Five years and two weeks ago, I parted ways with Boing Boing, a website I co-own and wrote for virtually every day for 19 years ago. Two weeks later - five years ago from today - I started my own blog, Pluralistic, which is, therefore, half a decade old, as of today.
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
pluralistic.net/2025/02/19/gim…
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Aaron In Minnesota reshared this.
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
I've written an annual rumination on this most years since.
Here's the fourth anniversary post (on blogging as a way to organize thoughts for big, ambitious, synthetic works):
pluralistic.net/2024/02/20/for…
The third (on writing without analytics):
pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/dre…
The second (on "post own site, share everywhere," AKA "POSSE"):
pluralistic.net/2022/02/19/now…
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Pluralistic: Pluralistic is four; The Bezzle excerpt (Part III) (20 Feb 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.netCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
I wasn't sure what I would write about today, but I figured it out yesterday, in the car, driving to my book-launch event with Wil Wheaton at LA's Diesel Books (tonight's event is in Seattle, with Dan Savage):
eventbrite.com/e/cory-doctorow…
I was listening to the always excellent Know Your Enemy podcast, where the hosts were interviewing Chris Hayes:
know-your-enemy-1682b684.simpl…
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Cory Doctorow with Dan Savage — 'Picks and Shovels: A Martin Hench Novel'
EventbriteCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
The occasion was the publication of Hayes's new book, *The Sirens' Call*, about the way technology interacts with our attention:
sirenscallbook.com
The interview was fascinating, and steered clear of moral panic about computers rotting our brains (shades of Socrates' possibly apocryphal statements that reading, rather than memorizing, was destroying young peoples' critical faculties).
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The Sirens' Call is a new book by Chris Hayes
sirenscallbook.comCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Rather, Hayes talked about how *empty* it feels to read algorithmic feeds, how our attention gets caught up by it for longer than we planned, and afterward, we feel like our attention and time were poorly spent. He talked about how reflective experiences - like reading a book with his kid before school - are shattered by pocket-buzzes as news articles came in. And he talked about how satisfying it was to pay protracted attention to something important, and how hard that was.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Listening to Hayes's description, I realized two things: first, he was absolutely right, those *are* terrible things; and second, I barely experience them (though, when I do, it makes me feel awful). Both of these are intimately bound up with my blogging and social media habits.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
15 years ago, I published "Writing in the Age of Distraction," an article about preserving your attention in a digital world so you could get writing done. We live in a very different world, but the advice still holds up:
locusmag.com/Features/2009/01/…
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Locus Online Features: Cory Doctorow: Writing in the Age of Distraction
www.locusmag.comCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
In particular, I advised readers to turn off *all* their alerts. This is something I've done since before the smartphone era, tracking down the preferences that kept programs like AIM, Apple Mail and Google Reader from popping up an alert when a new item appeared. This is absolutely fundamental and should be non-negotiable. When I heard Hayes describe how his phone buzzes in his pocket whenever there is breaking news, I was actually shocked.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Do people *really* allow devices to interrupt them on a random reinforcement schedule? I mean, no *wonder* the internet makes people go crazy. I'm not a big believer in BF Skinner, but I think it's well established that any stimulus that occurs at random intervals is impossible to get used to, and shocks you anew every time it recurs.
Rather than letting myself get pocket-buzzed by the news, I have an RSS reader. You should use an RSS reader, seriously:
pluralistic.net/2024/10/16/kee…
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Pluralistic: You should be using an RSS reader (16 Oct 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.netCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
I periodically check in with my reader to see what stories have been posted. The experience of *choosing* to look at the news is profoundly different from having the news blasted at you. I still don't always choose wisely - I'm as guilty of scrolling my phone when I could be doing something more ultimately satisfying as anyone else.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
But the *affect* of being in charge of when and how I consume current events is the opposite of the feeling of being at the beck-and-call of any fool headline writer who hits "publish."
