We’re back with some mini-meditations on traffic—the digital obsession and the physical reality. Happy spring, finally from both of us.
YL: In the opening lines of a new Chinese high-school textbook, it is the year of 2028, and Ming Ming wakes up to the soothing voice of his automated assistant. Over bot-prepared breakfast, he scans the flurry news of the day — algorithmically curated to his personal interests — and hops onto his ride to work — an autonomous car that shuttles him through the roads with ease. In Ming Ming’s world, traffic — from the flow of news to the movement of vehicles — is seamless.
We live in a world where traffic — vehicle traffic, web traffic, informational traffic — abounds. More things come and go; they come and go more quickly. But reality is a far stretch from the frictionless world presented in the opening pages of the high-school textbook. It overlooks the arduous and messy task of traffic management. How do we manage the flow? How do we ease congestion? Who decides on the rules of who gets to come and who gets to go?
There’s a fast way and a hard way, of which we need both. The fast way is to let the algorithms do it for us. We’ve long given them the simple tasks of finding short-cuts: turning off pop-up ads, refining searches, weeding out spam. But, we’ve also handed over some major navigational responsibilities to big tech companies. Click this first to get the information you need. Here’s a song that you’d also be interested in listening. That lane is fake news; this lane is not. Follow him. Like her.
I’ve been thinking more about the hard way — relying on pure intellect and intuition to make our way through the streets of cyberspace. What are the core skills that we need to learn, develop and hone, in order to get through the traffic of the 21st century? How do I discern what is true and what is false? How do I arrive at the destination I need and the answer I want, in not the most efficient way, but in the safest way possible?
Full disclosure: I still don’t have a driver’s license. But before then, I might as well learn how to navigate the net.
SH: Traffic is the thing these days. In every newsroom where I’ve ever worked it’s been something of an obsession, because it more or less has to be. The model of journalism built around digital advertising relies on traffic. That means a certain number of people hitting a link to a page, the general flow of clicks to content, the eyeballs on the page that advertisers pay pennies to get. Traffic is not a measure of how good something is, or even of how interested people are in reading it, and no one thinks it is. Often it’s just a measure of whether or not a link was included in a certain newsletter, or whether a weird confluence of things led something to go “viral” online, a state that leads to a brief burst of the ever-elusive traffic.
One of the strange paradoxes of our use of the word “traffic” to get at this phenomenon is that while web traffic is supposedly desirable, real traffic isn’t. Being stuck in traffic is to be in state of frozen chaos and frustration. It is to be uselessly polluting. It is to be going both somewhere and nowhere at once. It’s one of the strangest states of human existence under automation--it illuminates the shortcomings of our engineering, of our infrastructure, of our own ability to move ourselves through the world.
The metaphor of traffic for clicks would seem to be a bad one, then, but I like it for that reason. It illuminates, subtly and weirdly, how dystopian the design of our digital business models actually is. The obsession with traffic, the endless drive for growth, the baiting of clicks with any method possible, the content factories…the metaphorical annals of the internet are clogged and weighed down with all of this. The drive for traffic creates a space of existential despair that is perhaps almost perfectly described as being stuck in traffic.
Reading and Writing:
YL: Wrapping up an article for Foreign Policy on AI pedagogy in China (keep your eyes peeled.) Taught a series of workshops at my high-school on “Self-Authorship” — the ability to tell one’s own story in an age when algorithms are doing it better. From now until November, will be working on a long form piece of narrative non-fiction on a social networking app in China, with the support of the Matthew Power Literary Reportage Grant. On the shelf: a couple works of non-fiction — Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport and The Great Firewall of China by James Griffiths, a short story — Folding Beijing by Hao Jingfang, and fiction — Enigma Variations, by André Aciman.
SH: I wrote something very near and dear to my heart for Real Life Magazine: a piece on the metaphor “bandwidth” that was born out of our very first Fossil Poetry. Also, for Popula about the weirdness of freelance workspaces and the gig economy, and about the semiotics of Theresa May’s Frida Kahlo bracelet. I’ve also been writing a lot of news for The New York Times arts desk; among them, this piece on an unconventional artists’ residency, how pieces of a historic house are coming to the U.S. this summer, and public art on bus stops. I devoured The New Me by Halle Butler, which fulfilled my desire for dystopian dread.