At this point in my life, I have zero interest in the following:
NBA
NFL
NHL
Kylian Mbappé
Bolton Wanderers FC
Ruben Dias
Marvel
Ed Sheeran
Nike
A holiday in Fiji
People being overcharged for Uber journeys
Cage fighting
Pokemon trading cards
Solar lighting
Maps of the world re-arranged to look like farm animals
The Journal of Pharmaceutical Analysis
A career in healthcare
Innovative blockchain platforms
Spectacular Hawaiian shirts
Fae Farm
WHO Council on the Economics of Health
Colour-changing unicorn mugs
Tesco (or anyone else’s) cucumbers
Disaster Capitalism
The Hankyu Hanshin Express
72 hour deodorants (is there something I should know?)
Sadiq Khan
Simply Red
Digital Marketing News
Moms Against Vaping
Pistachios
SAP
XBrain Total Brain Optimizer®
Videos of people performing the Heimlich manoeuvre
The town of Barnsley
Nigel Fucking Farage
Darren Fucking Grimes
The Order Of St Andrew
The new all-electric Ford Explorer
Pet insurance
The latest jacuzzi innovation
Surveys from people who have no idea how to conduct surveys
The Raina Indian Restaurant in Amsterdam (unless you’re thinking of flying me over?)
Miracle axes
Waterproof silicone shoe covers
Tamil cinema actors
Bears shitting in the woods
Celine Dion
I have nothing against anyone that likes any of these things, and won’t rule out the possibility that, one day in the unknowable future, I might become interested in them, but right now my rather small brain spends most of its time buffering, and generally operating significantly beyond its depressingly meagre capacity for new information.
I mention this because – not sure if you’ve noticed it? – but someone seems to have been tweaking the Twitter algorithm in recent months. Before, if I wanted to find out about something new, the convention was that I did a search for it. Simple. Now, on the other hand, Twitter thinks it has an obligation to prompt me with several dozen shiny new things in my timeline every day. Thus forcing me to spend time telling the algorithm that I’m not interested in any of them. Given that the things I’m not interested in probably outweigh the things that I am interested in by a factor of around 18 million to one (guess), the prospect of having to tell Twitter about each of the millions of things I’m not interested in is somewhat daunting. To the point of recognising that, now I’m spending more time telling Twitter what I’m not interested in than looking at what I am interested in, I’ve reached the point of exhaustion.
I realise too that there is a contradiction here. Sometimes it is a good thing to jump me (and everyone else) out of our comfort zones and have a peak at something new and potentially exciting. This is the way of helping to prevent the problem of getting trapped inside radicalising echo chambers.
I want to be nudged outside my comfort zone and I don’t want to be nudged outside my comfort zone.
This is not a difficult contradiction to solve. Just give people a dial somewhere in their settings where we can select what percentage of wildcard ‘come and look at this’ provocation we get to receive.
When I’m in the middle of a project (and probably shouldn’t be looking at Twitter at all), surprise me, say, 0.01% of the time. When I’m on vacation, or clearly exploring (the algorithms know what I’m doing), then up the wildcard content to, say, 0.04% 😉
It’s not rocket science. It might help restore a little of our collective insanity.