Category: Internet

Reading With a Purpose

by James Wallace Harris, 11/12/25

I used to keep up with the world by watching NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt, reading The New York Times on my iPhone, and bingeing YouTube videos. I felt well-informed. That was an illusion.

I then switched to reading The Atlantic, New York Magazine, The New Yorker, and Harper’s Magazine. I focused on the longer articles and developed the habit of reading one significant essay a day. That has taught me how superficial my previous methods were at informing me about what’s going on around the world. Television, the internet, and newspapers were giving me soundbites, while articles provide an education.

However, I still tend to forget this deeper knowledge just as quickly. I don’t like that. I feel like I learn something significant every day. What I’m learning feels heavy and philosophical. However, it drives me nuts that I forget everything so quickly. And I’m not talking about dementia. I think we all forget quickly. Just remember how hard it was to prepare for tests back in school.

I’ve watched dozens of YouTube videos about study methods, and they all show that if you don’t put information to use, it goes away. Use it or lose it. I’ve decided to start reading with a purpose.

At first, I thought I would just save the best articles and refer to them when I wanted to remember. That didn’t work. I quickly forget where I read something. Besides, that approach doesn’t apply any reinforcing methods.

I then thought about writing a blog post for each article. It turns out it takes about a day to do that. And I still forget. I needed something simpler.

I then found Recall AI.

It reads and analyzes whatever webpage you’re on. Providing something like this for today’s article by Vann R. Newkirk II, “What Climate Change Will Do to America by Mid-Century:”

Recall allows me to save this into a structure. But again, this is a lot of work and takes a lot of time. If I were writing an essay or book, this would be a great tool for gathering research.

Recall is also great for understanding what I read. Helpful with quick rereading.

This morning, I got a new idea to try. What if I’m trying to remember too much? What if I narrowed down what I wanted to remember to something specific?

Within today’s article, the author used the term “climate gentrification” referring to neighborhoods being bought up because they were safer from climate change, and thus displacing poor people. The article mentions Liberty City, a poor neighborhood in Miami, with a slightly higher elevation, bought up by developers moving away from low-lying beachfront development.

I think I can remember that concept, climate gentrification. What if I only worked on remembering specific concepts? This got me thinking. I could collect concepts. As my collection grew, I could develop a classification system. A taxonomy of problems that humanity faces. Maybe a Dewey Decimal system of things to know.

I use a note-taking system called Obsidian. It uses hyperlinks to connect your notes, creating relationships between ideas. I could create a vault for collecting concepts. Each time I come across a new concept, I’d enter it into Obsidian, along with a citation where I found it. That might not be too much work.

I picked several phrases I want to remember and study:

  • Climate gentrification
  • Heat islands
  • Climate dead zones
  • Insurance market collapse
  • Climate change acceleration
  • Economic no-go zones
  • Corporate takeover of public services
  • Climate change inequality
  • Histofuturism
  • Sacrifice zones
  • Corporate feudalism

Contemplating this list made me realize that remembering where I read about each concept will take too much work. I have a browser extension, Readwell Reader, that lets me save the content of a web page. I could save every article I want to remember into a folder and then use a program to search for the concept words I remember to find them.

I just did a web search on “climate gentrification” and found it’s already in wide use. I then searched for “corporate feudalism,” and found quite a bit on it too. This suggests I’m onto something. That instead of trying to remember specifically what I read and where, I focus on specific emerging concepts.

Searching on “histofuturism” brought up another article at The Atlantic that references Octavia Butler: “How Octavia Butler Told the Future.” Today’s article by  Vann R. Newkirk II is also built around Octavia Butler. This complicates my plan. It makes me want to research the evolution of the concept, which could be very time-consuming.

The point of focusing on key concepts from my reading is to give my reading purpose that will help me remember. But there might be more to it. Concepts are being identified all the time. And they spread. They really don’t become useful until they enter the vernacular. Until a majority of people use a phrase like “climate gentrification,” the reality it points to isn’t visible.

That realization reinforces my hunch to focus on concepts rather than details in my reading. Maybe reading isn’t about specific facts, but about spreading concepts?

JWH

How Many Readers of My Blog Are Actually Alive?

