Donkey Kong World Records, Teenage Dirtbag, and Taste in a World of Algorithms
A third episode and name for my podcast with Andrew, too
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The King of Kong: A Fistfull of Quarters (2007)
A kid named Willis (aka Blue Scuti) recently "beat" classic Tetris, meaning he became the first player to ever reach the kill screen. I was enjoying this video essay on the event and lead-up, which prompted Andrew to recommend a similarly-themed, full-length documentary: The King of Kong.
While the Tetris video is a great way to get your feet wet and is on its own fascinating, Kong adds the most interesting component of any great competition: human drama.
There's a quote from William S. Burroughs that opens the film:
“This is a war universe. War all the time. That is its nature. There may be other universes based on all sorts of other principles, but ours seems to be based on war and games.
I'm interested in people who are compelled to grand and arbitrary things. I'm really interested in the through lines that stretch across domains and spiky people: the machinery inside the man that motivates him. Why do people get obsessed? What drives the need to conquer nations or Donkey Kong records? Why do the same patterns of heroes and villains and glory and pettiness and courage and fear emerge, regardless of how important or trivial the chosen field?
It's just a video game, after all. It's not real. Yet, it can mean everything. We as a species are great at finding meaning in small places, which is quite the blessing and the curse.
I think man just wants to prove something to somebody...anybody...even if only himself.
Lizzy McAlpine covers "Teenage Dirtbag"
I discovered Lizzy a few years ago on TikTok. Her voice is serene, there’s much to enjoy (Tiny Desk) and she even collaborated with two of my favorite artists, John Mayer and Jacob Collier (live at the Troubadour).
I'm a sucker for great covers, especially stripped-down acoustic renditions that bring new soul into a classic. This is one of the best of those. I missed it when it released a year ago but fortunately found it this week. Enjoy.
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How to Discover Your Own Taste with Kyle Chayka | The Ezra Klein Show
Kyle Chayka writes about internet culture, the struggles of managing our attention in a world of infinite supply, curation, taste, and more. His new book on how algorithms have come to dominate the internet, FILTERWORLD, just released. I just picked up my copy and you can read an excerpt here. He was recently interviewed by the always thoughtful and curious Ezra Klein.
This is a conversation that felt as though two people had crawled inside my head, taken a bunch of my jumbled thoughts, and articulated them more clearly than I could. It's jam-packed and full of insight. I'd recommend listening in full, although it's decidedly my taste (which is quite topical)! Some of it might as well be a thesis statement for why I write Thoughts + Things.
Chayka and Klein discuss how we've shifted from a human-curated internet to an algorithmically curated internet. This can make our experience online feel less personal and flattened. We've traded individualism and depth for engagement and ease of consumption. When the incentives are ruled by algorithms, the outcomes change, and the culture that is produced becomes poorer for it.
It's a discussion that comes down to the premise that deliberate attention, or intention about attention, should be valued more than ever. They start with the ever-elusive topic of taste:
EK: "What's taste?"
KC: "Style or taste is like knowing who you are and knowing what you like and then being able to look outside of yourself, see the world around you, and then pick out the one thing from around you that does resonate with you, that makes you feel like you are who you are...
I mean, it's a process of collection, almost like you're grabbing on to the little voices and artists and touchstones that make you who you are and give you your sense of self. You're drawn to something without knowing why."
Chayka quotes Montesquieu:
“Natural taste is not a theoretical knowledge; it’s a quick and exquisite application of rules which we do not even know."
This rocks. Taste can be challenging to pin down and for many people, feel entirely external. This is a radically different view: it's that ineffable quality of something that meets you where you are. It gets you. More:
KC: "But there's also this huge pressure to conform. And I think people really get pushed into that. They either think they have to conform to having good taste, or they kind of go the opposite direction and say, this is not worth my time. I don't want to worry about taste. I don't want to think too much about what I like or don't like because that's frivolous or pretentious."
It feels like being able to be attuned enough inside yourself to know what you really like, not just what you're being fed, being attentive enough to the world around you to see things that are really yours, not just everybody else's, feels like an important way to live.
They also discuss why deliberate taste and curation may be more relevant than ever in a world of algorithms and AI creation (as others like Emmett Shear and Scott Belsky have noted):
EK: "in a world where everybody has access to these models... they're going to... create a kind of lowest common denominator of aggregated taste. Having a very specific sense of taste... becomes... a real mark of distinction, because it's going to be so easy for people to skip that step in becoming their own human being.
