My_q4_experiments

November 12, 2024

I came back from my week on the Grand Canyon in the middle of September profoundly changed in one key respect: My embrace of a lifestyle with far less digital noise. On the Colorado River we had no cell service, or any other kind of service. There was a sat-phone for emergencies but it didn’t work consistently. It was primitive.

I have been Massively Online[^5] since 1992. I’ve been computer obsessed since the days of the Apple 2, so mid 1977. We couldn’t afford one so my dad used to take me to a local computer store and pretend to be interested so I could poke and prod at one for an hour or two every few weeks.

I never dreamed that I’d get to the point where we are now with a computer in my hand and another on my wrist, and 10 more on my desks, and a hundred trillion webpages and billions of people online. Never.

But, at what point did I cross over from a lot of great information and experiences (signal) to just an insane cacophony of garbage (noise). Great information is now in a needle meet haystack scenario. Online is overrun by either bots hijacking conversations or influencers spewing mind candy garbage that being involved with is the single most pure waste of time and resources I can imagine.

So now I’m running a couple of post trip lifestyle experiments designed to test out what happens if I radically lower the noise and increase the signal. And part 2 is what happens when I increase my own signal by consuming less and outputting more?

Information as code

There’s an important “why do this?” to my thinking beyond the obvious “hey, it would be nice to calm the fuck down”. I’ve become a believer in “words as code”. Or even “information as code” in that everything that comes into our senses effects us. Our brains process everything we see, hear, taste, touch. Our brains are literally incapable of not processing this incoming information.

You can think of your brain like a computer, attempting to run all the code it is fed, no matter who the programmer is or what the program is supposed to do. Listen to a Joe Rogan podcast? Your brain will wrestle with whatever statements come into it. Some will echo for years. Don’t believe me? I still think about things I saw on tv 50 years ago.

As we go through the years we are carrying large amounts of information we have picked up every day [^7]. [^7]: Except for names - why are names so hard? So why not try something old school and back off from running insane amounts of code from random sources that we don’t really need or want and see what happens.

In order to carry out this experiment… I’ve taken a few steps involving:

• Social Media
• Media
• Devices

Let’s go!

UnSocial Media

So, I have full blown cold turkey quit the public discourse found on what I’ll call “Broadcast Mode Social Media”. This list includes:

• Instagram
• Facebook
• Twitter / X
• TikTok So anything where people blather and it is intended for mass distribution. Why? Signal Vs. Noise. It’s almost all noise. We go there for the gems but we end up in a sea of garbage¹ . More on this momentarily.

iPhone/Personal Screens

My iPhone is now on serious probation. It’s an incredible device to be sure. A miracle containing other miracles, really. And of course phones are hard to be without these days if you use services like Uber, Instacart, (insert 1000 other services, etc) to manage your life.

The other problem with getting away from the constant phone feed is the massive utility of the iPhone in particular areas for me:

• I love having a camera with me. It’s a great camera/video camera.
• It’s actually still a phone and how I connect with family and friends.
• Music, audiobooks, podcasts. I love having a soundtrack around whenever I want.

So I’m replacing the iPhone use cases with 3 devices:

• A real camera. The Sony a6500. It’s a great camera in a manageable size when paired with a small lens. It’s not small by any means - it’s a serious camera.
• The Apple Watch. The tiny screen is no danger when it comes to consuming media, and it’s a great phone when paired with:
• Apple Airpods.

So now I’m really carrying around several devices but their modes of operation are far less intrusive on daily life. The Apple watch is also a miracle of tech. It’s a great music player, workout tracker, phone and texting machine. If Siri ever becomes usable this is going to be all I need.

TL;DR No use of phone for media consumption and demote it for creation. Carry a real camera instead of phone. Watch and AirPods instead of phone

News/Media

No general news. Financial, Health and Tech news are ok in limited doses. I do enjoy professional journalism. I do enjoy the weirdness that there exists an ocean of people screaming that the news is “fake” and that rather than listen to broadcast media you should listen to them. Because they, they are the unbiased and trustworthy sources. Paradoxically I will say that anyone telling you to ignore a source other than themselves is to be skeptically viewed. Including me.

But, here’s the thing: Even if the news is all relevant and worthy There exists a limit to how much and which kind of news is good for me. I have for decades now indulged in an unlimited buffet of news of all sorts. ² I see this all around me now and I have to say I don’t like how it looks for others to do this or how it works to take over our time and intentions. If we as people indulge in unlimited food, or unlimited anything else ³ we run into real and often terminal issues.
My brain (and probably yours) will happily gorge on as much info-garbage and low value entertainment as we’ll supply it. Look, I’ve met both Mark Zuckerberg and one of the Instagram guys and they both seem nice enough but they both got rich on wasting the time of billions of people. Well, one got rich, the other became so rich that we don’t really know how to understand how rich someone like him is ⁴.

Norm Macdonald had a great joke about the how TV news used to be half an hour and that “they had that right”. 30 minutes is more than enough to cover all the news. There is no need for 24 hours of news back in the quaint cable news channel days. We’ve moved into the unlimited hours of news being broadcast and dissected and opined on each day. Each hour.

AI will be the answer

Generative AI like ChatGPT is amazing at summarizing content that you feed it in the form of PDF’s or other similar word, number or picture based materials. I say amazing but it’s basically unthinkable and just jaw-dropping to see how bizarrely fast and accurate it is when working with information I feed it. This will likely be the answer for the news cycle as well. A short 1 minute summary of things. Without the breathless clickbaity headlines or the incendiary opinions of the 100 million braying jackasses on social media designed to find the like-minded followers they crave.

I see my own kids walking around staring at tiktok/instagram/snapchat/whatever and it’s scary.

It’s important to note that publishing does increase your perceived ROI to people that consume your content. So what to do? Is the answer to make sure that you publish very high-quality content? Whether it’s photos videos or writing?

1. Words, thoughts and pictures are like little pieces of code that run in our brains. ↩

2. I often wonder how much of my media consumption is just pure avoidance of unpleasant tasks or work That I don’t enjoy. ↩

3. Other than clean air with the right amount of oxygen. That seems to be the one thing we can have as much as we want of. And maybe laughter but I haven’t figured out how to get too much of that, it’s often in short supply. ↩

4. As I write this Zuckerberg is 40 years old and according to the Forbes real time billionaires list he’s worth over 200 Billion Dollars. This is good enough to be the 4th richest person in the world. I challenge you to figure out what you would do with say… 1 billion. Seriously, take a minute and write down what you would do with that much money. It’s hard to do. Planes. Houses. Yachts. You can have it all and not miss out on anything, ever again. ↩