The Algorithm Takes Hold

As we made the journey to our seats in peanut heaven at Acrisure Stadium the other night before the Monday Night Football game, I noticed something interesting out of the corner of my eye. Out beyond the open end of the stadium near the point of confluence, a swarm of drones lit up the night sky.

At first the drones appeared to be making elegant geometric designs. I thought it was cool and I couldn’t remember the Steelers ever making use of drones in their pre-game program. I paused to watch for a moment and then the designs began to morph into words. First Madame Vice President and then Madame President. Next the drones resolved into the Harris Walz logo.

I thought to myself, “What a subversive and smart advertising tactic!” with just enough time to grab my phone and snap a photo. When we got to the seats, there was still about 30 minutes before kickoff so I posted the photo here on my website with the caption: Harris Walz drone game is on point at tonight’s Steelers game! As with all posts on the site, the image and caption were syndicated to Mastodon, Bluesky and Threads. I then put my phone down and enjoyed watching my Pittsburgh Steelers beat those Giants in primetime.

Throughout the evening, I checked Mastodon a couple of times (per usual) to find a few friends had favorited the drone post. I don’t actively use Bluesky or Threads and I don’t have those applications installed on my phone, so the fact that the post went out to those platforms escaped me in the moment.

I usually try to check in on Bluesky and Threads replies once per day, so when I opened Threads on my laptop the next morning, I found the drone post had gone somewhat viral. At the time of this writing the post has 93K views, 12.4K likes, 246 replies and 292 reposts. Numbers of this scale are new to me. I’ve never had more than a dozen likes or replies to a post on any platform. Somehow the algorithm found this particular post, latched onto it and carried it across the Threads ecosystem.

A quick dive into the replies (I don’t recommend it) surfaces some of the worst of humanity. The comments trend toward distasteful, border on offensive and come from a wide-range of perspectives including crypto bots and MAGA trolls. There is even one commenter who claims it didn’t happen and asserts that I photoshopped the Harris Walz logo into the image.

While Meta and Threads talk about embracing the Fediverse and have taken some steps to walk the walk, their use of and reliance on algorithms alongside ActivityPub troubles me. What was it about this particular post that invited the algorithm to take hold? Was there something about the image itself? Or the caption? Or was it simply the network effect and extrapolation?

Whatever the cause, the experience raises some questions for me about my intention for cross-posting from this site. For now, I think I will disable Threads cross-posting because I’m not interested in going viral due to an algorithm boost. I write and publish as a method of capturing moments, and engaging in meaningful dialog with people about the topics that interest me. Threads does not seem like the place for that kind of interaction.

An Agent from Anthropic

AI startup Anthropic yesterday announced an update to the Claude 3.5 Sonnet large language model that brings a new feature called ‘computer use’ to the forefront of the user experience. Available to developers via the API, users can now direct Claude to use computers like people – surveying open windows and performing operations like moving the mouse cursor, clicking links and buttons, and drafting text.

This is a huge development in the AI space, and one that Anthropic’s rivals in the space are pursuing with great priority. While the tech is nascent, slow and error-prone, the potential is immense. Casey Newton writing for Platformer:

But to use another phrase popular among the AI crowd, the agent that Anthropic released today is as bad as this kind of software will ever be. From this moment on, AI will no longer be limited to what can be typed inside a box. Which means it’s time for the rest of us to start thinking outside that box, too.

I’ve never been a huge proponent or advocate for AI1 , but it’s impossible to deny the impact and influence on our daily lives in the wake of developments like this.

Several months ago, I began using both Claude and ChatGPT to understand how I might use LLMs to improve my professional workflows. Personally, I’ve found Claude to be a better fit for my use cases, which are specific to product management duties such as synthesizing user feedback, analyzing value and impact, and specifying acceptance criteria in technical terms.

With advancements like Anthropic’s ‘computer use’ happening so rapidly in the AI space, it’s daunting to think about what might be coming at us next. One might say the future is already here. I might say we’re perpetually living in it.

  1. I do not use AI to write or develop the content on this website. ↩︎

The Web Needs Words

Ryan Broderick writing in yesterday’s Garbage Day about the state of the social web as it relates to text-first platforms like Bluesky, Xitter and Threads:

Unless something truly miraculous happens, it is reasonable to assume that every day there will be fewer people reading words on the internet than there were the day before.

