Five Things: February 6, 2025
This is my bi-weekly “newsletter” delivered straight to your inbox with at least one guaranteed typo I’ll catch after hitting send! If email collectors’ items aren’t your thing, don’t hesitate to switch to the RSS feed, or catch me on the socials.
NOTE: 2025 is shaping up to be the worst-case scenario many expected, and although I’m limiting my doomscrolling as much as possible, it’s still been a lot. My Read Later folder is bursting at the seams because I haven’t had the mental real estate for much of anything after work, which has been crazy busy since the calendar turned.
_ONE
Combatting doomscroll | L. Rhodes
Doomscrolling, for example, leaves people feeling overwhelmed and incapable of contributing to more constructive forms of political action. We tend to treat that as a personal failure—a neurotic or masochistic impulse to inundate oneself with bad news online—but it’s just as much a consequence of the environment we create. After all, you cannot doomscroll unless others are providing ample doom to scroll.
I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that I was actively trying to limit my doomscrolling, and the need has only increased as the zone has officially and completely been flooded with an unprecedented amount of shit. It’s exhausting and makes it harder to find actual news coverage you can trust, and it doesn’t help that my local paper finally killed their print edition earlier this week.
As things were heating up heading into last year’s elections, I started evolving my thinking about the use of Content Warnings and hashtags to flag political content, mostly because I was tired of seeing all of the bad hot takes and links to bad journalism. Since then, despite following fewer than 100 people, Bluesky has steadily devolved into the depressing Twitter clone its power users apparently want it to be, even with filters in place. Mastodon, where I follow more people I don’t actually know, has been much better, but not entirely immune. I suspect its inherently anti-viral friction, smaller active userbase (which also means fewer bots and trolls), and more generous character count helps, but it might also mean my filters are more effective because of the culture of consent Rhodes highlights?
It’s a brief but insightful essay, and it also reminded me that Mastodon has visibility options you can use to limit the amount of doom you might be contributing to other people’s timelines. “Do unto others,” etc.
__TWO
AI-Generated Slop Is Already In Your Public Library | Emanuel Maiberg
“Is it the best use of my time doing this work on top of my other duties when customers may or may not care? And with the rising multitudes of AI generated content, will there come a point where it just ‘is what it is?’”
By focusing on quantity over quality and scale over curation, distributors AND libraries have helped create a discovery challenge for themselves and readers, that now includes having to sift through all kinds of AI-generated (and assisted) slop.
Distributors and aggregators focused on building the largest possible digital collections are taking in feeds from other distributors and aggregators with varying (or non-existent) levels of quality control, chasing the insatiable demand for growth by any means necessary. Whether it was the old days of blindly offering 200,000 self-published ebooks, or more recent missteps with disinformation and conspiracy theories, libraries’ alternatives to expensive Big 5 ebook licenses are disappointingly limited.
Even worse, because these distributors and aggregators aren’t vetting, identifying, or curating any of this non-traditional content, libraries’ already stretched budgets are inadvertently helping subsidize its creation every time they unknowingly acquire (or provide access to) these titles, making them more accessible. The distributor gets paid, the publisher gets paid, and libraries and patrons get screwed.
One could argue that traditional publishers are partly to blame for this, too. First, by lowering their own collective bar for quality over the years — neglecting basic fact-checking, and platforming disinformation merchants because they had an audience to monetize. Second, and worst, by treating libraries like pirates instead of partners. Similar to how their hamfisted approach to ebooks created a parallel consumer market for self-published authors, they’ve also created opportunities for these large, mostly uncurated collections filled with garbage to be sold to libraries as affordable alternatives.
___THREE
Knowing less about AI makes people more open to having it in their lives – new research | Chiara Longoni, Gil Appel, and Stephanie Tully
The rapid spread of artificial intelligence has people wondering: who’s most likely to embrace AI in their daily lives? Many assume it’s the tech-savvy – those who understand how AI works – who are most eager to adopt it…. People with less knowledge about AI are actually more open to using the technology. We call this difference in adoption propensity the “lower literacy-higher receptivity” link.
Taken alongside the growing research that shows who does and doesn’t benefit from using AI tools, the “lower literacy-higher receptivity” link feels like a no-brainer. (Also, maybe, confirmation bias, but the research appears to be legit.) In my experience, the two groups most excited (and vocal) about AI tools are the grifters and the people who want to believe creativity can be democratized because they lack a particular talent themselves.
