look, I’m not saying

Look, I’m not saying that AI and the Tyranny of the Algorithm will never bring me either joy or misery. But I’ve been trying to figure out why every single essay on AI makes me drop off to sleep before I’m halfway into it, and I have decided that a person who 

is not on Instagram is not on Twitter/X is not on TikTok is not on Spotify is not on Threads is not on Bluesky listens to music primarily on CDs and vinyl even when listening to music on a streaming service, never ever allows the service to decide what to listen to watches movies primarily on Blu-ray or on the Criterion Channel mainly reads books and print magazines reads online stuff that’s not “recommended” by anything but rather chosen through RSS subscriptions 

is (for now anyway) largely insulated from the depredations of Algorithm Life, AI-pretending-to-be-a-person, or (more common) Just Some Guy pretending to be AI. Whatever. Actually what all this really is, as Charlie Stross has explained, is not Artificial Intelligence, but rather “the pervasive spread of ‘AI’ (or rather, statistical modeling based on hidden layer neural networks) into everything.” 

Of course, all this garbage will almost certainly creep into my phone calls to the doctor’s office and emails back-and-forth with the insurance company, and when that happens I will have to develop means for dealing with it. (In a word: strategery.) But for now it seems to be hitting people primarily in their voluntary activities, and that’s where I’m keeping myself fairly clean. 

Now, some people may reply that this is all easy for me to say, because I am an economically privileged person who can afford to opt out of The Streaming World. And that’s true — to an extent. But if you can step aside from the expectation of having everything everywhere all at once — or a little bit of everything all of the time — then you can recalibrate your sense of value. For instance: 

Books are cheap and easily available used; Ditto CDs, DVDs, and Blu-ray discs;  Ditto CD, DVD, and Blu-ray players;   You can put together a perfectly acceptable stereo system for a couple of hundred dollars — even less if you just need a CD player and a pair of headphones. And if you want your music to be portable, then you can rip those CDs (remember “ripping CDs”?) to your computer’s music app and then download them to your phone; If you cut one video-streaming service, with the money you save you can afford one or two Blu-rays a month, more if you find good deals.  

I could go on, but you get the picture. You’ll have fewer things to read and watch and listen to, but they’ll be things you chose, not things served up by a streaming service that just wants to prevent you from doing something else. (Also, they can’t be taken away from you when some obscure contract ends or a service you’ve been relying on decided to “pivot” to doing something else.) Maybe you’ll re-read a few books, re-watch a few movies, and listen to what used to be called an “album” until you know by heart every vocal nuance and every note played by every instrument. 

As Bo says: “You know, it wasn’t always like this.”