michael-dean-k/

Screens are unfairly tainted. I'd love to write a post about how screens are underrated, a glorious technology that would be marveled at by basically any other generation in history. Screens are the scapegoat because they are the point-of-contact, the portal through which bad or selfish actors bend your pixels to their whims. I know people lament over "blue light" and the physical strain from staring at something for many hours, and of course that is real at excessive doses, but might that then be an software or psychology issue?

The main reason I started writing this was to riff on screen-time with kids. There is a revealing nuance in the advice, "no screen time for kids below 2 years old, but FaceTime with relatives is fine." Why is that? It's not the screen, but the nature of what's on them. FaceTime is fine because there is a fixed and unchanging frame which features a fixed and unchanging person moving within. There is stability and coherence. We take this for granted, but infants haven't modeled this yet! They might not even have object permanence (ie: if they disappear from the frame, are they gone forever?). So by this logic, any piece of media with a stable frame is potentially infant safe; beyond FaceTime that includes single-shot lectures, text editors, etc. Obviously an infant will not be in gDocs, but the point is, if they see you using a static interface, there is little harm, it's simply another object in their environment.

By contrast, cartoons and commercials are the real issue. To explain this to my mother-in-law, I counted out loud the camera cuts in an ad, and it's less than once per second. There is a whole psychology on why they do this, which I can guess, but should probably look into. TLDR you are being addled. But when an infant sees this, I imagine the frame resets are alluring, but disorienting. If the frame changes every second, they're locked trying to make sense of this self-evolving landscape, an experience novel and atypical from every other thing they've seen. It has no continuity.

By this logic, it also explains why feeds are worse than personal websites. You just stream past 100 things per second and have no steady frame. Even though my site is feedish now, it's all from a single person, so at least that's a constant. I'd feel okay with my daughter at 5-years old reading personal websites and having her own, but I wouldn't want her to be using algorithmic social media feeds even at age 15.

Why am I so engaged with the news these days? I think it’s part of a deeper desire to update my world model. There is no doubt, massive change. Geopolitical, economic, technological. And as abstract as those things usually are, it feels like some sort of shift that, in 2-3 years time, wil have an effect on my life. Of course, for many people in the world, it’s hitting them now. But similar to how COVID spared no one, it feels like your model of where things are going will directly effect your preparedness.

But this feels more existential; safety/security are actually on the line. And so that’s an anxious kind of thought, that the tectonic plates under your reality are shifting, and it’s not some recreational yearning to re-skill and recalibrate, but a mandatory thing.

And so to make sense, what do you do, go on X? That’s a total cesspool. New media is worse than the old gatekept media. And so, where I think I want to take this, is to build my own systems to sift through and aggregate information, and to build my own UI to do this. Even a simple Claude prompt, “what happened in Iran in the last 4 hours” is so much better than X. It’s stripped of sensationalism, and reading is just a less triggering medium. Bias aside, it’s at least free from people who are intentionally trying to deceive you for virality. There is a clout-chasing incentive, paired with actually turbulent times, which makes algorithmic news something like a schizophrenia filter.

And so what are these questions, these underlying uncertainties that are triggering a model change? How will anyone make income with the rise of AGI-3 and eventually ASI? How do I exist online and avoid hyper-surveillance and cyber-sabotage? Where in the world can I live to build a better future for my daughter, one where colleges doesn’t exist, jobs don’t exist, and where quality of life actually depends on nationalized social systems? A weird future. And weird to consider the fall of America, a kind of reverse migration, where, because of a confluence events, it might not be a place to raise a family in 1-2 generations down the line.

And so practically, this is resulting in things like: (a) applying for EU citizenship, (b) setting up AI agents for my business, and (c) considering cybersecurity, new ways to protect, share, and collaborate on writing (ie: how do you build an audience if the commons are polluted?). This is all very disorienting; it's hard to continue with business as usual when you become open to this scale of change.

I haven't shared with you my latest political views, but I’m exploring this idea of Radical Centrism, meaning, it might be okay to justify a centralized state-controlled media platform if that technologically and systematically guarantees a sane/just information environment. Obviously, this is hard, if not impossible, to do right.

It’s whole goal would be to invent an architecture that make it impossible for polarization or propaganda to occur. The key UI invention is that every news event would be presented as an atomic unit, with a mosaic of interpretations surrounding (not just left/right, but dozens of angles). Anyone who hits a certain POV too much would get de-ranked, so both Charlie Kirk and Jimmy Kimmel would be equally penalized because they predictably align with a faction. It would have to be structurally impossible for governments, media, money, or power to use their resources to promote a message above the system. Any media company who does not comply will be taxed into oblivion.

Of course everyone should have the right to say/think whatever they want without consequence, but the real issue isn't free speech, but in frame control.

