antisocialmedia (or anti-socialmedia?)

I'm on a social media detox right now (maybe forever?), partly inspired by reading the excellent books Dopamine Nation and Stolen Focus. Rather than just deactivating my Instagram, I'm trying to also retrain my brain not to slip into numbing out on stuff that's been served to me by algorithms controlled by huge corporations, so I'm also trying to limit my consumption of news, Reddit, and using my phone in general. I've installed a third-party launcher on my phone called Before Launcher, which basically makes my phone less fun more bizness, and I have App Blockers installed too. I've even re-subscribed to the print version of The New Yorker without waiting for a deal that includes a reduction and a snazzy tote. The one thing I haven't gone near is YouTube: that's my sacred cow and I can't even countenance the idea of trying to live without it.

... baby steps

Around the time I started experimenting with all of these digital changes, I also came across Xikipedia, which is a very clever project that allows you to doomscroll using Wikipedia articles. Clearly, scrolling on Wikipedia doesn't resolve the basic screen addiction / fear of letting the brain turn off, but at least it replaces the manipulative content of TikTok etc. with something that might be useful or interesting! It seems like a reasonably sane evolution of other Wikipedia-scouring communities I have previously belonged to, for example the Cool Freaks Wikipedia Club Facebook group (amazing; incredible; basically everyone trying to find the absolute strangest wikipedia articles to share with a community of thousands of cool freaks: the closest I came to being terminally online at an age where it was appropriate for me to be terminally online) or Annie Rauwerda/depthsofwikipedia (basically Cool Freaks Wikipedia Club in the form of one woman).

Anyway... In the course of writing my PhD I have to talk a lot about methodology <<stage one of PhD: my supervisor told me I was doing auto-ethnographic research --> I go home and google that ((((thank you wikipedia))))>> and one of the things I've been saying is "I will do technologically-mediated surfacing of my notes". So far, this has meant a tiny scrap of code in a note that opens when I open my notes app (Obsidian, which allows you to use JavaScript in your notes) and will suggest one note from my ReadItLater folder and one note from my entire vault. Sadly, I never, ever look at these notes.
I started to think about how looking at random notes I've written could be a good way of replacing my doomscrolling - but the problem is that Obsidian opens pretty slowly and therefore can't scratch that kind of primal itch to watch and like a TikTok. 

So, I thought "maybe Gemini can make an Android app that will display my notes to me like a social media feed". Since Obsidian files are just markdown (essentially plain text with bells on), it is relatively easy to interact with the vault content outside the Obsidian app itself (most other notes apps contain their notes within a database specific to the app itself).

and it did!! (some screenshots below). It's called antisocialmedia and it's available to download and build from GitHub. And it's clearly just Xikipedia except for my personal notes folder (please see Stolen Music for more info on how I am not in any way original). I haven't made a .apk file available yet but I might do so in the future, and you certainly can't get it on Google Play. If you're thinking of trying it out, please bear in mind that it was very quickly vibe-coded. It shouldn't have any access to the internet though... I hope ;D

It's not very fancy but I can use it to pick certain folders and have it surface notes from them in a random order and with proportions adjusted so that the folder I want to see notes from most often come up more regularly. I just want it to show me a few folders (my ReadItLater list - which is full of files that I save quickly by sharing from the browser when I come across them in the wild; my Ideas folder, which is full of ideas I might use in the future; my Lists folder - things to read, things to watch, restaurants to go to - and various folders to do with my research)

I'm hoping it will be quite useful for me as I try to unpick the tangled web of things that could or could not go in my thesis.......... and hopefully it will stop me forgetting the most interesting things I've ever learned.

Speaking of note-taking: one of the first things Seán Clancy said to me when I first met him to talk about doing a PhD was that I needed to get into the habit of taking notes on everything: about a year before that, I had seen an exhibition of Jennifer Walshe's work on AI called AT THE FIRST SOUND, THE WHOLE WORLD FREEZES in Huddersfield and had seen how Walshe's note-taking on AI, technology, robots etc. over the years (many of her notes were reproduced in the exhibition as standalone pieces of work, each one with a catalogue number from her note system) had crystallised into an exhibition that was far more than the sum of its parts. I was struck by how much of the interesting stuff that happens in my life washes over me and gets lost in time. Walshe uses, as far as I know, fairly systematic note-taking methods (maybe Zettelkasten or something similar) and the compounding effect of seeing those notes together in a gallery context was similar to how Walshe synthesises disparate ideas in her work in general. So when Seán mentioned note-taking to me, I was very willing to take it seriously