The best links of 2024, part 3
Featuring Elan Ullendorff of Escape the Algorithm
‘Tis the season for rapacious gift guides, viral Spotify memes and ubiquitous year-end retrospectives. To celebrate, our Saturday editions look a bit different this December: I’m bringing you the very best links of the year, as (arbitrarily and subjectively) chosen by me and three very special guests.
Earlier this month, we kicked things off with an eclectic digital treasure trove from Matt Muir of Web Curios and a #longread compilation from Dan Toller of The Electric Typewriter. This week, I’ve invited the designer, professor and “algorithm escape artist”
to share his favorite links of 2024.Elan is a brilliant, essential commentator on social platforms and online visibility, whether in art or in print. He’s the creator, most recently, of howdidyoufind.me — a dizzyingly meta little website that lots of you enjoyed earlier this year — as well as myriad other algorithm-subverting experiments. Elan is also the author of Escape the Algorithm, one of my very favorite newsletters and a continual source of incisive, lyrical observations about life online. He had this to say, for instance, about his Facebook Marketplace finds:
I’ve come to see Facebook Marketplace as a catalog of human transition. An object up for resale is its owner trapped between a life lived and a life to be lived.
Ah man. I love that shit.
Needless to say, Elan’s favorite links of 2024 are a varied and wonderful bunch, from sharp critiques of digital culture to alternative search engines. Please be sure to check out Escape the Algorithm for more picks like these. I’ll be back from Europe with my picks next week!!!
Elan Ullendorff’s favorite links of 2024
Sometimes the cinematic universe of newsletters that I’m a part of feels like the “being a millennial is just venmoing the same $20 back and forth until one of us dies” meme except that it’s me, Caitlin, Matt, and Kristoffer et al. recirculating each others’ links. So it feels appropriate that I have the honor of taking on the capital “L” Links mantle today.
Plenty of conflicts of interest here, but only because I tend to turn people I admire into friends/collaborators. The denizens of the poetic web are like mosquitoes that have learned to turn on lamps to attract other mosquitoes. My particular obsessive lens is hyper-attunement to and defiance of algorithms, so prepare to be made attuned and defiant. Here goes!
“The Cantor in the Brothel” and “The Secret Synagogue Tapes”: A two-episode podcast series from David Zvi Kalman, a historian of religion and technology, about efforts to archive cantorial singing. Part 1 is about taking cantors out of the synagogue and putting them in the recording booth; part 2 is about sneaking recording devices into the synagogue on shabbat to illicitly record. Listen to this while pondering what it means to capture moments of culture expressing itself (even when they resist capture), and how the shift in context changes the experience of that culture. I think you’ll find it apt to many of the internet age’s biggest questions.
Bop Spotter: Speaking of musical archives! If you recognize Riley Waltz’s name, it might be because earlier this month Riley accidentally found himself in the position of Foremost Expert in Real-Time Citibike Location Data after the United Healthcare CEO assassin allegedly fled the scene on a Citibike. But I prefer his earlier work.
This link has everything. Criticism of notoriously expensive and inaccurate police surveillance equipment. Archival of culture expressing itself. Sociology of a street corner. Reggaeton. A stupidly simple tech stack. Riley hid a solar-powered, constantly Shazam-ing Android phone high up on a pole in the Mission district and built a website to document any songs that it hears. The only thing that would make this better is if someone located the device and successfully executed a Rickroll Injection Attack on the target syste— [receives a transmission in my earpiece] I have good news.
Traffic Cam Photobooth: More surveillance, but make it cute. Load up the website, navigate to the nearest traffic camera, and take a self-portrait using a feed that your tax dollars helped fund.
“Are ‘Algorithms’ Making Us Boring?”: When I was in college, one of my many ideas of fun (I had others, I promise!) was to go down theory rabbit holes. I would do this while sitting in the library, searching the internet or culling citations for criticism of a piece I was researching, and walking to the shelf containing the identified book. If I found the book compelling enough, the process would repeat itself. In that time, inquiry was a visceral, physical process, requiring me to carry stacks of books up winding stairs and down hallways. The architecture of the library itself felt like a path to knowledge, and the path to knowledge like a piece of architecture. There’s nothing quite like the experience of opening your mind to a new way of thinking, only to immediately destabilize it.
On the internet, what passes for criticism often takes the shape of debate: a ping pong with two players held firm, trying to win, rather than an unfolding. But Max Read’s review of “Filterworld” by Kyle Chayka — a writer whose work I greatly admire — brought me right back to that library, to the heart-racing feeling of questioning my assumptions, and then questioning those questions.
The insights are sharp, but just as importantly, the block quotes and cited footnotes each send me on their own ontological tab-laden journeys (in particular, I’ll be thinking about the quote from Jeb Boniakowski’s “We Must Build An Enormous McWorld In Times Square, A Xanadu Representing A McDonald’s From Every Nation” for a very long time). It led me, as good criticism does, to resolve contradictions in my own thinking, and toward my own conclusions.
“The Algorithm of the Mind”: That’s all to say that these days, I find myself increasingly drawn towards an extrinsic rather than intrinsic understanding of algorithms. To borrow language from Ali Alkhatib’s musings on defining AI, we might do away with the idea that an algorithm is “a technological artifact with political features” and instead recognize it as “a political artifact through and through.”