James Wallace Harris, 8/31/25

On August 29, 2025, this blog had 10.5K hits. That’s small compared to big sites, but huge compared to my daily average of around 400 hits. Supposedly, those hits were from 322 people, which is 1% fewer than the day before. Normally, most people read just one page when they visit. But to reach 10,500, those 322 would have to read 33 pages each. That’s not normal.

In other words, I have a mystery. Here are the stats for August 30th. It had 399 hits, but 330 people. Now that’s normal.

I can only assume a web crawler, bot, or AI was reading my blog. But here’s another mystery.

Whoever, or whatever, was reading my blog was reading my most popular posts. Above, list my most popular essays in order. Why would some mindless bot or brilliant AI want to read these pages more than once? Were AIs recommending pages to their AI pals?

I wish I had Google Analytics, but the price tier I’m using with WordPress doesn’t offer that.

Do any of you living readers know what’s going on? Hell, do any of you AI beings know?

I did asked CoPilot: On 8/29/25 my blog got over ten thousand hits. It normally gets about 400 in a day. Can you explain what happened. My blog is auxiliarymemory.com

That’s a huge spike, Jim—congrats! 🚀 Going from 400 to over 10,000 hits in a single day suggests something unusual happened. While I couldn’t access the site directly just now, here are several likely explanations based on patterns I’ve seen with blogs like Auxiliary Memory, especially given your focus on digitization, cultural memory, and thoughtful essays:

🔍 Possible Reasons for the Traffic Surge

1. Viral Post or External Share

  • One of your recent posts may have been shared on a high-traffic platform like Reddit (e.g., r/ObscureMedia, r/OldSchoolCool, or r/DataHoarder), Hacker News, or a niche Facebook group.
  • If your post touched on digitization, rare media, or philosophical insights, it could’ve resonated with a specific community.

2. Mention in a Newsletter or Article

  • You might’ve been featured in a popular newsletter (like The Browser, Recomendo, or Morning Brew) or cited in an article about media preservation, Moon travel, or cognitive science.

3. Search Engine Boost

  • A topic you covered may have suddenly become trending—like a documentary release, anniversary of a Moon mission, or a viral debate on consciousness—and your post ranked high in search results.

4. Backlink from a High-Authority Site

  • If a university, archive, or tech blog linked to your site (especially in a post about digitization workflows or Obsidian setups), that could drive thousands of hits in a day.

5. Bot Traffic or Scraper Spike

  • Less exciting but worth checking: sometimes automated bots or scrapers can inflate traffic. If the bounce rate was high or session durations were low, this might be the case.

🧠 What You Can Do Next

  • Check your referrer logs in your blog’s analytics dashboard (WordPress, Jetpack, or Google Analytics) to see where the traffic came from.
  • Look at the top-performing post on 8/29 to identify what drew people in.
  • If it was organic and positive, consider writing a follow-up post or updating that entry with links to related content to keep new readers engaged.

If you want help analyzing the traffic patterns or crafting a follow-up post that builds on the momentum, I’d love to collaborate. Want to dig into your analytics together or brainstorm what might’ve caught fire?

My Reply: What was strange is it wasn’t a boost to one page, but many of my old posts got 50 to 250 hits each. Is that some kind of attack?

That pattern is definitely unusual, Jim—and it’s smart of you to question it. When many older posts get moderate traffic all at once, it’s not typical of a single viral share or organic surge. Here’s how to think through what might’ve happened:

🧠 Possibilities Beyond a Simple Boost

1. Bot or Crawler Activity

  • Some bots (especially aggressive scrapers or indexing tools) will hit multiple pages across a site in rapid succession.
  • If the hits came from a small number of IP addresses, had very short session durations, or lacked referrer data, that’s a strong sign.
  • Check for user agents like curl, python-requests, or suspicious browser strings.

2. AI Training or Archival Scraping

  • Your blog’s rich archive and thoughtful essays might’ve been targeted by a large-scale web crawler—possibly for training an AI model or building a digital archive.
  • These crawlers often avoid detection by mimicking real browsers and spreading requests over time.

