Beyond The Last Ad Break | 2039

S03E39

Television News has no memory beyond the last ad break. Updates on what I’ve got going on, and how a healthier media diet might be a good idea right now. 

Bog Mag: http://dust.bog.life/
Unsound 2020: https://www.unsound.pl/en/intermission/
New Solarpunk Essay: https://www.thejaymo.net/solarpunk-rusted-chrome/
Zine: http://thejaymo.net/zine
My new youtube show! http://comeinternetwith.me/

Links:

Website: https://www.thejaymo.net/
Podcast: http://permanentlymoved.online
Support: https://www.thejaymo.net/support/

Permanently moved is a personal podcast 301 seconds in length, written and recorded by @thejaymo


Beyond The Last Ad Break

Three warm welcomes to anyone who has joined the feed after my conversation with Matt and Holly on Interdependence.fm. If you are hearing this as an episode in the archive, then I encourage you to go subscribe to their Patreon and support their work. I enjoyed speaking with them, it’s been awhile since I’ve had the opportunity.

My favourite part of the conversation was when I derailed whatever it was we were talking about to go on a rant about Enya. I am serious about wanting to make a 6 part mini series about her work btw. If you’d like to help make that Enyavitable please do head over to thejaymo.net/support

This week is more of a missive than an essay as I have several things I’d like to mention.

Firstly, I have an audio piece called ‘The Dust of The Sun’ hidden away in the newest edition of the online webmag Bog. As well as an embed of Episode 20-25 – All Art Is Dust Eventually.

You can head over Bog.life and check it out.

Bog is fast becoming a favourite online publication. Bog build a digital garden for each issue. It feels a bit like the early web in aesthetics but the back end is all JS and CSS. Definitely worth spending some time checking it out. The first issue on pre-history is set up using playcanvas as a 3D world that you can explore in the browser.

It’s awesome to be excited by a website. Do go check it out, link in the show notes.

Unsound Festival 2020 began yesterday. Online from the 1st through to the 11th of October. There’s a bunch of amazing looking webinars and streams happening. I’ll link the schedule in the show notes. 

If you support the festival on Patreon at the highest tier then you can get the Unsound 2020 Intermission Festival book or buy it on their website. Which includes a piece from me called ‘Insufficient Tolkien’. A memoir/essay about being a teenaged conspiracy theorist. I cover conspiracies vs infowar, and how to deal with narratives outside of ones world view. So do support the festival if you wanna read that. As always, they are doing amazing work.

I have also yet to mention that I wrote up my Solarpunk talk from last year’s Unsound festival. Called: Life in the future beyond the rusted chrome of yestermorrow. It’s about why Solarpunk is Punk, Cultural Fracking (a common theme around here). Cyberpunk, Solarpunk as a Memetic Engine, and more. It’s been well received and recaps a lot of thinking that’s appeared on permanently moved before moving out into my other work.

I was hoping that it would be announced already. But I’ve signed the contract so it’s probably ok to talk about. I’ve also sold my first sci-fi story called ‘In a storm a fire’. Yay me. Co-written with the award winning speculative fiction writer Andrew Dana Hudson. Who incidentally was first guest on my new youtube web show ‘Come internet with me’. The story is out next month as an e-anthology. More on that once it’s up for pre-order.

The last of my announcements is that i’ve started putting scripts from the old episodes online at the jaymo.net. Its taking way longer than I thought it would, but that works in progress. So far I’ve done about one third of the shows, and have just under 60 episodes left to put online. You can find them at thejaymo.net/permanentlymoved

Originally I wanted to collect episodes with similar themes into PDF zines like I did last year. But having the collections on the blog makes more sense to me in the long run. 

Speaking of PDF’s the Your Attention Is Sovereign zine just passed 10,000 downloads. It’s been online for a year and I’m thinking of taking the link down soon. If you haven’t got a copy then you can find it at thejaymo.net/zine. I think now would be a good time to read (or re-read) it given what’s coming up.

Your Attention Is Sovereign

Let me reiterate the two key points that are important to me:

  • You, personally, get to decide where you put your attention.
  • By acknowledging this fact. You take full responsibility for where you have put your attention in the past and where you will put it in the future.

Turn off the feeds and cultivate a healthy media diet away from social media. Listen to more longform podcasts, get yourself an RSS reader and follow more blogs.

Social media has caused our understanding of the moment to become compressed. Providing information without context or history. The infotainment industry will keep calling things unprecedented when in fact they are far from it. Events always sit inside a continuum of events preceding one after another. 

Television News has no memory beyond the last ad break. Twitter and Facebook have no memory at all. The only way to contextualise stuff in the feed is to haul it out of the slurry with a quote tweet. But even then it will quickly sink below the surface.

Get your information from sources that don’t move a mile a min. 

It’s also important to remember that every tweet you make is feeding a machine. One that is designed to convert your attention into money. Every post you make gives the machine more value and more power over you and other people.

We all need to collectively take more responsibility for our attention, and where we put it.

Consume news in retrospect.
It’s much healthier to read about what happened yesterday than try and make sense of today moment by moment. 

I’ll speak to you next week. 


The above is the original script I wrote for the episode. It may differ from what ended up in audio due to time constraints.

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One response to “Beyond The Last Ad Break | 2039”

  1. […] ‘the news’ at any length on the blog. Read my Zine: Your Attention Sovereign. In my podcast this week, I talk about how ‘the news’ doesn’t have any sort of history beyond […]

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