This is even more important in the age of smartphones. Whenever you install an app, turn off its notifications.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
If you forget and an app pushes you an update ("Hi, this is the app you used to pay your parking meter that one time! We're having a 2% off sale on parking spots in a different city from the one you're in now and we wanted to make sure you stopped whatever you were doing and found out about it RIGHT NOW!") then turn off notifications for that app. Consider deleting it. Your phone should buzz when you're expecting a call, or an important message.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Note I said *important* message. I also turn off notifications for most of the apps I use that have a direct-messaging function. I check in with my group chats periodically, but I never get interrupted by friends across town or across the world posting photos of lunch or kvetching about the guy who farted next to them on the subway. I look at those chats when I'm taking a break, not when I'm trying to get stuff done.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
It's really nice to stay on top of your friends' lives without feeling low-grade resentment for how they interrupted your creative fog with a ganked Tiktok video of a zoomer making fun of a boomer for getting mad at a millennial for quoting Osama bin Laden. There's times when it makes sense to turn on group-chat notifications - like when you're on a group outing and trying to locate one another - but the rest of the time, turn it off.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Now, there are people I need to hear from urgently, who do get to buzz my pockets when something important comes up - people I'm working on a project with, say, or my wife and kid. But I also have all those people trained to send me emails *unless* it's urgent. You know the norm we have about calling someone out of the blue being kind of gross and rude? That's how you should feel about making someone's pocket buzz, unless it's important. Send those people emails.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
I visit my email in between other tasks and clear out my inbox. If that sounds impossible, I have some suggestions for how to manage it:
theguardian.com/technology/201…
Tldr? Get you some mail rules:
1. add everyone you correspond with to an address book called "people I know"
2. filter emails from anyone in the "people I know" address book into a high priority inbox, which you just treat as your regular inbox
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Keeping an email address secret won't hide it from spambots
Cory Doctorow (The Guardian)Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
3. look at the unfiltered inbox (full of people you've never corresponded with) every day or two and reply to messages that need replying (and those people will thereafter be filtered into the "people I know" inbox)
4. filter any message containing the world "unsubscribe" into a folder called "mailing lists"
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
5. if you're subscribed to mailing lists that you feel you can't leave because it would be impolite, filter them into a folder called "mailing lists" *unless* the message contains your name (so you can reply promptly if someone mentions you on the list)
The point here is to manage your attention. You decide when you want to get non-urgent communications, and mail-app automation automatically flags the stuff that you are most likely to want to see.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
For extra credit: adopt a "suspense file" that lets you manage *other peoples'* emails to *you*:
pluralistic.net/2024/10/26/one…
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Pluralistic: Keeping a suspense file gives you superpowers (26 Oct 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.netCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Now, let's talk about algorithmic feeds. Lots of phosphors have been spilled on this subject, and critics of The Algorithm have an unfortunately propensity to buy into the self aggrandizement of soi-dissant evil sorcerer tech bros who claim they can "hack your dopamine loops" by programming an algorithmic feed. I think this is bullshit. Mind-control rays are nonsense, whether they are being promoted by Rasputin or a repentant Prodigal Tech Bro:
conversationalist.org/2020/03/…
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
But I *hate* algorithmic feeds. To explain why, I must explain how much I love *non*-algorithmic feeds. I follow a *lot* of people on social media services, and I almost never feel the need to look at trending topics, suggested posts, or anything resembling the "For You" feed. Sure, there's times when I want to turn on the ole social TV and see what's on - the digital equivalent of leaving the TV on in a hotel room while I unpack and iron my suit - but those times are *rare*.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Mostly what I get is a feed of the things that my friends think are noteworthy enough to share. Some of that stuff is "OC" (material they've posted themselves), but the majority of it is stuff they're boosting from the feeds of *their* friends. Now, I say *friend* but I don't know the majority of the people I follow. I have a parasocial relationship (these get an undeserved bad rap) with them.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
We're "friends" in the sense that I think they have interesting taste. There's people I've followed for more than a decade without exchanging a single explicit communication. I think they're cool, and I repost the cool stuff they post, so the people who follow *me* can see it. Reposting is a way of collaborating with other people who've opted into sharing their attention-management with you:
pluralistic.net/2021/05/27/pro…
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Probably – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.netCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Reposting with a comment? Even better - you're telling people *why* to pay attention to that thing, or, more importantly, why they can safely ignore it if it's not their thing (what Bruce Sterling memorably calls an "attention conservation notice"). This is why Mastodon's decision not to implement quote-tweeting (over a misplaced squeamishness about "dunk culture") was such a catastrophic own-goal.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
If you're building a social network without an algorithmic suggestion feed (yay), you absolutely can't afford to block a feature that lets people annotate the material they boost into other people's timelines:
fediversereport.com/fediverse-…
Remember how I said the affect of going to read the news is totally different (and infinitely superior) to the affect of having the news pushed to you?