Non-coders marvel at AI’s ability to generate code and build simple programs or websites, ignoring the prompting required to get something remotely useful, or the QA required to make sure it’s correct. Non-writers marvel at ChatGPT’s ability to generate interesting stories or useful marketing copy, because they find the act of writing too hard and resent the idea of being edited by another person. One wannabe influencer blocked me on LinkedIn when I noted his ChatGPT data analysis trick was just a basic pivot table.
In every scenario, none of these users learn how to DO anything, they’re just excited the little magic robot might (theoretically) save them some time or money, while letting them feel like they’re being creative, too.
I am not “anti-AI”… I am pro-craft.
____FOUR
Episode 50: Rebecca Burgoyne on Lean Six Sigma for Knowledge Work | BookSmarts Podcast
Conversations are really important. There’s a lot of nuance to our work, and a lot of those hidden like we talked about, people are working at home. There’s a lot of hidden things they’re doing. Putting people at ease, and just having a conversation about it can open up ideas.
It’s always fascinating to learn there’s a term, definition, or entire discipline that aligns with something you do naturally, but I did not expect Lean Six Sigma to join Systems Thinking as one of them. I missed Burgoyne’s presentation at PIF24 last year but was intrigued by its description, so I’m glad Joshua Tallent had her on the BookSmarts podcast to give an insightful primer on how to apply it to publishing operations.
I’m annoyingly obsessed with processes — understanding them, dismantling them, and re-building them (not as big a fan of documenting them, though…) — and a lot of this resonated for me, particularly for metadata and production work, but also marketing planning and execution.
If you prefer reading to audio, there’s a full transcript with the podcast, and she also wrote a good post about right after the conference last year that has been buried in my Newsletter Consideration folder since then. Sometimes you need to read something for it to stick, and sometimes you have to hear it.
_____FIVE
The Console Wars Are Over And Nobody Really Won | Zack Zwiezen
A fight between massive corporations trying to sell you plastic boxes that play games and their weirdly dedicated supporters. The fight was always silly, but very real and expensive, involving massive companies spending hundreds of millions of dollars on marketing, game development, and hardware. And for a long time it seemed like the console wars would continue forever. But that’s not what happened.
It’s an interesting time to be a gamer from multiple perspectives, particularly if you’re into video games. The range of quality games across genres and platforms has never been greater, and you’d have years of great games to play even if a new one wasn’t released for the next ten years. I’ve owned a console for most of my life, from my first Atari 2600 to my current Xbox, and I’ve rarely had the time, money, or interest to be in more than one ecosystem at a time. (Steam sales don’t count. Shut up.)
In the most recent console era, I went from the original Xbox to the Wii, to Xbox 360, Xbox One, and currently, the Series X. I’ve never owned or wanted a PlayStation in any generation. In previous eras, I chose the aforementioned 2600 over Colecovision and Intellivision; Vectrex over the 7600 and NES; and Sega Genesis over SNES. I’ve owned a variety of Game Boys and DSs, and although I play sporadically on PC over the years, it’s always been a secondary platform because I’m never dealing with that insatiable arms race.
I’m rarely playing the newest popular games, and have never sweated exclusives, so the console wars were mostly background noise for me. I mistakenly thought the Xbox One was poised to win the war when my wife expressed interest in its non-gaming pitch, while the Kinect’s potential seemed like a promising upgrade on the Wii’s motion controls. Unfortunately, the reality was underwhelming for almost everyone, and I was one of the few people who loved Xbox Fitness enough to offset everything else! RIP.
I think the writing was on the wall when Xbox tried to push digital-only access with the One, but they were too early. Fast forward to the managed decline of physical media, the rise of streaming services, and multi-billion-dollar studio acquisitions, and Microsoft’s next phase makes total sense. Publish a wide range of games for all platforms (perhaps with some strategic timed exclusives and expensive collector’s editions), while offering a proprietary portal for members that offers many of those games for “free” via subscription. Plus, many of them are playable on PCs, the vast majority of which are powered by a little-known product called Windows.
In that scenario, a dedicated console doesn’t need to dominate sales, which has basically been the reality for Xbox over the last two console generations anyway. It’s not a slam dunk, but I think it’s way more realistic than the clumsy attempts to break into gaming by Amazon, Google, and Netflix.
______BONUS
If you’re reading this somewhere other than your inbox and would like to get it via email, sign up here, or you can add the RSS feed to your favorite reader. You do you!
Discover more from As in guillotine...
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Keep blogs alive! Drop a comment.