I hope this won’t be the case and will do everything I can to make sure it doesn’t. The fundamental building blocks of the web are words and hyperlinks. Both must have a place in perpetuity if the web is to function as it was intended, as we want and need it to.

The web needs words.

Thriving as a Practice

Beck Tench is a designer and researcher who studies the way technology impacts our lives at Harvard’s Center for Digital Thriving. Her mission is simple: begin to understand what it means for young people to thrive in this increasingly digital and connected world.

I’ve been a fan of Beck’s work since we initially crossed paths more than a decade ago, when we both focused on building compelling digital experiences for museums. I worked primarily with art museums and she worked primarily with science museums. We both brought a healthy sense of skepticism to the task of infusing cultural experiences with technology, and held a high regard of professional respect for each other’s approach to digital mindfulness. In fact, we collaborated twice (1, 2) and each conversation ranks as a personal highlight during my time in the museum sector.

While we haven’t kept in touch, I’ve been following Beck’s professional journey through her newsletter, Making Thriving Visible. And while everything she writes is interesting to me, I found her most recent update to be extremely profound. In it, Beck uses the analogy of a tiger named Mohini – who was conditioned by zookeepers to exist within an uncaged 12’ x 12’ space – to explain the way digitally-enabled grind culture was negatively impacting her mindset and happiness.

Through likening her situation to Mohini’s experience, Beck came to the realization that she was not thriving. She made some impactful changes and now considers the definition of thriving in a whole new light:

I am beginning to see thriving, digitally or otherwise, as a practice. It’s not a destination. It isn’t static. We can be thriving and things can change. We can change. If Mohini had ventured out of her 12x12 self-imposed cage… if she had explored the trees and hills and plants and pond, would she have started to notice the exhibit fence? Would she have wondered what was on the other side?

Thriving as a practice. I can get behind that, and I think to some extent I’m subconsciously working on it. The mindful changes I’ve made in my digital and professional footprint are evidence, but after reading Beck’s piece I am going formalize my thriving practice by creating a reflection and future visioning routine.

If you’re interested in digital mindfulness, I highly recommend Beck’s newsletter. You can subscribe via Substack, or via RSS (like I do) to avoid any surveillance capitalism that may be associated with the delivery platform.

Cory Doctorow loves RSS. So do I. His ode to the decades-old syndication protocol is a perspective we need right now as we attempt to avoid the enshitification of the web. And I never thought to use RSS for email newsletters! Super smart!

Garbage Day for Crazy Uncles

Ryan Broderick has some theories in today’s Garbage Day newsletter about why Republican disinformation isn’t completely gumming up the works this time around:

Is it because the media has gotten institutionally smarter about giving these stories oxygen? Is it because industry-wide layoffs have gutted newsrooms across the country and now there’s just fewer reporters to throw at stupid shit editors saw on Twitter/X? Is it because cable news audiences are literally dying off? Is it because Facebook has gotten rid of news content? Who knows, but things have changed in that regard.

It’s a little bit of all of this, I think. The media has gotten smarter about fanning the flames, but I hope we have too. If we haven’t gotten smarter, than maybe we’ve gotten tired of hearing about these disinformation narratives at every online turn. I mean, that’s a primary reason for my not using social media these days. Broderick continues:

The online pathways that the right wing have relied on since 2015 to, not just win elections, but shape America’s national discourse are gone. And it’s almost entirely because pathologically annoying conservatives pushed everyone else out. All of the viral energy around Walz might turn into something that America’s various horrible uncles might ramble about incoherently at the Thanksgiving table in a few weeks — if Harris wins, I guess — but unless a Republican operative Mr. Magoo’s themselves into a real scoop about Walz’s past, none of this is really going to move the needle.

This is right. We are now able to see our collective crazytown uncles and their wild theories as simply weird. And because the theories are not sucking the life out of our social fabric, we have the choice to participate with it. Or not. I choose the latter.

As an aside, Garbage Day is consistently one of the few email newsletters I read from top to bottom. The way Broderick weaves thoughtful and astute sociological observations against a backdrop of social media dumpster fires and the political hellscape we find ourselves in on the reg is a thing of beauty. Highly recommended.

