That is, until my Wix subscription came up for renewal last January, when the website was feeling especially stale. Decision time: pay $350 to renew for another year, throw in the towel on this project, or… try something else?

I naively chose to cancel Wix and attempt to rebuild the website from scratch. This turned out to be the slowest, most frustrating route I could’ve taken to redo the website, but it’s become one of my most gratifying projects to date. Take a look, and read on for some context on how this came to be.

VUJADE.WORLD

 (It’s an interactive Rubik’s Cube, composed of videos from VU JA DE)

Early subscribers may remember, the first version of the VU JA DE website featured an interactive splash page (created by the brilliant @mpkoz). At some point, this became quite glitchy, and I didn’t have the technical know-how to fix it myself.

Fast-forward to 2024, and some things have changed. While I’ve had no formal training in programming or web development, I’ve begun weaving some JavaScript and Python into my professional work. This gave me enough confidence to use these languages in my website, along with some CSS and HTML.

This project was my first exposure to every piece of the stack, which included:

• Backend using Flask and PostgreSQL

• Frontend using React, Three.js, Framer Motion, and excellent Rubik’s Cube source code from Keaton Mueller

• Hosting on Heroku, with assets on AWS S3/Cloudfront

This project also happened to be my first taste of git, npm, Google Analytics, and basic computer vision (the project used OpenCV to detect scenes and split the videos into the shorter clips you see on the cube).

Ultimately, this website became a nights/weekends project for the last 6 months. I basically became the guy in this meme:

The core app is just over 2000 lines of code (look under the hood in GitHub). With the help of ChatGPT and pointers from several friends and colleagues, it’s finally in a “completed” state.

I never expected that what started as a little Covid video project (and actually my college thesis before that) would evolve into my first foray into programming and web development. And after all that, it actually feels like a better expression of the idea behind VU JA DE than the initial site I launched 4 years ago.

This doesn’t mean I’m turning my back on videos. I haven’t stopped logging ideas — and many of them I still intend to create. But exploring this new medium of code has been invigorating, so I can’t guarantee any consistency (not that you expected consistency in the first place 😅).

VUJADE.WORLD

It’s an (unsolicited) music video for “Subaru Crosstrek XV,” a satirical rap by Hobo Johnson. Why the song? Because it made for a good test subject. Specifically, testing my hand at making a music video entirely of AI imagery. With lyrics like—

My clique orders club salads
And look like they all sing ballads

—I knew I’d like the results. See for yourself…

VU JA DE [SUBARU CROSSTREK]

The 691 images making up this video were generated using Craiyon, a popular *free* AI image generator. In the world of machines-scraping-web-images-to-create-new-images, its capabilities are modest. At least, when you compare it to DALL·E, the RED camera of this space.

DALL·E, not yet available to the public, has yielded heaps of creative FOMO—at least for people (like myself) whose fine art skills range between kindergartner and chimp with a pencil. I mean… look at what people are making with DALL·E! So, as fun as it’s been concocting preposterous images with Craiyon, I couldn’t help but see it as merely a waiting room for my true appointment with Salvador (what DALL·E’s close friends call him... just kidding, it's only me I think).

As it turns out, my last day working on this video was also my last day on the DALL·E waitlist. Great… convenient timing! I felt like this 2003 Super Bowl commercial parody version of Tom Hanks from Cast Away: after years on a deserted island, this outrageously dedicated FedEx worker has finally returned to civilization to deliver his precious cargo. He curiously asks the recipient what’s in the box, to which she cheerily drops the dagger into his heart:

“Just a satellite phone, GPS locator, fishing rod, water purifier, and some seeds. Just silly stuff.”

The pain!! But then again, maybe rushing back to modern civilization (or off the DALL·E waitlist) wasn’t the point. If you remember anything from Cast Away, it probably didn’t happen after Tom Hanks finally got home. The magic happened on the island.

By some measures, I’m living on that island already. My most recent creative purchase was a Hi8 tape camcorder released in 2003. Before that was a 1970s Soviet 16mm camera. Or the stack of vinyl records I just gave as a birthday present. Our tools for capturing reality are advanced as ever, yet what many of us crave most are the deviations from reality—the imperfections. The grain and the noise, the glitches, the leaks and burns.

When it comes to AI image generation, these ‘deviations’ take on a quite different character. Instead of those analog pleasures, you get demented cyclops faces, deformed hands with 6+ fingers, and other grotesque patchworks of reality. Not the same charm, huh? But while it’s easy to see the cyclops face as a failure, I appreciate it just as I do shooting on film: because I don’t know exactly what I’m going to get back.

So what does that make Craiyon? The disposable camera of AI image generation? The hypermodern version of ripped jeans? Is the cyclops face… vintage? I can say one thing confidently: when anything conceivable can be conjured up instantly, exactly how I imagined it, the first thing I’ll look for is a way to rough it up. Make it less perfect. I’ll yearn for the simpler times, when everything wasn’t so damn crisp and predictable.

So, DALL·E might be my ticket off that deserted island… but maybe the island wasn’t such a bad place to be after all?

You feel me? Crazy talk? Let me know. If you like the video, consider sharing it. Here’s that link…

SUBARU CROSSTREK

Oh yeah, and give Craiyon a try—send me your results! For inspo, some more links:

• Craiyon Forum

• DALL·E Prompt Book

• Prompt Engineering Guide

• DALL·E Murals

• A Guide To Asking Robots To Design Stained Glass Windows

WATCH: Pennies From Heaven

While I typically try to supplement these videos with some writing, in this case I found that many compelling and well-researched works already exist. So for everyone’s sake, I’ll just share those.

What follows is an assortment of my key influences on this project, which may also make for fruitful starting points in your own further explorations. Enjoy!

“Beginning in the 1950s, a new symbol began to creep into the diagrams drawn by electrical engineers to describe the systems that they built. The system was a fuzzy circle, or a puffball, or a thought bubble. Eventually the form settled on a cloud. . . . The cloud was a way of reducing complexity: it allowed [the engineer] to focus on the near at hand, and not worry about what was happening over there . . . it became a business buzzword and a selling point. It became more than engineering shorthand; it became a metaphor.”

— James Bridle, New Dark Age

"While in technical parlance the “Cloud” might refer to the pooling of computing resources over a network, in popular culture, “Cloud” has come to signify and encompass the full gamut of infrastructures that make online activity possible, everything from Instagram to Hulu to Google Drive. Like a puffy cumulus drifting across a clear blue sky, refusing to maintain a solid shape or form, the Cloud of the digital is elusive, its inner workings largely mysterious to the wider public, an example of what MIT cybernetician Norbert Weiner once called a “black box.” But just as the clouds above us, however formless or ethereal they may appear to be, are in fact made of matter, the Cloud of the digital is also relentlessly material. . . . [In fact], the Cloud now has a greater carbon footprint than the airline industry."

— Steven Gonzalez Monserrate, The Cloud Is Material: On the Environmental Impacts of Computation and Data Storage

“The cloud is not weightless; it is not amorphous, or even invisible, if you know where to look for it. The cloud is not some magical faraway place, made of water vapour and radio waves, where everything just works. It is a physical infrastructure consisting of phone lines, fibre optics, satellites, cables on the ocean floor, and vast amounts of warehouses filled with computers, which consume huge amounts of water and energy and reside within national and legal jurisdictions. The cloud is a new kind of industry, and a hungry one. The cloud doesn’t have a shadow; it has a footprint. Absorbed into the cloud are the many weighty edifices of the civic sphere: the places where we shop, bank, socialism, borrow books, and vote. Thus obscured, they are rendered less visible and amenable to critique, investigation, preservation and regulation.”

— James Bridle, New Dark Age

“The Cloud is made of rare earth. Lamps in video games use real electricity. In cyberspace, we’re constantly swimming in simulations . . . that make it all too easy to forget about the geological “stack” that undergirds our virtual hall of mirrors.”

— Aaron Z. Lewis, The Garden of Forking Memes

"Put simply: each small moment of convenience – be it answering a question, turning on a light, or playing a song — requires a vast planetary network . . . from indentured labor in mines for extracting the minerals . . . to the work of strictly controlled and sometimes dangerous hardware manufacturing and assembly processes in Chinese factories; to exploited outsourced cognitive workers in developing countries labelling AI training data sets; to the informal physical workers cleaning up toxic waste dumps."

— Kate Crawford & Vladan Jole, Anatomy of an AI System

"The cloud presupposes a geography where data centers can be built. It presupposes an environment protected and stable enough for its server farms to be secure, for its operations to run smoothly and uninterrupted. It presupposes redundant power grids, water supplies, high-volume, high-speed fiber-optic connectivity, and other advanced infrastructure. It presupposes cheap energy, as the cloud’s vast exhaust violates even the most lax of environmental rules. While data in the cloud may seem placeless and omnipresent, precisely for this reason, the infrastructure safeguarding its permanent availability is monstrous in size and scope."

— Metahaven, Captives of the Cloud: Part II

"All that information―all that information capacity―looms over us, not quite visible, not quite tangible, but awfully real; amorphous, spectral; hovering nearby, yet not situated in any one place. Heaven must once have felt this way to the faithful."

— James Gleick, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

“An ecological understanding allows us to identify “things”—rain, cloud, river—at the same time that it reminds us that these identities are fluid. Even mountains erode, and the ground below us moves in giant plates. It reminds us that—while it’s useful to have a word for that thing called a cloud—when we really get down to it, all we can really point to is a series of flows and relationships that intersect and hold together long enough to be a “cloud.”

— Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

Still hungry?

• Films

  • Cyber Monday

  • Unknown Fields - Consumed

  • The Internet is Running Out of Water

  • Field of Vision - The Moderators

• Media-rich articles

  • Anatomy of an AI System

  • Critical Atlas of Internet

• Essays

  • The Automation Charade

  • The Staggering Ecological Impacts of Computation and the Cloud

  • Air-Conditioning the Internet

  • The Internet is Drowning

Something new for you, live on VU JA DE:

WATCH

Pennies From Heaven is a story about clouds, the cloud, and where the two concepts clash.

Starring Ms. Frizzle and The Magic School Bus gang, Harold and his Purple Crayon, and Jay Jay the Jet Plane, it’s got major kindergartener energy. But don’t be fooled… this one’s dark as a fully-saturated cumulonimbus. You’ll also find cameos from Bob Ross, Miyazaki movies, and an assortment of vintage gems. Plus, my first attempt at datamoshing!

I’ll share some hints on the meaning next week. But for now, take a few minutes to indulge, and as always, please share if you felt something :)

WATCH NOW

Who’s there?

VU JA DE.

VU JA DE who??

VU JA DE, the obscure remix site that you probably forgot about… but never forgot about YOU.

So here I am—over a year from when you last heard from me—with a new video to share. It’s a visualizer for a Negativland song/sound collage/mindfuck called Megaphone Guy. 📣

More details to come, but for now I’ll just drop the link and cross my fingers hoping it’s worth 110 seconds of your time.

MEGAPHONE GUY

You back? Whaddya think? Have I gone mad?? Probably.

If this video made you feel something, I’d love to hear what. And hey, why not get a friend’s take on it? Here's the link if you’d like to do something with it... 😅

Hang tight for some background in the next email. But for anyone who cares: read on to learn what the hell has been up with VU JA DE.

🔔 VU JA DE came to life—as a website and newsletter—in March 2020. If that month rings a bell, it’s probably because that’s roughly when the COVID-19 pandemic became a tangible, real-life thing for you (as it did for me).

🪓 A global health crisis, materializing at precisely the same time as my tiny blog website thingy. What did this mean? For starters, it was an excuse to stay indoors reading, thinking, and squinting at screens. And as someone who can be nearly impossible to tear away from Adobe Premiere, I’ll assure you my lockdown experience played out pretty much as depicted in #WorkFromHome (minus the axe…?), which was the website’s first video installment.

💍 All in all, COVID’s first wave could’ve dealt me far worse hands than a VU JA DE honeymoon. This 6-month bout of lockdown restlessness gave me a reason to make visuals like Monkey Business & How To Beat The Algorithm, and reads like You Have A Right to Refrain from Silence (which dealt a hit of validation when it was printed in Current Resident’s publication, The Jungle). Lastly, the project that sent me down the remix rabbit hole—DREAM—was selected in a few small film festivals.

⏭️ But then came a new phase. My day job got busier, I picked up some freelance work, and gradually my honeymoon came to a close. The newsletter remained dormant for an ever-so-daunting span of time (of which I was certainly more anxious than you).

⏰ But today at last, that clock is back to zero. I can’t promise it won’t start counting back up again, nor can I promise a consistent content schedule. But I can assure you that VU JA DE isn’t going away. And to prove it, I’ll share the latest creation: a music video inspired by my remix idols, Negativland. Please enjoy Megaphone Guy. 📣

MEGAPHONE GUY

See you next time :)

I’ll skip the pleasantries and get right to the point. I finally made another video, and I blessed it with the ultra-clever name of:

HOW TO BEAT THE ALGORITHM

All I’ll say about it is: it probably won’t teach you anything, much less how to beat any algorithms.