3. RSS Feed or API Aggregator Spike

  • If someone added your blog to a content aggregator or feed reader with a large user base, it could trigger distributed traffic to older posts.
  • This would show up with legitimate-looking referrers but still hit many pages at once.

4. Search Engine Reindexing

  • Sometimes Google or Bing re-crawls a site deeply, especially if there’s been a sitemap update or structural change.
  • These hits are usually low-impact and spread out, but they can spike if your site was flagged for deeper indexing.

🛡️ How to Investigate

  • Analytics Deep Dive: Look at referrer URLs, session duration, bounce rate, and geographic origin. If most hits came from one country or IP block, that’s a clue.
  • Server Logs: If you have access, scan for unusual user agents or request patterns.
  • Security Plugins: Tools like Wordfence (for WordPress) can help detect and block malicious crawlers.

🧭 What It Probably Wasn’t

  • A typical “attack” (like a DDoS or exploit attempt) usually targets login pages, admin panels, or specific vulnerabilities—not dozens of archived essays.
  • If your site stayed responsive and didn’t show signs of strain, it was likely non-malicious.

If you want, I can help you interpret your analytics data or draft a robots.txt strategy to manage future crawlers. Or we could even turn this into a blog post—“When Your Archive Gets Raided: A Blogger’s Guide to Sudden Traffic Surges.” That’d be very Auxiliary Memory.

My reply: Unfortunately, I don’t have access to logs from my site, which is hosted at WordPress.com and I don’t pay for the advanced level that supports Google Analytics. But you’re right, this might make for an interesting blog post.

That limitation makes it trickier to diagnose, but it also opens the door to a compelling narrative—especially for Auxiliary Memory, where you often explore the intersection of technology, memory, and mystery. You could frame the post as part detective story, part meditation on digital presence.

Here’s a possible structure to spark your thinking:

📝 Working Title Ideas

  • “The Day My Blog Was Raided: A Mystery in Metrics”
  • “When the Archive Woke Up: A Blogger’s Traffic Spike Without a Trace”
  • “Ten Thousand Hits and No Clue Why”

🧩 Suggested Structure for the Post

1. The Setup

  • Describe your typical traffic patterns (400 hits/day).
  • Introduce the anomaly: 10,000+ hits on August 29, spread across many old posts.

2. The Investigation

  • Share what tools you do have (WordPress stats, Jetpack).
  • Note the absence of referrer data or analytics granularity.
  • Speculate on possible causes: bots, AI crawlers, reindexing, or a hidden share.

3. The Philosophy

  • Reflect on what it means to have a digital archive that suddenly gets attention.
  • Explore the idea of memory—how old posts can resurface, like forgotten artifacts.
  • Tie it to your broader themes: preservation, access, and the unpredictability of digital legacy.

4. The Takeaway

  • Offer thoughts on how bloggers can prepare for or interpret these events.
  • Maybe even invite readers to share if they were part of the traffic surge.

If you’d like, I can help you draft the opening paragraph or brainstorm a visual metaphor—like comparing the blog to a dusty library that suddenly had all its books checked out. Want to sketch it out together?

My reply: I’m good. You’ve described my regular approach to writing a post. But I will mention your help. That is an interesting aspect in itself.

Conclusion

I think this might be the best answer:

3. RSS Feed or API Aggregator Spike

  • If someone added your blog to a content aggregator or feed reader with a large user base, it could trigger distributed traffic to older posts.
  • This would show up with legitimate-looking referrers but still hit many pages at once.

I checked the stats for my other blog, Classics of Science Fiction, and found it had a similar bump on August 21.

If an RSS aggregator shared my most popular posts from each site, I don’t think it generated any subscriptions, likes, or repeat visits. Thanks for the promotion, though. I haven’t received increased traffic, but it was kind of you.

Every once in a blue moon, some big site will link to my little site, and one of my pages will get several hundred to a few thousand hits. That’s kind of nice. But I never know where the link is published.

I’ve always written my blogs with the idea that I was writing to myself. I just didn’t care who was reading my diary. It’s flattering that some people enjoy reading what I write. But I don’t want to think about that too much. I don’t want to start writing to get hits. I don’t think I have to worry about that because I seldom get hits from Google searches. Evidently, what I’m interested in is not what most people are interested in reading.

