Snippets: February 2023

Resisting homogeneity • ChatGPT • Search queries • Life is an experiment • Gratitude

And we’ve made it to February!

I don’t know about you, but the past month has flown by in the blink of an eye. I don’t regret any of it, but the pace of urban life is something that can be truly overwhelming if you aren’t very selective with your time. I revisited some passages from a little book - On The Shortness of Life by the Stoic philosopher, Seneca. It’s a really poignant and - true to its title - succinct meditation on how not to squander a life. I highly recommend picking it up.

Apart from that, here are some other threads of interest:

• Resisting homogeneity. Since the start of the year, I’ve been rethinking my relationship with social media a lot more. I don’t just mean the big players like Instagram and TikTok, but really any site where people can create and interact with shared content (I would very much park Substack under this umbrella). I think we’ve seen the same story play out enough to know when platforms are doomed to fail. Any site that seeks to appeal to the masses ultimately becomes trite and formulaic over time. Recommendation algorithms may make this slightly more tolerable for a while, but the fundamental incentives for creators on these platforms are to keep up with the latest trends. Simply put, everything starts to look the same after a while. The alternative - fostering small, close-knit communities with healthy debate - is what really stands the test of time. As a creator, you know that if you can build an audience like that, they will follow you wherever you choose to go. So far, I think that Substack (and YouTube, to a lesser extent) seem to have struck a nice balance, but we’re far from getting it right. We desperately need more online platforms that respect and prioritize original content - or maybe they already exist, and I’ve yet to find them.

• ChatGPT. I’ll be the first to acknowledge that I bought into the hype behind ChatGPT when it was first announced, but with the benefit of hindsight - and wealth of investigative writing, I’ve become far less impressed with large language models (LLMs). To me, widespread use of LLMs on the web only means that online content becomes even more unoriginal. Sure, it can easily come up with first drafts for a wide breadth of topics and generate human-like responses for everyday communication. It’s true that a lot of art, especially in the early stages, is imitation, but the important part is that it’s a process that the artist has to go through. Outsourcing this work to AI takes away the learning experience, which is the foundation for original work. And as for menial tasks, I believe that before asking if they can be automated, we should ask if they are necessary. It hardly makes sense if everyone starts using AI to handle the interactions we’d all rather not have. At that point, it simply becomes a facade. I don’t mean to say that LLMs are useless, but there are a lot of limitations and considerations we haven’t fully grappled with yet.

• Search queries. A wonderful piece (and while you’re at it, I also recommend everything else by the author) that stands in stark contrast to my previous point - while algorithms and AI serve to compress and rehash content, this article makes the argument that writing (or putting any sort of creative work) in public can be a way of seeking out interesting people with diverse opinions. I never thought of it this way before, but I think any online creator would easily agree. I’m not getting paid for anything I write here yet, so a big part of what keeps me going on this journey is the possibility of meeting like-minded folks and courting serendipity. (Side note: I am looking for fellow writers to proofread and bounce ideas off of! Send me an email if you’re interested in starting something 🙂)

• Life is an experiment. I think that most of us run the risk of taking ourselves far too seriously once we reach adulthood. It’s probably natural, even necessary, to rationalize the importance of something if we’re expected to do it every day. But whenever I contemplate the scale of space and time and the impossible odds of our existence, I’m just reminded of how insignificant everything really is. The truth is that things are never as grave as they seem, and the world will function just fine with or without you. Often the only thing that keeps me going is the sense of play that comes from treating life as one big experiment.

• Gratitude. Pairing nicely with curiosity and ending off with a nice quote from this article: “Even if you are the most privileged person, living in the most privileged circumstances, you could just as easily eat a piece of buttered toast and fail to notice how beautiful the experience was. Even if we have a utopian society, it will always be up to the individual to notice it—and we could just as easily miss it!”. I’d be lying if I said that I’m as optimistic about the world now as I was a few months before. But even when confronted with new problems, I can look only back with gratitude for all the growth that it’s sparked in me. That, and the fact that I get the chance to try again tomorrow.

Stay curious,

Emmanuel