Take a gander by clicking that cute blue button below. Read on for some further musings on the topic of algorithms.

WATCH NOW

Can you beat the algorithm?

No doubt, obscene sums of energy have been devoted to the task. Some, you might say, have even succeeded. But after you’ve driven clicks, maximized engagement, and topped all the search results, have you really “beat” the algorithm? Did the algorithm lose? If anything, you’ve “struck a deal” — finding the optimal balance between what you want and what the algorithm wants. It’s a negotiation.

Now, I don’t want this to devolve into some algo-bash. Nor do I want to condemn the pursuit of “beating” the algorithm. At a time when algorithms roughly equal the internet, and the internet roughly equals business, art, and life… can you blame anyone for trying?

At this point, the “algorithm” just feels like gravity. You can study it. You can build around it. You can apply math to leverage it. You can even harness it for recreation. Its mysterious force—what we’re all studying, leveraging, and harnessing—coordinates the movements of all that lies within orbit: artists, brands, subcultures, and memes. Gravity acts on all masses equally, after all!

As hard as I push against that gravity with this newsletter, I still feel it tugging and pulling… But from a different angle. My “algorithmic anxiety” now stems as much from my role as a viewer as it does from my role as a creator. To an obsessive collector and remixer of web videos, abundance is a cursed blessing:

Is this the best possible clip for this idea? Surely, I could find something better, right? Does it not exist, or can I simply not find it?

And even when I find exactly what I need, gravity still wins the day:

Did I truly “find” this? Or am I just seeing it because a bunch of code put it in front of me?

My ego attributes the discovery to my rigorous search or my impeccable taste. But statistically, YouTube’s recommendation algorithm is to thank for 7 in 10 videos I see.

Perhaps I’m like the drunkard searching for his keys under the streetlight simply because “that’s where the light is.” I march down the brightly-lit timeline ahead of me, led in one hand by my digital avatar—a composite of my past behavior; a forecast of my future desire…

So I’ll ask another way:

Can I beat my algorithm?

Maybe not, but I can stop it from beating me. If I can’t defeat gravity, I’ll just flee from its reach. The further I go, the weaker it’ll get. So I rocket through my filter bubble’s cozy atmosphere, beyond the orbit of my algorithmic feed. Eventually, I achieve escape velocity.

Thrusting me along is my Search Engine Un-optimization instrument of choice… aka Search by upload date: a forgotten remnant of the nearly-extinct chronological feed. Oriented only by temporal proximity, I probe the fleeting abyss. Let a day pass, and a search yields completely different results. Out here, I can actually witness what I’ve been told down on Earth—that space expands in all directions at once. It’s mostly empty, but somehow still… abundant?

One particular genre, I find, does exceptionally well out here. It’s the kind of content an algorithm would never showcase. It doesn’t have a mass audience, almost by definition. It’s the kind of thing you’d only find, simply because you looked for it—a rarity these days! By now, you must be wondering: well, what the hell is it?

How-to videos. Yes, tutorials. How to drive a stick shift. How to hit a baseball. How to mix a manhattan. How to feed your frog. How to fix your lawnmower. You don’t stumble upon one of these videos by accident, or because YouTube thinks you’ll love it. You’re watching for one reason, and one reason only: your lawnmower is broken, and your grass keeps on growing.

So like a faraway astronaut with my telescope pointed back at Earth, I fix upon a most peculiar array of subjects: humans sharing their expertise with the world.  It’s a motley crew, to say the least. Young and old; wielding snowblowers, leafblowers, and nerf guns; some appear video-savvy, others clearly are not. But one quality seems to be universal: their passion—for gadgets, guns, blunts, and beers… and nobody’s stopping them from spreading their wisdom.

Searching by upload date also produced a curious byproduct. Most of the clips—having been uploaded in the thick of the global quarantine—had a look and feel that was, above all else, domestic. And maybe it would’ve been anyways, had Covid been over by now. Regardless, it seems to be a natural set and setting for the tutorial genre: humans in their homes. What a better way to beat these ~strange and unusual times~ than to share something you know (or pretend to know) via the great interwebs.

The cynic would say they’re doing it for the subscribers, the clout, or to “beat the algorithm.” But I see an earnest human instinct—sharing learnings with the tribe. Not a grab for eyeballs; simply a message in a bottle for whoever happens to look.

Now, I can’t promise they’re authorities in their respective fields—whether it's welding, bubble blowing, or bong cleaning. But with a whopping median view count of 82, at least you can be sure your eyes lay upon on something few others have… and that’s worth something, isn’t it? So, after cutting down 16 hours of rambling, out-of-context YouTube content, I present to you…

HOW TO BEAT THE ALGORITHM

Haven’t seen the video yet? Watch again? Check it out here.

This post will paint a backdrop behind this wacky video of mine — highlighting the absurd nature show that graced my feed with robot spy monkeys (and the show’s surprising dark side). We’ll talk memes, #relatability, and some good old-fashioned film theory. Oh, and there’s a majestic sloth gif sprinkled in there too…

The idea for this video spawned from a single, hilarious tweet:

If you don’t see the image, hit “Load All Images” at the top of your screen.

In a deceptively simple package, this tweet highlights both the surveillance seeping through through our devices, and the primitive, helpless state we’re left in in those devices’ absence. Dozens of similar tweets riff on this headline, and it’s impossible to know the idea’s origin. But that’s not the point. With any meme, what matters most is that it exists in the first place; that a certain awareness amuses enough people — to the point it’s posted, shared, and remixed. The impulse came from somewhere, and that somewhere is always worth exploring.

Locating the source behind this meme was easy — a PBS Nature show called Spy in the Wild. Somewhere between Planet Earth and Inspector Gadget, the series deploys animatronic spycams to “infiltrate the natural world to film surprising behavior among wildlife from around the globe.” Browsing the show’s website I discovered, to my delight (and horror), the robot monkeys’ co-stars:

“Spy Orangutan, Spy Croc Hatchling, Spy Meerkat, Spy Egret, Spy Tortoise, Spy Prairie Dog, Spy Macaw, Spy Sloth, Spy Cobra, Spy Bushbaby, Spy Squirrel, Spy Adelie, and Spy Baby Hippo.”

Image: © John Downer Productions

Twitter memes aside, the show itself is practically a meme as it is. I mean… Robot spy monkeys? On one hand, this makes it a softball for further internet jokery. But on the other hand, it invites examination of the show’s coincidentally happy landing into the web memescape — in which “going viral” is any show’s holy grail. Here lie traces of the show’s shaky ideological grounding and potentially exploitative nature. To substantiate these concerns, I’ll leave it to these Reddit AMA questions for the show’s producers:

These comments are hardly surprising. If I found a limp hunk of metal that loosely resembled me, I’d probably be traumatized too. And were the robots necessary? Surely, stashing the cameras in trees and rocks would’ve been easier, cheaper, and more animal-friendly.

According to the show’s site, the robot spycams are intended to “reveal animals as having emotions and behavior similar to humans: specifically, a capacity to love, grieve, deceive, and invent.” While this sidesteps concerns like those voiced in the Reddit questions, it at least hints at one of the show’s objectives — rendering the animals similar to humans; making them relatable. This focus on “relatability” is common to most nature shows, and also happens to be strongly associated with memes. After all, what is a meme if not a satisfyingly accurate reflection of some precisely human experience?

Animals, especially those most easily anthropomorphized, tend to be particularly useful in achieving the ever-so-valuable currency of relatability. The “me when my phone dies” tweet and its variants suggest Spy in the Wild succeeded on this front. So it’s no accident the scenes that caught the most traction online featured the series’ most humanlike animals (langur monkeys and gorillas, instead of, say, cobras and crocs).

But still, why the spycams? Well, here’s my theory. Due to rapid ascent of privacy issues into the cultural conversation, the experience of being “spied on” has suddenly become #relatable. As algorithmic and artificially intelligent forces extend their authority over our lives, we increasingly crave cues in relating to this mysterious tech. Entertainment opportunists line up to satiate this hunger, for better or worse.

Spy in the Wild seems to have sprouted out of these digital-centric concerns — over AI, big data, automation and the rest. The robots aren’t simply recording the behavior of their animal counterparts, they’re spying on them. The cameras aren’t concealed discreetly, but they’re fashioned Terminator-style to glint in one eye. It’s not enough to see an orangutan operating a saw — we also need a robot orangutan competing to saw the log faster. Rife suspicions about robots “stealing our jobs” and social media “killing our privacy” are both threaded into and reinforced by the show’s creative decisions.

This digital undergirding also manifests in Spy in the Wild’s use of perspective. Shooting the animals with distant telephoto lenses would’ve been just fine in the TV era, when viewers were inherently detached from the production of the content onscreen. A clear audience-performer distinction, however, is much harder to find on the web. Now that everyone’s sucked into the conversation, “capturing the action” looks a little different than it used to. In the world of bits, the observer lies within the action, even catalyzes it.

So in Spy in the Wild, the camera isn’t just a camera; and the robots aren’t simply props. The robot spycams are the crux of the show: the point of view, the underlying tension, and the force driving the action. They aren’t ornaments to the scene, but they are the scene in itself. Like an episode of Punk'd, the entertainment derives not from the subjects per se, but from how the subjects have been played upon; left out of the joke.

Image: © John Downer Productions

The robo fluff monsters certainly don’t fool the real animals, but that doesn’t matter. To the producers, the more important spectator is the one sitting on the other side the screen (aka you!) and whatever it takes to draw a laugh or an awe takes priority. Any confusion or suffering to the real animals is just collateral. So while Spy in the Wild claims to capture “natural behavior” in the wild, its actual entertainment value rides on the artificiality of its constructed situations.

This all reminds me of a scene from Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls, in which Jim Carrey climbs inside an animatronic rhino to spy on the bad guys. After the rhino’s fan craps out he’s forced to strip down and find a way out. This scene (which, in middle school, I thought to be the absolute funniest moment in cinema) follows a similar blueprint as Spy in the Wild. In both, the supposed “observation” taking place is completely aside the point; the spying is just a narrative device — a source of drama, irony, and humor.

The experience viewing Spy in the Wild mirrors that of the mortified tourist watching Ace seemingly birthed out of the rhino. Despite being provided a grossly incomplete view of what’s going on, our narrative-seeking minds can’t help but to connect the dots to form a story — however grotesque it may be. The show hangs the narrative bait, but ultimately the story happens in our minds.

This sort of narrative manufacturing is endemic to the nature genre. Like any show, shooting wraps and editors squeeze down mountains of footage into a handful of selects, then painstakingly arrange those into something that resembles a narrative. Narrations are laid over the top to seal the deal — ascribing humanlike traits and desires to the animals. All of which makes the end product more readily absorbed by our narrative-oriented minds.

Artificial or not, these narratives supply the genre plenty of both entertainment and criticism. Storytelling purists argue the narratives are dishonest. Scientific purists argue they don’t address the real issues with enough rigor. Well... DUH! They're not made for science; they’re not even made to educate. They’re made to entertain, and most of us wouldn’t want it any other way. Would you rather read a scientific publication on sloth endangerment, or listen to David Attenborough narrate epic clips of a sloth’s river-crossing journey for love? Yeah, me too.

But stories do more than just entertain. As a wise person once said (many wise people, actually): culture creates stories, and stories create culture in return. Once you have a meme to describe something, the meme will consequently shape your experience of the thing. The “relatability” of a meme can then be a self-fulfilling prophesy: reinforcing the conditions it emerged from. This is the feedback loop we’ve come to associate with disparities in media representation — such as, how movies teach children whether they look more like heroes or villains, damsels or jocks. Nature documentaries, as innocuous as they may seem, are not free of these dangers.

With the gamut of human complexity on offer, Spy in the Wild memefies our most vile tendencies — not love like Attenborough’s sloth, but spying and voyeurism. Even worse, as an audience we relate not to the spies, but instead those being spied upon. We can’t help but to side with the helpless and confused animals because we share their slot in the hierarchy — made subordinate to those monitoring from a distance via Bluetooth monitors and algorithms. Spy in the Wild not only normalizes spying, but also champions those conducting it — as earnest, objective practitioners of “science.”

So if we are the monkeys being spied on, then who are the producers on the other side of the screen? What strings do they pull, and how? Who’s telling our story, and who’s reaping the profits?

Well, that’s what the video’s for! If you haven’t already, take a gander at this essay’s more visually-oriented sibling — Monkey Business. Hope it makes you laugh; hope it makes you think; and most of all, I hope it makes you think about why you’re laughing. And hey, share with a friend while you’re at it!

Thanks, as always, for joining me on the VU JA DE Express — aboard which we journeyed down my filter bubble from memes to relatability, and boomeranged right back (with guest appearances from David Attenborogh and Ace Ventura along the way); so if you’re still with me, congratulations.

In case you’ve forgotten by now, a clever tweet shot me down this rabbit hole; and it turns out the contents of another tweet have finally hoisted me back out. Here’s your think-piece to cap this one off:

“Perhaps we have even more to fear from people who act as if they were computers than from computers programmed to pretend to be human.”

