Neverpost, a show about the internet
Why do young content creators scream into their mics and blowout all the sound? When you need to reply to an important email, do you do it on your phone or wait until you get to a computer? What is the internet “megadungeon”? What about Poster’s Disease? Why does nobody use hashtags anymore, and who ruined the Laser Eyes Meme? Is it right to create an AI or generate photos of your departed parent?
These questions and much, much more are covered by Neverpo.st, a podcast, nay, an “audio magazine”, that covers the “internet.”
Okay, that’s a lot of scare quotes, let me explain.
The show is produced by experienced sound people including one of my fav YouTubers of yore Mike Rugnetta of Ideas Channel. Each episode opens with a short news-reading then moves on to two segments separated by short interstitials which tickle that ASMR section of your brain. It can be things like binaural recordings of the state fair, meditative ambient music, or a person walking on gravel. I used to listen to the show on long walks around Osaka Castle, and every time an interstitial comes on I get transported back to that place. It has a real power to create a “space” in your mind when you are listening to it. Finally, the show often ends with some amazing poetry. The topics are broad and every ep is different, but they all sound great. This is why “audio magazine.”
“Internet” is… well, it is impossible to cover the entire internet. Neverpost tends to be on the cultural side rather than the technical. Internet aesthetics, nostalgia, meme culture… these types of topics. But they are still very much grounded in the issues of the day. Take this short clip from their most recent episode:
I find Neverpost a relaxing “read” at the end of the week. It is very discursive, hyper-reflective, nerdy, neurotic, and possibly obsessive… so right up my alley 😄 The hosts are all younger than me and American, so theirs is a different Internet than the one I experience, but also one that I can recognize. It makes me think about generational experiences of media… the kind of question that could be a segment on the show! Anyways, I enjoy the show and wanted to recommend it. Everyone involved is very cool AND it is worker-owned independent media! (listen to Episode 0)
This story is lovely. And from it I found out about silentbook.club so tempted to start a chapter! 📚
Saturday night, so eating homemade tanghulu and watching BlueLock with my daughter
Renunciation and technology
“But why wouldn’t you use it? It’s so convenient!”
I was surprised that he was surprised. I was talking to a very intelligent technologist, someone who thought deeply about his craft. It got me thinking about the respect shown to renunciation in this culture, compared to other places I have been.
Nine years ago I renounced the eating of meat. At the beginning most people questioned it, but our culture has really come around to plant-based diets. When I was 18 my first alcohol experience was embarrassing and I swore it off. For the next decade it was “Oh, just a little won’t hurt, right?” Nowadays people don’t question it. During my year as an Upāsaka I took the 5 Precepts among other commitments. After years of living as a minimalist it was not that difficult, and very rewarding. I think I got the least pushback over that… maybe because it is religious?
Of all the renunciation choices in my life the most pushback I get from people are technology choices, like the person at the very beginning of this post. It’s okay when I tell people I quit Facebook in 2010 (Facebook is no longer fashionable anyways) but if it is a particularly popular or widespread app, I get disbelief (or dismissed as an unwashed hippie 😅).
Free and Open Source crusaders have been fighting the fight for ethical software for decades. We finally started to see some regulatory movement against tech monopolies, and I have seen more general discussion of Luddism in the zeitgeist. I was hoping for a change in the culture but now that Big Tech has captured the White House, I think we need to look elsewhere for that change. This is certainly a new opportunity to be talking more about mindful decision-making in tech adoption.
Where to start, and some provocations
Traditionally, renunciation is a practice about removing attachments to gain freedom, it is a path to personal liberation. It is about pursuing a purposeful “good life”. Renunciation of conveniences or consumer products can free up time/money/attention/etc to be spent on more deeply engaging with meaningful pursuits.
But what should we renounce? In 2018 I taught digital ethics to a Computer Science 101 class using Shannon Vallor’s Technology and the Virtues: A Philosophical Guide to a Future Worth Wanting, an excellent resource for thinking about the practice of moral self-cultivation in a technological world. She notes:
Aristotle explains that, just as a geometrically wise person will ‘see’ that what is mathematically significant about three intersecting lines is that they form a triangle, a practically wise person (a phronimos) will reliably ‘see’ and attend to the morally significant facts of concrete situations.
There is more consciousness-raising about tech ethics that needs to be done. Renunciation is a practice of moral cultivation, but one must have a certain level of cultivation before they can properly pursue renunciation.
I ended that first ComSci class with the following Questions to think about which I will leave for you to consider and maybe to comment on:
- What do you consider when you use or adopt a new technology?
- Can you think of examples of when new technology is a wholly positive thing? How about a negative thing?
- Are there any examples of technology that you have adopted that harms others?
Here are some more provocations:
- Think of your fav tech product, or the one you use the most. Are you aware of a friend or coworker that chooses not to use it? If you can’t think of anyone, why not?
- Do you do digital detoxes, or even more general practices like camping, Lent, Ramadan, or Uposatha? How do these practices inform your tech choices?
