8 ms·

The Cargo Cult of the Ennui Engine

119 points by pfix 3y ago

cgio 3y ago
I upvoted this one but wonder whether I did it because it cunningly convinced me to consume a long form content just to eat the pellet for the fact I read it to the end. I agree with many of the statements, always keep an eye out though for the potential I am just the old man who does not get the sophistication that goes into phenomenally only cheap, thoughtless content. What if the new art is not articulated in lighting but in the surprise out of the subtlety of the chain of simple contents. What if art is transitioning to a more directly dialectic between creators. I see my son working with a group on stickman animations, and I appreciate the community and its shared sense of newfound beauty in the pursuit of a perfection that I cannot fully understand.
- namaria 3y ago
  I found it pretty vapid. Goes to show high effort by itself cannot ensure high quality.
  - mistermann 3y ago
    Interestingly, the author addressed this sort of thing a few times in the article.
- jvanderbot 3y ago
  Reading and upvoting brings joy because it signals "I know this and am part of the solution", as much as any mildly controversial hot take.
OliverM 3y ago
I like the sentiment but this could have been a tweet. If it was it wouldn't be preaching to the choir. I am being glib above but in the spirit of useful feedback, the article needs editing for length. It's not that it's badly written, I just found that it took too circuitous a route to make its point.
- pipo234 3y ago
  I, for one, learned a new word: Ennui. And I believe I finally understand what people mean when referring to a cargo cult. A tweet most definitely would not have sufficed. Thanks for the long read, interesting an well written. (And: true, I'm probably living under a rock for being so ignorant) :-)
  - meandthewallaby 3y ago
    Because of the curse of the autodidact, do note that "ennui" is pronounced "on-wee," as it comes from French ("ennui" is "boredom" in French). It is not, as I found out rather embarrassingly, "en-you-eye". Incidentally, I agree with you. While there could be some editing for length (oh well), the point was well made with a great example to start out with, and a bit of a discussion about some of the effects of being trapped in the Ennui Engine. It definitely hit on something I've noticed about myself. I have a pile of books I've been meaning to read but haven't gotten to. I have lots of articles that I'd like to read but haven't made time yet. But I'd pull up Reddit and just scroll there. I deleted Twitter when Elon bought it and decided to burn it to the ground, and I'll be deleting Reddit now. Not so much to make a stand, but really just using this opportunity of upheaval as a way for my old head to extricate itself from the Ennui Engine.
    - jjkaczor 3y ago
      'It is not, as I found out rather embarrassingly, "en-you-eye"' Don't worry, as someone whose vocabulary was extended through voracious reading, I have made several of those "fox passes" over the years... (with that being the most memorable!)
      - angst_ridden 3y ago
        I too have made "bow-coupe" such errors.
      - parpfish 3y ago
        i remember when i tried to read "oaxaca" off of a menu
RegW 3y ago
> Our upvotes, likes, shares, and retweets need to be reserved for only those things which truly deserve to be amplified, not just because we personally appreciate them, but because they’re of exceptional quality. Sounds great, but with all the morons reacting prolifically to every piece of trash, will my one carefully allotted upvote be valued? I like the idea of Quadratic Voting: https://www.economist.com/interactive/2021/12/18/quadratic-voting https://www.economist.com/interactive/2021/12/18/quadratic-v...
- DrScientist 3y ago
  Interesting. When I looked at their example poll - what was interesting was I started to think tactically - as votes now cost - I'm much more interested in not wasting votes on issues that aren't going to be closely fought. ie Even if I had strong feelings about topic X - should I vote if I already can guess the outcome of the vote - surely smarter to avoid wasting that vote and focus on something that's likely to be closely contested? So you end up with a secondary market in information about how the vote is or is likely to go. Ideally, as a user, what I'd like is the ability see the existing state of all the polls, and be able to dynamically adjust my vote based on the current voting state. If the platform doesn't do that - then any differential in information about how the votes might go creates an unfair voting dynamic - ie the voting outcome isn't just about how much you care..... If you map that back to say hackernews threads and voting - would people hold off voting, hoping somebody else spends their vote first - leading to less interaction. In the end - isn't the quality of votes simply a reflection of the quality of the electorate?
  - bee_rider 3y ago
