Good morning!
Welcome to Digestable, your mouthful of things happening in the world.
Today’s ferments:
are a pair of columns from Gabriel and Travis Amiel. Enjoy them! Here’s one of the pictures I found when I searched “what does the internet really look like.”
The Second Look
Half-baked cultural criticism from Gabriel Coleman.
Download
The internet is a hairy place. At this very moment I’m typing into a Google Doc at my work computer so I can share my words with Lena and Travis on their respective devices on the other side of the ocean. This means the data I’m generating passes through my network manager at work, the college’s ISP, Google, and the ISPs and network managers on the other side of the connection, all of which have different data protection and user agreements I’ve signed without really reading them.
Consolidation of web services in the hands of a few large companies has made data protection and internet permissions part of our daily consciousness. Legislative attempts to regulate Amazon, Google, or Meta easily slip past their intended targets and end up primarily impacting individual users, in the GDPR’s case with an endless barrage of data-permissions pop-ups and in SESTA/FOSTA’s case with the blacklisting of your Drarry smut Tumblr blog. If someone asked me about my data ten or even five years ago, I would have assumed they were asking about my phone plan. Before GDPR, I would have dismissed cookies as just another funnily-named internet thing, not the insidious tool tracking your journey across websites so advertisers can prompt your Alexa to remind you about that ASOS bralette you were looking at last week. But without us noticing, better living through the Internet has quickly become a complicated, and at times impossible endeavor.
Unzip
I’ve ranted about Big Tech’s system of labor Captcha in this newsletter before so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that I’m pretty militant about data protection. Whenever one of those permission agreements pops up on my screen, “Object All, Reject All” is my motto. Websites and third-parties can still get around your permission requests pretty easily by claiming “legitimate interest,” even for marketing purposes, but I’m not getting paid to train Dall-E, ChatGPT, or anyone’s facial recognition algorithm, so I opt-out when I can. I’m sure most people don’t always click “Reject,” especially when that “Accept All” button is so colorful and inviting, but it's strange to me that the default architecture of today’s internet requires us to sell our data without compensation and that the legislated overlays that allow us to opt-out require clicking a clunky list of radio buttons on a pop-up that reappears every time we go to a new website.
But I try my best to use the internet as responsibly as possible. Recently this has involved getting fully off streaming services and, now that I’m not using an iPhone, even nixing iTunes altogether. Thanks to Bandcamp this has been pretty easy and I can rest easy knowing that 85-90 per cent of my purchase goes back to the artist, much better than iTunes’s 10 per-cent payout and the horrible divide-the-pot system Spotify uses to play artists. Like any jury-rigged system, there are some quirks. For instance, Beyoncé isn’t on Bandcamp, so I bought Renaissance through her own website. But, unlike the updated versions on streaming sites, which I’ve also written about before, the version from her site includes the Kelis sample and the ableist slur, making it both rarer, if a zip file can be rare, and more problematic.
But this week I hit a real snag. I’ve been wanting to download Empress Of’s EP Save Me, which came out last year, but it isn’t on Bandcamp like all her other releases. And unlike Beyonce, Empress Of doesn’t have her own webstore where I could download it. Maybe tweeting at Ms. Rodriguez would do something, but I’ve lately evacuated the burning building that is Twitter for greener pastures at social.coop so now it seems that I have to wade back into the waters of iTunes or Amazon to buy the album there.
Archive
This is my fault and also it isn’t. When you spend your time poking at the edges of a system, you expect to fall off a cliff from time to time. But this is also the fault of the industrial giants that dominate the internet to the extent that such a sharp drop-off in participation from Spotify to Bandcamp is inevitable, even more so for someone selling their own music independently. I’m still a computer creature, I don’t have a physical record collection just a bunch of files on a hard-drive and Save Me also seems to be a kind of digital creature, the only physical version of the EP is an exclusive vinyl edition of 1000. But the internet of today is a hairy place and I guess Empress Of is where I get snared.
So now that I’ve added a few more words to ChatGPT’s training dataset, I’ll suppose I’ll traipse over to the Amazon Music Store and pay Lorely Rodriguez much less than she deserves for her artistic output. The cookies I leave in my wake will add a few more pixels to one of the several digital Dorian Grays, stored in a server probably not far from where I am now, becoming more complete with each little piece of myself I give away.
Better living
by Travis Amiel
I have a love/hate (mostly hate) relationship with people using theatre terminology to describe derogatory behavior. Here are some examples: when someone is disingenuous or does something only for vain attention they are called "performative;" a corporation's worthless response to malfeasance or danger is called "theater;" a person who is deceptive or manipulative for another's interests gets labeled "a puppet." As a theatremaker and performer I am very offended by this, not in a major way at all, but I want to counter the underlying notion that if something is a PERFORMANCE, then it has no purpose.
