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LM: #320: Find the seekers
In the early days, the internet was the great democratizer of information.
In a world dominated by mass media, it was exciting to witness the surge of weird and diverse words purveyed by people who just had something to teach or say.
But the idea of following a particular creator started to crumble as platforms switched to an algorithmic feed. Supposedly this was to find what interested you, but it turned out it’s hard to gauge interest beyond the basest human emotions.
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There’s this idea that if there were infinite monkeys banging on infinite typewriters forever, eventually one would write Shakespeare. I now realize the result of the algorithm was to turn creators into the closest possible thing to infinite monkeys, with the aim of finding within each haystack the needle that could puncture the human mind.
As generative AI accelerates, a creator isn’t worth much as one of the infinite monkeys. A prolific creator can create, say, thirty posts in a month – a generative AI, in a minute. Every flick of your finger on the infinite scroll is like running a simulation, a data point to determine the Shakespeare of the second.
Most people will passively accept what the algorithm gives them. That’s easiest, as the channels for discovering something different are getting cut off. But I know for certain some will want to step out of the simulation, in search for something real or weird or simply human.
As a creator, appeasing the algorithm is becoming an increasingly dangerous game. I think the way forward is to find the seekers.
Aphorism: “Commerce is unexpectedly confident and serene, alert, adventurous, and unwearied. It is very natural in its methods withal, far more so than many fantastic enterprises and sentimental experiments, and hence its singular success.” —Henry David Thoreau
Cool: These bass traps (Amazon), which I demonstrated in a recent Patreon video, dampen some low-end sounds that reverberate in the corners of rooms.
Best,
David
P.S. My detailed author income reports are now available to Patreon supporters.