    Maybe we can come up with a scheme to combine all our votes into a giant finite state machine…
- orzig 3y ago
  Strong +1 (squared) to the quadratic voting suggestion. But I don’t think that it could be implemented in any sizable existing community, it is just too abstract of a benefit. But the discussion around SMOL Webb communities, feels applicable here, the type of person that would get excited about a quadratic coding community is self selected to think more deeply and abstractly in the first place. Plenty of these people exist, but there has not been a Schelling point for them. (definitely correct me if I’m wrong on that!)
Animats 3y ago
"There is a solution to all of this...When we scroll through our various feeds, we need to remain consciously aware of what we’re doing and what messages we’re silently sending.' That's not likely to help. The author is asking for people to devote more attention to something trivial.
- kayo_20211030 3y ago
  I think the operative word is "consciously". I think the author's wish is that we devote conscious thought, not merely emotional reaction, to whatever it is we're consuming. Not just what makes me feel good or bad; but rather, whether it is IMO good, or bad, or neither. If it's neither, move on; don't respond, reply, upvote, downvote, or anything else. Just move along. Let it atrophy and don't come back.
  - Aeolun 3y ago
    If people could do this conciously, we wouldn’t need this article.
    - worrycue 3y ago
      I think the author is just asking us to vote more thoughtfully. Currently, especially on sites like Reddit, the upvote/downvote buttons are abused as agree/disagree buttons and are clicked with little thought. The recent troubles on Reddit have people talking about alternatives. An old site - one of the first voting based forums - was brought up, Slashdot. It has an interesting voting system. Only some people can vote - I forgot the requirements. Each post maxes out at 5 points. Often/almost always the post has a label next to it saying why it was upvoted - e.g. Informative, Insightful, Interesting, ... I can't remember the details of the system as I mostly lurked back then as a kid. Anyway, I think a shift to a more deliberate form of voting might be what the article is advocating.
      - thebudgie 3y ago
        Slashdot also has a metamoderation system where after you've had votes for a while you are asked to confirm if comments were "Funny, Insightful, Troll etc" which could then lead to people losing the ability to vote for a while for using the votes incorrectly.
FrustratedMonky 3y ago
The cargo cult metaphor is stretched pretty thin. Could have just stuck to discussing Skinner.
- klik99 3y ago
  I think cargo cult is an interesting way of thinking of intrinsic motivations of addiction, and useful as a personal tool to assist breaking addictive cycles, whereas Skinner is a more scientific view of external effects. I mean, I agree this piece was way too long though
guy98238710 3y ago
The guy starts with a clickbait title and then proceeds to present a lecture on content quality.
guy98238710 3y ago
I think the main error of the author is to assume that short content equals low quality content. There's value in conciseness.
- nehal3m 3y ago
  Attributed to a whole bunch of people so I'm gonna say quote by unknown: If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter.
- digging 3y ago
  Yes, there's a difference between being concise (which may be highly information-dense) and just saying something that is intrinsically low value. - "mcdonalds is having a sale on fries" - fine, whatever, it's not bad or dangerous information but I don't care if it spreads - "former president indicted on 37 charges" does a lot of work, there is of course tons more to read, but it's hard to say that statement on its own isn't huge news - "normalize talking about mental illness" doesn't require much explanation to anyone who's struggled to talk about mental illness, but certainly a lot of thought went into the concept, and then it was fit into a known format
jalk 3y ago
Couldn't help thinking of the complex writing cargo cult.
dav_Oz 3y ago
Reading through the text which implicitly and as a perlocutionary/performative act by the author is precisely intended to be not the kind of low-effort content of the evoked 'Ennui Engine', actually strengthens my perception why I would actually feel more enjoyment in the "low effort content": The relatively long suspense of the "Cargo Cult"-like explanation at the end completely falls short of any built up expectations I had, I wouldn't have noticed a difference in the argument if it would have been left out. Instead it seems to function merely as an ornament to elicit some feeling of superiority in one's insight. I mean if I am able to "explain" cargo cult to you it would be least expected to be cargo cult'ed by the very thing. The text touches on that briefly but suddenly rejects its humbling implications for all the facets of our life by highlighting one aspect: >its most insidious and impactful manifestations lies in entertainment and how we consume it. Where does this uncanny certainty come from? Not to end on a negative note: Why not trying to appreciate some low-effort boredom at a time? Not something to be avoided at all cost but as an highly viscous opening space in one's rapidly passing sense of time, being mostly empty ("boring") or worn out of preconceived notions, but yet to be taken roads, train of thoughts or in some very rare cases, I'm told, for inspiration. Some appreciation for boredom goes a long way and makes oneself intrinsically less prone to the trappings of the described engine by just waiting "it" out.