Specifically, I want to talk about being "green.” Below are just some things I personally do to try and minimize my environmental impact:
I bike, take a bus or train, or walk most places.
I eat vegan, buying most of my groceries from a food co-op that sources local/ethical etc items.
I turn off lights and unplug things when I don't need them.
I take stairs unless an elevator is absolutely needed.
I turn on air conditioning or heating only when I absolutely need it.
I store my organic waste in my freezer, and when I have too much, carry it to a place to turn into compost.
Sometimes I save time or money, sometimes I spend more. I'm willing to sacrifice convenience or comfort, but I don't think my life is that extreme.
I started thinking about changing my life [to save the world] in my early teens. I saw the documentary No Impact Man and I learned of the freegans. I was fascinated by how people have protested the magnitude of urban waste by showing a lifestyle is possible (in the case of freegans proving the volume of discarded food) or nearly impossible (in the case of No Impact Man trying to create no waste in one year). I started to make little changes that I thought would make a big difference, and encouraged others to do the same. Since then, I've learned how much more complicated change is needed is beyond planting trees and sorting recyclables; plus I've consumed a lot of parody/criticism of the environmental and liberal movements. I do not believe that *everyone* has to, or *must* live like me, but I do think everyone should be considering how their actions affect others, because they do.
Because I don't spend time thinking or doing work related to this stuff for money, I suppose it is a hobby. Some people read magazines about vintage cars, the latest fashions, or the lives of celebrities. I like to read a magazine about the history of low-tech solutions for complicated problems, with articles that wax poetic about hot water bottles. It makes me want to change my whole life, but I can't say I have done much (or anything) they recommend. You can enjoy Low Tech Magazine via a traditional blog and it's available in printed form. But they also post each essay on a special website that I love: a site that is optimized to need the least amount of resources. This site is hosted on a server connected to a battery that's charged only by a solar panel. The background color is determined by the amount of battery left, and the website administrators concede that the site could go down if there's not enough sunlight to match demand. What I love about Low Tech Magazine is that they are walking and chewing gum. While experimenting to find radical ways of completing what they need to do (provide words + images to their readers), they completely conform to normal expectations with their regular old blog and printed edition. They are showing us what is possible, inspiring us to shift the conversation, as you can take from their solar-site what might work for your site. For example, maybe we don't need every page to be filled with hyper-fidelity photos.
On social media, I follow lots and lots of people who write or make videos on sustainability, eco-friendly living, and homemade everything. One I particularly enjoy is a couple that documents their "living off the land challenges'', in which they spend weeks consuming only what they've grown, foraged, or hunted themselves. The two share clever recipes, technique, highs, and lows. A recurring video format is responding to a comment like "well I couldn't do this because I don't have [space/time/water/raised beds/other resources] like you" or "you can only do this because you have money". The tension between influencers (to use the term very literally), and commentators who question the impact or practicality of someone's suggestion creates what I think is a peer-review-esq process. In my hypothetical fantasyland, the viewer and performer grow together through critique.
Gabriel and I talk a lot about what we actually think makes a real difference, like buying the wilted kale because we're Food Waste Warriors who will happily eat it, if it might otherwise be tossed away. We go back and forth about whether long trips by train/cruise are really better than flying. We sigh about the US military. It's one of my favorite topics, and I cherish their insight, informed by life experience, academic research, and observations living in Dublin.
We wouldn't and don't expect everyone to live exactly like we do. I love refilling my little glass jars from the big bulk bins instead of buying packaged flour, nuts, olive oil, nutritional yeast, etc. I invest in maintaining and transporting jars, slowing the inevitable fill of the trash can, saving me time emptying that trash and the money from buying more bags in the future. But I know such a routine is not for everyone. I am always experimenting with ‘what is a practical change that a normal person could be expected to make,’ and ‘what is a performative change, that most won't/can't,’ and the ones that can, do so because the value is not for others but in what it brings to themself.
There are plenty of things I have tried and feel like they're too burdensome to expect anyone else to do. For example, completely avoiding single-use plastic is far too difficult in my opinion. Also: I know I could/should make my own vegetable broth from scraps, but I don't. On the other hand, I do think that everyone must sort their organic waste to be composted.
A decision tree branches out in my brain as I make different decisions, considering the impact of available choices: "pee in the urinal" I say to myself "it takes only a gallon to flush, compared to a gallon and a half for the regular toilet." My individual actions remind me of both my agency and the futility to try and change the world. Coke vs Pepsi doesn't matter because they're both really fucking evil. But I sincerely believe (because I have to in order to get out of bed), that a lot of individuals can make a big change, or get someone in power to make a big change. And while I have your attention at the end of this essay: if you keep your money at a large for-profit bank, get it out of there ASAP and into a credit union because there's a BIIIG difference between the two.