[ recap ]

Last week we looked at taste: Rick Rubin's judgement and what disappears when a machine removes the learning from making.

[ thoughts ]

For the past week, I have been putting my apartment into boxes. The living room, the bedroom, my books, art I’ve collected from visiting different countries, all of it into a storage unit, because I am [ temporarily ] moving from NYC to Quito.

I stopped posting on social media. There was no time, and there isn’t much to say.

In all honesty, I felt kind bad about it.

I thought I would be penalised for the gap and would have to climb back up.

Meta describes posts as an audition, each post shown first to a small group and pushed further if the early signals hold, with no fixed formula for reach, but they also track how many times people have interacted with an account in the past few weeks.

The post after the gap reaches fewer people.

In 1999, the anthropologist Natasha Dow Schüll sat with a woman called Mollie in a Las Vegas hotel room. The room was free, given to Mollie by the casinos in return for the hours she put into their poker machines.

Schüll asked whether she was hoping for a big win. She was "not playing to win."

She won sometimes, and the winnings went straight back into the machines.

She played to keep playing, and to stay in the machine zone, where nothing else mattered. She described that zone as the eye of a storm, her vision clear on the screen while the room spun and went quiet.

Mollie worked at the MGM Grand taking hotel reservations. Her eleven-year-old son lay on the bed behind them with a games console rented from the front desk, playing a driving game set in Las Vegas in which you go from venue to venue looking for games to play. He was zoned into video games constantly, Mollie said, and added that she did not set much of an example.

Schüll gave fifteen years to this, across casino floors, industry conventions, Gamblers Anonymous meetings and a clinic where she worked as an intern. Her book Addiction by Design puts a question the industry preferred to keep pointed at the gambler: are the problems in the product, the user, or the interaction between them?

A few months after that conversation, Schüll stood at the back of a packed, windowless room in the basement of the Las Vegas Convention Center, where a panel of gambling-industry representatives had gathered to talk about the profitable future of machine gambling. They talked about gamblers' desire for "time-on-device."

[ creativity ]

French poet Paul Valéry wrote an essay published in La Nouvelle Revue Française in March 1933 on his own poem "Le Cimetière marin." The line everyone takes from it is not the line he wrote. The familiar version, that a poem is never finished but only abandoned, is from W. H. Auden's paraphrasing.

Valéry names the mechanism:
For anyone chasing perfection, he wrote, a work is never finished but abandoned, and the abandoning gets done by one of two things: weariness, or l'obligation de livrer, the obligation to deliver. He called the moment a kind of accident, like a train of thought broken by fatigue or an interruption.

The poem does not end because the poet knows it is right, it ends because the poet is tired or the printer is waiting.

Lola, a young buffet waitress Schüll interviewed, described a moderate day at the machines as "win, lose, win, lose."

Winning big early, she said, could stop her getting into the zone at all.

Anthropologist Nick Seaver spent time with the people who build for continuation on purpose. His fieldwork was with developers of recommendation systems, and they described the job as hooking people into frequent or enduring usage.

Better predictions had stopped meaning happier users, so the field turned to behaviour instead, measuring stopped videos, skips, repeat plays and dwell time.

Seaver calls these captivation metrics and borrows from the anthropology of animal trapping to think about what they produce. Continued use stands in for satisfaction, and a proxy of that kind cannot separate delight from anger, loneliness or habit, recording only that the person had not yet stopped.

In February this year the European Commission preliminarily found TikTok in breach of the EU's Digital Services Act over addictive design and said the company needs to change the basic design of its service, turning off infinite scroll over time and putting in screen time breaks that work.

The Tableau Physique, published with his Essay on the Geography of Plants, is a cross-section of Chimborazo roughly three feet by two (90 by 60cm), with the plants written onto the mountain at the heights he found them. Down each side run columns: elevation, temperature, humidity, air pressure, the line where snow stops melting, and the temperature at which water boils. He called it a microcosm on one page.

The finding would have fitted in a sentence. Instead he put the numbers on the page beside the plants, so that anyone reading it somewhere else could see what he had been standing in when he found it.

When you write something down for someone else, put the conditions next to the number. Where you were, what you were using, what you didn't measure.

Try it on something you already know how to do. Pick a process you have running well, a recipe, workflow or settings you copied from somewhere, and write out the steps as you would give them to someone else.

Then, down the side, write what you were standing in while you worked them out: the room, the machine, the materials, the version, the year. Most of that will be things you have never written down, because you have never had to.

[ sign off ]

I am writing this from Panama City, five days into a stopover, with almost everything I own in a storage unit. The apartment is gone, the posting schedule is broken, and everything seems to be staying afloat.

Mollie drew the loop and named the middle of it, and she was still inside it when she put the pen down. Getting the idea onto one page is the part a person can do alone.

Stay the one doing the noticing.

Thanks for reading. See you next Sunday.