rcktmrtn 3y ago
I liked most of this article and found it interesting. Maybe a bit long-winded, but like many people I've been thinking a lot about the same topic in recent years, struggling to break free of a certain mindset. Hearing the images and language how someone else feels when they describe that "machine" that keeps them captive is interesting -- a very "blind men and the elephant" experience. The cargo cult aspect is a new connection to me and something I'll think about more. That said, like many tech critiques, I found the conclusion underwhelming. In particular, the idea that how we manage our "upvotes, likes, shares, and retweets" is important strikes me as foolish. These are the master's tools and they won't unmake the master's house. Sites like reddit and twitter have long put their thumbs on the scale to rewrite these metrics. Plus, just like with democracy, institutions and norms that encourage uninformed frivolous voting will drown out the meaningful signal. Not to say these forms of engagement are all bad, but they aren't a solution in and of themselves. The real commodity to regulate is attention, of which "upvotes" are only a simulacrum. It should never be forgotten that this means often means disengaging from certain sites and systems entirely. edit: on the note of attention being the real metric -- another thing I thought the author could have done well drawing attention to is the trend of watching/listening at 2x speed. It increases our tolerance for drawn out drivel. Maybe an alternative would be to shun media that we don't think would be worth playing 2x times at normal speed.
- qubex 3y ago
  It struck me as “Capitalist Realism Lite”.
swiftcoder 3y ago
The author appears to have fundamentally misunderstood the nature of the so-called "cargo cults" in the pacific. Our best understanding is that these cults amounted to scams conducted on a vulnerable population by their own leaders - leaders who had suffered irreparable damage to their ability to control the local economy when the US army briefly thrust their culture into post-scarcity. The infinite scroll of mindless content generated by the big social networks is also about creating (a shallow facsimile of) post-scarcity. An endless stream of hobbies and lifestyles that could be yours - much like late night TV offered your parents the same promises for the low, low price of $14.95 excl. shipping and handling. You can spot this in the way these companies constalty try and undermine the livelihoods of the content creators whose labour they rely on, or try and replace creators wholesale with AIs. If there was a genuine desire to push the social aspects of these systems, they'd be considerably more invested in creating a viable living for creators who participate in the system - instead these networks are just a tool for profit and power.
- aktuel 3y ago
  The imperative of profit maximization is the law of the land. It is also in the air and in baby milk. From there it enters your dreams and then it's like water to the fish.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
5350-uiop-1130 3y ago
i wish i had an interest in learning. i seem to prefer mindless consumption. is it just laziness and lack of discipline. im unmotivated to learn anything that doesnt have immediate practical value, like consumption has immediate reward.
- kulahan 3y ago
  Consumption is just engaging with something meaningless to get your dopamine instead of something meaningful. There's no reason you can't consume educational material that intrigues you.
nehal3m 3y ago
>As unpleasant as it may be to admit, we are each individually to blame for this slump-inducing cycle’s persistence, and we are each responsible for halting it. To some degree we are to blame, however this doesn't take into account the fact that there are armies of psychologists, marketers and developers and billions of dollars' worth of equipment at the other end of your feed. They aim specifically to get you to stay in the Skinner box so it's not exactly fair to say it's on us.
com2kid 3y ago
