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Comment by kasey_junk | Hacker News Reader

I quite liked this piece to read as art. But there are some pretty simple solutions to the general malaise he is expressing:

1) get out of the myopic SV culture. There are lots of actually interesting problems to solve (even in the very small world of software) and if you are tired of talking about the same old thing, go somewhere that isn't doing that.

2) if you aren't interested by the data you are consuming, don't interact with it. Don't consume facebook, twitter, HN, et. al. Or more realistically only consume the ones that add value to your life. It's harder to opt out of being collected in the massive hoovering of this data, but in nearly all instances out of sight, really is out of mind.

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"if you are tired of talking about the same old thing, go somewhere that isn't doing that."

I was getting bored with music a while back, so I did an experiment: I limited the music on my phone to nothing older than five years. To do this I had to remove hundreds of albums.

At first there wasn't much left, so I went looking... for nothing released more than five years ago.

I found quite a bit of new stuff.

Eventually I re-added old stuff I loved, but my musical repertoire had broadened quite a bit.

Part of the problem today is that the amount of signal around us has increased so much that it's overwhelming, and people haven't yet learned that it's okay to tune out a significantly larger amount of chatter than what they had to tune out in previous eras. It feels like ignorance, or being "out of the loop," but it's essential.

I plan on repeating the music experiment regularly. I should probably purge some of my "feeds" too.

TLDR; I've done what you've done on a massive scale.

Most things end up depressing me if I follow them, knowing people are willingly participating in such an absence of brain activity. I had to stop myself from constantly scrolling down on facebook when I was bored (I realized I don't even actually read what people post most of the time because I'm looking for something interesting, but I still subconsciously notice what people are doing somehow.) I'm not against this by any means, so don't take this as me complaining. I don't know what's popular right now, I don't know what is trending on twitter. What's left is my little bubble where I have what I need to explore what I'm interested in. I can find interesting articles, I can find new music, and I can talk to people who actually are interesting to talk to. I've completely cut off any noise and am completely left with pure signal.

I'm completely out of touch with most everybody, and I've never felt better. I guess this goes hand in hand with being super introverted, I couldn't imagine actually holding a conversation with anybody around me with the information I know that wasn't super technical or completely shallow. I've lived with this obvious gap between me and other people my entire life though so it doesn't even feel lonely anymore when I can just find whatever I need to keep myself occupied when I'm bored.

The beauty of the internet.

>Most things end up depressing me if I follow them, knowing people are willingly participating in such an absence of brain activity.

What does this mean?

It means passively absorbing information can make you dumb because you're not demanding brain power (lack of using a muscle atrophies). Compare scrolling on Facebook to watching Television -- completely passive.

It means that they are adapted to a much higher stimulus level and lose interest if they have seen something beforehand. Also that they are a conceited brat who is convinced that they are the center of the universe. Or at least that's how I read their comment.

TL;DR "I've built my own echo chamber!"

To the contrary, seems he built an anechoic chamber. The only signals he perceives is what he wants, cleanly. He has decided what he doesn't want, knows that most signals out there are just variants on the same such content, and blocks it all.

I'm approaching half a century old. Comes a point where you realize you have heard it all, and are not interested in anything "new" because it isn't. I'm this -><- close to shutting it all off and going seriously minimalistic. The tipping point would be a news service which presents only actual need-to-know news, and a stream of new music.

Address, enumerate, and centralize your core axioms. Build from there. Stop letting others dump $#!^ in your head.

The purpose of the anechoic chamber is not to keep out sounds from the outside, but to allow you to differentiate the direct sound you're making from the environmental reflections.

Since it is impossible not to live in some variant of "chamber", always has been, and always will be, this is an accusation without teeth. Which is probably a good thing, since it's also hypocritical, but fortunately, it can't bite you back; it's toothless.

The interesting question is whether you have built a good or a bad one, and what exactly "good" and "bad" even mean in this context. But there is no "not in a chamber" option.

The problem is, it's becoming necessary to live in some kind of chamber in order to stay sane. Staring into the infinite void of indiscernible and contradictory truth forever is more than the brain can handle. More than mine anyway.

The challenge is to maintain the right mix of echoes in your chamber.

Do share how you get on. I'm in the same position as you.

It's the nature of information at this point in history that you cannot possibly consume it all[1]. Therefore, you have to have some selection criteria, which will obviously be biased. If you want to call that an "echo chamber", well I don't know what to say to that.

[1] - https://what-if.xkcd.com/76/

That's the point, at least it's not constructed for you in order to sell something.

Interesting. I'm really deep into music, collect and buy lots of niche stuff from all kinds of genres, I listen to my collection quite a lot and enjoy it, but I find it increasingly difficult to discover actual good music that I wasn't aware of before. Sure, we all know the usual recommendation engines and some more specific year-end lists help too, but generally the recommendations feel all too narrow - "You like The Antlers?" - "Let me suggest this band that fits into the very same sub-genre and probably has been named all over the place before."

