Filler and Filtering

Because Substack is limited

Platform

While I have not as yet run into a topic to write about here (I inevitably will), Substack either does not allow having blank publications or I have not found the setting for it yet. (Edit: I found the setting) It seems like platforms like Ghost might be better for things like customization but in lieu of setting up my own hosting for the code they post on their Github and the suffering that would come from trying to make that work or paying their $35 subscription fee with no subscribers of my own, I will take residence here and subject unwary readers to run on sentences.

Filler

In some ways, most readers (including myself) could be classified as the ‘unwary reader’; subject to the constant onslaught of advertisements and information feeds that they have very little control over - up to and including controlling how much they consume that information. The concept of people being ‘addicted’ to the infinite spigot of information that is the average app based internet experience has been more than beaten to death, with authors ascribing reasons on everything between lack of self discipline to the sheer power of the eponymous Algorithm. Personally, I see two primary reasons for ‘Junk Information Feed Addiction’ continuing:

• Unadapted culture

• Lack of leadership and policy

Previously in history things like the internet came and existed for some time - while things never fully stop changing, the rate that they change can slow to the point of being effectively still for the fragile attention spans of human beings. Summing up all the factors in the world that people were exposed to and that amount of change would be within the capacity of the human brain to process - at least in theory. Most of human history was existing as a hunter-gatherer tribes - it is not much of a stretch to say that the effectively infinite feeds we have now constitute some orders of magnitude more cognitive load than the long periods of inactivity that defined human evolution. We are likely primed to want to suck in every drop of information that we can get our hands on - more data means improving chances of survival. Like sugar and calories, we do not lack for data but need to follow a diet. Also like sugar and calories, the government and large organizations could take an ideological position on encouraging people to consume in a healthy fashion (Ignoring the discussion on all the ways that could, and likely would be implemented ineffectually).

Filtering

Since returning to the Stone Age is not a useful or desirable outcome to plan around, we have to work with what we have now, which means that infinite data feeds are here to stay. The general category of solution to living with IDFs is to have some way of filtering the information you process on a daily basis. This already exists for some people - mostly for people who are in leadership positions or have a large amount of wealth. While this is presumably by necessity / opportunity cost for said people, it stands as an example for what is intuitive - that you can only process so much so you outsource the mentally taxing job of filtering out to other people.

Luckily, you will not need to be able to afford a personal bodyguard against the torrent from the IDFs if GPT-3 is any indication. I imagine a tool where an AI assistant acts as a go-between for all of your internet access - controlled only by you. The proxy AI could be set to go off something simple like keywords and a set allocation for how much stuff you can deal with, or something more complex like engaging in a dialogue with the user when it sees something new or potentially different to dynamically learn the preferences of what the user wants to see.

The kind of tool to perform universal filtering for all the information you take in is probably some ways off - we theoretically have the capacity to build it today, but it would be a large undertaking to say the least. A company like Google or Amazon could pull it off right now - but they are existentially opposed to doing so. My ascription is that the tech giants are currently in the position of the Corporate Oil Barons, they are aware of the problem (IDFs and limited processing ability), but instead of working to own the future market (Renewable Energy) will likely spend effort on suppressing or working around it when people begin to work on it (There do exist new publications bent around compacting the newsfeed in some capacity but in my mind those attempts are similar enough to pre-existing content curation that they are proto-Filtering).