Flutterby™! : Getting up to change the music

When I was in my late teens, or perhaps very early 20s, there was a used book store along Hixson Pike in Chattanooga, and I read and read and read, trying to catch up with all of the culture I'd felt like I missed. One of those was B.F. Skinner's Beyond Freedom and Dignity. At the time I was in my Objectivist phase, so when I got to the last page, and read:

A scientific view of man offers exciting possibilities. We have not yet seen what man can make of man.

I hated it. The notion that we not only could, but should as society engineer the future of people felt horrendously dystopian.

But years passed, I moved across the country, and then a friend came back from Burning Man with a baggy of 'shrooms left over, and offered them to me. I was, at the time, an incredible control freak, so I set up the environment for the trip carefully, lighting, visible art, picked a series of CDs for the 5 CD changer(!) to carefully control the mood, made sure there was sufficient water and whatnot available, and settled in for the trip.

The colored fringes along the shadows were amazing, the joy in the details of the room made me conscious of elements I'd never taken time to observe, and the CD player switched over to Marcus Robert's album Alone With Three Giants. I was overcome with this immense sense of lethargy. My trip partner and I talked about how we had no energy, how sitting there was like swimming in molasses, and then I realized: I could get up and change the music.

I realize that, as life changing epiphanies go, "I can get up and change the music" doesn't sound earth-shaking, but it's a moment that sticks with me. It is also not just "I can get up and change the music", it's "I need to be actively monitoring and guiding what I expose myself to", so that I know when to get up and change the music.

Relatedly, A phrase from S.L.A. Marshall's Men Against Fire sticks with me: "more than life itself, we value the approval of our peers".

It's easy to dismiss statements like this: "I don't care what anyone thinks, I'm my own person." And, yes, I know that Marshall's history and scholarship is problematic. However, that realization that I could be influenced to destroy myself based on the approval of those around me made me conscious that I should work to surround myself with good people. Perhaps not conscious enough, but, heck, I'll be second-guessing decisions for the rest of my life.

A few years ago, as Twitter/X was going completely to hell, I got on to the Fediverse. Beyond the ability to just show posts from the people you follow in reverse chronological order, Mastodon has the ability to filter out words, and put words behind content warnings, so I created the obvious filter sets, "Democrats", "Republicans", etc (One of those filters now has "ICE", and I'm amused at how infrequently it catches "ice cream" or discussions of winter weather).

It was amazing how my sense of well-being improved when I had to consciously say "okay, I'm going to have to click to expose myself to outrage-bait".

To have the control to get up and change the music.

And then this past weekend, I listened the Game Studies Study Buddies episode on Natasha Dow Schüll's Addiction By Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas. I'm... not sure that my mental health can take actually reading the book... but...

From Duncan J. Watts' book Everything Is Obvious: Once You Know The Answer through modern dynamic/context pricing, to all of the comparisons with LLMs and slot machines (previously 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and bonus observation about NYT journalism), it's obvious that we have automated the exploit of human perceptions and behavior, and are doing so in a way that's going to be building on itself, in many cases with minimal human intervention.

We have become the cogs. We are seeing what machines can do with man.

And with the social pressures to use LLMs in coding, and the flood of ads, I am losing control of the music. I am suddenly conscious that I am in the club and it's too loud.

Anyway, I have removed the Meta apps from my phone, which means it's difficult to send and receive Facebook Messenger messages, and though I mean to check back in there occasionally because of my square dancing community and a few other folks I want to keep up with, if you're interested in interacting with me on social media we should find other venues. Independent venues, in which the content isn't filtered and rearranged to maximize "engagement".

And I'm looking for career directions which involve interacting with LLMs less. At least until this bubble goes pop.

Now to tune some ad blocking.