That's just not good enough. Whenever your taste isn't bound to certain genres, yet still very specific and hard to put into a score, it gets difficult. Actually I think this is a problem better solved by a small round of enthusiasts, real humans instead of algorithms or crowdsourced data. The latter always seem to fail when your taste ranges from, let's say James Holden (electronic, weird, yet carefully crafted), to Miles Davis, each for very different reasons.

While I buy my music, I enjoy the community over at what.cd which is just as enthusiastic about music as I am. Another community that helps can be found on rdio, which I use for previewing and discovering music - I only follow people with taste I can absolutely agree on there, and I'm really not a social network guy, but the community on rdio is great and knowing what those guys are listening to is very rewarding, and sometimes a good tastemaker.

Yet, I can't say that I'm completely satisfied with those options - there have to be some better places out there.

Every once in a while, spin the metaphorical wheel and just listen to whatever it lands on. Maybe the most recent song/album, maybe a random search on the letter "M" and take the first result, anything that just completely jumps you out of the groove. In the long run, I suspect this is a critical component of any exploratory plan.

On the one hand, the average result is disappointment, but every once in a while you get something you like, and then from there what you get is a new seed for exploration, which from there I get to do a new local hill-climbing exploration of. The rate at which new music is currently coming out exceeds the rate at which I can explore in this manner.

I'm often to picky or not patient enough to put up with random stuff. It's not as if I'm not wandering off beaten paths - I like jazz, ambient, soul, electronic music, post rock, 80s pop - really, genres have absolutely no meaning to me. However getting through all the noise and finding the good stuff isn't getting any easier these days.

I really like good curators in this regard - labels for instance, there are a lot of those that don't fit into the evil, greedy corporation narrative. Numero Group for instance - a fantastic re-issue label that digs out forgotten, rare or unreleased material and puts it into the spotlight, often for the very first time. Their track record is quite impressing.

However I get your general idea, I use it with my own collection - I actually have one of those smart playlists that picks an album for me I haven't listened to for quite a while. Sometimes you re-discover things you almost forgot about.

> Part of the problem today is that the amount of signal around us has increased so much that it's overwhelming, and people haven't yet learned that it's okay to tune out a significantly larger amount of chatter than what they had to tune out in previous eras. It feels like ignorance, or being "out of the loop," but it's essential.

It's worse than that; people will actively look down upon those who consciously "limit" despite the reasons. Hell, just the other day we had that pithy programming quotes article with one nearly equating preference with stagnation, ignoring nuances such as choosing the best tool for the job.

So sure, it's good to try out new things and "taste test" on a fairly regular basis, but if you don't filter almost all the rest of the time, it's unlikely you'll ever accomplish anything.

Maybe it would be also interesting to try limiting yourself to music that is older than 100 years for a while.

That would be interesting too!

>>> get out of the myopic SV culture.

This seems to be a recurrent theme throughout the article. All of the sideways conversations he hears and lamenting how we've become slaves to the data, and how all the people around him fit this stereotype or that stereotype.

It's interesting to note my father worked for Control Data in the 70's and 80's during its heyday. He spent a lot of time in SV during those formidable years of the valley. When I got older, I asked him why we never moved out there, and why he never took a job in the Valley if it was the coolest place to be for tech.

He said a lot of the same things mentioned in this article - about the suffocating culture, people "faking it until they make it", the tons of businesses being built on what he called, "bullshit and blue skies". He said it wasn't a place he wanted to raise his family, so we stayed in the Midwest instead. He's always maintained he was fine living as a passive participant in how technology took off and where it is today.

I guess the more things change, the more they stay the same huh?

SV reminds me very much of Hollywood, especially post-late-90s-bubble. It's more a center of commercialization than of innovation per se. It's also effectively a banking and finance center, as is Hollywood.

Has the banking/finance constituency been stable over the last decade, e.g. was it impacted in any way by the 2008 events in banking?

> He said a lot of the same things mentioned in this article - about the suffocating culture, people "faking it until they make it", the tons of businesses being built on what he called, "bullshit and blue skies".

Mixing with entrepreneurs at events around the UK, it's not unique to SV. There's a lot of it about here, and not just in London.

He explicitly addresses #2:

>We are not going to escape this crisis by putting ourselves in a cage. There is no opt-out anymore. You can draw the blinds, deadlock your door, smash your smartphone, and only carry cash, but you’ll still get caught up in their all-seeing algorithmic gaze. They’ve datafied your car, your city and even your snail mail. This is not a conspiracy, it’s the status quo, and we’ve been too busy displacing our anxiety into their tidy little containers to realize what’s going on.

I think that is too fatalistic. You can opt-out of the massive data collection through voluntary oversharing, i.e. Facebook and such.

What remains is limited (and localized) enough that it can be fought through democratic and political means. Regulation and legislation can limit what the main players (public transport, banks, municipal governments, postal service, ISP's) can do.

This battle is still far from lost, at least outside the US. It's not a status quo, and many people, not just digital rights fringe groups, realize what's going on.

It's easy to do interesting things in software. It's much harder to do them and get paid enough to lead a reasonable life.

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