mozzarella

Wow - thanks for this. Hadn't heard this term before, but certainly covers problems that are brought up by design ethicists. Literally laughed out loud at how hard it is to close an amazon account. And I thought it was bad that the New York Times made me call them to cancel my digital subscription.

When my dad decided to quit smoking, he didn't throw out the pack of cigarettes he was currently in the middle of. Instead, he put them up on the shelf next to his work desk. The pack wasn't totally in his face, nor was it out of sight. Despite the visual reminder being present, he broke his years' long pack-a-day habit.

Eventually - long after he stopped smoking - he threw the pack out, as part of his usual housekeeping.

I thought of this when I decided to quit social medias over the past two years. I bring it up now because it's something I think about in regard to how centrally important mindset is when trying to break a habit, or work on something of deeper value.

I wonder now too about the asymmetry in the ease of adoption vs. difficulty of opting out with smart phones and social media. Anecdotally, it just seems that you can nearly unconsciously start using a smartphone or say, sign up for instagram. But after a relatively quick onboarding, the effort required to opt out of these things feels akin to doing actual, hard work.

this is amazing, but 'professional photographers' aren't really the best arbiters of what a 'good' photograph is. Also, training on national parks binds the results to a naturally bland subject, no pun intended. While an amazing achievement, nothing shown here demonstrates ability beyond a photographer's assistant/digital tech adjusting settings to a client's tastes in Capture One Pro. Jon Rafman's 9 Eyes project comes to mind as something that produced interesting photographs, as does the idea to find a more rigorous panel of 'experts' (e.g. MoMA), or training the model on streets/different locations than national parks.

I wonder what the conversion rates on these within-client ads are. I know I've never opened any no matter how well-targeted or 'interesting' the ads were, because the immediate response is to just want to sweep the inbox clean.