Some more bananas for ya:

Marshawn Lynch Narrates Planet Earth

Hannity vs. Harris

The Tech Backlash We Really Need

Just watch this

In the last VU JA DE post (two months ago at this point!) I made a little promise: the next time you’d hear from me would be with a new video.

Well, I’m a man of my word!

This is a video I’ve been sitting on since February — making random changes here and there. Now that The Social Dilemma is making waves across Netflix and beyond, I figured it’d be a good time to crack open the vault and fling this one out there. Later this week I’ll share some context behind the project, but for now I’ll just say this:

Zuckerberg + robot monkeys.

Sit back, and enjoy Monkey Business. And since I know you want the pleasure of pressing a fancy button, here you go:

MONKEY BUSINESS

Till next time,

-Billy

Speaking of creative juices… If you’re like me and could use a refill, perhaps these links will help.

Filter Bubble Friday #5

Don't Hug Me I'm Scared

Video (3 min)

The best puppet show on the internet. Period.

If you trained a songwriting AI on Sesame Street and surreal horror movies, it’d probably spit out something like this. Underneath a sprinkled frosting of absurd characters and off-kilter jingles, there's some acute social commentary to be found. The first of a six-part series, this episode takes a surreal look at educational conventions surrounding creativity. All you need to know is: Green is not a creative color!

Seen it already? Take another look. There are plenty of Easter Eggs to find. You might’ve noticed snippets of this and episode four in the VU JA DE intro video; take a look see if you can spot/hear them!

ART THOUGHTZ: How to Make an Art.

Video (3 min)

Here’s another piece that appeared in the VU JA DE intro video linked above. I love it in the same way I love the puppet show — because it carries surprisingly lucid commentary on creativity and artistic practice, but does so in an unusual style and seemingly without effort.

Who you think you is, innanet?

Maria Popova — Mapping Meaning in a Digital Age

Podcast (50 min)

Maria Popova is the best. She runs a site called Brain Pickings, which was a major influence on my launching VU JA DE. So on the theme of art and creativity, I knew her voice was a must. This conversation radiates a zeal that’s near and dear to my heart: staying curious in a world which often feels designed for the opposite.

'88

Video (11 min)

Beautiful chaos. Or chaotic beauty? Either way, these 11 minutes will penetrate your eardrums and melt your retinas (probably the neurons floating behind them as well). This analogue gem tees up the internet’s go-to question for artists — “what app?” — then blows it to smithereens. It’s jam-packed so tight that you can pause at any moment, stare at the frame, and you’ll still need a moment to take it all in.

‘88 was made for Video Jam x Basquiat, a UK retrospective on the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat; and I have a feeling Basquiat himself would be proud of this one. Here’s a comment from the animator behind this piece, Ruffmercy:

“I feel like a thief that has been given keys to a palace for an evening. Once entering that palace there is only me and the treasures within. I get to wear his crown and to dance in his slippers; what an opportunity, if only for one night.”

Dirty Art Club - Gardens

Album (49 min)

Take the last video, feed it a few brownies, wait an hour, and you’ve got this album. It’s a little like elevator music; only for Willy Wonka’s glass elevator—launching straight through the roof and soaring in all directions.

Whatever you’re doing: walking, working, writing, editing, emailing, cleaning, cooking, dish washing… Toss this on and you’ll float away from the quarantine monotony, en route to—in the words of the late Gene Wilder—a world of pure imagination.

Bandcamp / Spotify / Apple Music

Next time you hear from me, it’ll be with a new video. Until then, stay healthy and send over anything that’s been on your eyes, ears, or mind.

-Billy

Speaking of wormholes… just as the lockdown picked up in the US — amidst March’s mad rush to stock up on essentials and sanitize everything — I made a short video called #WorkFromHome. Many of you joined the newsletter after this, so feel free to take a look. It’s also slightly sharper now, since I just found a way to download clips in higher res.

Rewatching it now feels like uncovering a fossil; an artifact from a bygone state of mind. One thing that strikes me is how, at one point, the thought of "quarantining" actually seemed the slightest bit enticing; like leaving school early on account of a snowstorm (my Minnesotan roots talking here).

But any novelty there at the beginning has long since vanished. I've made the self-starter sourdough. I've done the living room workouts. I've cycled through Zoom backgrounds. All of which I’ve done in the same rooms, the same clothes, and the same mask (which has gone through the wash more than a few times by now). Is any of this normal? Or is it all too normal?

The Covid pendulum swings on, between hypernormal to paranormal, but never stands still. The toilet paper shortage came and went. The stock market plunged and bounced back. The restaurants closed, reopened, and closed again. Just as we reach the peak of one direction, we swing right back to where we came. And while the daily happenings can be so erratic, you can at least be certain there’ll be more of it when you wake up tomorrow. More news; more stories; more updates; beating on like a metronome. Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.

Source

But how many BPM? Is it accelerating or decelerating? Is there a rhythm here, or is it all just noise? Like the piano on which the metronome sits, culture plays along; yielding to this wacky beat, and going off in its own tangents. But with so many lives to save and essential work to be done, what's the function of all this "artistic" stuff anyways? Is it a beacon of hope? Or like the violins atop the sinking titanic, simply a soundtrack to impending doom? Only time will tell (if we can trust it, at least).

Filter Bubble Friday #4

This Is Not Normal

Music video (4 min)

This first piece comes from one of my absolute favorite musical groups; although “musical group” seems hardly adequate to describe what they are. They’re called Negativland, and whatever it is they do, they’ve been doing it since the late 70s… and they’re still at it today. This track comes from their latest album True False (2019).

My own words couldn’t possibly do justice here, so I went straight to the source. Here are some thoughts from Negativland’s Mark Hosler and Jon Leidecker, and filmmaker Ryan Worsley:

Mark:

“This Is Not Normal turned out to be a track on the True False album that got a lot of strong reaction from listeners in 2019. Ryan approached us this past April with an idea to essentially "repurpose" that track into something visual that was inspired by the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic and how it had affected her personally, and we were sure she'd come up with something great.”

Jon:

“We got serious about finishing the album 'True False' in late 2016. In the wake of the election, the phrase 'this is not normal' became a talking head litany, intoned as if you're to repeat it aloud back to the screen you're watching. The sheer repetition of the term revealed it as a false hope; by the tenth time you hear it proclaimed, you just know: 'This sentence is False'. As we'd made the decision not to signal boost the sitting president by sampling him, this track was a way of getting at the current landscape without locking us into only one meaning. All the themes of the record pretty much come together on that track.

Ryan does not like to mention or make a big deal out of it, but it's part of the video for me that she made it while working through a case of the virus herself. She was fearless, which I found an incredibly reassuring antidote to the daily headlines. I think people can tell that's in the work.”

Ryan:

“After Covid hit, and everything was suddenly NOT NORMAL. The song from TRUE FALSE resonated in a sort of different way. [The song has] so many different voices reiterating "THIS IS NOT NORMAL," like it's speaking to a future nobody imagined. But it's hard to remember last week at this point, and it's even harder to gauge whether last week's events matter this week, or if what matters now will matter tomorrow. It's a weird thing to process, but hopefully the video evokes some of these feelings. Of course, the main focus is dogs barking with the voices of children pretending to be dogs. AND THAT'S NORMAL.”

Quarantine Dog Good Boy

Video (3 min)

So we’ve covered humans speaking like dogs; why don’t we reverse it? This video, ironically made by a production company called Normal, features a dog named Martin who simply wants to keep his humans happy during the quarantine:

"They watch the orange man and I feel their hopelessness; their fear; their desperation. It makes me want to cuddle them harder, because I know my cuddles are good for them."

Little does Martin know, his cuddles may not be good for them after all… This film’s got a dark side, but it’s also hysterically funny (enough to make me actually laugh out loud, which doesn’t happen often). Oh, and I guess it was made in 48 hours?

Covid Loop

Video (∞ duration)

Martin got you down? Maybe this will lighten the mood. Here’s another stylish take on the virus’ spread, but with a much less menacing vibe. This comic-style loop follows Covid’s trajectory through the panels of eight interconnected vignettes. The loop completes after a minute, but if you’re so inclined, you can watch it forever!

Here’s a note from the creator, Yuval Haker, on his piece’s form:

“The comic strip is a self-imposed limitation. With these hard boundaries in place, the characters could “break the rules” – flow between panels and take control of their frames.”

Parting Us

Short film (10 min)

If the last piece rides the Covid Roundabout, this one takes the Coronavirus Scenic Route. And it’s scenic indeed; as there’s a new shooting/editing technique about every 30 seconds. But that’s not to say its value is all visual. The film’s visual pluralism only reinforces its deeper pluralist leaning — as a mosaic of human perspective. Among others, we hear from medical workers, a firefighter, a florist, and several artists; all of whom share their own methods of coping, seeking gratitude, and staying hopeful in these strange and uncertain times.

Domestic Cozy

Blogchain (12 entries)

For the past few months, I’ve drenched my brain in the writings of Venkatesh Rao. He does essays, books, podcasts, and some world-class Tweetstorms. This won’t be the last time I share his work on here, so we might as well start it off with domestic cozy.

Venkat’s got a penchant for inventing his own neologisms, and spinning them out into grand societal theories. Here, he introduces a new one called domestic cozy, which he contrasts with a previous coinage, premium mediocre:

"Instagram, Tinder, kale salads, and Urban Outfitters are premium mediocre. Minecraft, YouTube, cooking at home, and knitting are domestic cozy. Steve Jobs represented the premium that premium mediocrity aspired towards. Elon Musk represents the relaxed-playfulness-amidst-weirdness at the heart of domestic cozy."

This blogchain, consisting of entries every month from March 2019 to March 2020, concluded just as the term became magnitudes more relevant — as we’ve entered what he calls a hard cozy. Writing back in March of 2019:

"[Domestic cozy] finds its best expression in privacy, among friends, rather than in public, among strangers. It prioritizes the needs of the actor rather than the expectations of the spectator. It seeks to predictably control a small, closed environment rather than gamble in a large, open one."

The series meanders well beyond the bounds of domesticity — weaving in topics like TikTok, ASMR, inactivewear, Venmo, admissions scandals, snowplow parenting, drone sweaters, 4chan, the Prisoner's Dilemma, and the wonders of The Great Indoors. You can think of it as a Gen Z field guide.

I hope these links provide some weekend entertainment during your own hard cozy. Please do share your thoughts, and send over anything you‘ve been chewing on. Until next time,

-Billy

Even the sharpest of spectators too often take the surface-level fluctuations to be the objects of study; like studying a tree but ignoring the roots. But waves don’t exist in isolation. Each ebb and flow arises from an ongoing fusion of forces and factors that can’t easily be seen — the shape of the sea floor, global wind patterns, heat convection, and Earth’s gravity propelling it all.

Source

Understanding any one of these components requires years of study; so to fathom the system in its entirety and predict it’s output? Good luck. What precisely emerges from this planetary wave machine is impossible to predict. Unless, of course, you simply expect noise and chaos. Then you’ll be right most of the time.

But maybe (and this is a big maybe) if the conditions are just right, the chaos might briefly coalesce into something more than rogue splashes of sea foam; something coherent; an actual… dare I say, shape. And this rare form, if it so chooses to reveal itself, may actually accept you along for the ride. That is, if you’ve armed yourself with the right device and enough practice maneuvering it (a little luck won’t hurt either). So when that one comes along — that righteous, glorious one — you better damn well be ready for it.

Source

Hold up. Before we go any further, let me break it to you (no pun intended): this isn’t actually about waves. Maybe you guessed it already, given my history of compulsively talking in metaphors.

Anyway, the real topic at hand is ideas — the mysterious forces that produce them, and the inexplicable euphoria we find in riding them out. You can imagine, waves are much easier to write about. But the oceanic system turned out to be a surprisingly fluid (another accidental pun) proxy for our mental processes.

They’re both just flows of energy, after all — whether through a web of neurons or good-old H2O. And both systems, impelled by the all-reaching hand of entropy, generally tend toward disorder. Especially when you zoom waaaay out to imagine these energy flows on cosmological scales of time and space, the incredible serendipity of a coherent form becomes impossible to ignore. Waves and ideas (forget that, planet Earth and life itself!) represent local, momentary reversals of the natural flow toward chaos.

So what does that mean for us puny rock-dwellers, who occasionally want to harness our own little sliver of these spectacular forces? In this comic, Nick Sousanis puts it better than I ever could:

Each of us, during our brief time in the stream, has the opportunity to reflect on the forces that set this in motion, and reach in to send up something uniquely our own against the flow.

As the latest crop of a 4.6-billion-years-and-running unfoldment, we’re lucky enough just to be here. So given the even rarer chance to coast atop a wave or an idea, it’s probably bad karma to be overly greedy about it.

