April 28, 2022

s11e43: Didn't Organize, Only Moved; Context Collapse

0.0 Context setting

I've started writing this bit after finishing the rest of the newsletter so today (you'll find out why) it feels especially... funny.

It's Thursday, 28 April 2022 and this afternoon I'm going to have my first eye exam since the beforetimes epoch. This will be interesting because for the last sixty subjective years I've been staring at a screen more than I usually stare at a screen.

Two things today, both of which were very much thinking out loud and seat-of-the-pants typing. You've been warned.

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1.0 Some Things That Caught My Attention

Didn't Organize, Only Moved

So it seems like yesterday's throwaway comment referencing Doom Boxes caught peoples' attention¹. ADHD, or even better, difficulty in regulating attention, is just one smeary point on a spectrum of what everyone's now happy to call neurobehavior, with "neurotypical" occupying a sort of probability blob, with, I don't know, distributions of lots of individual behaviors. A much longer winded way of saying people are complicated and individual and there is no "normal", but that it's probably reasonable to say "more common" and "less common".

Anyway. DOOM boxes, for Didn't Organize, Only Moved, and my analogy to "that folder on your desktop that you periodically sweep everything into because, for example, you're going to need to share your entire screen instead of just one window", or "in the beforetimes, when we used to be onsite and have to figure out how to use a projector properly, again, we'd tidy up because there'd be the chance that someone could see the underlying desktop sausage behind the pristine presentation".

There's a difference, of course, so some stream of consciousness thinking-out-loud² on organizing, attention, ability and capacity to do so, and the differences between the physical and the digital:

• Okay, for one let's get this out of the way. "Ability to organize things" isn't an axis where you're ADHD on one end and you're not on the other, or that if you have difficulty organizing things and, e.g. multiple boxes full of cables you can't bear parting with and that are relatively disorganized you are also ADHD. I mean, it's just one data point out of the 15,000 Facebook uses in its ad model of you.
• One of the reasons why ADHD people have doom boxes is because there's an individual threshold beyond which the action potential is required. Things have to get so urgent, as it were, so like the looming deadline. This is generally seen to be an explanation as to why laundry gets done (need clean clothes!) but why folding it and putting it away doesn't (have clean clothes now!). The job is completed. Unless, of course, it's Hyperfocus Day.
• So, if there's too much clutter, then action potential gets tripped, things get put in boxes, and then... there's less clutter. The things are in the boxes: moved them! But they aren't organized, so it's easy for the boxes to just... sit there. Crisis averted. Or they're hidden out of site. This is also, I think, a generally human behavior: it's an optimization of time/energy/effort because it does take time/energy/effort to organize things and decide what to discard.
• There's also attachment: the idea, or evidence, that you might have a stronger emotional reaction to disposing of something, that it might even be physically painful. You might not notice this, but if you were to learn to pay attention to your body (and if you're reading this, I'd imagine that there's a slightly higher than average chance that at some point you may have treated, or be treating, your body as the inconvenient meat sack my that merely acts as the container of my true worth and value as a thought processor and emitter), if you were to learn to pay attention to your body, you might notice a physical response (a tightening in the chest, maybe?) to "which of these cables should I get rid of and do I really not need them anymore)
• Turns out our bodies react to things all the time. One of the things I keep coming back to is Linda Stone's email apnea³.
• Let's get back to digital doom boxes. So, we have these equivalents of did-not-organize: directories upon directories upon directories. I do think that one of the reasons they're slightly more tolerable than physical doom boxes is because of the effectively infinite storage space we're afforded: there's no real crisis of visible clutter. The only real crisis (which I think has lessened of late), was if you were alive when you didn't have enough local storage and for example resorted to something like DriveSpace/DoubleSpace/Stacker, back in the MS-DOS era of on-the-fly disk compression.
• Look yes, I know all about the demise of the spatial finder, and that's why it's possible for me to make a joke obliquely referencing the spatial finder, memory palaces as pop-culture known visualizations to aid memory, virtual reality, cloud storage providers and the metaverse⁴.
• "Search" was supposed to fix this, but search doesn't get rid of things, search merely makes a sort of coquettish, sly promise that you don't have to organize things anymore, which isn't strictly true! But organizing -- i.e. pruning, discarding, neatly labeling, putting collections together so that things are findable is different from search, which is making things findable. Search presumes that it works well enough for you to remember the search term or the context to find the thing again. It relies on me naming my scanned passport photo with sufficient metadata, usually the filename, at least until computers caught up and indexed the text inside images, or like they've done recently, started to apply object recognition so you can search by thing instead of attribute of thing.
• Anyway, from here it's just a hop, skip and a jump to e.g. a cottage industry of Dropbox(R) Certified Personal Cloud Storage Consultants who'll Marie Kondo your digital doom boxes for a free 45 minute initial consult and very reasonable monthly rates, with peer-reviewed, replicated studies showing reduced stress and cortisol and a user-acquisition deal with Calm dot com.
• Anyway: do we want tools that help with digital doom boxes? I used to use a thing called DaisyDisk which promises to help you find out what's taking up space and get rid of it, which is a kind of decluttering, but a very focussed one. I mean, why bother having a tool for organizing when storage is cheap? How would you market it? Would people pay for it, or is it the next step in the evolution of something like Spotlight search in macOS? I have a commandline utility called rmlint which is pretty good at finding duplicate files and... it's a command line file!
• What would those tools look like? Would they show the age of files? Likely duplicates? How could they make it easy for you to decide what to discard, what to archive? Would they be bundled with something like Dropbox, because they're adjacent to concepts like Selective Sync, or with OneDrive or iCloud Drive?

