Ad Model Mistakes

Over the years, Twitter has made several important mistakes, each one amplified by Twitter’s strategic inconsistency. Google has also made mistakes. But it always knew what its core business was, so when Google course-corrected, it did so to its advantage. Facebook was often awful, but consistently awful in the same direction.

Twitter has never been able to reconcile the service it provides to users and the ad-business model it relies on. And it’s ad business is small – $4.5 billion compared to Facebook/Instagram/Meta’s $130 billion.

I love Twitter. Twitter is the closest thing we have to a global consciousness.

— jack (@jack) April 26, 2022

Jack Dorsey likes to say Twitter is a “protocol”. That’s technobabble for “publishing service”. This doesn’t mean ads have no place, but a better model would be “subscription”.

This is how LinkedIn managed to become the first profitable social media platform. Most users pay nothing. But power users – recruiters, big companies, business authors and consultants – pay quite a big premium for added features. This revenue stream allowed LinkedIn to expand into business education.

Twitter has already started on this with Twitter Blue, a service that gives users access to new features (including a version of the much-vaunted edit button). Twitter has also launched Super Follows and Ticketed Spaces as features, where users pay for extra access to their favourite accounts, creating another revenue stream for the company.

Twitter also has underdeveloped features, like TweetDeck or the Media Studio, which it could enhance and update for paid users. And there’s data on user demographics and behaviours, which could also be bundled into higher tiers of a subscription model.

However, it’s not clear how Musk sees the question of subscriptions or how the transition might be handled. It’s possible that moving towards subscription will hurt the ad revenues faster than the company can recoup in signups to new services. For now, Twitter relies on selling ads against the news of the day.

Trending Topics Create Problems

Twitter sells itself as the platform for understanding what’s trending. There’s no question that when something is happening, Twitter is great. The platform is amazing during an election, sports event, or awards show. It’s also at its best during a crisis, when fresh reports from the ground are important. In a crisis, everyone’s attention is focussed on one thing – how big was the earthquake, where is the fire, when will the flood waters hit?

But we’re not supposed to live every day in that heightened sense of awareness. Yet the trending topics are still there, filled with whatever gets the most engagement. This game entices a lot of bad actors. Gaming the trending topics is a big field of nefarious activity. The term “ephemeral astroturfing” was used for the way bots will tweet massive numbers of repetitive tweets in order to get a topic trending, then delete those tweets.

By mining https://t.co/nHEUDwZ1bE’s Twitter Stream Grab (which saves deletion notices) we detected 19k trends astroturfed by 108k accounts between July 2015 and September 2019. There were 33k bot accounts making up 5 communities in 2019, 2 of them were taken down in the same year pic.twitter.com/qugNY1zxUX

— Tugrulcan Elmas (@tugrulcanelmas) March 17, 2021

It’s also well documented that many high-profile accounts have a lot of fake followers. SparkToro, an audience research tool, noted that Donald Trump had 61 per cent fake followers. Not all fake followers are bots. Sometimes, people sign up for Twitter, then quit. It’s understandable that political figures might have followers who signed up simply to support their candidate. But the same study found 35 per cent of that account’s followers exhibited 10 or more signs of suspect behaviour, which suggests a big problem.

Still, for five years, this man dominated the platform. A lot of users hated his policies and the way he presented them. But they also hated having to think about one person every day. That just feels odd. Especially if you don’t live in the same country. And yet, even if you used all the available safety tools, he and his pronouncements were there on the trending topics every single day.

For a long time, Twitter resisted giving users the tools to manage their own following. Twitter also removed access to its API from third-party services that could help you manage your account. It only recently opened up the ability to remove followers. Until then, you were stuck with your own fake followers.

Musk’s solution is pure technocracy: Ban the bots; verify the humans.

But technology isn’t the solution for every cultural problem. Twitter needs to rethink not just its policies around authentic accounts and algorithms but also its whole approach to trending topics, news, and our ability to choose the conversations we want to participate in.