Remember what I said about waves being shy to reveal themselves? Yeah, same with ideas. No amount of skill, experience, or mysticism will coax out the perfect ride. Sure, there’s an intuition to being in the right place to catch one, and a privilege in being in that water in the first place. But when it all comes down to it, we’re all at the mercy of forces out (WAY out) of our control.

Best buckle up, because that ball of energy will do exactly what it wants to do. And by the time you realize what that is, you’re probably already inside it. So your job as a participant in this grand system — governed either by geological or neurological laws — is simply to remember: I have less control than I think.

The essay series I’ve been working on, Black Squares, Black Boxes, and Black Holes, has been a merciless reminder of this fact.

I dove in thinking it’d be a mellow solo post. Easy. But pretty quickly into the paddle (yep, back into surf speak), it swelled into a shoulder-high 3-part series. Okay... not what I set out for, but I can do this! Somehow, all of a sudden I'm staring down a beefy 10-parter, and I’m not sure I’m up to the task. Do I turn back to the shore? But the current’s pulling me in, so there’s no going back now! The crest rises and closes out over my head. Welp, looks like I'm doing down…

Source

Under the cumulative force of this planetary system, I’m plunged into the washing machine. Grasping for breath, I sift through my notes to maintain a sense of direction. Yet somehow down here in such a raucous spin cycle, I still find interesting the subjects that lured me into the water in the first place — which I’ll take as a good sign.

My post earlier this week, Out of Sight, Out of Mind, was the latest in this heavy set. At present, I’m deep on the black box concept — the voids that fill so much of our lives, and the dangerous implications they can have. So on the topic of black boxes and danger, I can’t help but consider how the series’ relentless expansion is itself driven the mechanics of yet another black box — my subconscious.

If the Titanic provides any lesson here, it’s the importance of directing attention below the surface. So being thrust underwater may offer my best chance to explore the rest of the iceberg of my creative subconscious. But deeper means darker; as it’s only down there beyond the reach of any light, in territory uncharted even to the experts, where strange thoughts lurk, ideological tides turn, and organic fragments freely associate. Because somewhere in that abyss, heat spills through seams in the ocean floor, to be swallowed by a sprawling system that might, just might, produce a wave.

Filter Bubble Friday (on a Saturday) #3

Only one link today. In part, because that write-up turned out to be longer than I had planned for (maybe you sense a theme here…). But also, this piece is so outstanding I really think it belongs on its own.

Invisible Man

Book

In researching for this essay series, I knew I had to pick up Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel Invisible Man. There’s a good chance you’ve heard of it, or maybe even read it. But if you haven’t, take a look.

For something published nearly seven decades ago, its relevance today is astounding. In future installments of the series, I hope to capture the precisely why.

Just a few pages into the introduction, I already struck gold — just not in the way I expected. Ellison, in 1981, recounts writing what later became American literary canon:

“I had floundered in a state of hyperreceptivity; a desperate condition in which a fiction writer finds it difficult to ignore even the most nebulous idea-emotion that might arise in the process of creation. For he soon learns that such amorphous projections might well be unexpected gifts from his daydreaming muse that might, when properly received, provide exactly the materials needed to keep afloat in the turbulent tides of composition. On the other hand, they might wreck him, drown him in the quicksands of indecision.”

The struggle is real. But it’s a worthy task:

“ . . . a novel could be fashioned as a raft of hope, perception and entertainment that might help keep us afloat as we tried to negotiate the snags and whirlpools that mark our nation's vascillating course toward and away from the democratic ideal."

I don’t think I need to underscore the connection to my waves/ideas babble. This book speaks for itself. And as I’m finding, it speaks for so, so much more than itself, doing so in a delicate grace I can only admire.

I’ve only just started the book, but I’m thoroughly excited to read the rest. If anyone’s looking for some quarantine summer reading and wants to start a little VU JA DE book club, hit me up.

Bonus: The Hold Downs

You really thought I was going to write an entire post in surf speak and not include a surf video?

Four friends, one groovy song, and lots of waves. If there’s anything that’ll make you want to hop in the water with some friends, this is surely it. And given the analogy between waves and ideas, maybe it’ll stoke collaboration? Yeah, the word stoke wasn’t a mistake.

Source

Part one focused on Blackout Tuesday, and introduced the concept of the black box. Part two extended our discussion of black boxes, exploring their role in early childhood development, and the many forms they take in modern society — including cars, coffee, democracy, and of course, spaghetti noodles.

This post will highlight the (invisible) power black boxes wield in society — over our climate, culture, labor, and more. We’ll see how they both emerge from and reproduce imbalances in visibility; and how these imbalances, when codified, look something like stories.

Run, Forrest, RUN!

Roadmap

• What we can’t see, can still hurt us (and others).

• Because the world’s filled with black boxes, we’re never exactly sure of what we’re seeing, and by extension, the hurt we may be inflicting.

• But so we can sleep at night, we usually keep these black boxes “closed.” We even tell ourselves stories to justify doing so.

• As a result, black boxes often come in the form of stories. In these cases, power belongs to the storytellers (this may not mean what you think).

Invisible is dangerous

But not like a gun or a drunk driver. Invisible is dangerous like poison. It doesn’t have a sharp blade, an open flame, or jagged shrapnel. And it’s not dangerous because a bright orange sign proclaimed it so; but precisely the opposite. Invisible goes under the radar and over our heads, engaging no defenses and no fight-or-flight moment.

Because invisible doesn’t invoke urgency, less visible matters naturally seem distant, even nonexistent. What’ll get first dibs on my attention — the Amazon rainforest burning for months on end, or the candle burning in my living room? Probably the candle; not because it’s more important than the rainforest, but because it’s more readily visible.

Visibility almost never exists on a level playing field. Why is SkyMall staring you in the face on a long flight? And why is Starbucks conveniently placed on the morning-commute-heavy side of the road? Particularly in commercial spaces, what you see is rarely coincidence. At any given moment, more than a few brands bid fiercely for your eyes — whether via the “strike zone” of convenience store shelves, the head of your search results, or slices of your Instagram timeline. So visibility becomes a point of leverage for those with capital — a differentiator between winners and losers.

Image source

Let’s rewind back to the candle and the rainforest. Who’s the winner there? For starters, it’s the company that sold me the candle. And as winners, they’re inclined to preserve the conditions that let them win. So the immense supply chain that turned crude oil, glass, and paper into a delightful candle (probably clearcutting a rainforest along the way) is deliberately made opaque to regulators and consumers like me. In other words, the box is kept black. With diminished visibility, the loser — the rainforest — is subject to further disadvantage. Thus, the black box preserves the existing divide between winners and losers.

But if you look a little closer, the winner-loser divide isn’t so black and white. Obviously I, as the owner of the candle, benefit from its black-boxedness. I can fill my living room with citrus blossom fragrances, blissfully ignorant of the polluted air it sends into the lungs of people and animals closer to the candle’s production. And though I may claim to support ecological policy reform, thereby aligning with the loser, my consumption choices say otherwise.

Image source

Defense mechanisms

Cognitive dissonance is inescapable in a world of black boxes. While they’re often vital to societal functioning — like the black box of democracy, as discussed in part two — they’re not necessarily moral. Underneath their murky surfaces, we know, are plenty of things we don’t want to see. But since our very lifestyles have molded around them, exposing their inner workings would threaten the way we live. To ward off anxiety and guilt, we construct defense mechanisms (on individual and societal scales).

Take, for example, the moment you dispose of a piece of trash. From the moment it hits the bottom of the bin, a massive system comes to life — of garbage trucks, dumpsters, street cleaners, sanitation centers, and landfills — to whisk it out of your life as quickly as it came in. Or, it just lands on the side of the road…

In any case, our products come from and return to a sort of mental nowhereland; a cavity for unspoken thoughts to fester: “this doesn’t exist after I’m done with it,” or taken further, “the Earth is abundant.” Of course, these aren’t explicit views in our minds; they occupy the negative space — like shadows, or lies.

Image source

And this is just for lifeless products. With human beings involved, you’d think we’d feel a greater sense of responsibility. But as demonstrated by the prison-industrial complex, we’re quite adept at dealing with people in the same callous, logistics-driven manner we deal with objects.

Cop cars fill the place of garbage trucks. Landfills become prisons. We thrust our pesky challenges as far as possible from the cozy suburbs, and guard them with barbed wire and strict visitation rules. Behind bars, we lock away the questions we don’t want to ask, as well as the societal shortcomings that made those bars necessary.

And like the candle/rainforest scenario, these black boxes produce winners and losers. Those in charge would like you to think that you — Mr. or Mrs. Upstanding Citizen — are the only winner. You can drive by inmates picking up trash on the side of the road, permitted to think: “those people belong there.” But as they pick up the scraps put there by people like you, the more complicated truth remains deep in a black box. Tucked away is not only the incarcerators’ obscene profiteering, but also the preexisting disparity — which made it more probable for you to be in the car than on the roadside.

Image source

Both the prison and the landfill serve as black box analogues. They are institutional voids, which perpetuate the same invisibilities that produced them. In the process, they carve out a negative space of shadows, lies, and unasked questions. And as this negative space crystallizes, power is encoded into narrative. Stories, after all, are the strongest defense mechanisms we have.

The glass slipper

If defense mechanisms work best when they’re invisible, and invisible is dangerous, then what does that say about stories? That they’re dangerous? Well, sort of. Stories are most dangerous when they’re invisible.

In their refined, packaged-up formats, stories are relatively benign. The danger in Disney fairy tales, for instance, stems from the societal narratives surrounding them — which they subtly reinforce. Cinderella, the movie, isn’t the problem; it’s the broader story of femininity, and the impossible challenge of fitting into the “glass slipper” of male expectations.

The symbols and mythology of a story, while potential tools for relaying the real issues at hand, also run the risk of obscuring those same issues. As a result, a story itself can be a sort of glass slipper. Beautiful, yet rigid; prompting conformity under the guise of transparency.

Because they’re so easy to perpetuate, stories are the most manipulative of all black boxes. And the protective shell of narrative too often lets injustice off the hook. If the content of a story doesn’t adequately address its context, a black box has been formed. These narrative black boxes, like the prison and the landfill, only reaffirm the conditions that produced them in the first place.

Mark Zuckerberg famously said: “A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa.” Albeit tone-deaf rhetorically (such as his default to dying and Africa), this is, in fact, a story. And it’s not actually about squirrels, nor people in Africa.

On the surface-level, it seems reminiscent of the candle/rainforest analogy — illustrating how we naturally prioritize what’s visible over what’s important. But Zuckerberg’s subtext is covertly self-reflexive. Visibility, according to the story, sits outside his locus of control. By focusing on a narrowly-defined “relevance” to our “interests,” he implies that all Facebook does is reflect our own natural tendencies. In a sly erasure of context, the squirrel analogy obscures Facebook’s troll-under-the-bridge role: how levied allotment of visibility is their entire profit model.

If history is written by the victors, then stories are told by the winners. So behind every story, and thus behind every black box, there’s a winner. And the BIG winners — like Facebook, Google, and Amazon — not only tell stories, but they run the bidding wars for visibility itself. Space, whether on a shelf or a timeline, is fought for exclusively by those on the outside of the black box.

Image source

But now, the black boxes that have cocooned us for so long are beginning to crack. The dangers, while invisible to many, were real all along — now bubbling up in the form of police brutality, cancel culture, worker strikes, wildfires, floods, refugees, and in case you forgot, the ongoing burning of the Amazon. With the world on fire, my mind drifts back to the candle…

Dedicating my lifetime would hardly put a dent in rainforest problem, but I can improve the smell of my living room — in about 15 seconds flat, with just a few clicks on Amazon. Meanwhile, the real Amazon keeps on burning. Who’s to blame? One side of me clings to the easy story:

It was Amazon, in the Amazon, with the candlestick!

And the other side of me just sits quietly, wafting pleasant fragrances and feeling guilty.

Image source

Especially out here in LA, the fireworks have long since begun. From PCH to Figueroa and beyond, random pops echo through the streets at all hours of the night. Summertime fireworks aren’t a new thing to LA, but they’ve certainly reached a new level — lighting the skies practically every night since the quarantine began.

This has sparked various conspiracy theories, including claims that the LAPD is deliberately keeping Black and Brown communities sleep deprived to stoke agitation. I don’t buy it. But while agitation probably isn’t the intended result of a coordinated scheme, I think it’s a primary cause.

The Trump-Covid-Protest trifecta has left many with a strange feeling of boredom, exasperation, and frustration. Shooting explosives into the air is an easy (not to mention contagious) way to combat all of those feelings. In this sense, the fireworks function much like the other city-wide quarantine rituals — like rooftop howling and pot clanging. We’re still here, can you hear us?

We live in explosive times, after all. If I had to describe today’s cultural conversation in one word, that would be it. Explosive. And not in an isolated way, like a single stick of dynamite up in the mountains. But a chaotic onslaught — like bursts multiplying in a chain reaction, sometimes (rarely) harmonizing into something that vaguely resembles a narrative. It’s a loud and obnoxious symphony, but it’s one hell of a spectacle.