> We favor videos that either are very short or don’t require dedicated focus, confident in the knowledge that we can move on to something else whenever we want to. We ignore thoughtfully composed “walls of text,” but we electronically applaud memetic image macros and single-sentence references that aren’t inherently entertaining or insightful The rise of long form YouTube videos and Podcasts directly contradicts this. Summoning Salt, Technology Connections, and the dozens of other small documentary channels. Heck Matholger is able to regularly hit 500k+ views with 30min+ math videos![1] True crime podcasts and history podcasts are also in direct opposition to the idea that we only consume short form content. Then there is the entire rise of Medium and Substack. 10 years ago if I wanted long form journalism it was either The New Yorker, The Atlantic, or some tiny indie news magazines. Now long form articles are more popular than ever. Heck even movies are getting longer! [2] [1] https://www.youtube.com/@Mathologer/videos https://www.youtube.com/@Mathologer/videos [2] https://www.whattowatch.com/features/are-movies-really-getting-longer https://www.whattowatch.com/features/are-movies-really-getti...
- skywal_l 3y ago
  I'll throw in Cathode Ray Dude [0] in there. It's hard to believe he will get 500K view on a 70 minutes video about some weird 90s hardware but he does. [0] https://www.youtube.com/@CathodeRayDude https://www.youtube.com/@CathodeRayDude
  - still_grokking 3y ago
    Is there any demographic of his audience? Given the topics on that channel I would guess most viewers are already older people who got struck with nostalgia (a typical phenomenon in elder people). Gen Z and younger on the other hand seems to have in large parts just an attention span of a few seconds left. At least that's my personal experience. (I don't want to annoy anybody here, there are exceptions of course!)
- majormajor 3y ago
  What's your time frame on "long form articles are more popular than ever"? And are you using relative or absolute popularity? E.g. "medium form" articles in pop magazines were probably always more popular than longform ones in literary mags, but were they more relatively popular than "tweets" or "tiktok videos"? Would a three hour film like Doctor Zhivago ever sell 248 million tickets today? And that number has a lower total population size to pull from! For a focused experience without your phone, or work, or anything else (compared to listening to a podcast in the background while working or driving)? There are groups that still enjoy, or are learning to enjoy, longer stuff still. But that's not the dominant trend.
allemagne 3y ago
>We need to remember that five minutes invested in reading an article – even a mediocre one – will almost always offer a better payout of emotional energy than five minutes of gambling on a slot machine with only one reel. This is not true. You cannot trick your brain into enjoying a mediocre "healthy" thing more than the enjoyment that you actually feel. This a recipe for burning out and relapsing. Your brain will always know the actual ratio of effort/reward over time, and will prefer the skinner box without question. If you are truly consciously aware of yourself while scrolling, you might find (to your disgust and dismay) that just being in front of the slot machine is a reward to your brain. The unfortunate truth is that you can "cargo cult" yourself into all kinds of debilitating addictions and behaviors with their own twisted, undeniably sound logic that you can't "mindset" your way out of.
nanidin 3y ago
Ennui was the wordle solution a few days ago. The number of people on my FB feed that didn’t know it was a word was entertaining.
kylewatson 3y ago
What makes a cult a cargo cult?
spandrew 3y ago
=== Article === "Worst of all, we snarl at anyone who tries to help us out of the mire, and we decry attempts at pulling anyone else out. We make excuses for writing errors instead of correcting them, we overlook factual mistakes if addressing them would be inconvenient, and we sneer at the alleged pretension of so-called elitists who haven’t yet been ground into the dirt. The only thing that we ever really accomplish is a gradual yet consistent lowering of standards… because even a reasonable excuse is still an excuse, and it represents an opportunity for improvement that’s being cast aside." ==== We do? I don't recall anyone ever yelling at me for opening my Kindle at lunch and reading a chapter or two of Rules of Civility for 45 minutes as I scarf down the meatballs leftovers I prepped last night for me and my partner? The article is cathartic in nailing the Ennui Engine's downsides of cheap content. The lack of fact checking, or care put into basic literature. But most people aren't mindless zombies only surfing Tik Tok. You do a little of that. And a little of the other things you like. Cable Access TV was full of Better Call Saul quacks in the 90s, you know. How many people genuinely read the newspaper in 1950 versus the funnies or the sports page? Wasn't that a staple joke in every sitcom? Yokels gonna yokel. New economies spin up. But NYTimes is still making a killing. The straggler media outlets adapt? And of course some terrifically fine middle sized agents unfortunately got pinched in the spinning of the universe at this juncture of Space–Time.