The Kids Are Alright

A few articles about the shopping habits of Gen Z have caught my attention over the past few days. As someone who works in retail technology – leading a team that focuses on sales floor operations – I keep a close eye on consumer trends. These two pieces, published within days of each other in separate outlets, are interesting to me because they reinforce a singular thesis: digital natives enjoy shopping in physical stores.

Modern Retail sets the stage with reference to an ICSC study that highlights the social nature of shopping for young people:

Sixty percent of the ICSC survey’s Gen Z respondents said they visit malls to socialize or meet friends even if they don’t need something specific, 60% also said they would rather spend money on experiences than material items, and 70% said retail centers and stores have done a good job designing things for Gen Z members to enjoy together.

This is interesting. I think the social experience created inside a store flys under the radar of most retailers. This is natural because we’re primarily business-minded and transactional in nature. Creating an environment for social connection on our sales floors not only meets this need for young customers, but it creates opportunity for connection points among all in-store customers. If you can do that well, it’s a big step toward creating community.

To my surprise, a few days after reading the Modern Retail article I stumbled upon a similar piece in The Guardian about how bookshops are suddenly cool1 with Gen Z and Millennials. Some of the same themes are reinforced here, notably how physical space can foster community and a growing aversion to algorithmic recommendations:

“I think it’s kind of a misconception that younger people want to do everything online or only care about how things look on social media,” Grace Gooda, the manager at Morocco Bound in Bermondsey tells me. “In our experience … it creates a relationship where they trust our recommendations and might take home something they wouldn’t have seen advertised elsewhere.”

This deeper connection is what really makes physical bookshops appeal to many younger readers. “Bookshops aren’t just places to buy books, they’re places of community, of gathering and this is something that’s actively fostered by so many bookshops,” Ash, 29, from Yorkshire, says. “Speaking to staff to get book recommendations is often a path into hearing more about the community aspects of bookshops, too – it’s often more than just a book recommendation.”

When I think about how these threads apply to my daily work at REI, I think there is relevance here. We already do a great job of showcasing the knowledge & expertise of our store employees, but we can definitely do more to foster human connection in our stores – inclusive of employee-to-customer and customer-to-customer experiences. My world (store technology) can play an important role in this effort, but it will take a truly collaborative effort across all store teams to create compelling experiences for the next generation of outdoor enthusiasts.

  1. Bookshops have always been cool in the mind of the Gen X author. ↩︎

Death to the algorithm.

At XOXO a few weeks ago, Erin Kissane proposed that we – people of the internet – come together to brute-force a fix for the broken social internet. It’s a wonderful, thought-provoking talk that has me fired up to help create a better internet for future generations.

Andrew Schmelyun gets his daily news from an ’80s era dot matrix printer. Awesome.

Molly White puts a name to the practice of syndicating posts from a personal/owned domain to external social media platforms:

The short-term solution to these problems is a little-known acronym called POSSE. Short for Post (on) Own Site Syndicate Elsewhere, it’s not a protocol or even a piece of software, but rather a philosophy.

I’ve been doing this for a while now and highly recommend it.

In my continued effort to eradicate algorithmic recommendations from my life, I am exploring alternatives to Spotify for music & podcast streaming. Current thinking is a local file library with iTunes Match enabled (music) and freestanding podcast app. How are y’all doing it? Advice welcome!

Finished reading: Filterworld by Kyle Chayka 📚

This book scratched the right itch for me at precisely the right time. It affirms my choice to walk away from corporate social media and go all-in on the indie or open social web. Chayka’s thesis asserts that proliferation of algorithmic recommendations flattens and homogenizes culture. He weaves a detailed thread from the origins of algorithmic thinking in ancient times, through the early days of Facebook’s News Feed which brought algorithms into every home, through the current algorithmic landscape that feeds from people’s time and attention at every turn. I highly recommend this book for anyone interested in mindfulness & digital culture.

For the love, not the likes

A couple months ago, my GPS watch stopped syncing with Strava. For whatever reason at the time, I was unable to restore the connection. I was also not in a position to spend $$$ on a new GPS watch, so since this disconnect was introduced my activities have no longer been pushing out to the popular social network for endurance athletes. As an active daily user who dished out boku kudos, I was initially quite bummed. And because I wasn’t posting to Strava, I stopped opening the app and reviewing what my friends were doing.

