Sorry. I don't intend to say that the result is (completely) homogenous, only that the tools are homogenzing. As Frank pointed out, such optimizers can be intelligently *used* for exploration. But absent the intentional usage pattern, they push (or pull) one into the same direction they push everyone else. It's been interesting sporadically going back to Twitter now that I've deleted everything. My lists, followed, followers, were fairly well curated. And I got a lot of exploratory value out of it when I did use it. I've had similar success with Pandora. I failed with Spotify mostly because I didn't try very hard.
I have a common conversation with Facebook users along these lines. Those who talk about *using* Facebook tend to make some sense to me. Those that talk about "having" or "being on" Facebook don't make much sense to me. The words they use are confusing and I have to pepper them with questions to get at their use cases and usage patterns. I think the conversation is similar for, say, those who "read the NYT" versus those who sporadically cite it. Such technologies (or [sub]cultures) are only homogenizing for those who don't pay fairly close attention to their usage patterns. As an idiot "investor" who simply tries to put in their Roth, per year, allotment and spreads it out arbitrarily, I suspect etoro.com would homogenize me. But I wouldn't know unless I started putting money in there and suffering the consequences. On 11/17/22 09:23, Roger Critchlow wrote:
But are spotify and instagram internationally homogenous? I get the impression that they're caught in the western world bubble, which only pretends to be the whole world. We sort of have a world culture that is purely technical: electricity, heat engines, cell phones, internet protocol, unicode, cellphone localization clusters in space-time, et c.. But at the linguistic boundaries, everything else is up for grabs, and the news coming back across the linguistic boundaries is treated as exotica. -- rec -- On Thu, Nov 17, 2022 at 11:32 AM glen <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: IDK, man. I feel like this is the same homogenizing force as Spotify, or influencers on Instagram, driving us all into the same gravity well. What I'd *like* ... what I've looked for and failed to find, are ways to invest "locally", to bet on strangers' enterprises, sure, but strangers that satisfy a locality predicate, local in space mostly, but perhaps local in ethos (like B corps or co-ops), or domain (not the useless "tech" or "life sciences" but something more refined).
-- ꙮ Mɥǝu ǝlǝdɥɐuʇs ɟᴉƃɥʇ' ʇɥǝ ƃɹɐss snɟɟǝɹs˙ ꙮ -. --- - / ...- .- .-.. .. -.. / -- --- .-. ... . / -.-. --- -.. . FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Fridays 9a-12p Friday St. Johns Cafe / Thursdays 9a-12p Zoom https://bit.ly/virtualfriam to (un)subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ archives: 5/2017 thru present https://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/ 1/2003 thru 6/2021 http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/
