TOP UPDATES FOUR PILLARS CINEMA/TV GAMES MANGA/ANIME MUSIC WRITINGS FAQ LINKS
TOP UPDATES FOUR PILLARS CINEMA/TV GAMES MANGA/ANIME MUSIC WRITINGS FAQ LINKS
In this essay I want to talk about the dangers of the modern algorithmic web landscape and how to escape it to the degree that you can.
Think about how amazing it is to be able to own a website: You can put any words or images you want online and any one of the over 2 billion people on earth who have connection to the internet have the ability to read them. They just need to know the URL. Sure, the vast majority of them will never know it. And a big chunk of them probably don't even speak the same language as you in the first place even if they did. But this is still more power than any king or president has ever had for all of human history. Think about what Martin Luther have given to be able to post his 95 Theses online!
I haven't even said the best part about it though: Your words will STAY PUT! Well, as long as they aren't illegal and as long as you can afford the cost of paying a host or running your own server, if need be. We can all erect monuments to ourselves and have the whole world be able to see them for our lifetimes. Of course, we cannot continue paying for web hosting after our deaths. Even digital things are ultimately impermanent. This is not new. Even a Shakespeare or Milton could not guarantee that every one of their manuscripts wouldn't be burned. This is where the importance of leaving a legacy to posterity comes in. Shakespeare's works are with us precisely because so many fans went to the trouble of copying them. This much has not changed.
But compare how much more of a guarantee you have here as well: For a work to stay alive in the past, a scribe would have had to write it all, word for word, on some dusty piece of parchment. You better hope that he liked your work enough for it to be worth hours of tedious copying, a cramped hand with untreatable carpal-tunnel syndrome, and eyes made bleary from hours of squinting in dim candlelight! Compare that today where copying, archiving, and spreading your words is a matter of a few keyboard clicks. The most famous kings on earth could not have dreamed of having this kind of legacy.
And the worst thing of it all is that most people who use the web today do so in a way that directly undermines all of this. We have gone from kings erecting monuments to piggies gorging on slop.
I only started noticing this when I recently began using a program called FreeTube. I can't shill it enough. Let me explain exactly what this program can do and why it's important. It basically lets you use YouTube with the usual perks (uBlock Origin and SponsorBlock), but in a program on your computer instead of on YouTube's site. You can route everything through Invidious if you want to. That already is great.
But now for the really good stuff: You can add only the channels you want to subscribe to. If you have a ton, you can quickly import them from your profile. But in my case, it was a good exercise to actually scroll through all my subscriptions and decide which ones were worth keeping. It turned out that I kept maybe a third of them. Now, your homepage will be only your subscribers in reverse-chronological order, i.e. what you see when you click on "My Subscriptions" on the normal YouTube homepage. You can also do the following, which I chose to do:
＊I turned off "recommended" videos from the sidebar and from the end of videos
＊I replaced all thumbnails with actual stills from the videos instead of images
of guys cooming into the camera with text like I JUST FUCKING KILLED THE PRESIDENT OF
ZIMBABWE 100% NOT CLICKBAIT CLICK HERE TO WATCH ME SKULLFUCK HIS CORPSE ALSO I'M GONNA
DELETE MY CHANNEL AND KILL MYSELF UNLESS YOU SUBSCRIBE
＊I turned off all subscriber counts, view counts, likes/dislikes, and comments
(don't worry if you comment on one of my videos, I still check these manually and
always appreciate the thoughtful ones <3)
＊I NUKED ALL SHORTS FROM THE PLATFORM THANK FUCK
So what you essentially do is remove the algorithm from YouTube. And when I did this, the scales fell from my eyes. It's amazing when you take a step back and look at YouTube with no algorithm and then realize the degree that Google has sloppified the web with these algorithms, which were probably forged by Satan himself. I don't really know how to structure my observations, but these are the main ones I had and how they built on each other:
99% of videos on YouTube are on the same level of shitty reality TV shows from the early 2010s. You often don't notice just how bad they are until you isolate them from the comments, the likes, the recommended videos sidebar, and all the other psychological manipulation. I find myself stopping videos a lot sooner, because I notice how shit they are more quickly.
