Recalibrating

Larry is in the other room practicing a piano accompaniment that sounds just enough like the theme to The Young and the Restless that it makes me want to remind myself of what that theme actually sounded like, and of course whenever you go to YouTube you can't just watch what you came to watch, first you have to watch an ad and then you have to deal with everything else it would prefer you watch, the little videos telling you that one celebrity DESTROYED WOKE INTERVIEWERS and another celebrity DIED TRAGICALLY and maybe I'd like to consider watching JIMMY CARTER'S FUNERAL and so on.

And I don't know if you've done any Google searches in the past few days, but all you seem to get are artificial answers, Larry and I were looking last night to see if Gary Sinise had been in the play version of Of Mice and Men before directing and starring in the movie version, and the AI told us that the movie existed, plenty of information ("information") about the movie spilled down the page as if it were being intelligently generated in real time, but did not even reference the possibility of a play.

I told Larry last night that the internet had died, and he told me that I shouldn't worry about the internet, and I said that was what people had been telling me since the 1990s.

But we can –

and I should –

recalibrate.

First of all there is &udm=14, a "disenshittification Konami code" that can give you Google search results without AI autoresponses, sponsored content, or any of the other clutter.

Second of all there is the idea, most recently popularized by Cal Newport, that one should try to think and work as much as possible without the influence of other minds.

It is interesting, by the way, that the &udm=14 didn't yield a direct result for that quote, which took me to Kindle so I could search my copy of Deep Work and then find what I was looking for in my copy of Digital Minimalism. Kindle for PC is still functional in the sense that when you open the app it doesn't immediately try to get you to do something you didn't open the app to do; the Kindle app on my phone, on the other hand, will not let me open a book until it has shown me recommendations of what it would prefer I read.

Also, the actual quote is "input from other minds" – but I prefer my variation. We need input from other minds to ensure our calibration is accurate. Influence, on the other hand, suggests a discalibrating force, e.g. the current state of Google search.

To stay off the thing that is designed to discalibrate you seems like a worthwhile goal, and I am ready to commit to eliminating all that is programmed to capture my attention.

This is likely to cause problems if I want to do something like "listen to Martha Argerich play Ravel's Sonatine," because before I have the chance to type my request into the Amazon Music search bar I am prompted to listen to an AI-created playlist or consider opening Audible. You can numb yourself to that kind of thing, train yourself not to look at it the way you train yourself not to glance at the clock when you wake up in the middle of the night, because even a brief "awwww gawwwwh I wonder what my AI playlist sounds like, I bet it's hilaaaarious" means that you are giving up what you wanted to do in favor of what Amazon wants you to waste your time doing.

This also means that wanting to do what you want to do is an essential part of calibration, and you don't need me to tell you that the majority of the internet is designed for people who do not want to do what they are tasked with doing.

Here are my open tasks, in the order in which I pursue them:

• Writing and scoring MELISANDE, my original musical
• Completing freelance writing assignments
• Keeping this journal, e.g. showing the work of my mind

(taking a walk, to separate the two halves of the day)

• Completing freelance music assignments
• Preparing for a recital
• Studying the work of other minds

All of this is completed between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m.; the rest of the time is devoted to homemaking and relationship-building, as it were.

There's no room in any of this for DESTROYING WOKE INTERVIEWERS. There isn't even room for JIMMY CARTER'S FUNERAL.

Which means that the next time I hear Larry play something that sounds like the start of a soap opera theme, I need to trust my own mind and memory – because the internet is designed, right now, to play tricks on both.

But we can't be the only people who are doing what we're doing, and so I still want a way to connect with other minds who exist now and are working now and might have input worth considering.

I actually thought about creating a forum. Can you believe it? I could moderate the Nicole Dieker Finley community and create channels for personal finance and time management and music composition, and then I could charge you all $20 per month to participate.

But that doesn't work, and not just because it would take 50 of you to sign up before I would even make $1,000 a month, and then I'd have to pay attention to 50 people all the time.

It doesn't work because we shouldn't be spending our time on forums.

The last thing we need is more asynchronous chatter, and the idea that every person who keeps any kind of personal or professional website should be encouraged to manage a community of followers is laughably ridiculous.

This is also the reason I don't have comments, by the way – and why I don't comment on other blogs.

Also, I don't want followers.

I want peers.

People who are working at least as hard as I am on whatever they want to work on.

So consider this a call to action, as we build what must necessarily come next:

1. Calibrate yourself around the work you want to complete, within the time you have available to complete it.
2. Eliminate, as much as possible, discalibrating influence.
3. Start your own journal – not a Substack, something that's your own – so you can show and share the work of your mind.
4. Email it to me: nicole@nicolediekerfinley.com
5. If I think about what you're thinking about it will end up here eventually, and then other people may think about it too.

Or not, you know –

I mean, you don't have to do any of this –

but this is the next phase of the kind of internet I want, and so I might as well try to make it happen.