Check out my Uses page where you will find a list of things I DO NOT use. I am by no means a perfect paragon of technology ethics ("we all can’t be Buddhas"), but this supposed to be a practice, which means it is ongoing. If you make a DO NOT USE list, please share. All of our lists do not need to look exactly the same, everyone has their own life contingencies, but I relish the free and open discussion.
Slide from my Computer Science 101 course introducing the technomoral virtues from Shannon Vallor’s Technology and the Virtues: A Philosophical Guide to a Future Worth Wanting
Rainy Friday night dinner date with my wife in Gastown (I forgot to take photos of the food! Sorry!)
Cindy Mochizuki, director of BETWEEN PICTURES: THE LENS OF TAMIO WAKAYAMA takes questions at the Vancouver Asian Film Fest. Tamio travelled to the US south in 1963 to join and photograph SNCC during the Civil Rights Movement. Later, back in Canada, he photographed the Powell Street Festival.
#vaff
Went to Amazon.ca to check on something and this was on my For You page
😬😬😬
😞
After months of waiting, my wife’s new Permanent Resident Card arrived! 🎉
Now we can leave the country 😜
Just found out about the passing of Kei Kamanishi, the last surviving member of the legendary Asahi baseball team made up of Japanese-Canadians disbanded during the WW2 internment. He was 102 years old. I never met him in person, just on a virtual call. 南無阿弥陀🙏📿
I can hear the fireworks 🎆 Happy Diwali everyone! 🪔
Our IETF Decentralization of the Internet Research Group (DIN RG) will be in Los Angeles in Dec 9th at ACM featuring speakers like Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr and @martin.kleppmann.com
Check out the schedule
#dweb
CITED is back and taking on "economics"
The CITED podcast is back! It has been a few years. I’ve previously enjoyed their work on the reproducibility crisis in scientific publishing and many of their critical episodes on their original run in the 2015-2018 era. Gordon Katic and the CITED team have an engaging narrative technique for introducing listeners to complex topics, so I know this new series is going to be good.
This time they are taking on the issue of expertise in economics and how it is abused.
A quick, illustrative personal story: back in the early 2000s I met a professor at a tiny coffee shop tucked away behind an ivy wall north of my university in Kyoto. The flower print ceramics and doilies made me feel like I was taking tea at an English nan’s house. In this setting I asked for advice: “how can I prepare to study regional conflict in grad school?” He was quick with an answer: “Study economics.”
I did go on to study regional conflict and counter-terrorism in grad school, and encountered much economic thinking, including a prof who worked for NORAD using complex mathematical models to fight the Soviets during the arms race in the 1980s.
Economics is the science with an answer for everything. That does not mean those answers are right. In the past few years there have been a new raft of books challenging mainstream economics, and the power of economists and economic thinking in our political life. This is in some part due to society slowly coming out of four decades of neoliberalism. (I first came upon that word a decade ago reading things like Piketty’s Capitalism in the 21st Century and Graeber’s Debt: The First 5000 Years — another pair of books that make you question economics as a field — but finally that word has entered the mainstream, even being denounced by global leaders like former Japan PM Kishida and US President Joe Biden. This just goes to show how things had evolved over the past few years).
One of my favourite recent books is The Economist’s Hour: The Rise of a Discipline, the Failures of Globalization, and the Road to Nationalism. That was my fav book of 2021. While that book exams how economistic thinking weaseled it’s way into our political system, I recently finished The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality which examines the legal methods used to prepare the soil for those seeds of thought.
In terms of what society reaps when you sow such seeds, I really recommend Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy (my GR Review and chapter notes) which very much brings this debate into today’s political reality. There are still reactionary elements out there, many active in my are of the internet and startup-land, so read Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy (my GR Review and chapter notes) to understand where they are coming from. And if you want to imagine an alternative to global capitalism as driven by the thinking of mainstream economic thinkers, take a walk into the forest and read The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins.
Okay, so this turned out to be a giant book recommendation post, but it is also a podcast recommendation. Check out CITED. I will be listening along. So far the first ep on Simon Kuznets and the history of the econometric measure of GDP already has me angry. Let me know what you think, and what we can do to have better ways to think about social political issues today and tomorrow.
This Gulabjamun cheesecake is 😋
Just been sitting ant home tonight watching the #bcelxn results come in. Still too close to call! 😬 #cdnpoli
Gawd I really need to get out and do a photo walk soon… I really like our new neighbourhood, but I sure miss living in downtown Kyoto/Osaka
Setting the table for a special dinner tonight #IYKYK
Lovely walk and talk in the forest with a friend this afternoon. We talked travel, politics, games, and the joys of back-end infrastructure… all while surrounded by GREEN
#mosstodon #lichensubscribe
I… AM… CANADIAN! 🇨🇦 🦫 🍁
I blazed through the book, and have a lot more thinking to do, but am glad I could spend some more time processing by listening to this excellent conversation: