Intro
Last week was a total mess. Not because of work or anything like that but after barely having anything similar like it, we had two school shootings in Turkey in two days. If you’re familiar with how these events are discussed in US, you have a really good idea about the situation in Turkey as well. And my wife being a teacher made all of that even worse for us.
Greetings from Sangarius. Hope you’re all doing well.
Mission Control
Inbox: 132
RSS Reader: 3559
Upcoming Events/Travel in Next 30 Days: 1
- Finishing touches for a talk and a workshop for this weekend.
- Working on new Tuhaf Gelecek Podcast episode.
- Spending some serious time on updating my work system and admin side of the things.
Check my Now page if you want to see what I’m up to in a more detailed way.
Quality Filters
If you’re someone like me, who feels the need to keep up with the now for professional or personal reasons, you also know the importance of maintaining your media diet and updating your sources and tools regularly. Which is definitely a good thing — as long as it’s not turning into an unhealthy obsession.
But one of the major misconceptions about this kind of person is that their media diet is basically everything and they’ll keep up with whatever is out there. You can certainly try but no one in their right mind would actually do anything like that. On the contrary, if you want to make sure that you’re well-informed and up-to-date, you need to design some solid filters for yourself.
If reading this made you think about concepts like “filter bubbles”, I’m sorry about that. I’m sorry because internet made you think that you need to endure low quality and useless information to become a more informed person. You don’t. Because thinking that you need to consume low quality and useless information to avoid putting yourself into an ideological bubble is no different that you need to eat from the trash daily to have a healthy diet.
And yet, for multiple reasons, we’re forced to think that we should eat trash regularly. Politicians wants us to eat because it helps them. A good chunk of the media wants us to eat because they made themselves completely reliant on the income from the trash collection centers. People online wants us to eat because they don’t want to feel alone.
But you don’t have to. And you certainly don’t have any reason to feel bad for caring about the quality of the media you consume. You can follow the news from reliable and professional sources instead of chaotic feeds, you can learn about the latest trends and developments from the people you trust instead of the ones paid to promote it with slop (AI and non-AI included). What you should focus first is the quality and if you think that certain formats or places doesn’t serve you enough quality information, you don’t have to think twice before leaving it.
That’s why, after declaring my resignation from the discourse, I also started putting more filters and automation to push microblogging platforms in my media diet to near zero. I’ve set up automation to make sure those accounts looks alive for people who wants to keep up with me over there but I don’t have plans to spend real time on those places.
I was already feeling the need for a change like this for a while. But recently I’ve been paying more attention to where I should be putting more time and energy helped me realize I had to do this as soon as possible. And feeling more comfortable with blogging regularly again and noticing how it feels a lot better than “posting” definitely helped speed up this transition.
I’ll stick with Instagram and LinkedIn for now because those two has completely different purposes and quite resistant to automation. Plus, people still feel a lot normal on Instagram compared to other places.
Of course this filter building process isn’t limited to social media. I’m also going through my RSS reader, news and magazine subscriptions, podcasts and other sources as well. I want to make sure that all of them are filtered in a way to make sure I’m limiting my junk information consumption at minimum. And also getting the kinds of information and news I want and need with as little noise as possible. I know adding friction to our lives or making up stuff like frictionmaxxing is the trend these days but my brain generates enough friction without any extra effort already, so I’m good on that front.
When the world is as chaotic and messy as it is right now, it’s even more important to make sure you’re getting quality information. We’re already dealing with so many things attacking to our minds every day and I’m assuming many of you are looking at the abyss as a day job, one way or another. So, our brains are already dealing with enough. We shouldn’t force them to deal with additional trash.
Song of the Week
I knew Nine Inch Noize collaboration will be good but I wasn’t expecting it to be this good. Definitely recommend listening to the full album.
Reading Log
- Will Self: ‘Our historical condition is a peculiar mixture of omniscience and impotence’ – Le Monde
- ”Instead of a single decisive reversal, we witness innumerable tiny reversals. Each event is too small to constitute history on its own, yet together they form a swarm of unpredictable perturbations. The tragedy has not disappeared. It has been distributed across the network. Enter the Pizza Index.”
- The CEO Chatbot Era Is Coming – Financial Times
- “Agentic oversight is the AI version of chief executives’ beloved online “dashboards” — a remote managerial panopticon with a 360-degree view of operations — or their top-down “Dear All” memos.”
- Forced Futures – by Johannes Kleske – The Futures Lens
- “Reactance is the response to having your agency restricted. Its inverse is just as important. Positive future narratives create agency. They invite people to co-write the future they describe, rather than receive it as an announcement. They turn listeners into participants.”
Outro
And that’s all for this week. Make sure you’re taking care of yourselves and not touching any Silicon Valley manifestos you see on the street. You can catch something bad from those things.
See you all around!
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