Podcast & Pensées 127: Russia’s Antisemitic Agitprop. Mental Hygiene and Visual Images.

First thing I wanted to talk about, which is something I noticed on my Twitter about five days ago. I first noticed I was getting a lot of pictures of David Bowie and the Rolling Stones. Never really liked the Rolling Stones. Really loved David Bowie from the age of about eight onwards. And that got me thinking, why am I getting this stuff on Twitter?

And then I realized, ah, for some reason, I had cut off images. There was a setting in Twitter which I used as part of my incoming troll radar to block images. And so I would never see images on my Twitter feed, just text. And suddenly that disappeared. And then I looked for the setting and the setting had disappeared. And then I Googled it and I discovered two days before I worked this out, because I was wondering why am I, what is different about this experience? And what is different is I’m getting two channels of information and I’m used to only getting one channel of information on Twitter, which is just text.

I would click sometimes on images to look at them if I wanted. But basically, it was my only way of controlling what was going into my mind, into my brain. And they got rid of the setting inside the app which is obviously very annoying because clearly there’s an intelligence behind this and what the intelligence behind this is trying to do is involuntarily feed us with visual memes which can have a greater impact on imprinting on our mind and printing archetypes on our mind. And so obviously that’s very annoying that I as the consumer who actually pay because it’s my main medium for initial writing.

And the algorithm trolls me and I troll it and it inspires it. I’ve trained the algorithm so that it hits me with my for you feed is, every now and again there’s a bit of a change but it’s basically exactly how I, I’m pretty happy with it the way it is especially if I can cut out the images. And because of that, I pay for it. And it’s extremely annoying to have my experience determined in this way. That’s one thing, because I think of it as a violation of my right as a consumer or to have the experience that I want. And then I think also, what’s behind it? Why is the intelligence behind the algorithm trying to feed me images which I don’t want to see. It should be no skin off their nose. And it’s very annoying.

So I worked out a solution for this, which I now have. I have quite a few different types of browsers on my phone, which I use for different applications. I use the DuckDuckGo browser now for You