Dearest readers, I know many of us have not been alive or old enough to remember state-curated news on TV and in newspapers, either is our country or abroad. We do know this approach under a different name- legacy media. We call it legacy because these media outlets have seniority and receive tax money subsidies- money from us- to in return tell us what we are supposed to know, and boy oh boy they burn through cash trying to do it. New media, powered by the biggest social media platforms, can do news and news derivatives at a fraction of a cost and quite fast as well, reaching millions of viewers every day. The future of news reporting, information gathering and presenting facts is fast becoming decentralized and heterodox. While we struggle to balance the good and bad of this brave new world (good- wealth of freemium information and different perspectives; bad- creation of news, facts and cultural bubbles that may fracture our societies unless we find actionable solutions to this problem), we might be forgetting one thing. We are forgetting that, when Internet goes down or we are in a tunnel, our vast music collection served up by Spotify goes away; meanwhile, younger Generation X and older Millennials have vast music collections from their iPod days onwards and they laugh smugly in our faces while twirling their imaginary moustaches and peering at us through their monocles of rich and storied life experiences. Similarly, they collect books, CD's, DVD's, have lots of actual physical photos... So today, I would like to explore with you if it is worth it for us to do the same but in a 21st century way, the main reason why we may want to consider it, and the excellent thing we can end up doing with our new collections.
So, let us begin. Regardless of your political leanings and YouTube algorithm rabbit holes you dig for yourself (we all do, do not worry- just pop out here and there into the real world or look at YouTube while logged out to gain a wider perspective), you may know a content creator or two who got hit hard by the platform's increasingly restrictive content rules, and this includes speech. This is not the only platform that does it. Apparently, the new Twitter CEO also happens to have a problem with free speech as he says that, ostensibly, Twitter is not an American company (time to dump the stock?). The rules for content moderation, by the way, are very arbitrary by design and they expand and evolve without any proper notice. Case in point, you may have noticed that YouTube auto-generated captions type out [______] instead of swear words. Fine, ok, TV stations bleep it out. However, they started doing this in documentaries, history channels etc. for words like war, kill and so on. Umm, if textbooks were written like that, how would students learn? Now, if you do not feel this is a problem, then you still may watch cable TV more than Netflix+YouTube and that is fine. However, for those of us who watch online platforms' content primarily or even exclusively, many are starting to feel like we are sitting in a burning house and saying this is fine (there are memes for that but it seems that memes may get banned...). Alternatively, maybe the plan all along was this. Corporations saw the Dot Com era as a threat, Imagine, everyone having their own website and they pay for hosting and a domain name and then do whatever they want with it, share it with people any way they see fit. The nerve these people have! So, they used the Dot Com crash to pick what gets to rise out of the ashes and what direction Internet proliferation would go in. They chose to slowly turn this nascent decentralization of the early 2000's into a set of new, powerful centralized digital platforms- our Big Brothers if you will. So, you feel things are getting more decentralized just like a dog on an extending leash feels the leash is getting longer; sooner or later the leash shortens, snapping back in the process and the dog is taken aback, shocked and shaken. Now, we are not dogs- we are humans who can conceptualize the circumstances we are in if we put our minds to it. So, what happens when these platforms start banning or rather deplatforming content you want to see? What happens when their supposedly benevolent reasons for deplatforming the content you want totally misalign with the reasons you want to see it? What if you want to see a few Flat Earth videos just to get a glimpse into how someone can possibly rationalize it in this day and age, and not because you believe it and want to spread it around or find validation for your beliefs online? By fighting decentralization and free speech, the big platforms assume they know how you think and based on their model of it, they want to take "harmful" or "bad" content away from you. The truth is, they have no freakin' clue why you specifically want to see it and what you want to do with the information you obtain. They cannot possibly know that. Instead, they hope that by centralizing information in a way that has far overreach into your lives, you will begin to think and act the way they want you to. Then, they will say "You see? We were right all along!". In reality, however, they will have achieved a self-fulfilled prophecy. This, dearest readers, is the most compelling argument to start backing up any content from these platforms that- regardless of your belief system- you feel there is even of outside chance that said content will disappear from our current centralizing platforms and never appear again. It is time to create your own collections, your own archives.