When you don't get it slopped to you on the front page, you actually have to think about what you're in the mood to watch. That is a great thing. It makes you engage with the content and, as a by-product, be more critical and skeptical about it. And you have that feeling of "Is this really what I want to spend my day watching?" more often. You realize that most YouTube "content" is really secondary, sloppified, derivative stuff related to something more original. It's made me less likely to watch a video about a game or an anime or a movie and more likely to just go engage with that game, anime, or movie directly. And this coming from me, who already complains about how zoomers never experience anything firsthand anymore!
Note about the above: This doesn't mean I don't have time for "mindless" fun anymore. I just spend my time doing something more real and worth being proud of. Make no mistake, even just spending all day playing games and watching anime is a day much, much better spent than one spent all day watching YouTube. You're at least setting a goal and accomplishing it in a game. You're following visual storytelling in an anime. YouTube videos are rotted even below this low bar. Our parents used to say "You should spend your time outside doing something REAL instead of just doing something on a SCREEN." Now we don't even play the games ourselves anymore. We've somehow made it even more passive and sloppified.
That said, I do find myself still watching some channels for comfort when I need something extra mindless. I watch a lot of old AVGN reviews for nostalgic comfort, for example. But I spend a lot less time doing that. I get a good fix of it and then realize when I'm ready for something more substantial. YouTube's algorithm is like the equivalent of some goyslop food corp that makes the food intentionally addicting so that you have a whole bag of candy when you really would be satisfied with a few pieces. On FreeTube, I find myself doing the equivalent of noticing when my stomach is full a lot more often. And when I need "background noise," I find myself listening to my own music much more often, which is an amazing improvement!
I realized very quickly how insidious this gets when the content you engage with has anything to do with politics. Back in the 1920s, how would you get your news? You would maybe pick up a newspaper at a stand and stand there for 10 minutes on the way to or from work. It's funny to me to see old silent movies from the 1920s and their symbolism for how "hectic" and "fast-paced" everything is in the big city is that people (gasp!) have to read their newspapers WHILE riding the subway! This might have changed with the radio and TV, but you still had a specific time and location carved out of your day to do "news stuff." You had your period for news to integrate and deal with new information and think about it. Then you went back to living your "normal" life. If you don't take aggressive action, you cannot have that boundary anymore. The algorithm wants you to consume news slop constantly. And this is the most dangerous kind, as it's usually meant to make you feel angry or hopeless.
In Industrial Society and Its Future, Kaczynski described a pathologism of the modern left that he called "over-socialization:"
Psychologists use the term "socialization" to designate the process by which children are trained to think and act as society demands. A person is said to be well socialized if he believes in and obeys the moral code of his society and fits in well as a functioning part of that society. It may seem senseless to say that many leftists are over-socialized, since the leftist is perceived as a rebel. Nevertheless, the position can be defended. Many leftists are not such rebels as they seem.
The moral code of our society is so demanding that no one can think, feel and act in a completely moral way. For example, we are not supposed to hate anyone, yet almost everyone hates somebody at some time or other, whether he admits it to himself or not. Some people are so highly socialized that the attempt to think, feel and act morally imposes a severe burden on them. In order to avoid feelings of guilt, they continually have to deceive themselves about their own motives and find moral explanations for feelings and actions that in reality have a non-moral origin. We use the term "over-socialized" to describe such people.