Or, to paraphrase Dorsey, Twitter needs to rewire its consciousness.

The Challenge Of Verification

Online anonymity makes me uncomfortable because a lot of the worst online behaviour comes from anonymous users. And there’s research in moral psychology to suggest anonymity can bring out the worst in people.

In principle, I agree with Musk on this.

But this isn’t a simple issue. And it’s not just a matter of opinion.

Culture plays a role. In Japan, for example, employers take a dim view on staff having social media accounts. Pseudonyms are common because users want to go on Twitter to talk about their hobbies and passions or explore their identity, free from the harsh judgement of fellow employees, staff or even family.

Musk has said he wants to authenticate all users on Twitter…but Japanese Twitter users – an overwhelming number of whom use the sit under a pseudonym – reminding everyone that they like things just the way they are https://t.co/zsgKeqPNiT

— Eleanor Warnock (@misssaxbys) April 29, 2022

Of course, pseudonyms have been commonplace in the history of art and especially writing. If we take a creativity-forward attitude to the internet, which I do, then we have to embrace the potential positives of online anonymity.

Moreover, for some people in politically repressive societies, anonymity is the only alternative. Whatever “free speech” might mean, if it’s going to serve democratic ends, then we have to accept that in many countries people can speak up on Twitter only if they use an assumed name.

Even in free societies, forcing people to . And it’s unfair to claim Twitter hasn’t been trying to address these problems, even if they did mess up the verification process. In fact, Twitter has a track record of going to court to protect the First Amendment free speech rights of its users.

So, while I agree with Musk in an abstract, philosophical way, the idea argument feels simplistic. It ignores the needs of vulnerable users and fails to account for the ways Twitter is exploited around the world.

What The Hell Is Free Speech

Free speech is one of those phrases that users assume everyone understands what it means. It’s drawn from the US First Amendment. But that’s about the government not being able to restrict speech. And, as Stanley Fish pointed out in the essay There’s No Such Thing As Free Speech, this isn’t a once-for-always proclamation. Rather, it’s constantly being negotiated, and varies greatly from country to country.

Or to put it another way, speech is always being limited.

In a TED interview, Musk described free speech as “Is someone you don’t like allowed to say something you don’t like”. Sounds clever. But you wouldn’t get away with that in a first year political philosophy or law class.

There’s a world of difference between someone saying, “Rugby is a better sport than football” or “Taylor Swift writes terrible songs”, and “People like you don’t deserve to live” or “I’m going to find out where your kid goes to school and rape them.”

The first two are opinions. Yes, I dislike them. Sure, they feel objectively wrong. But neither prompts any greater emotion than faint amusement. If someone insisted otherwise, I’d be tempted to just say, “Okay, sure” and walk away.

The latter two statements are both replies I’ve received on Twitter. They’re not opinions. They’re threats. You can block or mute or report, but you can’t easily forget. However thick-skinned you try to be, those kinds of words find a way through.

How Speech Works Online

The rules we might use to respond to opinions are inadequate to deal with hate, threats and other kinds of toxicity. These opinions are more than just words. They’re actions. Online, and especially in a text-based environment like Twitter, the distinction between words and actions can fall apart.

And, while a lot of people love the idea of “free speech”, where you can say whatever you want, only a very few would argue for “free actions”, where you can do whatever you want.

This distinction gets obscured because the work platforms do to keep users safe is described as content moderation. This sounds like censorship, but it’s more like behaviour moderation.

Keeping users safe isn’t about protecting them from ideas or opinions they don’t like. It’s helping them avoid hate and targeted harassment.

I can’t imagine spending time in an unmoderated online space, for the same reason I can’t imagine spending time in an unmoderated physical space. All of life is regulated by laws, customs and traditions. Moreover, the most creative, inspiring, and artistically free spaces I’ve been are always moderated.

The freedom comes in large part from the election of people who are welcomed and the attitudes they embody. You can’t just walk into an academic seminar, design agency, recording studio or government policy briefing. But Twitter gives anybody direct access to people in those kinds of spaces.