There’s a primal allure to it all. It’s the feeling our Neanderthal ancestors might’ve had while squatting around a fire. It should be dark out, but it’s not. You can see faces. Whether illuminated by skies of red, white, and blue, or just the blue light of phone screens, eyes are aglow. You can see them. And they can see you.

This week’s Filter Bubble Friday rounds up five pieces shining much-needed light on various facets of the American experience — two music videos, a short film, a podcast, and a speech. Don’t worry, the Katy Perry song isn’t one of them. Here’s to life, liberty, and the pursuit of explosive conversation.

Image source

Filter Bubble Friday #2

Surma — Wanna Be Basquiat

Music video (5 min)

The Chevrolet Bel Air, the neighborhood drug store, the white picket fence… What do these have in common? They’re icons of the so-called American Dream. This music video is composed of hundreds (maybe thousands?) of archival fragments from the 50s and 60s, appearing upon first glance to be a tribute to the era’s aesthetic. The haunting track underneath it all, however, signals it’s anything but. Around the halfway mark, it turns sharply away from the white picket fence to plunge into the belly of the American beast — the behemoth of postwar industrialization.

This masterpiece was crafted by João Pombeiro — the same guy who made the Back To Nature video I featured last week. I hit up João for some comments on this one:

I use CC Search and Flickr to find public domain and CC0 images. The videos come mostly from the Prelinger Archives (at archive.org). This helps to build the narrative, since it reflects American history (and west society) and its relation with economical and industrial growth. But the result of this progress is the destruction of everything. This ending is very Japanese but it works very well as a metaphor to what’s been happening in the world in the last few decades. Basically, the 20 century ideals, promises and expectations have failed us all.

One Nation Under

Short film (7 min)

Key word here: perspective. And in every sense of the word — perspective, as in point of view, optics, a way of seeing, and walking in someone else’s shoes. Set to the mise-en-scène of American hyper-capitalism, we hear rare commentary from the ground-level. It’s the concrete jungle and the glass ceiling rolled into one. Like the summertime fireworks, this film is an audiovisual expression of what it means to be seen and be heard.

Kendrick Lamar - For Free

Music video (2 min)

Haven’t seen this one yet? Now’s the time. It’s an interlude track from an album ago, Kendrick’s To Pimp A Butterfly. The whole record is worth a listen (or re-listen) right now, but here’s a nice starter.

After a grand opening scene with a saxophonist, a gospel choir, and Uncle Sam, it’s off to the races. As for the woman character, here’s what Genius has to say:

The relationship between Kendrick and the girl serves as a conceit for the way America has continually treated black people in an attempt to devalue their character and diminish their self-esteem.

Rapping over jazzy sounds from Terrace Martin (another favorite of mine), Kendrick challenges the common understanding of what it means to be “free” — reminiscent of Frederick Douglass’ What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?. And the last 30 seconds really heat up. Kendrick powers through some words prophetic of his turbo verse on King’s Dead from the Black Panther album.

Hey Kenny, my man, I know you're reading this. Whatcha working on these days? HMU.

What is Democracy?

Podcast (53 min)

A common retort to the glorification of American democracy goes as such: “We’re a republic, not a democracy, you idiot!” Well maybe I added that last part… But you’ve probably heard it before. It’s often used to discredit leftist faith in majority rule, framing it instead as “mob rule.” Astra Taylor — one of my intellectual heroes of the last year — takes this claim in a different direction.

Here’s a conversation between Taylor and MSNBC’s Chris Hayes. The two chat about her recent documentary What Is Democracy? and companion book Democracy May Not Exist But We’ll Miss it When It’s Gone. BIG ideas, casual vibes.

Here are Apple, Spotify, and YouTube versions of the podcast.

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace

Declaration…? (9 min)

Here’s a legendary piece of internet history. It’s a time capsule from the pivotal moment of 90s cyberculture. This screed was written by John Perry Barlow, cofounder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Grateful Dead lyricist. He was THE cyberlibertarian if there ever was one, for better or worse. Here’s his famous opening statement, a cornerstone in my remix film DREAM:

Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone.

Pretty audacious, wouldn’t you say? These brazen remarks capture the early imagination of the digital frontier — before TikTok, Facebook, and even Google. The idea was that cyberspace needed no central governance, since beauty and order would naturally emerge from the contributions of hackers and fanatics. This myth propelled Silicon Valley for a decade or so, and even flavored my rosy understanding of the internet as a kid.

The idea has long since gone stale. But at the time, I can imagine it made sense. WIRED describes Barlow’s headspace as he wrote the speech at the 1996 World Economic Forum in Davos:

He was incensed at President Bill Clinton's decision the same day to sign the Communications Decency Act into law . . . So after a "fair amount of champagne" he left the dance floor and banged out the statement on his laptop in one of the hotel's side rooms.

It’s ironic that section 230 of the act signed in that day — which protects websites from lawsuits over their users’ behavior — has been repeatedly abused to the benefit of the very companies that emerged from Barlow’s era. Now, at a time when cyberspace has gone haywire, it seems government intervention may be the only path forward.

While this “declaration” has its blindspots, it embodies a spirit we could use a dose of right now — hope. Sadly, Barlow passed away a couple years ago, carrying to the grave any and all traces of residual techno-utopianism. It’ll be back again someday.

Until then, go outside and enjoy some fireworks.

Coming down to Earth doesn’t have to mean deflating the balloon. I just need a counterweight — so I’m bringing a new email format into the mix. To balance out the idea balloon, I’m creating a bubble. A filter bubble, to be precise.

As you may know, the term filter bubble refers to a state of algorithm-induced media isolation. It suggests platforms show us only what we want to see (or what they think we want to see), implying various sociopolitical hazards may result. Rooted in internet activism, filter bubble often appears next to terms like algorithm, misinformation, echo chamber, and extreme. In these conversation circles (or bubbles?), a filter bubble is a definitively bad thing to be in.

To me, it’s just a variant of the adage you are what you eat, but with the added dimension that what you eat — or on the internet, the content you consume (my two least favorite buzzwords in one phrase!) — isn’t always up to you. Of course it’s not. This is why the saying exists in the first place: so kids across the world don’t eat Fruity Pebbles every meal of the day. You wouldn’t want to turn into sugary breakfast cereal, would you?

Even when you’re mature enough to “control” what you eat, a perfectly transparent diet is impossible. Usually you can’t even know the entire path a single meal takes to your plate, much less an entire diet. The same goes for media. You follow who you follow and like what you like; but at the end of the day, what appears on your timeline is mostly a mystery. Same with Chicken McNuggets, but that’s not stopping anyone.

Algorithms aside, content options are abundant. The modern media buffet includes (but certainly isn’t limited to): threads, forums, group chats, Slack channels, albums, articles, podcasts, movies, conversations IRL, and newsletters like this one. A filter bubble is simply your unique path through the cornucopia. So this is mine.

VU JA DE externalizes my personal filter bubble. It allows me to process the media around me, and spin it into something that makes sense (at least for me). I already wear my influences on my sleeve, so why not go straight to the source?

Filter Bubble Friday’s will be an extension of my favorite pastime — sharing cool stuff with my friends. I’m also curious what’s bouncing around your own filter bubbles, so feel free to send over whatever’s been on your mind/eyes/ears. Maybe that way, this project can look less like a solo treasure hunt, and more like a community garden.

Oh, and the Friday part? Simple. It’s the best day of the week. And it just got marginally better. So, let’s kick off the inaugural Filter Bubble Friday.

Filter Bubble Friday #1

Island of Flowers

(the text above is clickable, and will be for all of these)

Short film (12 min)

Speaking of the process food takes to our table, here's a 1989 short film by Brazilian filmmaker Jorge Furtado. In the playful, meandering style you might know from Kurt Vonnegut, this film tracks the web of production revolving around a single tomato (I won't spoil the rest). If you ever meet an alien who wants to understand humanity, show them this.

Nightmares On Wax — Back To Nature

Music video (8 min)

To continue the zoomed-out view on humanity, here’s “an emotional journey into humankind’s relationship with the natural world.” I dove deep into Nightmares On Wax last week, and after hours of listening, this music video by João Pombeiro was the perfect icing on the cake. And I’ve got a soft spot for anything collage, so this one’s extra special. I really can’t imagine how much work must have gone into it.

MAD

Shorter film (2 min)

A brief and beautiful collection of thoughts from a guy named Valentino. This one’s by a great friend of mine and huge creative influence — Rob Prochnow. Since he's too humble to push his work as shamelessly as I do, I'll share it for him. Editors out there, I hope this provides some inspo for you the way it has for me.

The Funkees — Dancing Time

Music compilation (1.5 hr)

This is hands down the best music I’ve heard so far in 2020. It’s a collection of 18 songs by Nigerian afro-rock group The Funkees — and every single track is exceptional. Toss it on and you’ll be bouncing around in no time. Props to Jordan for sharing this group in the company Slack.

The California Honeydrops — Just One More, and Then Some

Music EP (17 min)

Ever since my friend TJ put me onto this group a few years ago, it’s been a permanent staple in my good vibe jam library. They dropped this EP today, and it did NOT disappoint. Guaranteed to make your Friday 98% more Friday-like.

Hope you enjoyed this new email format. Feel free to share with your friends, and shoot over stuff you’ve been jiving with lately.

Till next time.

Part one focused on Blackout Tuesday — what the spread of the black squares tells us about digital space, and how they inadvertently “black boxed” both the movement they emerged from, and the adspace-maximizing algorithms that propelled them. If you haven’t read it yet, feel free to check that out first.

Today I’ll shift the focus from black squares to black boxes, exploring their ubiquity in modern life, and the surprising forms they come in. If I succeed, you’ll have a new addition to your sense-making toolbox. If I don’t, you’ll have spent 10 minutes reading about spaghetti.

If you enjoy it, go ahead and share with a friend or two — maybe it’ll spark a convo. Away we go…

TL;DR:

• There’s always more to the world than meets the eye (or ears, hands, or nose). This is always going to be true, no matter how smart you think you are.

• But fear not, black boxes are here to save the day! You don’t have to know how a car works to get yourself to work.

• Black boxes come in many shapes and sizes, and understanding them gets successively more challenging — like video game boss battles.

• It’s not the “black” or “box-like” qualities that make black boxes confusing, it’s how they’re intertwined with other black boxes.

All boxes are black, and that's a good thing

I don't have many memories from kindergarten, but one was so unsettling it sticks with me to this day: the sensory game where you stick your hand into a box and guess what’s inside. Could be anything, but for me and seemingly everyone else, the box contained slimy spaghetti noodles. If anything were “anti-ASMR” in this world, the unsettling feeling of those noodles would surely be it.

If your kindergarten teacher never subjected you to this wicked sorcery, maybe you’ve encountered it at a Halloween party — blindly handling what you’re told is zombie brains… equally traumatic.

But what makes this a suitable activity for a classroom of toddlers? If the same terror arises in both observers — those who feel noodles and those who feel brains — then the real action must not be occurring in the boxes at all. But ironically, inside our brains.

A key milestone in an infant’s development is the acquisition of object permanence — an understanding that objects continue to exist, even when they aren’t seen, heard, smelt, or felt. An undeveloped sense of object permanence is the source of both joy in peek-a-boo, and of distress in “I got your nose.” The subsequent moments of realization — seeing your parents’ faces again, or finding that your uncle didn’t actually steal your nose — instill a lesson we too often take for granted as adults: that there’s more to the world than meets the eye.

So what does all this have to do with spaghetti noodles? Well, if object permanence is the recognition that familiar things persist even when they can’t be seen, then a step further is the awareness of things never seen in the first place. For the kindergarten class, the mystery box activity is a practice of extrapolation. By connecting tactile input with past experiences of watching mom or dad cook dinner, it’s possible to deduce the box contains spaghetti noodles. No unboxing necessary. Omniscience isn’t a prerequisite of clarity; kindergartners know it best.

The infamous spaghetti noodle mystery box epitomizes a concept I introduced in part one: the black box — a system or object we can apply inputs to and measure outputs from, whilst limited in visibility of its inner workings. Taken literally, a black box is anything with a distinct inside and outside (hence, the “box”) and an opaque surface (hence, the “black”). This definition has been stretched and morphed every which way, but in all cases, the important factor is that observer can’t know exactly what’s going on inside. What slides through your fingertips feels just like spaghetti (or what you’d imagine spaghetti feels like), but until you open it up — ceasing its condition as a black box — you can’t be sure it’s not zombie brains.

The inability of observers to be certain of a black box’s contents isn’t restricted to children; it’s a key feature of modern life. From the coffee that gets you out of bed, to the car you drive to work (or not so much in these times…), a complete knowledge of all the variables at play is impossible. Sure, maybe you know how to change a tire, or how many cups of coffee start making you jittery. But this functional knowledge is a far cry from a total understanding of human biology, or the physics of a combustion engine. And if you define understanding strictly, even the experts can’t know anything with absolute certainty. We have working models of the world, and those do just fine most of the time.