119 points by pfix 3y ago

cgio 3y ago

I upvoted this one but wonder whether I did it because it cunningly convinced me to consume a long form content just to eat the pellet for the fact I read it to the end. I agree with many of the statements, always keep an eye out though for the potential I am just the old man who does not get the sophistication that goes into phenomenally only cheap, thoughtless content. What if the new art is not articulated in lighting but in the surprise out of the subtlety of the chain of simple contents. What if art is transitioning to a more directly dialectic between creators. I see my son working with a group on stickman animations, and I appreciate the community and its shared sense of newfound beauty in the pursuit of a perfection that I cannot fully understand.

namaria 3y ago
I found it pretty vapid. Goes to show high effort by itself cannot ensure high quality.
- mistermann 3y ago
  Interestingly, the author addressed this sort of thing a few times in the article.
jvanderbot 3y ago
Reading and upvoting brings joy because it signals "I know this and am part of the solution", as much as any mildly controversial hot take.

OliverM 3y ago

I like the sentiment but this could have been a tweet. If it was it wouldn't be preaching to the choir. I am being glib above but in the spirit of useful feedback, the article needs editing for length. It's not that it's badly written, I just found that it took too circuitous a route to make its point.

pipo234 3y ago
I, for one, learned a new word: Ennui. And I believe I finally understand what people mean when referring to a cargo cult. A tweet most definitely would not have sufficed. Thanks for the long read, interesting an well written. (And: true, I'm probably living under a rock for being so ignorant) :-)
- meandthewallaby 3y ago
  Because of the curse of the autodidact, do note that "ennui" is pronounced "on-wee," as it comes from French ("ennui" is "boredom" in French). It is not, as I found out rather embarrassingly, "en-you-eye". Incidentally, I agree with you. While there could be some editing for length (oh well), the point was well made with a great example to start out with, and a bit of a discussion about some of the effects of being trapped in the Ennui Engine. It definitely hit on something I've noticed about myself. I have a pile of books I've been meaning to read but haven't gotten to. I have lots of articles that I'd like to read but haven't made time yet. But I'd pull up Reddit and just scroll there. I deleted Twitter when Elon bought it and decided to burn it to the ground, and I'll be deleting Reddit now. Not so much to make a stand, but really just using this opportunity of upheaval as a way for my old head to extricate itself from the Ennui Engine.
  - jjkaczor 3y ago
    'It is not, as I found out rather embarrassingly, "en-you-eye"' Don't worry, as someone whose vocabulary was extended through voracious reading, I have made several of those "fox passes" over the years... (with that being the most memorable!)
    - angst_ridden 3y ago
      I too have made "bow-coupe" such errors.
    - parpfish 3y ago
      i remember when i tried to read "oaxaca" off of a menu

RegW 3y ago

> Our upvotes, likes, shares, and retweets need to be reserved for only those things which truly deserve to be amplified, not just because we personally appreciate them, but because they’re of exceptional quality. Sounds great, but with all the morons reacting prolifically to every piece of trash, will my one carefully allotted upvote be valued? I like the idea of Quadratic Voting: https://www.economist.com/interactive/2021/12/18/quadratic-voting https://www.economist.com/interactive/2021/12/18/quadratic-v...

DrScientist 3y ago
Interesting. When I looked at their example poll - what was interesting was I started to think tactically - as votes now cost - I'm much more interested in not wasting votes on issues that aren't going to be closely fought. ie Even if I had strong feelings about topic X - should I vote if I already can guess the outcome of the vote - surely smarter to avoid wasting that vote and focus on something that's likely to be closely contested? So you end up with a secondary market in information about how the vote is or is likely to go. Ideally, as a user, what I'd like is the ability see the existing state of all the polls, and be able to dynamically adjust my vote based on the current voting state. If the platform doesn't do that - then any differential in information about how the votes might go creates an unfair voting dynamic - ie the voting outcome isn't just about how much you care..... If you map that back to say hackernews threads and voting - would people hold off voting, hoping somebody else spends their vote first - leading to less interaction. In the end - isn't the quality of votes simply a reflection of the quality of the electorate?
- bee_rider 3y ago
  Maybe we can come up with a scheme to combine all our votes into a giant finite state machine…
orzig 3y ago
Strong +1 (squared) to the quadratic voting suggestion. But I don’t think that it could be implemented in any sizable existing community, it is just too abstract of a benefit. But the discussion around SMOL Webb communities, feels applicable here, the type of person that would get excited about a quadratic coding community is self selected to think more deeply and abstractly in the first place. Plenty of these people exist, but there has not been a Schelling point for them. (definitely correct me if I’m wrong on that!)