If you are at least intrigued by the idea of doing this, I am sure that one question alone pops up in your head. How do I organize it? Ah, and here comes the age old problem. How do you organize your collections? With Spotify, you can ask Google to play you whatever song and it just happens. You can ask encyclopedia style questions and it will use Wikipedia to answer. But how about having your own Spotify and your own Wikipedia with your hand picked data and nothing else? To be honest, this idea of making my own offline collections of everything is fairly new in my head and while I thought about how to put it into words for this article, I have been lazy on researching ways to make such collections less unwieldy. What are some user friendly ways to collect and sort videos, transcribe text from them and organize it, organize articles, and organize and search through your music collection? Someone chime in on this, please and thanks. Bottom line, platforms like YouTube made this so easy for us that they got us addicted to the ease of it before we even started to think hey, how can we do this without Big Brother? There must be a way. :)
When you find a way to organize all the stuff in your collection, now you have something powerful. You have a collection that reflects you, your path through the sea of music, photography, YouTube videos, podcasts, memes... a reflection of your choices of experiences and knowledge as you see fit, as you grow and evolve. Remember- you are your own algorithm and the reality of who you are and more importantly, how you evolve, can never be replicated by the likes of Google and you should never allow it to erode your uniqueness until you become something more useful to Google than to your own self. Above all, you must stay true to yourself and evolve in a way that serves you first, and everyone else second. You see, after collecting so much data, Google and other platforms started offering personal assistants. However, those personal assistants are data extraction tools that these platforms use to assist themselves while pretending to assist you. Sure, they might be good for tasks like lights thermostat and so on, but then companies learn from when you turn your lights on and off too and create all sorts of models off of that. To me, the only good future for us as individual, sovereign human beings is to have our own assistants that work off of our collected knowledge and experiences, assistants that share our ideology and faithfully represent us online and offline. You have all the power, all the control, you choose what goes into the brain of your assistant and what is likely to come out of it. You get your AI assistant to serve you the way you want to be served, off of a framework you create.
Now, you might say "Miss Z, what you are describing is a self-made, offline rabbit hole with an AI assistant added on." If that is what you think, I am sorry but you are wrong. Without a strong foundation and a hand picked digital framework, you will always end up flying like a leaf out there, whichever way the wind blows. Guess what? Google loves it, but people typically hate it. With that, I conclude this topic- for now. I would like to hear from you on this topic, in the comment section or in private. Have you given this topic some thought before? Have you started a project like this one? Share if you like :)
So, let us begin. Regardless of your political leanings and YouTube algorithm rabbit holes you dig for yourself (we all do, do not worry- just pop out here and there into the real world or look at YouTube while logged out to gain a wider perspective), you may know a content creator or two who got hit hard by the platform's increasingly restrictive content rules, and this includes speech. This is not the only platform that does it. Apparently, the new Twitter CEO also happens to have a problem with free speech as he says that, ostensibly, Twitter is not an American company (time to dump the stock?). The rules for content moderation, by the way, are very arbitrary by design and they expand and evolve without any proper notice. Case in point, you may have noticed that YouTube auto-generated captions type out [______] instead of swear words. Fine, ok, TV stations bleep it out. However, they started doing this in documentaries, history channels etc. for words like war, kill and so on. Umm, if textbooks were written like that, how would students learn? Now, if you do not feel this is a problem, then you still may watch cable TV more than Netflix+YouTube and that is fine. However, for those of us who watch online platforms' content primarily or even exclusively, many are starting to feel like we are sitting in a burning house and saying this is fine (there are memes for that but it seems that memes may get banned...). Alternatively, maybe the plan all along was this. Corporations saw the Dot Com era as a threat, Imagine, everyone having their own website and they pay for hosting and a domain name and then do whatever they want with it, share it with people any way they see fit. The nerve these people have! So, they used the Dot Com crash to pick what gets to rise out of the ashes and what direction Internet proliferation would go in. They chose to slowly turn this nascent decentralization of the