Theodore J. Kaczynski, Industrial Society and Its Future 24-25 [1]
Of course, Uncle Ted only attributed this to the left, but today everyone is over-"socialized," right or left. There's a dangerous cross-breed of entertainment and politics, where people now grab random political content to put on as "background noise" instead of music. And of course, the angrier and more unhinged it is, the more entertaining it is to listen to! And the "societies" into which the consumers of this kind of content are socialized are so different that it is hard to bridge the gap, which is the scariest part. I don't encourage apathy about current events, but I do think that most people today are being driven literally insane by being constantly bombarded with existential crises pregnant with meaning. No one in history was ever made to think about the fate of things this much larger than their own sphere of influence, nor were they made to think about them this often, nor were they ever this "fun" (in the kind of way that gives you 40 minutes of catharsis when you watch your favorite streamer-man call another streamer-man a chud or a pedo and then keeps you up at night wanting to die).
Lastly, I want to emphasize the point that I knew all about how evil the algorithms of the major social media sites, including YouTube, were. But you delude yourself into thinking you resist their poisonous power by merely being aware of them. You don't. I want to be clear though: I'm not supporting censorship of any form of content. I despise censorship in all forms. I don't think the problem here is one of content. It is one of form. That is, it's not a problem of what we watch, but the context in which it is presented to us. I have to admit that I have what might be called a strong "libertarian" streak about this in that I think that in an ideal world all information would be free and that we should always err on the side of free information. But I urge you to take care of yourself here, just as I would encourage people to be careful with their consumption of stuff like alcohol and certain other drugs despite the fact that I don't think they should be illegal.
Finally, I want to give some concrete advice. This is how I choose to live in our modern, fucked world. And I recommend most of it:
I only read news from real, physical newspapers and a few trusted news sites. Your local paper is probably the best place to get your news. First, it's about things near you, so it's about things you can have more of a direct control over and thus will help you direct your attention and concern more productively. Second, even the worst local paper has better editorial standards in terms of misinformation than the average YouTube pundit. At the end of the day, they really are still the best way to get your news. You don't have to buy them. They're around like everywhere. I augment these papers with some sites for things I care most about (news about global heating and other nature stuff, mostly) and some podcasts I find to be quality (I'm a fan of Sam Harris's Making Sense podcast especially, which you can email and request access to get for free).
Related to the above: I use RSS feeds to access your news and favorite sites (like mine ^^). You can even do this for YouTube channels, but at that point I would say just get FreeTube. It makes it easier to check all the sites you care about at a quick glance. I suggest making a section for news. This is great because it keeps you from wasting an hour reading the past 10 articles in their sidebar. Just know what's new and what you need to stay informed, then move on with your day and look at more rewarding sites.
I spend less and less time on online on sites that aren't owned by individuals instead of corporations. A lot of people live under an illusion, and so did I until I looked at the traffic my site actually gets on my host. I was shocked how many people were actually reading my page (thank you all so much <3). Because the internet is so much more centralized around just a few sites today, it's easy to have the illusion that everything outside of those sites is a ghost town. It is in proportional terms, sure. But when you actually adjust the numbers for how much more of the world is just ONLINE in general today, I wouldn't be suprised if the average hobbyist site like this gets MORE views today than it would have back in like 2003, even though the internet en masse has decided that they are "old-fashioned." Of course, I have no stats for this and am just going off "vibes," but the point stands: make a few good connections and you'd be surprised how many people will start visting your small site. And I mean "connections" in a genuine, organic, friendly way, not in a corpospeak way. (Emailing me is always a good start if you feel yourself to be a kindred spirit and have a site you want to share :D)
Basically all this advice amounts to "do more real shit." The algorithms keep us faker, gayer, and more removed from everything cool, direct, and real than ever before. And be cool, have fun, enjoy yourself. I don't mean this lightly: Today when we are about ready to destroy the foundations of human civilization because of how rotted our brains are from social media, it's more important than ever to re-establish zones that are chill, fun, and escapist. A friend of mine once said that the developers of Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike did more than any US government program to improve racial relations between nerdy white kids from the suburbs and black kids in the inner city, and he was absolutely right.
And no, I won't stop using YouTube or uploading my stuff there for the time being. But you should always know that my activity there is a lure meant to get people off of big sites like it.