I tried to tell myself not to read this book when I first heard what it was about. I’m already quite cynical about Big Tech, and I thought that this would only entrench my biases further, with no real benefit to my mental health. But I saw it sitting on the shelf at my library and I just couldn’t help myself.

The author, Sarah Wynn-Williams, worked at Facebook in the global policy department, where her responsibility was (ostensibly) to help the company negotiate with countries around the world. She started with the optimism typical of tech companies in the early aughts, believing that she would “make the world a better place.” But over the course of the book, she becomes disillusioned by Facebook’s relentless pursuit of growth and profit, which came at the high cost of creating political instability in countries like Myanmar and ultimately the US.

None of this is very surprising, if you follow the news about social media companies over the last few years. But Wynn-Williams’ position gave her access to the top brass at Facebook, Cheryl Sandberg and Mark Zuckerberg, and she reveals some really bizarre behaviour by the leaders of the company. For example, Zuckerberg once asked her, on a visit to Indonesia, to organize a “gentle mob,” for no apparent reason other than to make himself look cool. These sections were both hard to read and hard to put down, having the feeling of learning some juicy gossip about someone you don’t like. You kind of have to take her word for it, because corroboration from other sources is not really built into the narrative style, but if it’s true, these incidents confirm the old adage that power corrupts.

storygraph link

hardcover link

A while back, I wrote about my history with e-readers, and highlighted in particular the Pocket app that’s available on Kobo devices. I named it “Kobo’s killer app,” because I think that e-readers hit their sweet spot with long articles: for shorter pieces, I can live with the slight eyestrain of reading on a phone or computer screen, and for full-length books, I’ll always prefer a physical copy. For me, e-readers are perfect for the in-between articles and essays that can be read in 15-30 minutes, and Pocket is the key piece of software that makes it happen. That is, until now.

Sadly, the Pocket service will be shutting down. There are other alternatives for saving articles, but there’s no (easy) way to access them on the Kobo.

What to do? Luckily, the open-source community comes to the rescue.

In case you couldn’t tell, I enjoy reading a lot. I also like to record my experiences, for example, by tracking the books I read on The Storygraph, and tracking the movies I watch on Letterboxd.

There’s an app called Readwise which is great for readers like myself. In the app, you can point your phone’s camera at the text on a page, and it will use OCR to save it as a quote. The app also allows you to review the quotes that you’ve saved in the past. It’s fun to revisit the favourite bits from books that I’ve read. The Readwise app implemented well, and I found it useful enough to pay for a subscription.

Having said that, I’m a firm believer in owning one’s data, so I decided to try to create my own solution. Introducing… “Quoteshelf”! This new section of the website contains all of the quotes that I’ve exported from Readwise. On the main page, I can swipe through a random selection of quotes, and I can browse the author index to find specific books.

To accompany my recent post reviewing the book One Day, I attempted to use DALL-E to generate an image of a calendar. The book is about events that occurred on a single day in history (December 28, 1986), and so I “engineered” the simplest prompt I could think of:

a drawing of a calendar with the date December 28, 1986 circled

I picked up this book because I, like many others, feel like I need to reduce my phone usage. It’s a constant distraction and I hate it when I find myself scrolling through some feed, not looking for anything in particular.

Newport does a good job explicitly explaining what I implicitly knew was true: there’s value in solitude and letting your mind think without forcing it to process a constant input of information. The philosophy of digital minimalism aims to reclaim that value by being intentional about technology.

Unfortunately, the book falls short for me when it comes to how to actually achieve this outcome. In its introduction, it states that willpower and superficial lifehacks aren’t enough to break the grip that the attention economy has on us; but, the suggestions given in the book read exactly like superficial lifehacks based on willpower. His biggest idea is the digital declutter, which involves removing all optional technology for 30 days. But how do we do this, if not through willpower?

storygraph link

I was building the 404 page for this site and a random idea occurred to me. I know that from a 404 message, you should always link back a valid page, usually the home page, but then I thought it’d be fun to link to a random blog post also.

I came up with a component that scrolls through a random selection of items with an animation like a slot machine. Svelte has some pretty cool features for supporting transitions and animations, so I wanted to learn more about that.

You can play with the final result here.

As a TODO for myself, maybe I’ll extract this as a reusable component and publish it.

I’m introducing a new type of blog post under the label of quick reviews. My goal is to write down brief thoughts about the media that I consume, short enough that the entire contents of each post can appear on the main blog page. Keeping it short incentivizes me to do it more often, because I don’t have the pressure to write a lot.

The contents are what I would post on my Storygraph and Letterboxd profiles, but as I become increasingly disillusioned against the world of tech capitalism, I’m trying to own my data as much as I can. I’ll still use those platforms, but I want my words to belong to me and not live on someone else’s servers.