Animats 3y ago

"There is a solution to all of this...When we scroll through our various feeds, we need to remain consciously aware of what we’re doing and what messages we’re silently sending.' That's not likely to help. The author is asking for people to devote more attention to something trivial.

kayo_20211030 3y ago
I think the operative word is "consciously". I think the author's wish is that we devote conscious thought, not merely emotional reaction, to whatever it is we're consuming. Not just what makes me feel good or bad; but rather, whether it is IMO good, or bad, or neither. If it's neither, move on; don't respond, reply, upvote, downvote, or anything else. Just move along. Let it atrophy and don't come back.
- Aeolun 3y ago
  If people could do this conciously, we wouldn’t need this article.
  - worrycue 3y ago
    I think the author is just asking us to vote more thoughtfully. Currently, especially on sites like Reddit, the upvote/downvote buttons are abused as agree/disagree buttons and are clicked with little thought. The recent troubles on Reddit have people talking about alternatives. An old site - one of the first voting based forums - was brought up, Slashdot. It has an interesting voting system. Only some people can vote - I forgot the requirements. Each post maxes out at 5 points. Often/almost always the post has a label next to it saying why it was upvoted - e.g. Informative, Insightful, Interesting, ... I can't remember the details of the system as I mostly lurked back then as a kid. Anyway, I think a shift to a more deliberate form of voting might be what the article is advocating.
    - thebudgie 3y ago
      Slashdot also has a metamoderation system where after you've had votes for a while you are asked to confirm if comments were "Funny, Insightful, Troll etc" which could then lead to people losing the ability to vote for a while for using the votes incorrectly.

FrustratedMonky 3y ago

The cargo cult metaphor is stretched pretty thin. Could have just stuck to discussing Skinner.

klik99 3y ago
I think cargo cult is an interesting way of thinking of intrinsic motivations of addiction, and useful as a personal tool to assist breaking addictive cycles, whereas Skinner is a more scientific view of external effects. I mean, I agree this piece was way too long though

guy98238710 3y ago

The guy starts with a clickbait title and then proceeds to present a lecture on content quality.

guy98238710 3y ago

I think the main error of the author is to assume that short content equals low quality content. There's value in conciseness.

nehal3m 3y ago
Attributed to a whole bunch of people so I'm gonna say quote by unknown: If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter.
digging 3y ago
Yes, there's a difference between being concise (which may be highly information-dense) and just saying something that is intrinsically low value. - "mcdonalds is having a sale on fries" - fine, whatever, it's not bad or dangerous information but I don't care if it spreads - "former president indicted on 37 charges" does a lot of work, there is of course tons more to read, but it's hard to say that statement on its own isn't huge news - "normalize talking about mental illness" doesn't require much explanation to anyone who's struggled to talk about mental illness, but certainly a lot of thought went into the concept, and then it was fit into a known format

jalk 3y ago

Couldn't help thinking of the complex writing cargo cult.

dav_Oz 3y ago

Reading through the text which implicitly and as a perlocutionary/performative act by the author is precisely intended to be not the kind of low-effort content of the evoked 'Ennui Engine', actually strengthens my perception why I would actually feel more enjoyment in the "low effort content": The relatively long suspense of the "Cargo Cult"-like explanation at the end completely falls short of any built up expectations I had, I wouldn't have noticed a difference in the argument if it would have been left out. Instead it seems to function merely as an ornament to elicit some feeling of superiority in one's insight. I mean if I am able to "explain" cargo cult to you it would be least expected to be cargo cult'ed by the very thing. The text touches on that briefly but suddenly rejects its humbling implications for all the facets of our life by highlighting one aspect: >its most insidious and impactful manifestations lies in entertainment and how we consume it. Where does this uncanny certainty come from? Not to end on a negative note: Why not trying to appreciate some low-effort boredom at a time? Not something to be avoided at all cost but as an highly viscous opening space in one's rapidly passing sense of time, being mostly empty ("boring") or worn out of preconceived notions, but yet to be taken roads, train of thoughts or in some very rare cases, I'm told, for inspiration. Some appreciation for boredom goes a long way and makes oneself intrinsically less prone to the trappings of the described engine by just waiting "it" out.