Cocooned in black boxed bliss, we get along with our days, trusting our coffee won’t poison us and our car won’t explode. And with the leftover cognitive horsepower, we can focus on more important matters, like mouthing off the asshole who cut us off on the 110 (in this scenario, the active black box isn’t your car, but it’s the other driver — think about it!). For better or worse, ignorance simplifies our lives. Unless you’re a domain expert, or Bradley Cooper from Limitless, black boxes makes life easier, not harder.

When a box doesn’t look like a box

As you might imagine, the black boxes we face change with age. Like rising through algebra, pre-calc and calculus, we graduate out of elementary black boxes, and new, more complex ones take their place. Eventually, the spaghetti box loses its allure, and other angles become more interesting — like how the same exercise can be used to study the black box of childhood development. These “grown-up” black boxes are never as cut and dry (literally) as the spaghetti box.

Perspective determines which boxes appear “black,” and which ones are visible at all. We sharpen our sensory acuity and build deeper catalogues of past experience, and the boxes surrounding us mature in tandem — gaining slighter shades of opacity and more nuanced inside/outside distinctions. What if you’re inside the black box? Or if the box is nested Russian doll-style in other boxes? What if the box is so familiar that you don’t recognize it’s a box at all?

Everything we do (yes, everything) involves a black box in some form or another. Institutional black boxes, as I’ll call them for now, are those so pervasive we hardly notice them — such as language, capitalism, and anything ending in "industrial complex." Their inputs and outputs are generally predictable, like how a phonetic sound evokes a certain meaning, or how a dollar equates to spending power.

But while it allows us to function, this predictability doesn’t help us understand how they operate as systems. Entire professions are devoted to understanding and mechanizing these large-scale black boxes — economists, doctors, physicists, linguists, and the like. But still, their behaviors often appear most mysterious at the expert-level. The opacity of these boxes (usually) doesn’t arise from deliberate obfuscation, but from sheer complexity.

Perhaps the clearest example of an institutional black box is democracy. We citizens (the demos) can’t possibly understand all the factors impacting our civic life, much less how to pull these levers to maximize prosperity. So we elect leaders to handle it for us — whom we trust will act in our best interests. For this to work, ongoing education is needed so we understand what our best interests are in the first place, and which candidate might best realize them. Both of these democratic pillars — citizens’ education and leaders’ accountability — seem to be imperative in the responsible deployment of any black box. But unfortunately, they’re both far from guaranteed.

Democracy isn’t so simple as the electorate and the elected; there are lobbyists, corporate interests, foreign nations, existential problems, Russian bots, huge egos… And all of these extraneous variables are, of course, black boxes in their own rite. The muddling of inputs and outputs makes it difficult to tell where one box ends and another begins. Pledging to a carbon tax is a great way to raise citizens’ quality of life, but it’s a bad way to raise a campaign budget. Both campaign finance and climate change are at least semi-understood challenges, but accomplishing them together is near impossible.

The true dilemma with black boxes isn’t that they’re black, or that they’re boxes. It’s that they are — like spaghetti noodles — tangled.

Read part three

Still hungry?

All Boxes are Black (essay)

The Construction of Reality in the Child (research paper)

Object Permanence in babies (video)

Image sources

Object permanence

World dynamics model

Peek a boo

There’s no doubt the movement’s enormous social media presence has played a major role in these wins. In this essay series, I’ll explore some contours, complications, and contradictions of activism’s digital component — using last week’s black squares as a case study. I’ll introduce technology’s intrinsic “black box” problem, and question whether it’s a problem at all. In the process, I’ll inquire as to how we can interrogate whiteness, foster transparency, and mobilize action (at least for those who wouldn’t otherwise participate) that escapes the black hole the internet has become.

Hit “Load All Images” at the top of your screen if you don’t see them. Let’s dive into part one.

Part 1: Blackout

TL;DR (but I hope you R anyways):

• The black squares reigned Instagram for a day. But you already knew that.

• Many weren’t happy about it, because the squares took up space where more important messages could’ve been.

• But “space” has a different meaning online, and those in charge of it don’t care about important messages; they only care about expanding the space to sell more ads.

• More people posting = more space = more ads

• Because we’re focused on the stuff that fills the spaces, we forget about those in charge of them — and they want to keep it that way.

Silence isn't the only problem

Blackout Tuesday was arguably the most all-encompassing internet campaign since the dawn of web 2.0. There’s plenty of coverage on its conception and reception, so I won’t go into that here. Instead, I’d like to explore the meaning of the black square itself — as an icon of the movement, and as a definitive artifact of our internet era. At risk of oversimplification, I’ll break the black square’s meaning into two levels:

1. Black as in the skin color — and the cultural history that comes along with it; honoring the people this movement is all about.

2. Black as in blank — a form without content; an empty screen; the absence of white.

The latter became a point of contention once it really got off the ground. Activists and celebrities alike argued that posting the black square was an inadequate form of support. In this New York Times piece, reporter Tariro Mzezewa clarifies this view:

"It feels like it's a way for white people who aren't comfortable talking about racism to avoid doing so entirely, while acting like they are doing something. Instead of having to confront this thing that makes you so uncomfortable, you can post a square and it feels like you did something."

Some took this stance further, citing how the black squares may have done more harm than good — specifically, by crowding out the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag. Standing somewhere between silence and action (while possibly accomplishing neither), the black square added a wrinkle to the silence is part of the problem argument.

I don’t aim to demean those who posted the square. After all, I think it’s clear the square’s omnipresence generated momentum for all sorts of further action. And without fail, statements like the one above were met with equally convincing appeals in the other direction, rapidly spiraling the entire discourse into ambiguity. Any attempt to define Blackout Tuesday as a total win or loss would be impossible.

If anything, the fallout of Blackout Tuesday suggests our language for delineating positive behavior on the web needs development. In doing this, I think it’s worth exploring what momentum actually means in digital space; and what space means, for that matter.

Afloat cybernetic tides

The notion of space, whether prefixed by “digital” or “physical,” can carry vastly different meanings. Digital space isn’t static like the streets protesters occupy, or "used up" like the money of donors. Sure, you could say Blackout Tuesday hijacked #BlackLivesMatter; but the #ship itself floats in waters where the premise of “hijacking” is brought into question.

The movement’s digital front wasn’t laid with bricks or erected like a highrise. It emerged, at least in meatspace terminology, out of thin air, and continues to grow as such. Of course, immense efforts in the real world have made it all possible, but the laws governing its trajectory are as digital as they are physical.

So what are the mechanics (if you can even call them that) of digital space? Just as the shift from Euclidean to non-Euclidean geometry gave rise to new theories on the motion of bodies, digital space elicits new models for the spread of information. Ideas are no longer fixed to pages and publications, but they are hashed out in threads. We speak less of preservation, and more of compression and decompression. Media is no longer broadcast from the top-down, but grown from the ground-up.

The internet’s role in movements like the Arab Spring exhibited this revolutionary ground-up nature — further cementing the myth of the internet as the ultimate democratizing force. But the idea that the emancipatory nature of digital space would automatically permeate into the real world turned out to be an illusion. Under the aesthetic of democratization was just an unprecedented centralization of content and dialogue. And with such massive concentration of matter, to return to the physics analogy, comes the warping of space itself.

Ever since the abandonment of chronological feeds in the mid-2010s, space has become a point of leverage for the platforms — particularly, the ability to sort content and measure its potency with a granularity impossible with conventional media. So yes, the black squares mostly appeared on Tuesday in a temporal grouping, but they weren’t shown chronologically.

With the content variable out of the question (all posts being the exact same), it seems Blackout Tuesday bestowed upon Instagram as clean a test as any conniving social scientist could hope for. For the first time ever, the order of timelines was dominated not by what was inside the frame, but the information surrounding it — the users who posted the squares and the reactions they generated. I can’t imagine a better setting to test the effects of social pressure on digital activity en masse. Well, that’s a pretty cynical way to look at it...

Our “timelines” can be divided like newspaper columns and valued like real estate, but that’s about the extent to which digital space resembles physical space. Like television, social platforms have limited spots advertisers bid for. But on the platforms, the space available isn’t fixed. With each post and impression, digital space expands like an accordion.

So while platforms exercise the godlike role of directing the global conversation, users are implicitly tasked with expanding available advertising space. Activists and shitposters become anodes and cathodes of the same circuitry, at best maximizing voltage and minimizing resistance to data flow. With the electrification of human processes, we’ve moved away from a mechanistic ontology, to a cybernetic one. We are no longer gears in a machine, but nodes in a circuit.

The point is, while Blackout Tuesday may have taken up space on #BlackLivesMatter, it also sparked new corners of Instagram’s billable ad space. The movement’s success is still measured in the real world, so its usage of digital space is more zero-sum. A list of protesting resources will draw different real-world outcomes than a black square; but to Instagram, it’s all just pink slime.

I don’t mean to bring a raincloud over this encouraging cultural moment. But I think maximizing impact requires we understand the field we’re playing on. And the black squares, controversial as they were, may actually provide crucial insight as to how we might hasten much-needed revamps to our brave new world. We’ll get there, I promise.

Black boxes under black squares

What happens online doesn’t stay online — as is true of all forms of media. Just as Hitler’s voice boomed through the radio waves of Nazi Germany, and as raw TV coverage of warfare in Vietnam mobilized the antiwar movement in the US, the internet gives rise to new forms of both malice and activism. But concealed behind ongoing streams of content, the role of the medium itself once again goes mostly unnoticed.

There’s a simple metaphor that can help us understand — or more precisely, account for our necessarily partial understanding — of the platforms’ role in digital space. It’s called the black box. This term refers to technological systems in which we observe inputs and outputs without knowledge of their inner workings.

Today, the most fervently discussed black boxes involve artificial intelligence, where arguably even those who build them don't know exactly how they work (by definition in the case of machine learning). Black box rhetoric has enabled heated arguments against the application of these AI’s in high-stakes domains of our lives — such as credit scoring, insurance rates, parole terms, and the deployment of police to one neighborhood versus another.

The black box concept also gives us another definition for the word black, which has surprising connections to the other two noted above:

3. Black as in opaque — the opposite of transparent; camouflaged; intentionally or unintentionally obscured.

In this sense of the word, it becomes clear that black boxes are not neutral. Blackness, as in leaving observers “in the dark,” is a powerful tool for exercising control while deflecting accountability. When misused, black box systems make it possible for authorities to act unjustly while covering their tracks.

What gets seen determines what gets done. The original intention of Blackout Tuesday acted on this idea — flooding social media feeds to highlight racial injustice (black as in the skin color). But the implications of its form factor (black as in blank) had the converse effect of burying the actual work happening on the ground, as well as the very injustices it aimed to spotlight. In this way, the black square itself became a black box — and in more ways than one, given our discussion of the platforms’ role in warping digital space.

I already touched on the platforms’ massive influence on global conversation — which goes mostly unnoticed because critical attention is diverted towards the content they host. The black squares were no exception. Like a magician using misdirection to hide their tricks, the platforms gladly gather spectators, while being extra careful to conceal their own trickery.

We’ve reached the end (whew!) of part one of this essay. I’ll be back soon with part two, where we’ll explore how black boxes are being deployed beyond social media — such as facial recognition and predictive policing. We’ll touch on whitewashing, “mathwashing,” and examine misleading metaphors like “the cloud.” Finally, we’ll arrive at a new idea of what “whiteness” might mean in a world of black boxes. You’ll have to wait for part three for the black holes :)

Read part two

Further reading:

What Screens Want

Social Media Made the Arab Spring, But Couldn't Save It

Image sources:

Black Square

@will___perkins

Revolution Tools

Electric Diagram

Black Square painting

“Can you hear me, Major Tom?

Here am I floating 'round my tin can

Far above the moon

Planet Earth is blue

And there's nothing I can do”

From outer space, Planet Earth may look blue. But on the ground level, it's a burnt orange haze of flames and tear gas. And to say there's nothing I can do wouldn’t be right either. I can donate, sign the petitions, share posts to create awareness... But for starters, I just want to get my own thoughts straight.

While ground control addresses more urgent matters, I float along in a tin can—watching, reading, and listening to all that comes through the transmission of my laptop screen. With a privileged feeling of security, and blessed with a surplus of time, I write through my thoughts in effort of making sense of it all. I hope, at least, it can help in a small way. As always, I'd love to hear your thoughts and/or disagreements. This is a conversation, so I invite you to join me in pushing it just a little bit forward.

Dialogue and violence are polar opposites. They're probably the most polar of opposites I can think of. Some close contenders are construction and destruction, peace and war, love and hate. But melt them all down, and you're left with the same substrate: humankind’s greatest abilities, and our worst instincts. On this level, dialogue and violence aren’t isolated acts; they are states of being. Dialogue is generous, optimistic, and sustainable. Violence is territorial, cynical, and shortsighted.

Dialogue and violence hang in a balance governed not by conscious action, but by situation. If you're staring down a huffy grizzly bear, talking it down won't be of much help. Likewise, even the swiftest roundhouse kick won't make your boss give you a raise. Behaviors are only advantageous in certain settings. Violent encounters champion cunning strategy and physical prowess, while dialogue favors compassion and understanding.