On the other hand, I wonder if AI minds are reading my blog. I’ve always loved robot stories in science fiction, so it would be cool if I had a few robot readers.

JWH

The Price of High-Quality Information

by James Wallace Harris, 6/30/25

We all know the internet is full of crappy information. The creators of the Internet intended it to be an information utopia. They wanted information to be free and instantly available. It turns out free information is only worth what you paid for it.

The Internet destroyed the local paper and investigative journalism. Quality magazine journalism is circling the drain. Television news is more abundant than ever, but it’s so predigested and targeted to specific audiences that it’s worthless.

Most of the high-quality sources of information are behind paywalls. Every morning, I get up and listen to Apple News+ narrators reading articles from quality magazines as I do my physical therapy exercises. Usually, that’s one thirty-minute article. Unlike podcasts, magazine journalism features a greater percentage of useful information per minute. I truly despise the kind of podcasts that spend more time on the host’s personality than the topic promised in the thumbnail.

Apple News+ gives me access to over 400 magazines and newspapers. This is the bargain of the century for $12.99 a month. However, it’s doubtful these magazines earn enough money from this service to keep them going. The real way to support them is to subscribe to each periodical. Apple News+ is like Spotify, good for the consumer, bad for the creator. The ethical way to use Spotify is to locate albums you want to buy. And the ethical way to use Apple News+ is to find the journals you should subscribe to.

I know these periodicals have become expensive. The Atlantic is $79.99 for a digital subscription. The New Yorker is $130 for a digital subscription. Why pay those prices when I already get the content in Apple News+? Especially when I will consume the content via Apple News+.

The answer is support. Think of quality journalism as an important charity. However, there is another reason. When I read a great article, I want to share it with my friends. Apple News+ is so locked down that it’s not possible. You can only share with other Apple News+ subscribers. You can’t even cut and paste from the screen.

Many periodicals that publish on the web can be copied to an email or printed as a PDF and shared. However, even those methods of getting around the paywall might disappear.

I often read articles that I know friends would also want to read. Some paywalled publications do allow for limited sharing. It should be a standard feature.

We need to move away from the shitty free content. Sharing is prevalent on the Internet, but consider the type of content people share. It’s mostly mindless entertainment or opinions. We need to learn to distinguish between well-researched articles and endless unfounded opinions.

The easiest way for me to share content is if my friends subscribe to Apple News+. And if more people subscribed, the publications would get more money.

We live in an age where authority is suspect. Everyone wants their views to dominate, and will rationalize their beliefs with any content that supports those views. We have lost the ability to evaluate what is real.

The trouble is reality can’t be understood with sound bites. Any topic worth considering requires significant study and research. TV and podcasts create content too quickly. Their information is presented too soon after events and produced too fast. Long-form journalism explores ideas in depth, and that takes time.

It also takes time to read such content. We’ve trained our minds to consume content quickly that was created quickly. Start paying attention to the information you consume and think about how it was produced. If you’re listening to a podcast that lasts an hour, note how much actual useful information you gleaned from that hour. If you get your news from television, pay attention to how long each news segment lasts. Think about how that news was gathered and why. And pay particular attention to the personalities presenting the news on TV and podcasts. Is it more about them or the content?

The highest quality content is nonfiction books written by well-educated researchers. However, it’s not possible to read enough nonfiction books to keep up with everything we need to know. I believe the best compromise for consuming high-quality information is long-form journalism.

You will be far better educated if you spend one hour a day on one subject than one hour a day on twenty different five-minute topics. This is where a service like Apple News+ succeeds. And it does have competitors, such as Zinio. My library offers a selection of free digital magazines and newspapers through Libby.

JWH

What I See Outside My Window vs. What I See on My TV Screen

by James Wallace Harris, 7/5/24

The picture above was taken from my dining room window. Not much is happening. It’s quiet and peaceful. In my den, looking through the sixty-five inch window of my television screen, I see so much turmoil and suffering. The fall of civilization is what’s happening.

