Introducing Seek Alternate Route
My attempt to re-examine discovery, engagement, and personal taste in a world of apps and algorithms.
Welcome to Seek Alternate Route! Thanks for being here.
I’d like to start by providing some background on the creation this Substack. Seek Alternate Route is rooted in a sentiment I feel might be shared by anyone who, like me, is navigating creative discovery and personal taste in an incredibly online world:
While the current model of hyper-personalized streaming, subscriptions, and social media provides near unlimited access to art and content, why does actually engaging with these things feel increasingly impersonal?
I won’t pretend that I have an immediate answer to this question – and I think that’s a good thing! If nothing else, I hope this blog helps me (and anyone reading along) explore the way we interact with culture, content, and creative pursuits in our daily lives, both online and offline.
With that out of the way, let’s get into things!
Too Much Stuff, Not Enough (Mental) Space
If you know me, you know that I love music. It’s something that’s always played a large role in my life – from laying next to the stereo speakers listening to Andrea Bocelli’s “Con Te Partiro” as a toddler, to participating in years of piano lessons & recitals, to amassing hundreds (maybe thousands) of vinyl records and cassette tapes, and finally attending my first Newport Folk Festival this past summer.
Like many others, this love extends beyond music to reading new books, watching (and rewatching) movies and television shows, and engaging in other common forms of artistic consumption. But recently, it’s felt like my appreciation for these activities has been diminished.
I wasn’t initially able to identify the cause of this shift – was I just distracted, was my personal taste changing that dramatically, or was it something else? Thankfully, a few distinct moments from the past year have helped me get to the root of this problem, and ultimately consider how to go about fixing it.
These moments included:
1. The Onset of Seasonal Boredom
As one does in the dreary post-holiday winter months, I was spending a lot of time hunkered down trying to keep both warm and occupied. I had no shortage of options to turn to for entertainment – my apartment was littered with unread books, records, and a TV with all the streaming services I could remember the passwords for. Yet something felt particularly “off,” and I couldn’t figure out why.
In hindsight, I can see that I was in something of a creative rut. Projects at work were feeling a bit monotonous, and I spent far too much of my free time mindlessly scrolling Twitter and Instagram Reels – I thought deleting TikTok was noble, but its unfortunately very easy to replace. I was reading a lot (shout out to the wicked long Wheel of Time series), but most of my other creative hobbies had become stagnant. Records gathered dust on their shelves, new releases were saved on Spotify and immediately forgotten, TV shows got added to an ever-growing watchlist, and algorithmic “daylists” became a crutch for soundtracking my working hours.
Activities that had traditionally been exciting and engaging were instead unconsciously relegated to background noise. And the result was a less fruitful, more mediocre creative experience.
2. Reading Filterworld by Kyle Chayka
As if in response to this boredom, I stumbled across a How Long Gone interview with author and New Yorker staff writer Kyle Chayka in late January. Chayka joined the podcast to promote his new book Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture, an examination of the pervasiveness and growing cultural impact of data-driven algorithms. This subject immediately piqued my interest, and I placed an order for the book before the episode was even halfway over.
Chayka’s central focus in Filterworld is to examine algorithmic pervasiveness across our modern lives, demonstrating how culture-by-algorithm both severely limits and ultimately flattens our experiences of life and art.
Given my mindset at the time, his writing hit me like a smack over the head. One passage in the introduction felt particularly relevant:
“The network of algorithms makes so many decisions for us, and yet we have little way of talking back to it or changing how it works. This imbalance induces a state of passivity: We consume what the feeds recommend to us without engaging too deeply with the material.” (Chayka p. 7)
This so accurately communicated the way I’d been feeling – the majority of my cultural engagement was surface level, derived from constantly-refreshing social media feeds and streaming apps. I rarely took time to dwell on anything before moving onto whatever came next. Chayka expanded on this idea, sharing:
“On the other side of our algorithmic anxiety is a state of numbness. The dopamine rushes become inadequate, and the noise and speed of the feeds overwhelming. Our natural reaction is to seek out culture that embraces nothingness, that blankets and soothes rather than challenges or surprises, as powerful artwork is meant to do. Our capacity to be moved, or even to be interested and curious, is depleted.” (p. 7)
I don’t think he could’ve hit the nail more squarely on the head. I’d been passively sinking my energy and attention into frictionless feeds and playlists, letting content come to me on a conveyor belt instead of actively seeking it out myself. It was limiting my experiences, and in turn diminishing my capacity for enjoyment and appreciation.
Chayka’s argument helped me realize that I needed to take back control over my cultural intake, more actively choosing what to consume and how I consume it. At this point, all I needed was a way to put this desire into action.