Anyway, more to think about, most likely.

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Context Collapse

Look, here is a dumb thing. One criticism/observation of Twitter is that by reducing "things" to URl-addressable chunks of 140 character (and then 280 character) text, the network reduces/collapses/eliminates context. This is not a new idea! If I search Google for "context collapse twitter", which is called "doing research", one of the top hits is a paper from 2010.

Anyway, here is the dumb thing: Twitter, but you have to post at least 280 characters.

This is dumb because it's a naive attempt at a technical solution for a human problem, and yet part of me also wants to scream that humans are influenced by tools! So it's not all-or-nothing technical solutionism, but it is a dumb idea if only expressed that way. And yes, I know that "Twitter but you have to post at least 280 characters" is essentially "Have you recreated blogs?", which in my head is functionally the same (valid) criticism as "That's a bus, Dan", or "Libraries. You've invented libraries".

But! It is interesting. There are ideas for networks that go harder on context collapse (Yo!), there are ideas that go harder on enforcing Dunbar-esque communities (where you would lose out on being exposed to newer ideas and people), ideas that go harder on reducing virality and increasing latency (post only x times a day/week/month), but I haven't personally seen ideas for networks which are essentially "you're only allowed to post a medium to long-form letter".

So, here is the silly thing:

After the Social Network Truth and Reconciliation hearings of 2041, the worldwide Context Laws were passed, mandating deep-packet inspection and content scanning. Not for copyright infringement -- which had already happened -- but with the aim of enforcing a minimum 500-word count for any "relevant posting" on "regulated networks".

Like much reactive legislation, it missed the point, going for a pretty ham-fisted attempt at solving a high-level problem ("context collapse") by targeting one tiny factor: the length of a social media post. Twitter, after its rollercoaster of performance following the events of 2022, was the ultimate scapegoat, its enforced 280 character limit an easy target.

But human communication is a difficult, complicated, wonderful, creative thing, and if there's one thing humans like doing, it's exploring how to break and bend rules, sometimes in the pursuit of equality, equity and freedom, and often "because it's funny". Never estimate the motivator of fun and trollishness in breaking the boundaries of a system.

So again was machine learning applied. Already a part of networks' arsenal in dealing with abusive and hateful speech in the name of content moderation -- required, after all, to enable speech in the first place -- it was quickly used to meet the mandate of the new Context Laws. When people are required to post at least 500 words in an effort to restore context, how do you know if people are attempting to circumvent the requirement to produce context? When are posts mostly nonsense, and when are they mostly meaningful? After all, wasn't the promise of all of these networks to encourage, enable and allow us to grow and rejoice in meaningful connection?

In many respects, the results were disastrous. Scoring human communication for meaning resulted in the unsurprising and in some cases distressing revelation that much human communication is, in some way, meaning-free. At least, meaning-free when parsed without context. Which, ironically, was what the legislation was supposed to improve. Because how, after all, were these scoring systems, however much trained, supposed to understand and score context and meaning when they weren't embodied and without experiencing the complexity and diversity of a human life?

So it was that the usual commentators started evaluating people on whether they were "context and content-free zombies, communicating meaningless nonsense, Chinese-rooms lacking understanding and effectively producing at least 500 words of grunting to each other". The influencer economy collapsed, within six months. LinkedIn took slightly longer. On the plus side, much SEO was deemed content-free.

And then, after a Facebook employee leaked their implementation, and someone else decided it would be funny to liberate several datacenters worth of Google TPUs, one enterprising soul pointed the scoring algorithms at "the mainstream media" and all hell broke loose.

Context had definitely collapsed.

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Well, today was different!

It's Thursday, the day before Friday, which in some parts of the world, and for some people, means it's nearly the weekend, that time when you get to do all the things you didn't have time to do during the week, of which some proportion might even include things you enjoy.

How are you doing?

Best,

Dan