media Archives » Exolymph

This website was archived on July 20, 2019. It is frozen in time on that date.
Exolymph creator Sonya Mann's active website is Sonya, Supposedly.

Photo by Dushan Hanuska.

September 15, 2016

Quotidian Rage

“We live in a world where we are lied to every day. The only rational response is outrage, but outrage is an emotion whose energy is impossible to sustain. Even the strongest among us eventually submit, and most of us are not strong.” — Alex Balk

I think I’ve mentioned it before, but I personally feel exhausted by the unceasing onslaught of Bad News. The world is Going to Hell in a Hand Basket, haven’t you heard?! And I find myself unable to calibrate whether the state of public discourse has always been this catastrophic. Was everyone intensely worried forever, or is this level of handwringing new?

Photo of an angry monkey by Navaneeth KN.

Photo by Navaneeth KN.

As the Balk quote indicates, our state of affairs is even worse because we have to parse every last thing, wonder about the source, wonder what the reporter exaggerated to game our sympathy for clicks. Professional media outlets behave marginally better than meme-makers. But only marginally. In the absence of trust there should be outrage, like Balk says, but in the absence of trust I mainly feel fatigue.

Meanwhile:

“Being middle class didn’t mean you felt secure, because that class was thinning out as a tiny elite shot up to great wealth and more people fell into a life of broken teeth, unpaid rent, and shame.” — Arlie Russell Hochschild

No wonder I’m tired (disclaimer: I am comparatively well-off and privileged). No wonder you’re tired. Unless you’re already in the hyper-elite, upward mobility seems like an elaborate joke set up by the twentieth century. Ha ha ha!!!!! We get it! You can stop pretending now!

Header photo by Dushan Hanuska.

May 31, 2016

Meandering Digital Meta-Anxiety

The infamous Skateboard Academic on Twitter.

Sometimes I make grand declarations: “Fundamentally, I am a cynical optimist.” Imagine that accompanied by a sweeping gesture. But it’s not true, of course. Fundamentally, I ride the tides of the media I’m absorbing on a given day, and whether I’ve remembered to take my meds or not.

(A cynical optimist believes that the world is gradually improving over time, but that human beings are selfish above all else. I do believe both of those things. However, like most ideological posturing, at core it’s probably just my way of signaling a certain set of sympathies.)

“You are what you eat.” I am what I consume, information and images included. And so are you, meaning that I’m feeding you right now, if we stretch the metaphor a bit. The phrase “media diet” is kinda played out by now, but you know what I mean.

Does this seem disjointed?

Photo by Dave Bonta.

Well, it is disjointed. That’s how I read nowadays so it’s also how I write. I came back to this browser tab after detouring through Facebook and Slack. It’s okay, I suppose. The ideas are still here. Or at least I don’t know about the ideas that have been sacrificed.

“To the days beyond this one which are still perfect” — that which is unborn is unspoiled. It’s easy to expect so much of the days that haven’t come yet. But I worry, too. I’m sure Y Combinator and everyone who hates Y Combinator will find a way to make their basic income experiment contentious, for example.

Here in the US, those of us in the Blue Tribe are increasingly frightened by Trump as the election trundles onward like some perverse version of Manifest Destiny where meme magic conquers every plot of land and the fucking alt right gets to decide who can sharecrop.

So the days beyond this one are not only perfect — the possibility also exists that they’re horrific. And we’d obsessed with both dialectical futures.

May 3, 2016

Mundane Media Addictions + Snapchat Fever

I am inundated with information. It’s my default state now, and anything else feels odd. If I’m not actively intaking or creating media, I get restless because I’m under-stimulated. My senses are constantly processing multiple layers of pictures and text and sound. Most of my daily socializing happens through the internet — well, through glossy frontend interfaces that live on top of web infrastructure powered by the internet. Technically speaking, I understand none of this. Experientially, it’s natural.

Blatantly stolen from BuzzFeed.

Snapchat Fever

Back in February, a BuzzFeed employee named Ben Rosen wrote about how his teen sister uses Snapchat. I have to admit, it was a little bit frightening. I’ve seen my own little sister use this app too, and even though I’m in my early twenties, it makes me feel ancient. Media production is how I support myself, broadly speaking, so it’s terrifying not to have a handle on the latest ~hot~ platform. I talk melodramatically about stuffing my face full of photos and words, but I’m not on this level:

“I would watch in awe as she flipped through her snaps, opening and responding to each one in less than a second with a quick selfie face. She answered all 40 of her friends’ snaps in under a minute.”

Rosen included this quote from his sister: “I don’t really see what [my friends] send. I tap through so fast. It’s rapid fire.” Predictably, in the comments a bunch of adults chimed in with varying expressions of horror and fear. Someone named Jeanie Glaser said, “It never ceases to be amusing, how every single generation can be so certain that the one coming up after them will be the one that is going to bring about the death of humanity.” She has a point.

I don’t foresee doom and gloom, but I do foresee my own irrelevance. It’s not something I want to be aware of — the inevitable eclipse. I feel like my media intake is extreme, compared to how I grew up, and I’m someone who leaves her phone on the side table at night and reads a paper book in bed. I still have the patience for long magazine pieces. My intellectual and entertainment habits are very slow-moving compared to the dreaded teens.

What will it be like when virtual reality is integrated into our daily lives? Perhaps, ironically, it will strip away one of the layers of information that we perceive, since we’ll be immersed in constructed worlds. Or maybe VR will just add another set of interfaces for users to manage. Will Facebook build a Facebook app for the Oculus Rift? If they did, would it feel hopelessly antiquated?

January 18, 2016

Figuring Out What’s Predetermined

Image by Neil Cummings.

You can’t prepare for a future that you haven’t imagined. Of course, the future that you + me + various experts have conceived will not come true in the way that we expect it to. If future-prediction were easy, the stock market wouldn’t exist, and the economy that we’re familiar with might not function either. Lack of accurate or certain information is integral to the current system.

Consider the scarce resource. What’s hard to obtain? From the perspective of media suppliers (publishers), it’s attention. From the perspective of media consumers, especially in the business/tech sphere, the scarce resource is valuable information, the kind that can be used to make decisions or shape strategies.

Participants in abundance economies are forced to sort through a deluge of options to find what’s worthwhile. Thus media businesses like Stratechery and The Information are successful. They don’t rely on volume — they rely on significance per word (I swear that’s a genuine metric).

When we’re dealing with futurism, actionable information is difficult to identify. Most people aren’t even in a position to change their behavior based the likely trends of the next century. (Venture capitalists and other people with resources to deploy, but who else?) Near-future estimates, or insights regarding what powerful people want and expect, are more immediately useful to us commoners.

Of course, we shouldn’t let that stop us from speculating! There might be more advantage in it than I’m guessing. Besides, there’s always grinding:

“So i know that you can implant an RFID chip in your body but is there any form of security. RFID Identification information can be stolen remotely outside of the body, but does it being inside the body change its vulnerability. I’ve been thinking about this for a while now and i know that the bio-hacking community has been growing for a while and that as it grows so do the dangers. Not too worried but i just wanted to know the security risks.”

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