On Nudging And Recursion

One of the interesting things about keeping a diary—especially electronic diaries—is that you can compile a lot of information. I've been keeping an Evernote diary since 2009. In the beginning, I just saved articles to it to read later, and now it's become encyclopedic in some ways. It's my personal internet.

A while back I was thinking about nudges. (There was a book that came out in 2013 by Cass Sunstein titled Nudge). I had a note in my diary about doing a piece on it and then I ran a search in Evernote and I have articles going back to 2010 talking about nudging—especially nudging with technology using notifications and algorithms. 

What's remarkable about digital text is that you can amass a lot of it and you can go back and do searches and then collect that information and shape it again in a recursive process, which is interesting because our minds are naturally recursive in some ways—continually connecting to something else—winnowing it down—-a narrowing.

Last night I watched an old video from the 1980s about Peter Gabriel when he was working on the Security album–essentially his creative process during that time. It was that winnowing process where a wireframe gets shaped over time as one would shape a piece of stone. Ultimately, the piece is performed live and you see all the incremental steps where he nudged the music in this direction or that direction. It's also recursive in the sense that it's taking a set and then doing something to the set by splitting it in many ways and then saving all of it. This is essentially what I'm doing with text in Evernote–or in any application: it's a mass of information that can be searched and reshaped. In the end, you have a final essay or a piece or something and that gets added back to the universe of knowledge. Peter Gabriel amassed a lot of provisional experimental recordings. He’d have the band come in and jam for a couple of hours he saved all of it. To some extent, it becomes excessive unless you can readily access it. But we can, in fact, now access it readily–as opposed to using all paper-based information.

It's useful to  be a gleaner of history. But the information can become fungible, disconnected from the original context. Deepfake remix makes it even more tangible (if that's possible) through a continuous process of deracination so you don't know the veracity of the information without somebody actually speaking for it, all the while appearing to be spoken for.

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On Nudging

Simply waiting around is a form of nudging without doing anything. This is what's called wu wei or trying not to try. Either you're moving or the world is moving around you and you'll never be able to differentiate between the two. So you can just stay put and things will happen to you or they won't happen to you. If you decide to move, other things are moving as well—the world is moving around you. And it's not under your agency; you're only moving in context with other things. Staying put is a way of moving as well because everything else is in motion. 

What we can do is to do a little bit of each. For example, in the morning you don't any specific intentions and then in the afternoon you do something—or the reverse. You're essentially playing dice with the universe by your action or your inaction. You don't want to think about it too much, you just stay put--or what has become known as being "present"--or what Iain McGilchrist refers to as operating from the right hemisphere of the brain. There's some wisdom in that, but there is also no wisdom in that because the world wants us to take action— to seize the moment.

The people that seem to be doing things are doing things. To get it to move in the direction that you want it's better to opt for doing something rather than nothing. But the question becomes is that something something, or is that something just anything? I think something has to be something because if you're just doing anything it might be something. But if you do some of something, then it's better than nothing.

Rewritten from video transcript of 10/22/2021.