It creates a higher premium on being a human, on being an individual, on offering to the people in your life, offering in your work, offering in your contributions, something specific. And in many ways, one reason I think AI is so threatening is that we have asked people for so long to not be very human, to actually be very generic, to act themselves like a machine...
we move into this world where anybody can call up any piece of culture and create it instantly, as long as it is highly derivative."
KC: "the generic human is like the ideal consumer. In capitalism, it's the ideal worker. In industrialization, it's like the person who has no desires, that are not the desires of everyone else...
taste is always a way of carving out a distinction for yourself and figuring out who you are. And I think that's more important when algorithmic feeds try to tell you who you are all the time."
The internet causes a convergence of tastes, rather than the distinct scenes, aesthetics, and styles that previously formed due to space and time and friction between them.
Ezra describes how algorithms have a "preference for quantified mass appeal as opposed to particularistic appeal." Everything became a poll; culture becomes data-fied; we build systems like rotten tomatoes that reward consensus. The problem is that many great things are inherently divisive! Kyle:
KC: "the kind of culture that the algorithmic ecosystem ends up promoting is that widest possible average. It's the stuff that avoids alienating people, keeps you engaged as much as possible, even if that engagement is very shallow. It's like, fundamentally scalable...
historically, the culture that we prize the most is usually not that. It's usually the stuff that is not popular, but grows in popularity over time. It's the stuff you have to be patient with."
There's an early section of Byung-Chul Han's Non Things that I keep returning to. We've lost the ability to linger:
What counts is short-term effect. Effectiveness replaces truth... Anything time-consuming is on the way out...
Lingering is another time-consuming practice. Perception that latches on to information does not have a lasting and slow gaze. Information makes us short-sighted and short of breath. It is not possible to linger on information. Lingering on things in contemplation, intention-less seeing, which would be a formula for happiness, gives way to the hunt for information.
The podcast conversation gets into several ideas that hit on exactly this.
Ambient content and our opt-in reality:
KC: I think a lot about how we live in this very opt-in reality... you can think about noise canceling headphones that you see on every airplane and train all the time, or you can think about looking at your phone as you're walking around or playing a podcast... that necessitates ambience almost, because there's always... a background against which you can experience something else. And you want to be able to constantly toggle between paying attention to something and not paying attention to it.
Taste as an "attunement to yourself" and how that is challenging in a world where we are tempted to drown ourselves out or jump to something less challenging and easier to passively enjoy:
KC: "these ecosystems and platforms kind of prevent us from experiencing difficult content in a healthy way... we don't have to fight through something, we don't have to be patient, we don't have to think so much about what something is doing to us or consider our own opinion as it develops, because we always have that possibility of clicking away, like flipping to the next video on TikTok. It's almost like boredom doesn't exist, like difficulty doesn't exist, scarcity doesn't exist.
And I think a feeling I've been having a lot lately is that scarcity is often what creates meaning when you're surrounded by infinite possibilities."
When we don't make time for depth, creators stop giving us the opportunity to find it:
KC: "what we lack is that kind of museum or movie theater-like experience, where you do have to sit with something and think about it and kind of puzzle your way through it without flipping to get an answer. We have so little patience for difficulty and incomprehension that artists... don't offer it to us. They want to give us the answers right away."
There are many more compelling topics, but I'll stop quoting this discussion now. It's one I hope to sit with and ponder for a while. If this newsletter hasn't made it clear, I believe in the importance of art and media, even when much of it is trivial. One of the main reasons I write here is to force myself to sink deeper into the things I give my attention to. I hope you can find time to do the same.
I can't wait to read FILTERWORLD. One last note: one of Kyle's book recs is In Praise of Shadows, which I recently started on Jason's recommendation. The convergence of taste is a funny thing!
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Tweet of the Week: The Book Dedication for The Founders: The Story of Paypal via David Senra
It feels like cheating to call this a tweet, but this 400-word note from author Jimmy Soni to his young daughter is worth a read.
Your life will be shaped by the things you create, and the people you make them with.
We tend to sweat the former. We don't worry enough about the latter.
The story of PayPal isn't just about people banding together to shape a product—it's about how banding together shaped the people themselves.
Fellow travelers will help. Books need editors; lives do too
That’s all for this week. More soon! Oh, and we recorded another podcast:
Active Listening Interrupting, Ep. 3
Andrew and I have a tentative name for what now appears to be a continuous podcast. We hope you find some of the discussion interesting or at least enjoy a few laughs.
Topics include: talking to the audience, morning and night people, non-boredom, the internet's impact on attention, life without it, floor pillows and the value in physical spaces, The King of Kong more discussion if interested!), the Vision Pro, Paul Giamatti, The Olson Twins, a viewer/listener mailbag, and more. Available on YouTube and Spotify.