In the days since, I’ve noticed my mindset has been much healthier with respect to my exercise activities. So much of my time spent in Strava was me comparing my stats, paces and distances to others’. This resulted (subconsciously) in feeling pressure to always push harder, faster and further. I was losing the joy associated with getting outside and moving my body through the natural world.

In recent weeks, it’s been refreshing to get out for runs, rides and climbs simply for my own personal enjoyment, rather than feeding the ego associated with throwing down something epic for the kudos. It’s funny how this small technical hiccup has allowed me to recenter on my love for movement outside instead of the dopamine that came from the likes after the fact.

A study performed by Amazon for the Australian government finds humans outperform AI in every way when summarizing information. In fact, the study posits that utilizing AI in it’s current state may even create more work for people doing certain tasks:

Reviewers told the report’s authors that AI summaries often missed emphasis, nuance and context; included incorrect information or missed relevant information; and sometimes focused on auxiliary points or introduced irrelevant information.

A good reminder that AI should be used as a tool to complement human work, not replace it.

The City of Pittsburgh has published it’s generative AI usage standards. (via Public Source)

Dang, the Bluesky product teams have been crushing it. They just dropped some very good anti-toxicity features like detaching quote posts, hiding replies, improved user controls for notifications & blocking lists.

There was a significant step forward for the Fediverse yesterday with the launch of sub.club, a payments platform for the social web. After a brief onboarding process, Mastodon users can post premium content to subscribers. It’s not something I’m looking for, but it could be a big unlock for some.

The Standard asks, “Why does Gen Z have such bad concert etiquette?”

I dunno. What did boomers think of mosh pits in the 90’s? What did Gen X think of the cell phones that popped up at shows in aughts? All of this seems like a bit of generational hand ringing to me. The kids are alright.

Death to the Algorithm

As someone who was born on the blurry border between Generation X and the Millennial generation, I remember a time before the internet and I fondly recollect my curiosity surrounding the emerging internet in the late-90s. The infant internet was an extremely strange place. There were very few rules, even fewer boundaries and – as far as I could gather – no limits to the interconnected potential of this new universe.

I wanted to know how it worked, so I too could have a hand in creating the magic of the World Wide Web. I viewed page sources and inspected elements to learn how HTML and CSS fused together to make websites. I started making my own sites and added them to webrings. Remember those?

AOL gave way to Geocities gave way to Blogger gave way to Wordpress, which led to MySpace which led to Twitter. At the dawn of early social media, I felt just as excited about using the web to connect and share with likeminded people who were equally excited about the promise of digital culture. The early days of Twitter felt like the Wild West. Everyone was exploiting the tech for their own needs via open APIs and user-generated features like the hashtag.

The progress in this space in the early- to mid-2000s was a thing of wonder. We started to see its impact on communities, politics, art + culture, and social justice. Social media had become the great democratizer.

And then somewhere along the line money, user data, and algorithms took over.

Reverse chronological timelines morphed into algorithmic feeds labeled ‘For You,’ but the feeds don’t actually show posts from the people you follow. This helped create the attention economy and influencers were born. Shortly after, the 2016 & 2020 elections helped create a toxic level of political polarization, online echo chambers fortified the barriers between those polarized, and misinformation campaigns continue to feed the flames of the burning social stack.

I’m done with all that. Over time I’ve learned that participating in the attention economy negatively impacts my mental and emotional well being and I am making a conscious choice to walk away from it. In support of this decision, I am rethinking how I spend my time online. Connecting and sharing with people is still important to me, but I want to do it in a mindful and responsible way. Here’s how I plan to do this:

  • Reinvest in publishing on a personal domain. I’ve written on the web since I was a kid and I really enjoy the act of working through thoughts and then putting those thoughts out into the world to see what comes back. A personal site allows for writing at a deeper level than social media will allow and I maintain control over the final product. This website – built on the Micro.Blog platform and underlying Hugo CMS – will be my home for that moving forward.
  • Integrate with the social web. I’ve consolidated my social media use to Mountains.Social, a decentralized instance of Mastodon that caters to outdoors enthusiasts. The people are friendly, the community is vibrant, the culture is healthy and there are no algorithms. I’m enjoying my time there. Check it out if you’re interested, or not. No pressure. All posts here will automatically cross-post there, as well as Bluesky (although I am not really hanging out there very much).