But of course, the real world is fuzzier than that. Unless you're in a bar fight or a Socratic discussion, the suitable response isn't so clear. Twitter, our "global conversation," often feels more a war zone. And some of the most progressive music also happens to sound the most violent. When healing and hurting flow through the same channels, it’s not easy for an outsider to know which is occurring. What's really happening at the center of a mosh pit, violence or dialogue? To me, the answer is far from obvious.

Because dialogue and violence draw out their own favorable behaviors, they also elicit different expressions of power. In violent conditions, power can be understood more literally—applying force to physically conquer an opponent. But in dialogue, power is deployed through the artillery of stories — that of the white savior, the computer wiz kid, the nasty woman, or the black thug. A story’s proliferation (or lack thereof) hinges on its adherence to the status quo, the storyteller’s access to capital, and somehow still, their gender and skin color.

To describe power's use and misuse of story, the word "representation" is oft uttered. But representation, while it's happy to put a person of color in a lead role, has no problem with the network being owned entirely by white men. Representation gives all agency to the representer, and none to the represented. And in recent years, the limits of this representation rhetoric have become clear — such as Colin Kaepernick losing his job after taking a knee to illuminate racial injustice. Being "represented" doesn't mean you've been given a voice.

Nowhere is power’s suppression of voice clearer than in the moment of an arrest. You have a right to remain silent, not a right to be heard. You have a right to be represented (by an attorney), but your own voice is a liability. Anything you say can and will be used against you, but won't be heard by those in power. The cuffs are drawn, and you're on the concrete. The asymmetry of power has already extinguished any chance for dialogue to mount. It's hard to speak when there's a knee pinned to your neck.

And when voice isn't given, it must be claimed. The Black Lives Matter movement has been tremendously successful in doing this — achieving awareness through protests and other organized action. Yet in this post-Trayvon Martin, post-Michael Brown, post-Eric Garner, post-Breonna Taylor, post-Ahmaud Arbery, post-countless others world, we've witnessed yet another appalling murder of George Floyd. Voices have spoken, but seemingly haven't been heard.

The George Floyd protests exhibit what happens when power continually denies voice. To call it a cautionary tale isn’t strong enough. Violence IS what WILL happen when dialogue is ruled out as a viable option. It's an inversion of the old saying your mom might've told you as a child: Sticks and stones may break bones, but only because the words aren’t doing enough. If the bullies aren't listening, as the logic goes, maybe they'll listen to destruction. Hand-in-hand becomes eye-for-an-eye; fire is fought with fire.

But sadly, the outcomes of this response have been far from perfect. Property destruction, a stand-in for inaccessible oppressors, unfortunately includes the collateral of many livelihoods. And as the response to racial injustice has snowballed into other interests, it's become increasingly difficult to know who to root for. Swirling together in the same pressure cooker, there's anti-authoritarianism, Robinhood-style opportunism, accelerationist white nationalism, and perhaps some misplaced Covid stir-craze. Rodeo Drive is ransacked, "Kill Bezos" is spray painted on windows, and white supremacists are disguising themselves as cops. Meanwhile, journalists are on the pavement coughing out tear gas. When violence carries out that which is best accomplished with dialogue, things get messy.

The pandemic is no longer the story, but the setting. As we’ve become less accustomed to seeing each other face-to-face, it seems social isolation has had an unfortunate by-product: forming coherent dialogue is more challenging. Our technological capacity for dialogue is greater than ever, yet the perpetuation of violence favors our primal, tribe-like impulses. And as added economic pressures accelerate pushes for overhaul, civility devolves into blind militance. But justice won’t be found on the other side of a smashed window.

Violence begets violence, and so does dialogue. These two states of being, polar opposites as they are, do have one thing in common: they’re contagious. And if the pandemic has taught us anything about managing a contagion, it’s that we’re better off addressing root causes than fighting symptoms. Put in reverse, this means we need not only instances of dialogue, but also conditions for its proliferation. Yes, silence is part of the problem, but so is not listening, and not acknowledging power’s sway over your own voice. And we can’t forget dialogue entails more than just representation; it means all voices are heard, respected, and acted upon. Only through an upwards spiral of dialogue, you have a right to remain silent will become you have a right to be heard.

While others are on the ground vocalizing, reporting, and cleaning up the mess, I’ve been lucky enough to have the spare time to write this. I have the privilege to fear being merely misunderstood, while many fear not being heard at all. So I hope I’ve made this read worthwhile. If you’re interested, here’s some further reading/viewing:

The New Jim Crow

Are Prisons Obsolete?

One Nation Under

Marcy Me

Raised by Krump

“This is Ground Control to Major Tom

You've really made the grade

And the papers want to know whose shirts you wear

Now it's time to leave the capsule if you dare”

So today, I'll wrap up this Wizard of Oz chapter with a short “making-of” video. This is a 2-minute snapshot of the ideas and influences that got this ball rolling, the toil in bringing them to life, plus some creative wisdom sprinkled in from David Lynch, Mister Rogers, and others. So without further ado, enjoy the DREAM process reel:

WATCH NOW

Arguably, The Wizard of Oz’s most meme-ified moment is the “pulling back the curtain” scene, when Dorothy uncovers the true nature of Oz and the charlatan supposedly running it. Today, this curtain-pulling trope appears all over pop culture — from podcast titles to Drake lyrics. In common speak, the saying behind the curtain typifies all that has been deceptively obscured or hidden from us — whether by Trump, Zuck, or David Blaine. You pull the curtain on any entity meddling with your reality bubble, like the school bully, the rap game, the White House, or the “fake-news-liberal-media.” In any case, there's one thing you probably wouldn't pull the curtain on: yourself.

My aim with DREAM was to reveal the people and myths pulling the levers of our digital world. But even if it succeeded in doing that, the argument was yet another narrative carefully manufactured behind a curtain. Painstakingly constructed out of sight from you viewers, DREAM is my own version of reality rendered in the tools available — namely, dramatic music, clip selections, juxtaposition, and other tactics of cinema. All of which collectively implies: "Trust me, I'll show you the way."

In a similar charade, the "Great Oz" preserves his governing power through balls of fire, an artificially booming voice, and the awe-demanding Emerald City. Literal smoke and mirrors. Likewise, DREAM, albeit more honest in spirit than that of the Wizard, is an artifice. Behind dazzling clips and fancy edits is just a guy staring at a screen, pushing buttons to manipulate your viewing experience. So with this process reel (a fabrication in its own rite) I wanted to pull the curtain on myself.

My favorite resurrection of Oz's curtain-pulling energy in a modern context is The Truman Show, which is why I chose it to be the skeleton of my process reel for DREAM. If you haven't seen the movie, it's a Matrix-esque "waking up" tale of Truman Burbank, who unwittingly discovers he's the star of a reality show. The film's sapience on today's digital-endemic anxieties is stunning, but I'll spare you of that here (watch it yourself and report back!).

Having spent his entire life on idyllic Seahaven Island, Truman repeatedly expresses a desire to travel to Fiji. Like Dorothy's imagined land over the rainbow, Fiji is Truman's stand-in for the nebulous world beyond his limited existence. But his longing is always met with faux-bewilderment: "Why would you want to do that Truman?"

Literally out of the blue, Truman receives a tangible signal of that other world. Seemingly falling from sky, a studio light crashes down on the pavement outside of his house. A curious artifact to say the least, this light serves as Truman's proof of the world beyond Seahaven — as well as his license to go out and find it.

As the cracks in Truman's reality begin to show, the film's central questions emerge: how do we know what's real and what's not? What's behind the curtain, and how do we get there? DREAM grew out of the same line of inquiry, though far more amorphous in the beginning. Galvanized by work from Kirby Ferguson, Maria Popova, and Negativland to name a few, I realized I didn't need to go out and shoot something to answer my questions. So when the Oz allegory idea arrived out of the blue, like a light out from the sky, I couldn't help but to search for the rest.

From a young age, Truman had been conditioned to fear the open water — to prevent him from wanting to leave Seahaven. So when he finally makes up his mind to set sail, he really means it. But of course, Truman’s escape to Fiji isn’t going to be easy. The show’s executive producer summons a vicious storm to stop him in his path (very Wicked Witch-esque, wouldn’t you say?). Awash tides of my own making, I slogged through notebook scribbles, word docs, and Premiere sequences. Like Truman, I began to lose control of my ship, but I was also the producer summoning the storm. So by the time my bow crashed into the wall, I was practically ready to delete the whole thing. But thanks to guidance from USC's incredible MA+P faculty and advice from friends, the ship somehow stayed afloat.

Thankfully, my process has changed a lot since starting on DREAM. In fact, it was a necessity in making it to the finish line. But I’m happy to have documented my workflow at that point in time, as well as the entire cycle that emerged out of it — from the peaks of idea infatuation, down through trenches of drudgery and self-doubt.

WATCH NOW

So this is, hold your breath... a video about the making of another video that’s based on movie, told through the lens of another movie. And yes, even this video exhibits my process precisely the way I want you to see it. I hope you’re critical of it, and more importantly, feel compelled to find your own curtains to pull. So with that, I’d like to finally draw the DREAM curtains to a close. I’ll see you soon with the next installment of VU JA DE.

With this post, I’d like to expand on some concepts from DREAM and introduce a few others that didn't make the cut. So if you're not already sick of me talking about The Wizard of Oz, and you're in the mood to jog the old cerebrum, read on.

Disclaimer: it's on the longer side, and I'm trying to keep the academic jargon to a minimum, but it should be worthwhile if you enjoyed the film.

Nobody in the world today was alive when The Wonderful Wizard of Oz book was published in 1900. Even its successor, the film, is over 80 years old at this point. Yet if there's any takeaway from the story's enduring resonance, it's that while society never stops changing, our deepest struggles are timeless.

The Wizard of Oz has quite a fascinating background as it is, and even more so when you consider its parallels with today's age. It's widely-known to be an allegory of the gold standard. But on a broader level, Oz deals with society's valuation of our labor and intrinsic worth - which is where it becomes relevant to social media, advertising, and algorithms. But to understand this, we first need to paint a picture of the world this story emerged from.

The first 20 minutes of the movie reflect exactly what comes to my mind when I think of the American frontier - dusty plains, a washed out beige tinge, bonnets and pioneer dresses. But this is no Little House on the Prairie. It's Kansas during the Great Depression (or the 1890s Long Depression in the book). Times are tough, and the soil is even tougher. And like today, the recession hits hardest those already in precarious financial standing; in this story, it's the farmers.

Amidst this backdrop we're introduced to Dorothy Gale, whose farming family scrapes through the draught in a rushed frenzy. As an antidote to the austerity, Dorothy *dreams* of another world beyond the barren plains, where skies are blue and troubles melt like lemon drops. Little does she know, her fantasies will end up manifesting a central cause of her family's hardship: the gold standard.

The gold standard is a monetary policy linking a currency's value to that of gold, ensuring the amount of money in circulation can't grow too fast. This system, no longer active today, put farmers like the Gales at a severe disadvantage because the shrunken money supply drove down the prices of their crops. And since they borrowed money each fall to plant their annual harvest, farmers were forced to grow cash crops just to repay their debts - only further deteriorating the soil they relied on. This vicious cycle has surprising resemblance to today's internet. We'll get to that - just a little more history first.

Hints of The Wizard of Oz's gold standard allegory are hardly subtle. Take its title for instance: Oz (or ounces) represents the measurement of gold, and by extension, the valuation of the work required to attain it. The Yellow Brick Road, then, can be seen as the gold standard system with the added vector of time - the outcomes of navigating the uneven financial landscape. Leading both to prosperity and destitution, the golden path is laid in bricks of policy.

Recognizing this, the nation's farmers and other "plain people" coalesced into the People's Party, the first populist movement in the US. Fighting vehemently for various financial reforms, the populists scored their first big win with FDR's New Deal, which abandoned the gold standard (for US citizens, at least). Building on this bedrock of progressive policy, the American economy charged forward for a few solid decades.

For a while, everything seemed alright on the American homefront. But the cyclone of instability picked up again after a few decades. In the 1970s, the global economy began to stumble, prompting Nixon to complete what FDR started: halting usage of the gold standard in international trade. This wasn't so much a continuation of populist interests from the New Deal era, but instead reflected a more general confusion regarding the state of the economy. With diminishing need for agricultural and industrial work, nobody was quite sure where the next source of growth would come from. This is where our story finally begins to converge with the internet.

Initially known as ARPANET, a Cold War defense project, the internet materialized in sync with this economic slowdown. Anti-communist sentiments swirling, Washington began to step aside from corporate affairs - loosening its grip on the internet in the same way it had with monetary policy. So in these powerful crosswinds of laissez-faire economics and rapid tech advancement, the internet was swept out of the hands of the government, and the World Wide Web was momentarily up-for-grabs.