2/ Here are a few of the highlights.

First, it’s a complete misunderstanding to think anything the Twitter Trust and Safety team does is political. We never had one political conversation.

They were trying to solve a USER EXPERIENCE problem. Every tech product has UX people.

— Brianna Wu (@BriannaWu) April 26, 2022

We already have online spaces where so-called free speech in unfettered, such as 4chan and all the Twitter clones that have sprung up in recent years. But guess what? Academics and artists and creatives and musicians and scientists and writers don’t invest time in those spaces. They do on Twitter.

The Political Edge Of Speech

Musk’s recent comments suggest he’s bought into a common misconception that the left side of US politics dominates Twitter. The most extreme versions of this even suggest the algorithms favour the politics of the Democrats over those of the Republicans.

Twitter’s own research disputes this. They found that, if anything, it favours the Republicans. This probably says more about the way issues are framed than the algorithm itself. Another study confirmed this, finding personalization algorithms don’t amplify parties at either extreme and instead reflect “strong partisan bias in news reporting.” It also reflects the different ways that supporters of each side of US politics use Twitter.

In other words, the mess you see on Twitter reflects deeper divisions in society.

It’s not clear how changing the algorithms, making them public, or rewriting content moderation policies will fix the polarization we see on Twitter. Hot culture-war topics like the so-called “cancel culture” are viewed so differently across the political spectrum that it’s unlikely they will be reconciled through any technical tweaks.

Collective Versus Individual Rights

The way Musk talks about “free speech” suggests he believes that Twitter is some kind of marketplace of ideas. You can judge ideas like you judge consumer preferences. The truth is somewhere in the middle.

But markets are terrible ways to choose our morality. Most truths don’t exist on a single axis. And they’re seldom either/or choices.

At the moment, we don’t really have a marketplace of ideas so much as a marketplace of attention – yours, mine – sold to the highest bidder. What’s missing isn’t really the “right” to speak more. It’s something closer to De Toqueville’s habits of the heart.

We don’t get closer to democracy by just mouthing off. We get democracy by listening, reading, reflecting, contemplating, and working together. Twitter gets compared to the town square. But what we need is the town hall.

In the early days of Twitter, I used to compare the platform to the cafés that shaped the art and intellectual scene of Paris and Vienna. At its best, Twitter is still like that – people talking to people about interesting things. When we get to that level, the abstract yelling about speech falls away because people are simply talking to each other.

A Few Notes On Elon Musk’s Business Ethics

Musk is asking us to trust him to make Twitter more transparent. But this calls to mind Tesla’s past failures to be transparent about their own climate management strategies. Sure, electric vehicles are better for the environment. But the mining of cobalt and lithium, essential to make the batteries, is a messy business. Full transparency requires understanding the ecological effect of the whole business.

In recent weeks, we’ve been reminded of other questions in the Musk success story. Like when Musk’s anti-union tweet broke US Labour laws along with other infringements which included having security guards harass workers who handed out pamphlets. A Tesla employee sued after being repeatedly subject to racial slurs. The workplace culture is often reported as being grueling and toxic. There’s also the claims of sexual harassment from employees at Space X.

There’s Musk’s behaviour on Twitter itself. Like when he (falsely) accused British cave rescuer Vernon Unsworth of being a paedophile. How Musk’s tweets put so much strain on Tesla’ that the SEC imposed a regulartory oversight of his tweets about the company. Or the alarmingly addictive way he uses the platform.

Musk has tweeted almost every day for the past 4 years, and tweets at all hours of the day.

You can see his obsession with Twitter really pick up in this visualization of his entire history on the site.https://t.co/CjOQ0eKy9x pic.twitter.com/QIV17Q4lwU

— Christopher Mims 🤌 (@mims) April 29, 2022

Then there’s his recent public attacks on Twitter employees. Musk tweeted criticism of Twitter’s chief lawyer prompting a pile-on of frequently racist abuse. Musk might think Twitter is something akin to a “war zone” but most users would disagree with that.

