Finding What To Read Next: Tales Of Books & Caffeine

An appeal for your feedback to improve search and discovery, labeling and topics

Jun 28, 2022

Encountering good writing is more pleasurable nowadays but challenges remain.
Despite megastores and online retail, it was better when more friends were readers.
Recommendations can feel faceless; the chase a lonely hunt for stone-cold keywords.

Misguided forces are damming the rivers; it gets harder for content to ‘surface.’
As 'engines manipulate results, labeling and discovery will become old-school.
(1,300 words or about seven minutes’ read.)

See also Moneycircus, Sep 2021 — Defend Our Networks: Free and fast-flowing information key to survival

A favourite haunt of the author in Tbilisi: fine coffee and books.

Jun 28, 2022

Discovering a book that scratched the itch inside your head was once as difficult as finding the coffee that restored composure.

That’s the way it was. The era of Barnes and Noble or Waterstones hadn’t arrived, nor the dozen Starbucks imitators, let alone the ability to search online.

On London’s Charing Cross Road, Foyles was legendary — as were the Soho coffee shops, a brisk 10 minutes’ walk away, which survived from the 1950s caffeine scene. [1]

The pain was part of the pleasure; frustration drove you to keep looking in an age when time was quixotic enough to hang — no such quest was ever measured by the clock — just as the cup of bitter-sweet smoking umber would both stimulate and relax.

Companions were often the answer. A recommendation came with familiarity and a certain world view. We’d read a book because it was thrust into our hands by a friend or lay about their home. Browsing the bookshop was only slightly more structured, according to the interests of the bookseller.

Despite the challenge of discovering new authors, we probably read more books: a greater number among our friends were active readers; there was less distraction. Was the writing better? That’s a matter of opinion but the big name authors did play interlocutor, poet or bard, a role we’ll discuss in the next article.

Information cascade

If the spear is a stand-in for the quill, the Internet is double-pointed. If you know what you are hunting, it works well. Otherwise you’re likely to gore yourself, if only in frustration, for the web can be less accessible than a forest at dusk.

It’s not that we doubt a recommended author — it’s what other works were set aside in making that selection; for we don’t know what assumptions played a role in that choice. The problem is bigger than FOMO (fear of missing out.)

A recommendation on the Internet involves many people in the process. First the writer’s insights are condensed into something that the chooser deems “relevant.” Then people sequentially accept or reject, according to what they infer about the decisions of those who acted before. Behavioural economists call this the information cascade.

Each person comes to a decision with their own new piece of information but cannot know what information the previous decision-makers rejected. Unlike the friend holding a book in outstretched arms, we cannot ask them.

We end up with a cacophony of opinions that we cannot interrogate. That’s before different influences come into play, like social approval.

Governments, corporations and their associated foundations want to replace this flawed discovery with a direct line to a “trusted source” who will do the thinking for us. To the techy heads of social media it makes sense in a binary world where something is right or wrong, or simply more efficient.

Their answer is to bombard us with fact checkers — Fakt Cheka — who make the process worse. You don’t have to search for controversial topics before you are waylaid by nudges and suggestions from assorted advisers and advertisers who want to shape your thoughts and decisions.

They are wrong and one can prove it. The Internet is already subject to brutal consolidation. Nowhere in the off-line world could you see a handful of corporations dominating traffic and using underhand, privacy-violating surveillance, combined with blatant psychological manipulation.

Any government, military propaganda operation or corporation that thinks we need fewer options and more direction is clearly up to no good. Military censors aside — “War is a racket,” said Maj Gen Smedley Butler — the corporations are playing a zero-sum game in which every click that favours someone else is money lost.

As a metaphor, take theirs: they bang on about the environment. In what ecological system would every blade of grass eaten by another animal be an existential threat?

Only the corporation as psychopath, bent on oligarchical collectivism, would think this way. “Competition is a sin,” said J. D. Rockefeller.

Ah, the same families who pin their Great Reset on the climate — but we digress.

“The dream of cyberspace — strangers, strangeness, anonymity, and spontaneity — lost out to order, advertising, surveillance, and cutthroat corporatism,” writes Joanne McNeil in Lurking: How a Person Became a User (2020).

How to find it

Readers and fellow writers on Substack and other platforms know about the filter bubble — how search engines are constructed to monitor your activity, profile you, and feed you more of the same.

We can block trackers and clear cookies — try the extension Forget Me Not, to forget cookies and all the data you don’t want your browser to remember — but that still does not help us discover.

The problem as we experience it here, at Moneycircus, is that the publishing apps, like Substack, can’t be expected to have their own search function beyond the basics.

There are third parties which offer to help readers find new material and there are options to boost and promote. One example just launched is The Sample (to which Moneycircus has no connection). [2]

The nature of offloading the finding of content onto a third party is that they consolidate headings, when we really want something granular that scratches those thoughts which bothered us at the start.

Still, ticking boxes like news, culture, essays, life, business, marketing, history, future, politics, tech, art and fiction would help, even though they overlap and subdivide — what to do?

Your suggestions

Use Google to search “site:moneycircus.substack.com Afghanistan” where Afghanistan is the topic you want — you don’t need the quote marks.

We would prefer such a search feature on Substack but there are other steps we can take in the meantime. There are options to make a subsidiary or sister publication on a specific topic but that would segment readers and make it harder, not easier, to discover related material.

Substack has introduced a recommend function, so that one writer highlights another.

Labels could be embedded in headlines to make them easier to peruse. On Moneycircus, content is currently split four ways:

Crisis Update - issues of the day that the media corps ignore or misrepresent.
Eurasia note - geopolitics from the world’s biggest landmass.
Chronicle of Dissent - monologue in kriziz genre, Russian for decline as lifestyle.
Uncategorised - longer pieces or disparate topics like food and travel.

This article will be shared with the Substack community to try to generate ideas but please send me your thoughts by commenting below. Alternatively you can email at MoneyCircus@ProtonMail.com.

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If a building’s alight we put out the fire; we don’t have to share every opinion. Let’s build that bucket brigade!

See also Moneycircus, Sep 2021 — Defend Our Networks: Free and fast-flowing information key to survival

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