rcktmrtn 3y ago

I liked most of this article and found it interesting. Maybe a bit long-winded, but like many people I've been thinking a lot about the same topic in recent years, struggling to break free of a certain mindset. Hearing the images and language how someone else feels when they describe that "machine" that keeps them captive is interesting -- a very "blind men and the elephant" experience. The cargo cult aspect is a new connection to me and something I'll think about more. That said, like many tech critiques, I found the conclusion underwhelming. In particular, the idea that how we manage our "upvotes, likes, shares, and retweets" is important strikes me as foolish. These are the master's tools and they won't unmake the master's house. Sites like reddit and twitter have long put their thumbs on the scale to rewrite these metrics. Plus, just like with democracy, institutions and norms that encourage uninformed frivolous voting will drown out the meaningful signal. Not to say these forms of engagement are all bad, but they aren't a solution in and of themselves. The real commodity to regulate is attention, of which "upvotes" are only a simulacrum. It should never be forgotten that this means often means disengaging from certain sites and systems entirely. edit: on the note of attention being the real metric -- another thing I thought the author could have done well drawing attention to is the trend of watching/listening at 2x speed. It increases our tolerance for drawn out drivel. Maybe an alternative would be to shun media that we don't think would be worth playing 2x times at normal speed.

qubex 3y ago
It struck me as “Capitalist Realism Lite”.

swiftcoder 3y ago

The author appears to have fundamentally misunderstood the nature of the so-called "cargo cults" in the pacific. Our best understanding is that these cults amounted to scams conducted on a vulnerable population by their own leaders - leaders who had suffered irreparable damage to their ability to control the local economy when the US army briefly thrust their culture into post-scarcity. The infinite scroll of mindless content generated by the big social networks is also about creating (a shallow facsimile of) post-scarcity. An endless stream of hobbies and lifestyles that could be yours - much like late night TV offered your parents the same promises for the low, low price of $14.95 excl. shipping and handling. You can spot this in the way these companies constalty try and undermine the livelihoods of the content creators whose labour they rely on, or try and replace creators wholesale with AIs. If there was a genuine desire to push the social aspects of these systems, they'd be considerably more invested in creating a viable living for creators who participate in the system - instead these networks are just a tool for profit and power.

aktuel 3y ago
The imperative of profit maximization is the law of the land. It is also in the air and in baby milk. From there it enters your dreams and then it's like water to the fish.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

5350-uiop-1130 3y ago

i wish i had an interest in learning. i seem to prefer mindless consumption. is it just laziness and lack of discipline. im unmotivated to learn anything that doesnt have immediate practical value, like consumption has immediate reward.

kulahan 3y ago
Consumption is just engaging with something meaningless to get your dopamine instead of something meaningful. There's no reason you can't consume educational material that intrigues you.

nehal3m 3y ago

>As unpleasant as it may be to admit, we are each individually to blame for this slump-inducing cycle’s persistence, and we are each responsible for halting it. To some degree we are to blame, however this doesn't take into account the fact that there are armies of psychologists, marketers and developers and billions of dollars' worth of equipment at the other end of your feed. They aim specifically to get you to stay in the Skinner box so it's not exactly fair to say it's on us.

