Scratch Pad: Noise, Agent, Home

I do this manually at the end of each week: collating (and sometimes lightly editing) most of the recent little comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad. Some end up on Disquiet.com earlier, sometimes in expanded form. These days I mostly hang out on Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also trying out a few others. I take weekends and evenings off social media.

▰ Synth patch experiment: process audio so it sounds like when you call the banh mi shop with an order and the cashier answers but puts the phone face down (rather than hitting mute) so as to first complete an earlier order and you hear everything including a muffled conversation with another customer

▰ My current favorite retronym is “live agent.” When one contacts tech support one is informed that one’s interlocutor isn’t a chat AI reared on repair manual PDFs and episodes of The Big Bang Theory, but in fact an actual human. One is not told “This is a human.” One is told “This is a live agent.”

▰ I worked in an office once where it seemed like Pandora eventually resolved to a song by Fleetwood Mac, no matter where we started.

At home, my YouTube often resolves to Brian Eno’s Thursday Afternoon.

This is my argument in favor of working from home.