So here’s to hoping I can enjoy a healthy relationship with the internet again. The spirit of the open web was a philosophical pillar for me at one point in my life, and I’m hoping that it will be again. Hello, old friend.

Today’s Indie Media Circus track at XOXO looks🔥. Of particular interest to me is the discussion between Jason Kottke and Craig Mod, two ‘people of the internet’ I greatly admire for their sustainable approach to independent publishing online. The good folx from 404 Media are also on the bill.

Fault Lines

Innovation starts on the fringes. It germinates on the edges and festers in the shadows. It begins below the surface where the dissidents and dissatisfied reside, and it is from these depths that seismic shifts occur.

These shifts rarely happen slowly and incrementally. We may think of them as glacial, but the historical evidence suggests that change of this scale is rapid and transformational. Subterranean ideas take shape and take hold quickly inside the earth’s core, and they begin their rise to the surface through fault lines and volcanos. And then, when enough pressure and momentum has built, the earth gives way to new land formations upon which these new ideas can stand tall.

A question I regularly ask myself and now pose to you: Who’s your core and what’s your fault line?

Let’s shake the world.

Death of the Art Museum?

In an op-ed piece in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review published last week, cartoonist, pundit and former director of the Toonseum Joe Wos attempts to tackle the topic of technology’s impact on the museum experience. In Death of the Art Museum?, a markedly uninformed Wos asserts:

Art is an important part of society. But museums to house it might no longer be needed. Art museums are a holdover from an elitist, patriarchal society that force-fed us hand-picked culture. They are becoming discarded relics of the past, much like encyclopedias, phone books and Bill Cosby’s career.

He continues:

Only a handful of high-profile art museums — such as the Met, Smithsonian and Louvre — are thriving. That’s because they package themselves as “must-see” attractions, serving tourists as backdrops for cultural selfies.

To those of us who work in the #musetech field, the article regurgitates many of the antiquated arguments we’re used to confronting, however this piece lacks even the slightest trace of research or factual support. I suggest you take a few minutes to read the whole thing.

Outside of the author’s baseless assertions and lack of evidence to support the claims thrown around within the piece, there has been some constructive dialogue emerging from the article:

Wow. Pittsburgh is talking openly about museums and technology! Even though his article is completely off-base, I’d personally like to thank Mr. Wos for starting this discussion. Anytime the topic of #musetech transcends specialty blogs like this one and makes a splash within mainstream conventional media, especially here in Pittsburgh, it’s a good thing. I hope the conversation continues.

A Mission and a Marker

I’ve been writing and developing Static Made three years this month. Before that, I was publishing a less-focused personal blog. And before that, I had a fairly-well-read lefty political site. If we go all the way back, a Geocities page for emo show reviews got the whole thing rolling for me.

When I stop and really think about it, I’ve been making stuff for the internet my entire adult life. Lately it’s art + tech projects or blog posts, but at times it’s been music, video or political opinion. I guess this is natural for creators — evolving, shifting, moving forward.

People always ask me, when such great off-the-shelf tools exist for internet creators, why I continue to put so much time and attention into a freestanding personal website. I then typically launch into a diatribe about how it’s important that we participate in the open web and publish content that’s independent of platform-specific silos. And while that’s part of the reason, it’s not completely true.

The real reason I do this is because no one else will. This site is an extension of me. If I want the logo shifted over 5 pixels, I’ll do it. If I grow tired of the color pallette, I’ll change it. If I want to blow the whole thing up and start over, I can and I have. If I want to publish a piece no one will read about my motives behind making this site, there’s no one stopping me.

Dave Winer believes a good blog exists independently of people reading it. I agree. Readers are important, and I certainly appreciate each and every one of you who reads this site, but I’d continue to write if the Static Made readership vanished overnight.

My objective here has nothing to do with what happens after I’ve published. It’s about the creative process. My mission with this website is to create a place where I can grow artistically and professionally; workshop some crazy thoughts in varying states of undress, and leave a semi-permanent marker of those ideas that can live on indefinitely when I’m gone. Hopefully that’s not any time soon.

Elliott exploring Google Cardboard