early 2000's into a set of new, powerful centralized digital platforms- our Big Brothers if you will. So, you feel things are getting more decentralized just like a dog on an extending leash feels the leash is getting longer; sooner or later the leash shortens, snapping back in the process and the dog is taken aback, shocked and shaken. Now, we are not dogs- we are humans who can conceptualize the circumstances we are in if we put our minds to it. So, what happens when these platforms start banning or rather deplatforming content you want to see? What happens when their supposedly benevolent reasons for deplatforming the content you want totally misalign with the reasons you want to see it? What if you want to see a few Flat Earth videos just to get a glimpse into how someone can possibly rationalize it in this day and age, and not because you believe it and want to spread it around or find validation for your beliefs online? By fighting decentralization and free speech, the big platforms assume they know how you think and based on their model of it, they want to take "harmful" or "bad" content away from you. The truth is, they have no freakin' clue why you specifically want to see it and what you want to do with the information you obtain. They cannot possibly know that. Instead, they hope that by centralizing information in a way that has far overreach into your lives, you will begin to think and act the way they want you to. Then, they will say "You see? We were right all along!". In reality, however, they will have achieved a self-fulfilled prophecy. This, dearest readers, is the most compelling argument to start backing up any content from these platforms that- regardless of your belief system- you feel there is even of outside chance that said content will disappear from our current centralizing platforms and never appear again. It is time to create your own collections, your own archives.
If you are at least intrigued by the idea of doing this, I am sure that one question alone pops up in your head. How do I organize it? Ah, and here comes the age old problem. How do you organize your collections? With Spotify, you can ask Google to play you whatever song and it just happens. You can ask encyclopedia style questions and it will use Wikipedia to answer. But how about having your own Spotify and your own Wikipedia with your hand picked data and nothing else? To be honest, this idea of making my own offline collections of everything is fairly new in my head and while I thought about how to put it into words for this article, I have been lazy on researching ways to make such collections less unwieldy. What are some user friendly ways to collect and sort videos, transcribe text from them and organize it, organize articles, and organize and search through your music collection? Someone chime in on this, please and thanks. Bottom line, platforms like YouTube made this so easy for us that they got us addicted to the ease of it before we even started to think hey, how can we do this without Big Brother? There must be a way. :)
When you find a way to organize all the stuff in your collection, now you have something powerful. You have a collection that reflects you, your path through the sea of music, photography, YouTube videos, podcasts, memes... a reflection of your choices of experiences and knowledge as you see fit, as you grow and evolve. Remember- you are your own algorithm and the reality of who you are and more importantly, how you evolve, can never be replicated by the likes of Google and you should never allow it to erode your uniqueness until you become something more useful to Google than to your own self. Above all, you must stay true to yourself and evolve in a way that serves you first, and everyone else second. You see, after collecting so much data, Google and other platforms started offering personal assistants. However, those personal assistants are data extraction tools that these platforms use to assist themselves while pretending to assist you. Sure, they might be good for tasks like lights thermostat and so on, but then companies learn from when you turn your lights on and off too and create all sorts of models off of that. To me, the only good future for us as individual, sovereign human beings is to have our own assistants that work off of our collected knowledge and experiences, assistants that share our ideology and faithfully represent us online and offline. You have all the power, all the control, you choose what goes into the brain of your assistant and what is likely to come out of it. You get your AI assistant to serve you the way you want to be served, off of a framework you create.
Now, you might say "Miss Z, what you are describing is a self-made, offline rabbit hole with an AI assistant added on." If that is what you think, I am sorry but you are wrong. Without a strong foundation and a hand picked digital framework, you will always end up flying like a leaf out there, whichever way the wind blows. Guess what? Google loves it, but people typically hate it. With that, I conclude this topic- for now. I would like to hear from you on this topic, in the comment section or in private. Have you given this topic some thought before? Have you started a project like this one? Share if you like :)