getting human voices into my working day

One of the things I have noticed about lockdown is the lack of human voices. Of course, I don't live alone, and there are kids and dogs and neighbours shrieking/barking/having fun in the back gardens (I live in a terrace) and workmen and dog-walkers and daily health walkers doing their job and business out front, but it's not the same as someone in your workplace gently discussing a problem five desks away, far enough to be screenable if you need to concentrate, close enough to tune in if you lack interest. Work had a music to it; the undernoise of the city centre (buses, weather, crowds) the intrusive squawks of buskers and vehicle alarms, the soft clatter of blinds, ventilation, machines and the sound of people talking to themselves, concentration humming, foraging for tea and biscuits, chatting, discussing, swearing gently at recalcitrant technology, hmming, aha-ing, tapping, typing and generally making the sound of working.

In its absence, I've struggled to concentrate. At work, when things get too noisy, or the tinnitus shrieks, I use that Youtube Classic, Ten Hours of Pink Noise. At home, that just makes me feel more isolated. So I've taken to listening to work-related seminars and short videos. But everyone overperforms and is too exciting, too groundbreaking, too sincere. I don't belong to the Youtube generation. This pitch and intensity is so needy, I can't do other work while it's going on.

In my quest to find someone calm enough, I turned to the motherlode of mindful narration, Sir David Attenborough. I can't listen to him during the working day, as the subject matter is always too thrilling, but the calming, measured tones approximate the professional sounds I am familiar with. My species' morning chorus, if you like. So I let him talk briefly through an observation or two (Life Stories is good) while I check my morning emails and meeting schedule, pick up yesterday's lists and reminders and sketch out the work of the day.

It has to be audio only, of course. Try to listen to David Attenborough on Youtube and he'll mention something you just have to look at. Don't take my word for this. Try playing this video in a hidden tab. You'll look, I promise.

the merlin beggars copyright wars part 1

Every month I create a youtube playlist of songs I listened to and favourited the previous month. This is a weird hangover from when I was in a mixtape-swap  community (yes I know) earlier this century, when I cracked a methodology for making mixtapes with pretty much zero effort. The methodology is as follows:

1. Carry a personal listening device with a favorite or add to playlist function (I use a banana yellow ipod nano which barely holds any battery life any more).
2. Refresh the personal listening device content monthly according to any criteria you please (I use recently added + random from entire collection).
3. At the end of each month extract favourited tracks and order them into a compilation.

And there you go, a monthly playlist with pretty much no effort on your part. Naturally I complicate things by drawing a cover, writing a bit of blurb and agonising over song order, but these are all things I enjoy doing.   Draw a picture? I'm in.

Once upon a time I'd print them onto a CD, but last year this started to feel wasteful, and maybe a touch morbid - what was I creating all these artefacts for? Was I expecting them to be handed out at my funeral or something? So I switched to Youtube playlists.

This created issues. Mainly this issue:

Song videos like this are often described as "merlin beggared" after a music rights group that was very, very active with location-specific take-downs at one time. They seem to have calmed down a bit, and most music has moved onto the automatic recognition treadmill, so I'm not having to do as many substitutions as I used to. But they're still there, and still happen, and sometimes very big names are caught in a flash of Youtube refusenikdom - I remember one month I couldn't find any Prince on Youtube, for example. How much effort must that have cost someone?

The other main irritation for the Youtube mixtaper is those artists who feel a stream of their full album is good, but not individual tracks. Preciousness? Profits protection? I'm no more able to understand it than the habit of putting tracks with significant chunks of silence and/or random noise onto albums - leaving the user inexpertly completing what the producer should have done (and probably spent a long time arguing with the artist over).

Recently I've found an odd phenomenon of tracks with a snatch of unrelated track/movie footage attached. Which is a way of hacking Youtube's automatic content recognition software, maybe, as below.

Where it's well chosen and brief, I sometimes take the lumps and put it in the mixtape anyway. But when it's a large chunk of something not well aligned, it's got to go. It's another substitution.

Over the years, there's a steady trickle of takedowns, channel deletions, rebrandings, label changes and other entropic processes which steadily fillet the playlists. At one time Youtube would leave the removed video in the playlist, a grey thumbnail like a dead tooth in the grinning mouth of your playlist.

They don't do that any more. All that remains of the music that has been disappeared is a single alert message: one of more of the tracks has been deleted and removed from your playlist. The older the playlist, the shorter it becomes. In the end, I suppose, every playlist will empty.

the day I had to re-educate my youtube profile

I was reminded by various things in the news recently (I'm still trying to parse that last link, seriously, Google is responding to what by doing what?) of the time last autumn when, for job-related reasons I briefly needed to reference some news stories about Child Sexual Abuse (CSA) on Youtube for a training presentation.  I also needed at the same time to  access some video promotions for CSA perpetrator programmes, access some internet safety and grooming public information films by CEOP (UK Police) and some new (and old) films from the NSPCC. All job-related, fully factual content.