The freedom to speak is irrelevant if no one takes seriously the imperative to think. I don’t care about Kimmel or Carlson or any pundit who gets cancelled. They are, mostly, automatons with predictable views, warped by the incentives and mind viruses of some political body. When someone gets cancelled, it’s not that we’re preventing open thought, it’s just a casualty of a two-sided ideological war. If you care about the freedom to speak and think, you should be grieving the fact that the American spirit has been dead for a century, or more accurately, it's never truly existed in mass media, never perpetuated through a democracy, only paraded around by propagandists, grieving that independent parties and voices have been systematically throttled to have no mainstream influence.

I'd like to better articulate my impressions on the New Yorker over the last year. First, it’s too political to trust. I want to read great cultural writing from them, not politics. It feels like part of an agenda, and makes me wonder if the whole magazine is compromised: a propaganda vehicle rather than a place for essays and opinions. Even the “mail bag” feels strategically curated to generate uncritical dissent; they want me to mimic their dissent, but I’d rather derive it independently.

Separate from that, I’ve found the non-political essays (if you can call them essays) to be boring. Why? The New Yorker is a “product” that taps into a particular urban aesthetic, meaning it’s more about rehashing a predictable and consistent tone than publishing original, interesting, or rogue acts of thought (surely, this is what happens in cities more than anywhere else).

I scored the latest essay I read of theirs a 2.85. It excelled in paragraph form and vocabulary. To basically any reader, this would be flagged in their mind as “great writing.” In a way, it is. But as an essay, a specific genre, it lacks. There’s no authorial perspective (it’s more of a profile); there’s no real debate (it’s one sided); it’s missing a cohesive thesis; and the tone is … what is their tone? Erudite, dry, witty, understated irony. It seeks authority through a false conversationality. It is “cultural” and gives specifics, but has no imagination. The essays are mosey-like: lazy, unhurried, with no tension or spine, as if you have many hours to read through their ambles. There are snobby asides with little uncertainty. There is limited register of emotion, rarely rage or ecstasy, even in topics that would warrant it. They are occasionally cheeky, but never sly, slapstick, bawdy, or archaic. It is metropolitan, coastal, a business-class professional style of writing that takes no risk. Of course, writers vary, but this is my take of their overall editorial stance.

In the end, The New Yorker is tonal product: they’re known for a house style, and they bet on the fact that through locking into a particular tone, a good amount of readers will buy into it and get high off reading it each week. It is less about expanding your thinking, and more about helping one gain status by training themselves in an ethos of haughtiness. Good essay tone is dynamic, evolving many times from beginning to end; The New Yorker’s tone has been static for a hundred years.

The covers are great though, I keep them in my apartment as decorations.

08:10 AM – Some notes on recent politics (pulled from texts to a friend):

1. The fact that Trump can appeal to racists in the middle of the country to gain power is a flaw of democracy. Obviously there’s nuance there. But I don’t think “Thiel is anti-democracy” is an immediate disqualifier (also not a defense). It’s just that the word “democracy” has an emotional charge, and it’s basically propaganda (ie: how regime change is always framed as “spreading democracy”). Personally, I feel like some people’s votes should count 100x more than others (while OFC everyone has the right to earn/advance).
2. My sense is that Trump is exposing the gaps in the structure of our government that both democrats and republicans and corporations have exploited for decades, if not a century. “Big beautiful bills” have been a systematic bi-partisan problem with the structure of our government for a long time, but Trump is branding it in a way so that everyone recognize it and hate it. It seems like Trump is 100x corruption, but I’d say it’s more like 2-3x corruption. The reason it feels so different is that Trump is so outward and careless about it.
3. Before Trump, I think we were spiraling towards a disaster course, and Trump is accelerating that and making it visible, and I guess I’m arguing that I’d rather have open chaos then shadow chaos because at least we can see it and maybe the right people can regain control and debug.
4. I think I’d call myself a Constitutionalist who is willing to throw away the Constitution to rebuild from Constitutional principles that adopt for our times—the separation of powers (as conceived 250 years ago) is nowhere near robust enough create a functional, legible, sane, principled, transparent government. The question that matters is how do you actually create an architecture that curbs the abuses of power in the complexity of our modern circumstance? I think that’s the core of the American spirit.
5. Re: Trump’s alligator jokes around prisoners trying to escape the new detention camp in Florida. I said it was ‘weird’ and my friend said ‘not sick?’ and I said, “It’s sick if I take it literally and if people are actually dying in that camp, and weird if I try to understand how he manipulates media for outrage.”
6. FWIW I think the whole deportation thing is sad and ridiculous. A far better compromise would be to just grant amnesty, close the borders, and unfuck the legal immigration process (which is terrible). The sensible solution would not solve his political goals though. I just am very careful to not take the rage bait and get mad about Trump. We gain almost nothing from it. ICE is bad, but there’s also mass-scale child trafficking, organized murder, pointless wars, etc. I have limited emotional bandwidth, and American politics deserves close to 0% IMO. I can only change how I react to what I can’t control, and take courageous action on what I can, and hope that someday I’ll be able to do something about any of the bad in the world in some small, hard-to-calculate way, but I don’t think I’ll get in that position if I’m mad everyday over absurd alligator jokes. Basically, I’m trying to operate in a non-grief state about Trump. Would recommend.