Treasa Lynch

Back when I was 18, I encountered Noam Chomsky in linguistics class and Naomi Wolf in the pages of Marie Claire. And spectacularly failed to understand why I was supposed to revere or respect the views of either of them. It seems despite my general lack of worldliness this was not a fail on my part

She was still a minor. A girl. This wasn’t about women giving birth outside marriage. It was about girls who weren’t women yet. An utter tragedy.

I was 11 years old. I remember this but through the eyes of an 11 year old. I am now 42 years older but Ann Lovett was 15 years old. A teenager. If, in the 1980s, they focused on women giving birth outside marriage they were still failing Ann Lovett. She wasn’t a woman giving birth outside marriage.

Probably not but tbh I am MiddleAged and Not Trying To Promote My Business And Playing the Piano A lot now.

Anyway, I recommend the Gadfly by Shostakovich this morning and then seek out Trifonov and Babayan playing the Symphonic dances. I will look for a piano transcription of the Gadfly now.

The second movement of the second piano concerto which really could be an anthem for our times in its own right, and the well known waltz from Jazz Suite No 2. Yes. I know, more investigation is warranted. You will know the Romance from the Gadfly if you ever saw Reilly Ace of Spies.

It was an extract from the Gadfly suite of music for the film of the same name, III. Folk Festival. Absolutely brilliant. But I have been listening to the whole suite this morning, played by BBC Phil. It is an extraordinary tour de force by a composer I really only know for two things:

Was Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Dances. It is an extraordinary piece of music both in orchestra and piano reduction form. I loved it. However, the Philharmonia played an encore which was new to me but which I felt was vaguely Shostakovich in style and so I spent time this morning looking for it.

I was at Bozar last night for the Philharmonia doing a program of Sibelius, Prokofiev and a Rachmaninov. The Prokofiev should have been Hilary Hahn but she is currently injured. The Sib was En Saga, which is one of my all time favourite short orchestral works. But the reason I was there at all…

If it makes you happy to believe that, fine. But you are probably being naive if you think that such a ban would be _necessary_ or technically a prerequisite to implement such a state surveillance system. It isn’t.

M365 to default to a list of recently opened files on my own account on my computer. I simply cannot do it. They provide three solutions, 1 of which is irrelevant for my account and 2 of which refer to settings that are just not available on all versions of W11 or O365.

And the regulations we require in the short term, are targeting harm prevention in countries who have little scope to regulate against oligopolies in the US.

I miss social media as it used to be. But it isn’t coming back. Meta isn’t interested in reducing the amount of profits it gets from frustrating the hell out of me. Doomscrolling never used to exist. Stopping scrolling is anathema to the companies who seek rents from my attention.

And maybe, ultimately, questioning the benefit of existence of the increasingly antisocial and far from reliable networks. Questioning the idea that personalised flows benefit the media consumer. Questioning the amount of advertising, the form of content, the type of tools used to create.

Again, regulation can have many forms. Arguing against harm prevention so that you can force your competitors to provide access to my data, my social graph seems to completely miss the point. It isn’t about business and a well regulated market.

Any attempts to reduce harm by limiting the scale of advertising, generative AI content and personalised recommenders will be lobbied away in the home of most social networks. Or screamed blue murder about by Elon Musk.

They don’t overlap. So the bans will continue to get discussed.

The regulation desired from this writer is increased competition so the companies can continue to exist and make money. The regulation demanded by those countries implementing youth bans is harm prevention.

So other countries, much more focused on harm prevention will start reining in the social media companies to protect young people because these countries place higher value on the safety of their young people than on the ability of people to profit from harming their minds.

In the US, the objective is not to provide a good and healthy service. It isn’t even in their psyche.

I don’t recall any substantial condemnation of X by any other large social media company in the US for the issue of AI generated slop harassing women and children. And because of yowls of cowardice regarding their first amendment, this will not be fixed in the home of most social media companies.

Competition was the cause of Shorts and Reels. I cannot see more competition giving me back YT and Instagram pre-TikTok because the issues in that particular social sector are getting worse and because these US has a laissez-faire approach, it is a race to the bottom there.

Other tools to deal with the worst of the practical issues like reducing exposure to reels and recommended accounts have to I be implemented repeatedly. I the user cannot switch them off definitively. Same with Shorts on YT, I can only get rid of some of them for a while.

Second: the industry does not want to be regulated. The point about meta and its chronological timeline is woefully hilarious. Sure I can get it but I have to configure it every single time I open instagram. It is implemented with a maximum amount of friction.

It isn’t dissimilar to the concept of banning the sale of harmful substances to teenagers from a health protection point of view. This article doesn’t address the harm prevention point, especially not the issues relating to social media harm. Only toxic content.

So the objective here is not to fix social media. It is simply an acknowledgement that the industry has the potential to harm both directly and indirectly young minds, and that the industry itself, cannot be trusted to put measures in place to prevent those harms.

This is very disappointing and a poor analysis of the issues. First, banning the under-16s is not about fixing social media. It never was. It is about avoiding the damage caused to young people by social media, and especially, I suspect, short form videos.

Hi. Thanks to your post last night, I got to see them in Brussels last night. We have cloud cover tonight but I appreciate your posts

Aurora Borealis in Brussels

Northern lights, and a relatively clear sky in Brussels.

Second note, don’t know how the hell they did it but the piano sounds like it is in the same room as me and I can feel the strings vibrating. And I am listening through AirPods. It is insane because this recording is more than 50 years old and it is glorious.