I noticed the problem when I then embedded an (unrelated) video in a blog post and watched the content through. Among the usual run of cat videos, 80s electronica and garden walk-throughs there was a single really odd-looking recommendation. I clicked it to check it (as one does) and discovered a truly deeply horrific fake news paedophilia/celebrity conspiracy "news" video. I made an abortive moment towards reporting the content, and then froze, remembering the not guilty verdict on the Girls Aloud torture porn trial. There was a good chance this bilge counted as free speech, fiction, comedy, entertainment or all of the above.

So I clicked away again and instead went to disable the related videos on the embed link, reminded once more that with the variability of content on Youtube nowadays you really kind of need to do this on personal content as well as professional, or you'll end up exposing people to who knows what. But the worst was yet to come.

I got back to Youtube and discovered that my "up next" videos had, to put it mildly, changed. My recommendations were now very one note indeed, and all variations on the same sort of video. Some  politicians, some celebrities, but all of it was CSA-related, all clearly fake, all news/expose/revealed shock-jock style ranting, and all uniformly the sort of horrible fake news crap that I was disappointed existed, and certainly didn't want to have spontaneously served into my browser.

I started to google for fixes.  I found the methodology quite quickly, but the process itself was slow.

The fix, fact-fans, is to go and adjust your recommended videos manually, i.e. for every single video click on "Not interested". This will remove the video, and eventually, all videos like it. This takes a strong stomach, and a lot of clicking, but in the end I fully resealed my bubble against the fake-news sewage tide. Which is great for my blood pressure, but this terrible, horrible, afactual... no, counterfactual content still exists, hovering, ready to jump in the moment someone shows a change in their viewing preferences. And while I did it as part of a research run, in a well-balanced and rational state of mind, how might it different if I'd triggered something similar inadvertently in a moment of doubt, confusion, unhappiness or vulnerability? What might be the long-term effects if I lacked the wherewithal to hack back the tide of misinformation?

After all, as I discovered, it doesn't have to be a big change at all. Just a few clicks, and it comes rushing in, a foul tide of information pollution; as damaging to mental health as the real thing is to physical health.

Day 13 : the focus group hack the nanny-ware

Something different today. 9/10 young people turned up to the A.N. Web Workshop (I have a couple a year) and I asked them, where do you live on the internet?

Only two laughed and said they didn't live anywhere on the Internet, and, on further questioning, one of them turned out to be trying to hide his blog. A couple were on one-note joke sites like sloganizer -- which they had great fun typing my name into. Workshop leader, please leave your dignity at the door. The blogspot I mentioned, a couple of myspacers who didn't want to show off their profiles and a couple of bebo babies who did, a home-made homepage, a favourite shopping site and Tagged, the mere mention of which made the rest of the room groan.

My idea was that we'd look at the sites and assess what made them appeal to the young people, but my borrowed office environment had blocked all non-work-related sites and done their damnedest to disable the browser on the sawn-off laptop they grudgingly provided (to a background mumble which augered ill for whoever had told us having an internet connection in a meeting room would be "no problem"). While the adults are sharing site-blocking funnies (did you hear the one about the legal department having all emails about sexual harassment blocked?) the young people are on the laptop, finding a proxy site that isn't blocked. It takes them less than 30s.

Of course, the proxy site is teeming with nasty adverts and toxic pop-ups but the young people don't give it a second glance. They're here to check their messages, see if anyone has left them "love" (a Bebo thing) and count their myspace friends. Then they remember that they're not supposed to be showing us their myspace pages and we end up on mine instead. "Only 19 friends in two years? That's rubbish, that is."

As the borrowed laptop disappears under a torrent of spyware (I try to fix it, but discover I don't even have enough privileges to bookmark pages) and I haul the last young person off its twitching corpse, I feel weirdly gratified. They really are all online, just like the future promised. They're keeping in touch with friends in different towns, swapping music recommendations and providing each other with emotional support. This is madness!

.. and this is Tagged, the only unfamiliar name to come up all day. It's another video posting site, and I suspect its popularity with the group may be to do with none of the blocking programs knowing about it. Another I'm not going to join, I fear -- but then, I don't spend my life in a world where Youtube is eternally locked behind a wall of nannyware.

Californians may wish to know that Tagged is currently looking for a Director of Advertising Sales, an Online Sales Ad Executive, a Senior Software Developer and a Software Developer - Release Manager, and that if you join their team, you can expect a competitive salary, performance bonuses, generous pre-IPO stock options, full health benefits, 401(K) plan, and perks like a well-stocked kitchen, gym membership, monthly massages and various offsite activities.

I get a cheese and pickle sandwich and some terrifying jelly sweets, shuffle together my research and the new design notes, and hop the bus home. They want the site to look tasteful.

Truly, times have changed.

Verdict: I'm going to post a cat video because I can.