Five Ways Twitter Could Become Better

Twitter talked a lot about authenticity in the early days. It was tied to the culture of sharing the ordinary details of your life.

In fact, authenticity was the hallmark of one of Twitter’s important early successes: authentication. This is a war that Google and Apple have largely won now, at least in the current version of the internet. But authentication, which allows you to log into services and platforms, was something Twitter took an early lead in.

If Twitter could fix and extend verification, connect it again to the idea of authentication, then it could become the gateway to a load of Web3’s potential.

Twitter has already moved in this direction, being a better social media marketplace. But it could do more, faster, and communicate better to users. This is more than just Twitter’s initial gestures towards the “creator economy”; it involves fixing thorny issues like licensing.

This could help Twitter wean itself off the ad-revenue model. The sooner Twitter relies less on ads the faster it can change its philosophy around engagement and trending topics.

Perhaps most importantly, Twitter needs to do better at explaining its behaviour moderation policies. If this week has taught us anything, it’s that many users are unsure about how the platform handles speech. Pretending we have one, single, global conversation around this doesn’t help.

Finally, Twitter needs to do more to introduce users to the diversity of experiences that are possible on the platform. It needs to educate users on how to customize the experience they have on the platform, enhance these tools, and open up them up more to third-party developers.

I’m not convinced Twitter will implement these changes. But it’s worth highlighting that changes similar to Musk’s proposals could make the platform better and more future-ready.

What Will Happen Next?

Twitter has been one of the great, revolutionary tech innovations, alongside Blogger, Facebook, Flickr, Friendster, iTunes, MySpace, and YouTube. Not every name on that list still exists.

Sadly, there are no alternatives. Platforms like Mastodon get suggested but they’re not able to provide what Twitter offers. And users will be unwilling to migrate to another platform if it’s hard to recreate their social graph, if their safety is not guaranteed, or if it’s technically too challenging.

Maybe Twitter will be okay. The problems that exist are vast, and sufficiently radical fixes might be too difficult. Reality has a way of slowing down ideologues.

What seems clear is that Twitter will have to shed a lot of employees to fund this takeover. Where they will be lost is unclear.

If Twitter does undo most of its moderation, advertisers who Twitter rely on for the foreseeable future might revolt. The ad industry is already well organized and militant about brand safety after its experiences with poor content moderation on Facebook and YouTube.

Conclusion

Wealthy tycoons owning media companies is not new. What we’re seeing is a generational shift in who the owners are, a shift away from the industrial world of Henry Ford and production lines to the networked world of Steve Jobs and cloud services.

A hundred years ago, everyone read newspapers, but most people would never have anything published in them. A few might have a letter to the editor published, take out a classified, or maybe appear in an obituary. But the general population didn’t actively participate in the public discourse.

What’s different today is the idea that we, collectively, have a role in creating and curating the discourse. This has always been at the core of the most utopian versions of the internet, from publishing your own home page on the early web to tweeting on Twitter today.

Platforms like Twitter are, despite our protestations about algorithms and moderation policies, what we make them into. They are messy because the project of creating culture is complex. They are fraught not only because we can’t always agree on important issues but because where we are in the world changes what we think the important issues are.

Twitter will change. A few people know what some of the changes might be. Nobody knows what the consequences of those changes will be. It could even be that the whole deal collapses – especially if Tesla’s share price keeps falling.

For now, what we can do is what we should’ve been doing all along. We can curate the experience we have on Twitter. Follow accounts with good ideas and good information. Mute and unfollow accounts that sow division, hatred and strife. Resist the urge to amplify drama or things we hate. Have a little fun. Then log off and spend the bulk of day doing other wonderful things and not thinking about or doom-scrolling through Twitter.

Full disclosure: At the time of writing, I was a shareholder in both Tesla and Twitter.

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