Island of Signal

An Island of Signal in a Sea of Noise

The Gatekeeper Shrugged

by mcouthon on posted in
Photo: Pavel Brodsky

A huge thanks to Ellen Fishbein for collaborating for months on this essay with me. It would’ve been twenty thousand words long, instead of just a thousand, if not for her.

The overarching problem of the information sphere is a signal-and-noise problem. Sorting through the near-infinite supply of available content to find relevant, high-quality information is a Sisyphean task.

This problem exists because technology has eliminated friction from the processes of creating, publishing, sharing, and curating content. Anyone can hit “publish” anytime. This led to an exponential explosion of content: the supply of content far outstrips demand. Crucially, it also outstrips our ability to process even the very best of the available content; we’re finite creatures, after all.

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A Tale of Two Religions

by mcouthon on posted in

Wolfilser, Courtesy of Shutterstock, Inc.

Modern Western theology can be seen as the opposition of two secular religions: Radical Responsibility and Radical Irresponsibility. I call them religions, because they require faith. Just like Christianity promises the believer eternal life after death, so do these religions promise their followers something of equal value—mastery over your own fate, or absolution from responsibility, respectively.

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Friction

by mcouthon on posted in

Here’s a heuristic to measure the merit of an idea: if, after being told what it is, you start seeing it everywhere, chances are it’s a good one.

Friction, or, more concretely, frictionlessness, appears to be such an idea. 

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In Defense of Exclusivity

by mcouthon on posted in

“I don’t want to belong to any club that would accept me as one of its members.”

— Groucho Marx
Image by Romain Hus from Unsplash

Would you rather be shot by a shotgun or a sniper rifle? I’ll let you ponder the gruesome details while I explore the analogy. 

The Web looks to be splitting over multiple dimensions—ad-supported vs. subscription based, giant corporations vs. the IndieWeb, as broad as possible vs. exclusive. Spoiler alert: they’re all related. But I want to focus on that last one: what does it mean to be exclusive online?

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The Degradation of Public Discourse

by mcouthon on posted in
Copyright of GoodReadBiography

“How dare you?” asked Greta Thunberg, the 16-year-old Swede when she, almost singlehandedly, relaunched the conversation about our planet’s health. One day, she might receive proper recognition from “official” forums and gain her place in history as an important activist, but in today’s online climate (no pun intended), she’s just fodder for memes and ridicule. A cynic’s dream — an actual earnest person.

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The Fragility of Tech

by mcouthon on posted in
Photo by Jaspreet Monga on Unsplash

A Dystopian Prologue

I’m fascinated by apocalyptic narratives. I enjoy the boiling down of the human experience to its barest essentials. When the world around you is being torn apart, what do you care about? What do you keep and what do you discard? What do you believe?

These questions are of a more philosophical nature, and they’re not what I want to discuss here. I want to talk about post-apocalyptic technology.

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The Attentional Commons

by mcouthon on posted in
Photo by Joshua Godsey on Unsplash

Walking down the street from my office to the bus station, I am bathed in a bright red neon glow. The whole street is. Looking at me from above is probably the largest single screen in Israel, outside of cinema theaters. Its goal — advertising. Its customers — literally everyone on the street at the moment.

You can’t escape it; its pull is too strong. It is attached to the side of a large mall. Who has decided it should be there? Who has Ok’d the brightness with which it shines, night and day? Who deemed it “perfectly fine” to make such a claim on all of our attention with the moving, dancing, happy images it displays? I didn’t.

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Creating This Blog

by mcouthon on posted in

Why, anybody can have a brain. That’s a very mediocre commodity! Every pusillanimous creature that crawls on the earth or slinks through slimy seas has a brain!

— The Wizard of Oz

So I decided to create a blog. Following the journey I described in the previous post, and some advice that prompted me to start considering owning the content I produce, this seemed like the only solution. Having “why” covered, I still had several unanswered questions, “how” being the prime among them. This post is here to document my tumultuous road (mostly for my future self, but if anyone’s present selves can benefit from it, so much the better).

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