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Laurens Hof
2025-02-18 18:41:02
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Same goes for the difference between getting a feed of things boosted and written by *people* you've chosen to follow, and getting a feed of things chosen by an algorithm. This is for reasons far more profound than the mere fact that algorithms use poor signals to choose those posts (e.g. "do a lot of people seem to be arguing about this post?").
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
For me, the problem with algorithmic feeds is the same as the problem with AI art. The point of art is to communicate something, and art consists of thousands of micro-decisions made by someone intending to communicate something, which gives it a richness and a texture that can make art arresting and profound.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Prompting an AI to draw you a picture consists of just a few decisions, orders of magnitude fewer communicative acts than are embodied in a human-drawn illustration, even if you refine the image through many subsequent prompts. What you get is something "soulless" - a thing that seems to involve many decisions, but almost all of them were made by a machine that had *no* communicative intent.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
This is the definition of "uncanniness," which is "the seeming of intention without intending anything." Most of the "meaning" in an AI illustration is "meaning that does not stem from organizing intention":
pluralistic.net/2024/05/13/spo…
The same is true of an algorithmic feed. When someone you follow - a person - posts or boosts something into their feed, there is a human *intention*. It is a communicative act.
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Pluralistic: AI “art” and uncanniness (13 May 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.netCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
It can be very communicative, even if it's just a boost, provided the person adds some context with their own commentary or quoting. It can be just a little communicative, too - a momentary thumbpress on the boost button. But either way, to read a feed populated by people, rather than machines, is to be showered with the communicative intent of people whom you have chosen to hear from.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Perhaps you chose unwisely and followed someone whose communications are banal or offensive or repetitious. Unfollow them.
Most importantly, follow the people who are followed by the people you follow. If someone whose taste you like pleases or interests you time and again by promoting something by a stranger to your attention, then bring that stranger closer by making them someone you follow, too.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Do this, again and again, and build a constellation of people who make you smile or make you think. Just the act of boosting and virtually *handling* the things those people make and boost gets that stuff into your skin and your thoughts:
pluralistic.net/2022/07/31/div…
This is the good kind of filter bubble - the bubble of "people who interest me."
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Divination – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.netCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
I'm not saying that it's a *sin* to read an algorithmic feed, but relying on algorithmic feeds *is* a recipe for feeling empty, and regretful of your misspent attention. This is true even when the algorithm is good at its job, as with Tiktok, whose whole appeal is to take your hands off the wheel and give total control over to the autopilot.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Even when an algorithm makes many good guesses about what you'll like, seeing something you like isn't as nice, as pleasing, as useful, as seeing that same thing as the result of someone else's *intention*.
And, of course, once you let the app drive, you become a soft target for the cupidity and deceptions of the app's makers.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Tiktok, for example, uses its "heating tool" to selectively boost things into your feed - not because they think you'll like it, but because they want to trick the person whose content they're boosting into thinking that Tiktok is a good place to distribute their work through:
pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/pot…
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Pluralistic: Tiktok’s enshittification (21 Jan 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.netCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
The value of an algorithmic feed - of an intermediated feed - is to help you build your *disintermediated*, human feed. Find people you like through the algorithm, follow them, then stop letting the algorithm drive.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
And the human feed you consume is input for the human feed you create, the stream of communicative acts you commit in order to say to the world, "This is what feels good to spend my attention on. If this makes you feel good, too, then please follow me, and you will sit downstream of my communicative acts, as I sit downstream of the communicative acts of so many others."
