Today, I saw the video "GoodBye 2006" on my youtube recommended feed. Along with 400k other people, this video from December 2006 was deemed worth showing me 18 years separated in time, plucked out of its context and sent into the future. The top comment is "2007 will be our year", from 11 days ago. On one hand, there's nothing so deep to read into this. The algorithm constantly feeds me videos with 26 views trying it's hardest to get me to engage; this one must have just worked for some reason. But everything about this whole circumstance touches upon thoughts I've been working through for some time now. Thoughts around recommendation algorithms and their cultural impact of course, but also thoughts on the digital ephemera we spread around.
This may be the first entry, but it finds you as I'm in the midst of a reconsideration of my relationship to the contemporary algorithmically driven culture. Like many people, the engagement-driven outrage-bait ratcheted me up until the aftermath of the November 2024 US presidential elections, after which I had to ejector seat to preserve my mental. Since then I've been spending time thinking about how imma operate moving forward, and how to channel intentionality while still, well, living in a society joker meme (lol). I'm trying to not let this become some sprawling mess of thoughts, but it'll be like that anyways at first probably. Gotta let the practice happen and the voice hone I guess.
Physical media, journalling, becoming ephemera pilled, thrifting.
Up until a few years ago, I had always agreed with the sentiment that "the internet is forever". There's a tendency for the internet to be able to dig up things from decades ago to point and gawk at. Hell, the video that spawned this post is an example of that. Nowadays though, the permanence of the internet feels naive. Digital ephemera, early internet, social media. 8tracks.
seed this to the next thought about algorithms within culture, algorithm as god, algorithm as accountability sink, ai as accountability sink.