com2kid 3y ago

> We favor videos that either are very short or don’t require dedicated focus, confident in the knowledge that we can move on to something else whenever we want to. We ignore thoughtfully composed “walls of text,” but we electronically applaud memetic image macros and single-sentence references that aren’t inherently entertaining or insightful The rise of long form YouTube videos and Podcasts directly contradicts this. Summoning Salt, Technology Connections, and the dozens of other small documentary channels. Heck Matholger is able to regularly hit 500k+ views with 30min+ math videos![1] True crime podcasts and history podcasts are also in direct opposition to the idea that we only consume short form content. Then there is the entire rise of Medium and Substack. 10 years ago if I wanted long form journalism it was either The New Yorker, The Atlantic, or some tiny indie news magazines. Now long form articles are more popular than ever. Heck even movies are getting longer! [2] [1] https://www.youtube.com/@Mathologer/videos https://www.youtube.com/@Mathologer/videos [2] https://www.whattowatch.com/features/are-movies-really-getting-longer https://www.whattowatch.com/features/are-movies-really-getti...

skywal_l 3y ago
I'll throw in Cathode Ray Dude [0] in there. It's hard to believe he will get 500K view on a 70 minutes video about some weird 90s hardware but he does. [0] https://www.youtube.com/@CathodeRayDude https://www.youtube.com/@CathodeRayDude
- still_grokking 3y ago
  Is there any demographic of his audience? Given the topics on that channel I would guess most viewers are already older people who got struck with nostalgia (a typical phenomenon in elder people). Gen Z and younger on the other hand seems to have in large parts just an attention span of a few seconds left. At least that's my personal experience. (I don't want to annoy anybody here, there are exceptions of course!)
majormajor 3y ago
What's your time frame on "long form articles are more popular than ever"? And are you using relative or absolute popularity? E.g. "medium form" articles in pop magazines were probably always more popular than longform ones in literary mags, but were they more relatively popular than "tweets" or "tiktok videos"? Would a three hour film like Doctor Zhivago ever sell 248 million tickets today? And that number has a lower total population size to pull from! For a focused experience without your phone, or work, or anything else (compared to listening to a podcast in the background while working or driving)? There are groups that still enjoy, or are learning to enjoy, longer stuff still. But that's not the dominant trend.

allemagne 3y ago

>We need to remember that five minutes invested in reading an article – even a mediocre one – will almost always offer a better payout of emotional energy than five minutes of gambling on a slot machine with only one reel. This is not true. You cannot trick your brain into enjoying a mediocre "healthy" thing more than the enjoyment that you actually feel. This a recipe for burning out and relapsing. Your brain will always know the actual ratio of effort/reward over time, and will prefer the skinner box without question. If you are truly consciously aware of yourself while scrolling, you might find (to your disgust and dismay) that just being in front of the slot machine is a reward to your brain. The unfortunate truth is that you can "cargo cult" yourself into all kinds of debilitating addictions and behaviors with their own twisted, undeniably sound logic that you can't "mindset" your way out of.

nanidin 3y ago

Ennui was the wordle solution a few days ago. The number of people on my FB feed that didn’t know it was a word was entertaining.

kylewatson 3y ago

What makes a cult a cargo cult?

spandrew 3y ago

=== Article === "Worst of all, we snarl at anyone who tries to help us out of the mire, and we decry attempts at pulling anyone else out. We make excuses for writing errors instead of correcting them, we overlook factual mistakes if addressing them would be inconvenient, and we sneer at the alleged pretension of so-called elitists who haven’t yet been ground into the dirt. The only thing that we ever really accomplish is a gradual yet consistent lowering of standards… because even a reasonable excuse is still an excuse, and it represents an opportunity for improvement that’s being cast aside." ==== We do? I don't recall anyone ever yelling at me for opening my Kindle at lunch and reading a chapter or two of Rules of Civility for 45 minutes as I scarf down the meatballs leftovers I prepped last night for me and my partner? The article is cathartic in nailing the Ennui Engine's downsides of cheap content. The lack of fact checking, or care put into basic literature. But most people aren't mindless zombies only surfing Tik Tok. You do a little of that. And a little of the other things you like. Cable Access TV was full of Better Call Saul quacks in the 90s, you know. How many people genuinely read the newspaper in 1950 versus the funnies or the sports page? Wasn't that a staple joke in every sitcom? Yokels gonna yokel. New economies spin up. But NYTimes is still making a killing. The straggler media outlets adapt? And of course some terrifically fine middle sized agents unfortunately got pinched in the spinning of the universe at this juncture of Space–Time.