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
The more communicative the feeds you emit are, the more reward you will reap. First, because interrogating your own attention - "why was this thing interesting?" - is a clarifying and mnemonic act, that lets you get more back from the attention you pay.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
And second, because the more you communicate about those attentive insights, the more people you will find who are truly Your People, a community that goes beyond "I follow this stranger" and gets into the realm of "this stranger and I are on the same side in a world of great peril and worry":
pluralistic.net/2021/05/09/the…
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The Memex Method – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.netCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Which brings me back to this blog and my fifth bloggaversary. Because a blog *is* a feed, but one that is far heavier on communications than a stream of boosted posts. Five years into this iteration of my blogging life (and 24 years into my blogging life overall), blogging remains one of the most powerful, clarifying and uplifting parts of my day.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel *Picks and Shovels*.
Catch me in SEATTLE TONIGHT (Feb 19) with Dan Savage:
eventbrite.com/e/cory-doctorow…
And in TORONTO on SUNDAY (Feb 23) at Another Story Books:
eventbrite.ca/e/picks-shovels-…
More tour dates here:
martinhench.com
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Cory Doctorow with Dan Savage — 'Picks and Shovels: A Martin Hench Novel'
EventbriteMerc
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •On feeds, have you ever posted a list of the RSS feeds you follow? Or, any tips on how to choose your own feeds?
I'm thinking something like: don't follow the BBC News feed because it's too much of a firehose -- you can rely on someone boosting an important story. Do follow niche feeds where you might otherwise miss a post, and regret it. Any suggestions along those lines?
Azuaron
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Control is a vital part of being. Lacking control can literally result in your brain not developing (as shown in some frankly disturbing studies a few decades ago with kittens).
I've been pretty substantially disabled by long COVID. A couple years ago, my family was going to a theme park, and there was no way I was going to be able to walk around the park for very long, so we rented a wheelchair and my wife pushed me around.
This experience was incredibly disassociating. By lunch, I didn't feel like a person anymore. Even though, I could stand up whenever I wanted. Even though, if I asked to be pushed in a direction, my wife gladly would. The simple fact that the default was that I didn't control how I moved removed me from the experience.
I'll never do it again without a motorized wheelchair. Animals, especially human ones, need control over themselves. I will never be pushed around in a wheelchair again if I can help it.
And I'll never let an algorithm decide what it is that I see.
Merc
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Most email services let you set up email aliases. Both gmail and outlook.com (and probably many others) support "plus addressing", where if you're merc@example.com email to merc+foo@example.com will also come to you.
If I'm not giving an email address directly to another human, I always use an alias like this. For example, merc+mastodon@example.com for signing in to mastodon. That makes filtering emails to that address really easy. Also, if merc+linkedin@ starts getting spam, either they sold my info, or they had a data breach. Maybe now I want to cancel that account and blackhole any email sent to that sub-address.
It also makes phishing much harder. An email supposedly from my financial institution but sent to merc+tumblr@ is obviously not legit.
Andreas K
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Great tip.
What about Google, which likes to hide their ads in between relevant notifications?
AFAIK, there aren't custom roms there yet that allow regex matching on notifications, sigh.
Aaron In Minnesota
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •dang, wish I could boost this with a note about why I think it is worth your time.
It's got a a great take on quote toots, a bead on the soullessness of AI with a connection to the soullessness of algorithmic attention trances, and some real practical life hack advice along the way
Cory Doctorow reshared this.
Janeishly
in reply to Aaron In Minnesota • • •Johan Pelck Olsen
in reply to Aaron In Minnesota • • •Cory Doctorow reshared this.
bignose
in reply to Johan Pelck Olsen • • •@jpkolsen
> I don’t have enough on my mind to output a feed of my own original content so I often just read and boost, but that just isn’t very engaging.
I reply and (if I want my followers to see) boost my reply, much more often than I start a new thread of my own.
If you've got a response in mind, does that not work? Why do we need a new way to do that?
@aeischeid @pluralistic
Johan Pelck Olsen
in reply to bignose • • •Ian.Burnette
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •a random schedule is actually more effective at reinforcing (behaviorism speak for increasing the frequency of) a behavior than a periodic schedule with the same average frequency.
If the subject doesn't want to increase that behavior, then the observer is forcing an addiction on the subject.
But in cases where behaviorism is being practiced ethically, this can be an extraordinarily cost effective tool for achieving the subject's desired outcome.