3. A Shared Margarita Pitcher
Fed up with my boredom and bolstered by Filterworld’s insights, I knew that I was on the cusp of making a change but lacking a clear path forward. Luckily, the intervention of one final ingredient helped turn this nebulous desire into a concrete idea: a classic margarita pitcher from Providence’s own Diego’s East Side.
In March, my girlfriend’s parents came to visit us and celebrate her birthday. While splitting the aforementioned margarita pitcher at dinner one night, her dad and I got to talking about work. He asked how I was enjoying my job (content marketing at a data security company), and I replied as I usually did at the time: “I like the people on my team and the variety of projects I get to work on, but I don’t really love the subject matter.” Data security platforms were interesting, but they weren’t something that got me out of bed in the morning.
He nodded, responding “Ok, so why don’t you write about something you do care about?”
This exceedingly straightforward reply was the lightbulb moment I’d been waiting for. If I wanted be more invested in the things I consumed, why not put into words how I feel about them? Supplement the act of consumption with the creative act of recording and sharing my thoughts, and make these recently mindless activities inherently more mindful.
As the pitcher drained, we explored the various shapes this project could take. Would I review albums and live shows like I’d done for my college newspaper? Would I interview the local record store owners I’d developed a rapport with? Would this be a newsletter, a blog, maybe even another 20-something-year-old dude podcast?
The specifics were still up in the air, but by the time we left dinner I knew two things for sure:
I want to interview people that create art and curate their own personal taste, learn what they like and how they engage with it, and see what lessons their approach might hold.
I want to develop and share my own personal taste more intentionally, consistently, and thoroughly.
So here we are. Thank you Mr. Smith for the idea, and thank you Diego’s for the pitcher!
Made for You Made by You
Before I wrap things up here, I want to make one important note. You may notice that all of the events I listed above happened roughly 7+ months ago – that’s a lot of time for this idea to be kicking around in my head (and in numerous draft versions of this post).
Naturally, my plans for Seek Alternate Route have evolved. Some thoughts stemming from the margarita conversation have stuck, and others have been adjusted as I’ve worked through and planned out this project.
One thought in particular has been revisited and debated the most – what do I think about the role of the internet in all of this? If you couldn’t guess, Margarita March Peter’s answer to this question was very emphatic. He wanted this project to stay as far as possible from the online world, only asking people about their interactions with art and culture outside of the internet.
But the more I’ve considered this, the less grounded its become. The internet is not an inherently soul-sucking, culture-flattening place – it just becomes that when you don’t interact with it cautiously and intentionally. Excluding the online world from this project would do nothing but restrict its purpose and limit its scope.
The benefits of conscious digital engagement (accessibility, connectivity, and the opportunity for discovery) make the internet central to the modern individual’s experience of culture. I’m by no means exempt from this – so much of my personal discovery happens on sites like New Commute, Aquarium Drunkard, Raven Sings The Blues, and UPROXX’s Indiecast. I follow countless accounts on Instagram and Twitter that create, recommend, and review different kinds of art, music, and literature. And at the end of the day, this very blog will be posted on the internet, not printed and dropped on the doorstep of everyone I know.
The key is that these outlets provide curated cultural expression, not merely algorithmic recommendation. They are products of people’s personal experience with and suggestion of content, rather than Spotify’s “daylist” algorithm or TikTok’s endless scroll. They serve both as resources for discovery and examples I can aspire to emulate with Seek Alternate Route.
So What’s Next for Seek Alternate Route?
This is where I find myself – I know the main causes dulling my artistic enjoyment, and have a plan of how I want to go about dissecting and surmounting them.
I want to balance the possible with the personal, achieving a better, more symbiotic relationship between the boundless access of our digital lives with the thoughts, opinions, and cultivated taste of our individual ones. I want to place less emphasis on the algorithmically-developed “Made for You” categories and learn more from what’s being made, and experienced, by artists and connoisseurs.
I’ll close with another topical (and inspirational) pull from Filterworld:
“The benefit of the slower, self-managed approach to culture is that it might lead to a greater appreciation of the content at hand, and you might be able to lead another person down the same path that you followed, showing them how to appreciate the same things. It’s more sustainable and more respectful of culture, treating it as something important rather than ephemeral, merely fodder for brief attention spans.” (p. 234)
I hope that Seek Alternate Route can be a vessel for my evolving self-managed approach to culture, steering me (and anyone in the same position) towards a reinvigorated form of engagement, expression, and appreciation.
Only one way to find out!
Feel free to subscribe if you’d like to follow along – it’ll take some trial and error to determine the best format and cadence for these posts, but once that’s settled they should be relatively regular. Talk to you soon!
- Peter
Love this, Pete!
Banger as always