Eventually, this cyclone of economic turmoil began to settle. Dorothy's home, a relic of the dwindling agricultural economy, came crashing down into uncharted territory: the digital frontier. Chaos turned to silence, and silence turned to anticipation. Separating past and future was just a shoddy wooden door, and hopes of what lay beyond it sparked rampant imagination.

Distrustful of Washington's handling of past affairs, many internet thinkers envisioned this digital future to be free of political jurisdiction. Instead of petitioning for the government's backing like the People's Party, their vision excluded Washington altogether. At last, the Wicked Witch of the East was defeated!

Surging with countercultural utopianism, the so-called cyberlibertarians rejoiced. John Perry Barlow, a founding member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Grateful Dead lyricist, defined the cyberlibertarian attitude towards the government:

“Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us”.

Here's a video of Barlow reciting the full speech (he has sadly passed away since then). With noble intentions, and a healthy dose of countercultural hubris, this triumphant proclamation rang with a vigor akin to that of the Mayor of Munchkinland. Leveraging freedom not only from the government, but also from material constraints, the cyberlibertarian Lollipop Guild laid their own path to prosperity with bricks of code.

Dorothy jovially strolls down the Yellow Brick Algorithm, mirroring the happy-go-lucky attitude of 90s cyberculture. Seemingly transcending the limitations of the physical world, cyberspace appeared to be a cornucopia capable of enriching both the economy and the human condition, FOREVER!

Her first two companions along this road – the Scarecrow and the Tin Man – reflect the definitive character of Silicon Valley's early days: a unique balance between idealism (lacking a brain) and solutionism (lacking a heart). In DREAM, I framed these these characters more simply as the contradictory ambitions of "free information" and the valorization of entrepreneurship. Internet pioneer Jaron Lanier reflects:

“We wanted everything to be free because we were hippie socialists. But we also loved entrepreneurs because we loved Steve Jobs. So you wanna be both a socialist and a libertarian at the same time, and it’s absurd . . . there’s only one way to merge [socialism and libertarianism], which is what we call the advertising model, where everything’s free but you pay for it by selling ads”.

As the trio naïvely rambles on, this hidden dilemma gradually *bubbles* to the surface. Right at the turn of the millennium, the burst of the dot-com bubble shook the tech world to its core - suggesting an inability to fulfill its enormous financial expectations. As a result, Silicon Valley quickly shifted from a boundless honey hole to something of a haunted forest. Dreading lions, tigers, and the bear market, Dorothy and her two friends skittishly trekked through the ominous woods.

Just as this tension reached its peak, out popped the lion! Menacing on the surface, the Cowardly Lion quickly softened up after some interrogation from Dorothy and company. In the cybercultural context, the Cowardly Lion could be seen as the Valley's double-down on the advertising model. Further amplifying its "disruptive" facade, Big Tech concealed its nervous reluctance to charge users directly for their services.

The original inspiration for the Cowardly Lion was likely William Jennings Bryan, a lead figure of the People’s Party (labeled “cowardly” because he had brilliant speaking skills, yet was unable to secure a presidential election). Bryan argued that abolishing the gold standard would spread wealth without having to grow gold reserves. Similarly, the advertising model promised to finance the internet's expansion without charging users. But following the dot-com bubble burst, Big Tech sought additional methods of monetizing its position between users and content. So Silicon Valley, desperately seeking a path out of the dot-com forest, found the Cowardly Lion to be its only way forward.

For a while, this move seemed harmless, and the glorious Emerald City was once again in sight. After all, society had gotten along just fine with advertising since well before The Wizard of Oz was even written. But the internet, unlike previous ad-supported media, lives in a far more intimate, measurable form-factor. The onslaught of available information, paired with increasingly powerful computational tools for pattern recognition, transformed advertising beyond recognition - from Madison Avenue into the incredibly lucrative beast of surveillance capitalism. And with the Wicked Witch of Washington out of the way, her younger sister came of age with almost zero regulatory oversight.

With all the attention towards "privacy" issues, the more subtle affect of this shift is often lost. It's not that platforms are deliberately spying on users; rather, it's the more fundamental shift in technology’s relationship to culture. As some have put it, if you're not paying for a product, you are the product.

Sure, the internet wasn't the first "free" ad-supported media. And entertainment's use value is almost never perfectly aligned with its exchange value. But on the internet, the messages that thrive aren't those with the best ratings or the most stellar reviews. Rather, it’s those that stimulate the most monetizable reactions.

So the platforms happily connect ‘content creators’ with hungry audiences, but only on their ground rules. Caught in the crossfire of data brokerage, creative works become “valuable only insofar as they serve as a kind of 'signal generator' from which data can be mined,” according to Astra Taylor. So with the gold standard in the rear-view mirror, the algorithm-fueled 2000s gave rise to an even more insidious system of value exchange.

In the book, anyone who enters the Emerald City must wear green-tinted glasses. In the same fashion, endeavors of all kinds now redesign their practices through the abstractions created by social platforms. News needs to be shareable, food needs to be Instagrammable, and festivals need to be... fyre.

It seems data has become the new gold standard. Much of our economy is now dependent on the growth of its reserves, and its value determines what work is worthwhile. But there's one key difference: because of the nature of digital space, the value of data derives not from its scarcity, but from its abundance.

Yet pseudo-scarcities still drive behavior in lower realms of commerce - in the form of likes, followers, and blue verification marks. Wielding these levers, platforms covertly incentivize cash crops over sustainable ones. Works are not rewarded for originality, integrity, and truthfulness. Rather, shock value and #relatability bring in the numbers, luring sensationalist headlines, clickbait, and even children’s nightmare videos.

Gradually, the signals have become more valuable than what they’re signaling. The explosion of the fake follower market suggests a perceived audience is worth more than an actual one. We run around collecting monopoly money while our "digital topsoil" loses its fertility. Gradually, as healthy crops become harder to grow, societal dysfunction ensues.

I'd like to take a brief intermission from this rant to jump to a quote from Ev Williams, previous CEO of Twitter and current CEO of Medium.

"Say you’re driving down the road and see a car crash. Of course you look. Everyone looks. The internet interprets behavior like this to mean everyone is asking for car crashes, so it tries to supply them."

Incentivization isn't the same as causation, but on a certain level this statement rings true. By rewarding certain behaviors, algorithms summon more of the same. But there's an even subtler dimension to this: it doesn't matter whether you're in the crash or not; even if you're just an observer, your eyes aren't on the road.

This is what happens when Dorothy and her friends, totally consumed by their quest for the Wizard, completely forget about the Wicked Witch of the West. Spying on them through her glass ball of Big Data, she chooses an indirect strategy to stop them in their path: “something with poison in it, but attractive to the eye, and soothing to the smell.” She musters a beautiful field of poppies between Dorothy’s crew and the Emerald City, through which they merrily frolic. Signifying the effects of opium (a derivative of poppies), their excitement quickly devolves into paralysis.

This is where the Asleep @ the Wheel chapter title comes from. Like the conked out Tesla driver, we coast along in a high-tech cocoon, completely blind to where we're headed. As Big Tech colonizes new realms of human life, our defenses lie dormant in a content-induced slumber.

The Wicked Witch of the West, also known as Elphaba from Oz’s prequel Wicked, wasn’t evil from the beginning. Her evil nature actually began as a well-intentioned rebellion against Oz’s corruption. Similarly, her army of winged monkeys, who terrorize Dorothy and her friends “are not inherently bad; their actions depend wholly upon the bidding of others. Under the control of an evil influence, they do evil,” says Henry James.

From Alex Jones, to Pepe the Frog, to the Russian bot army, our internet monkeys are products of an algorithmically-mediated society. Simply carrying out the Witch's ideology, this weaponized tech puts the disrupt in disruption. Making matters worse, bad actors like Donald Trump leverage the resulting economic disparity and social alienation to their own benefit - appealing to “over the rainbow”-esque dreams. This is where it goes full circle: these misplaced populist fantasies loop together the powerful and the powerless into a single vicious cycle.

The power of the Wicked Witch, though, proves to be quite fragile. After being doused in water, she shrivels into oblivion until nothing is left but a cape and a pointy hat. Along with her hideous green skin dissolves the hostility of her winged monkeys. Without the tyrannical third-party standing between them, dialogue can initiate between the "good guys" and the "bad guys.”

But even after defeating the Witch, Dorothy’s team soon discovers the Great Oz was not the magnificent wizard they had made him up to be. With Toto’s help, they find that behind the curtain is nothing but a frantic “humbug.” Utterly dismayed, the crew realizes their entire excursion may have been in vain. The Man Behind the Platform’s power didn't come from any fantastic skill, but instead from a different form of sorcery: sustained illusion.

Yip Harburg, writer of The Wizard of Oz’s unforgettable soundtrack, echoed this idea – that our desires too often lie “in the images of things rather than the things themselves." No character embodies this more than the one singing most of his music – Dorothy. What began as a longing to return home became an arbitrary quest to find the Wizard who would grant her wish.

In DREAM, this dramatic moment of reckoning comes to an abrupt halt, cutting to Adobe Premiere's "Media Offline" screen. I'm sure many of you thought this was a mistake for a few seconds. This was a last-minute decision, but in retrospect, one of my favorite moments. I needed to transition into a silver-lining somehow, but certainly didn't want to suggest there was a clear-cut solution to the whole situation. As is often the case, I let the narrative guide me out of this roadblock.

The land over the rainbow was a fantasy to begin with. Populated by people from her actual life in Kansas, Dorothy’s dreamscape was a method of processing her real world struggles. Her friends along the way extend the scope of this. Seeking a brain, a heart, and courage, the crew trekked all the way down the Yellow Brick Road, only to discover they each already had what they were seeking; they had just been conditioned out of seeing it. Dorothy’s two tickets back home were on her feet all along; she just hadn’t realized their power.

In book version, the iconic ruby slippers were actually silver. Extending the gold standard allegory, many agree the silver slippers represent bimetallism - the populists' alternative to the gold standard in which a currency is tied to both gold and silver. Whether or not this is true, pop cultural understanding of the slippers is dominated by the quote associated with them: "there's no place like home." This recitation signals the moment Dorothy is finally ready to confront reality directly.

So what do the slippers represent in DREAM? I'm still not sure myself. But my favorite answer right now is imagination. The Land of Oz itself is a brilliant exhibit of imagination's liberating potential, but also the slipperiness of its slope. What Dorothy's adventure demonstrates most is how economic injustice often devolves into rampant fantasy - something that's truer today than ever.

We've entered the New Gilded Age, and the parallels to Oz's time are everywhere. Supplanting Rockefeller and the Carnegie, we have a new cast of barons: Bezos, Zuck, and the rest. A few corporations dominate most of our economy, eliciting uproar and disillusionment from everyone else.

Just as the Progressive Era ushered out the gold standard, we need to channel populist tendencies into productive outlets. Keeping in mind the gold standard’s subjugation of laborers in Dorothy’s time, we must be vigilant of how today’s data brokerage system is doing the same. It's a privileged issue to be complaining about, but important nonetheless.

If our goal is to cultivate healthier harvests of dialogue and policy, we first need to nourish the soil underneath our feet. This starts by reframing the incentives driving our "digital land" usage. This is one of my aims with VU JA DE - practicing a form of digital localism. While I'm currently still relying partially on the platforms, I hope to soon reduce that reliance to zero.

Swept along by the perpetual cyclone of innovation, we’re constantly navigating the uncharted territory of media and markets. Like Dorothy, we have no choice but to journey onward (or so we're told). And now, so much of our lives revolve around a more abstract form of production – harvests not from dirt and soil, but from zeroes and ones. This digitization of our lives muddles our grasp on value and worth.

As we wander through the internet's dark forests and alluring poppy fields, we can't forget to take a hard look down at the Yellow Brick Algorithm guiding our way. And even when we return home, we may be reminded the odyssey was all just a dream. But like Dorothy, we must keep believing that beautiful land over the rainbow can indeed exist.

Well, we just blew through 100+ years of history and some pretty beefy topics... I hope that didn't sound too much like an APUSH class. If you're still with me, give yourself a pat on the back. Maybe you’ll want to check out DREAM again with all this in mind. And if you're somehow still hungry for more, here's some further reading/viewing:

• Adam Curtis' documentary series All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace

• Fred Turner’s book From Counterculture to Cyberculture

• The Twilight Zone S2E29 “The Obsolete Man”

Works Cited

WATCH NOW

DREAM allegorizes The Wizard of Oz to explore how the internet came to be the way it is today. I'll leave it at that for now. It's 16 minutes long - perhaps it'd go well with a drink during your personal socially-distanced happy hour, or as an appetizer for tonight's TV binge. Above all, I hope it serves as a conversation starter with others who may enjoy it as well.

Anyway, it's been my most grueling project to date, but also the most rewarding. If you contributed thoughts or feedback along the way, I’m very grateful your fingerprints are present. I hope you enjoy and share your thoughts!

Thank you,

-Billy

Side note - if you’re curious about any of the content I used in this piece, check out the “Sources” doc at the bottom of the page, or by clicking here. Feel free to reach out to me directly if you’d like to know more.