One reason I love this piece by Alicia Kennedy is that it reckons with the very real anxieties of social media without fetishizing web algorithms as their sole arbiter. Instead, there is a curiosity for other systems that exert control, and existed before the internet: capitalism, consumer psychology, institutions, to name a few.
“Field Companions”: Over the past decade there has been nothing sexier from a consumerist perspective than turning objects into Smart Objects. But the vast majority have been, to my mind, completely empty of the magic that was promised. Connection without connectedness.
There is nothing particularly “smart” about Spencer Chang’s Field Companions. They’re rocks with a little hole carved out for an NFC chip. Put the rock near your phone, and it will play back an audio recording of the place where Spencer found it.
But with this simple idea, Spencer has imbued actions, objects, and memories with meaning. The creator’s travels are imbued with a deliberateness, attention, and resolve. Objects are capable of holding memory. Nature becomes an interface for gifting. Gifting is folded back onto nature. Your Wifi-connected fridge could never.
Quiet Posters: [Keep reading even if you don’t use Bluesky and never intend to use Bluesky] Quiet Posters is a custom installable Bluesky feed that highlights posts from people who post less often. It sounds like a gimmick, but I use it basically every day, and — in the way that a great conversation facilitator can encourage people who usually don’t take up much space to speak up and those that do to take a step back — it feels like a breath of fresh air. Some days it’s the only feed that I look at. A dozen or so posts, and then I’m caught up.
Even more than that, using Quiet Posters really unlocked for me the potential of decentralized social networks. Letting people install custom feed logic not only means algorithmic agency, but also means that the incentives for gaming the system to boost engagement becomes diluted.
Marginalia: I will never shut up about Marginalia, a search engine for the non-commercial internet. The internet is the primary portal to knowledge, and search engines are the primary portals to the internet. Right now we have very few search engines (and even fewer search indices), which means that one of the best ways to make money is to weasel your way to the top of the results page on Google, which makes Google terrible to use, which makes knowledge inaccessible.
I’m excited about Marginalia, and even more excited about the prospect of a large variety of folk search engines (that same kind of algorithmic diffusion offered by custom Bluesky feeds).
Next time you’re looking for a discursive experience of the internet (rather than to find something specific), fire up Marginalia.
Eyechat: One story you could tell about the internet is that it’s an answer to the question: what if we created a whole economy focused on competing to get as many eyeballs to look at your thing for as long as possible? Neal Agarwal’s Eyechat points the mirror back at this story. It’s Chatroulette, but just eyes (no audio). Spend time gazing into strangers’ eyes and bask in the knowledge that you’re robbing internet ad conglomerates of profit.
Caitlin and Elan’s Unread Picks of the Year
We have been trained to equate a work’s engagement or views with its value. Indeed, there’s a whole content playbook that pops up around the end of the year to promote “our most shared recipes,” “my most liked reels,” or “the most popular product picks.” No shade to Caitlin’s 12 most read stories list just below — that is one signal of worthiness — but there are all sorts of reasons an email can go unread: subject line missed the mark, sent at the wrong time of day, conflicted with a major news event, didn’t get shared by someone with a lot of followers, too “political” for this platform, too much of a bummer for that platform, the list goes on.
Very often this says less about the stories and more about the information and attention apparatus that they operate in. So I asked Caitlin to select a story that deserves another look, and selected one from my own archives as well.
From Links I Would Gchat You: the surreality of writing an out of office message after a miscarriage.
And from Escape the Algorithm: reconciling Spotify Wrapped with my identity as a parent.
“Century-Scale Storage”: What’s this... a last-minute bonus link? I just pored through this magnum opus by Maxwell Neely-Cohen and I promise it’s not just recency bias that drives me to share it. What can I say, the Links never stop Linking, and this is a good one.
It touches on dozens of my hobbyhorses, (and gave me some new ones too!) including but not limited to: digital data is more ephemeral than we think! Passing on rituals of archival care and maintenance may be more important than the archive itself! Culture is a major driving force of hardware storage options! The relative strengths of centralized vs. decentralized protocols! The efficacy of piracy as a long-term preservation tactic! The world should probably be run by librarians! It’s just a fascinating undertaking to look at every possible angle of a single, simple question: if you had to store something for 100 years, how would you do it?
In case you missed it
On reflection, it would’ve been far more interesting to run a list of my LEAST-read posts of 2024. Again, this sort of thing is why I love Elan’s work!! Check out Escape the Algorithm for more. And while you’re at it, in lieu of least-read posts, perhaps you’d still like to revisit last year’s most popular Links Originals. We covered #7-12 in previous editions.
6: An interview with the artist and researcher Ben Grosser, whose work probes the basic assumptions and values beneath online life.
5: A short essay on the existential dangers of outsourcing care to technology.
4: An analysis of the “last great internet mystery” and the people who solved it — against all odds and with the help of facial recognition.
Thank you, as always, to the paid subscribers who make this work possible. It takes many, many hours to produce both the weekly link round-up and the dozens of pieces of original reporting and analysis that I’ve published this year. If you appreciate this work and would like to contribute directly to the sustainability and success of this little project, you can do so here — with my gratitude! xx
That’s it for this week! And that’s it for our ~special guests~. I’ll be back with my favorite links of the year next weekend.
Warmest virtual AND holiday regards,
Caitlin