In this letter:
📌 A short reflection on a week of news and two great examples of how to think about chaos and technology.
References:
Daisaku Ikeda: Toward a new era of value creation
NYT: Goldman Sachs, Ozy Media and a $40 Million Conference Call Gone Wrong
Nieman Lab: Ozy says it’s great at discovering big names before the mainstream media. But is it?
The Rebooting: ‘Grab ‘em by the pageviews’: Growth hacking to nowhere
ProPublica: Black Children Were Jailed for a Crime That Doesn’t Exist
New_Public: Care is not an infinite scroll
The Reading: 'I Can't Write Through Chaos!'
Good morning,
Yesterday, Twitter alerted me that I joined 12 years ago, so I went back to have a look at my first tweet, which was a link to this quote:
If we can look beyond the diverse distractions of daily life–the noisy surface of an information society that appeals only to people’s nerve endings–we will discover an innate capacity to appreciate genuine reality, to hear the heartbeat of that which is truly worth living for.
It’s an excerpt from Daisaku Ikeda’s “Toward a new era of value creation,” the 2010 edition of my Buddhist mentor’s annual peace proposals to the U.N., which explore how core Buddhist concepts relate to the state of the world.
In 2010, I was a junior in college. Tech didn’t quite feel dystopian yet. The Arab Spring was happening. Social media was opening the way for global collaboration. Journalism was opening its doors to user-generated content.
Now, it feels like we are at the other end of the spectrum. Every other email newsletter in my inbox in the last week has been about “Big Tech” — a long list of analyses of social media platforms, especially all the recent news about Facebook.
I keep turning these words over in my head from NYT opinion writer Kara Swisher, who is very angry:
Would I like to write about anything else in tech except Facebook? I would. Can I write about anything else in tech but Facebook? I cannot.
Every week seems to bring fresh hell — largely self-inflicted — to the social media company, capturing all of our attention and blocking out other seemingly important stories.
While some people can’t turn away, especially those experts and journalists whose work it is cover social media and tech (many of whom I admire), many of us can turn away. Dystopia is exhausting.
How do you turn away effectively?
It’s hard. I followed just a few stories this week I would consider“news” in the traditional sense and they all ended up being incredibly shocking and heartbreaking. I’ll spare you the list and just give you the first and last one.
First: I caught up on the Ozy story that Ben Smith broke in NYT about the extremely bizarre media company built on lies, culminating in their co-founder impersonating a YouTube executive during a meeting with Goldman Sachs. This included a take from Nieman Lab, which fact-checked a bunch of Ozy’s claims about discovering big names before the mainstream media (but actually they didn’t), and an analysis by Brian Morissey, who concludes:
Being full of shit should be a liability, not a hustle merit badge.
In between: I read a bunch of stories about deforestation, supply-chain delays, how high schoolers are struggling socially and the latest leak on offshore havens.
Last: I read ProPublica’s horrifying investigation on why Rutherford County, Tennessee has such a staggering history of jailing Black children.
Side Note: I will say the good thing about social media is that it’s pretty easy to find smart people explaining how to help in such situations, for example:
Toward the end of the week, I spent an entire evening on Tiktok watching videos of babies and make-up, and I don’t even use Tiktok. I just had to put an icepack on my brain and that’s what it felt like it took.
Unable to make sense of my own consumption choices, yesterday, I turned to my husband and asked, if I can’t do much about any of these things, why am I reading them? What role do well-reported, negative stories play in my life?
We had an interesting conversation about the different reasons people consume news, the strongest of which tend to be identity or in-group related. You’re trying to find your ‘tribe’ so you subscribe to the same media sources they do. You’re trying to find a way to engage with someone, so you keep up with stories that matter to them. You want to be seen, and voyeurism helps. You want to take action, so you do research. Or you consume by accident and get sucked in by the attention economy.
How to stop getting pulled along by others’ priorities
The whole process of observing your own consumption and discovering your own needs is messy, but I’ve found that it has become second nature to me to have experiences like the above and then take a moment to reflect on them.
And I’m taking notes from others who do the same.
Here are two examples.
Artist/design researcher Sara Hendren’s piece in the first issue of New_Public, Care is not an infinite scroll, is a reflection on how her behavior changed when she moved off Instagram to a slower social photo app.
I’m inspired by people who are sure about what they want, and while the piece is about a single app, it doesn’t read like an advertisement for it. It reads like an intentional person finding a way to fulfill their own needs.
She writes:
I want my technology to point me toward those relationships—connections with such tightly-woven histories that I can’t imagine their breaking apart, but whose ties can indeed become fragile under the slow pressure of more.
Similarly, in writer Yanyi’s July 2020 advice column for writers, a reader asks how to write through chaos, which I think extends to anyone trying to ‘make sense’ of or process anything during a chaotic time.
Yanyi replies by saying that first, one cannot write their way through disaster, because writing is not a duty, it’s an assertion of humanity.
Here are my two favorite parts:
When you let yourself be pulled along by “everything that needs immediate attention,” your sense of priorities are not managed by your ethics, your needs, or your desires, but the needs and priorities of others.
And, this bit, on practicing awareness of one’s thoughts without the pressure of output:
If your mind is allowed to play, it will collect, over time, a map of your desires. That map will point you toward not only what you care about but also what you need for your own care. Only then can you build the life necessary that will make your creative work possible.
Or, I think, build the life necessary to make your own well-being and agency possible.
Jihii
wonderful column, Jihii. i find an answer to "how do we turn away effectively" in the quote from your very first tweet. "If we can look beyond the diverse distractions of daily life." It is for that reason i am not active on Twitter!