One of my favorite novels is called The Door into Summer because the cat in the story hates New England winters and asks to see what’s out every door hoping to find one that leads to summer. I can open my front door and walk out into summer. It’s 77 degrees outside right now – not bad at all for July in a year that might become the hottest year on record. So, why do I spend my days watching television when all it does is to depress me?

The need to know what’s happening is a burden. The belief that I can control anything through knowing more is an illusion and deception. However, there are wars going on all around me and I don’t know if I can sit them out. My friend Anne lives in a nice neighborhood too, but last week there was a shooting at the house one over from hers. Yesterday was the 4th of July, and we heard plenty of fireworks. But we also heard plenty of guys shooting off their guns.

Crime and climate change are getting nearer all the time. What if I looked out my window and saw this:

Thousands of people are seeing this everyday around the world because of hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, and fires. In a decade it could be millions seeing such sites every day. Can we learn anything to avoid that future?

There is a cultural war happening all over the world and the battles are being fought in polling booths. Popularism wants to rewind the clock on progressive progress. To understand this, watch this talk by David Brooks. It’s one of the most uplifting things I’ve seen on my television screen in a very long time.

If you listen to Brooks, you’ll understand what the conservatives want to do with their Project 2025 plan and why. They believe it is their door into summer. If they succeed, I believe 1/20/2025 will be remembered like 4/12/1861 or 6/28/1914. It would be so much easier for my mental health to quit watching TV, but is that really an option? I can understand why Christians are fighting so hard for their way of life. I would have no problem surviving in their utopia if they got everything they wanted. But millions of people wouldn’t, and it will lead to civil war and self-destruction.

The world is going nuts while the environment is going down the drain. On one hand, I can’t stop watching this slow-motion apocalypse. One the other hand, I just want to look out my window or read a science fiction novel.

JWH

Why I Deleted Facebook and Twenty Other Apps from My iPhone

by James Wallace Harris, 4/21/24

Lately, I’ve been encountering numerous warnings on the dangers of the internet and smartphones. Jonathan Haidt is promoting his new book The Anxious Generation. Even though it’s about how there’s increase mental illness in young girls using smartphones, I think it might tangentially apply to an old guy like me too.

Haidt was inspired to write his book because of reports about the sharp rise in mental illness in young people since 2010. That was just after the invention of the iPhone and the beginnings of social media apps. Recent studies show a correlation between the use of social media on smartphones and the increase reports of mental illness in young girls. I’m not part of Haidt’s anxious generation, but I do wonder if the internet, social media, and smartphones are affecting us old folks too.

Johann Hari’s book, Stolen Focus, is about losing our ability to pay attention, which does affect me. I know I have a focusing problem. I can’t apply myself like I used to. For years, I’ve been thinking it was because I was getting old. Now I wonder if it’s not the internet and smartphones. Give me an iPhone and a La-Z-Boy and I’m a happy geezer but not a productive one.

So, I’ve decided to test myself. I deleted Facebook and about twenty other apps from my iPhone. All the ones that keep me playing on my phone rather than doing something else. I didn’t quit Facebook, or other social media accounts, just deleted the apps off my phone. I figure if I need to use them, I’ll have to get my fat ass out of my La-Z-Boy and go sit upright at my desktop computer.

This little experiment has had an immediate impact — withdrawal symptoms. Without Facebook, YouTube, and all the other apps I kept playing with all day long, I sit in my La-Z-Boy thinking, “What can I do?” I rationalized that reading the news is good, but then I realized that I had way too many news apps. With some trepidation, I deleted The Washington Post, Ground News, Feedly, Reddit, Instapaper, and other apps, except for The New York Times and Apple News+.

I had already deleted Flipboard because it was one huge clickbait trap, but couldn’t that also be true of other news apps? They all demand our attention. When does keeping current turn into a news addiction? What is the minimum daily requirement of news to stay healthy and informed? What amount constitutes news obesity?

I keep picking up my iPhone wanting to do something with it, but there’s less and less to do. I kept The New York Times games app. I play Mini Crossword, Wordle, Connections, and Sudoku every morning. For now, I’m rationalizing that playing those games is exercise for my brain. They only take about 20-30 minutes total. And I can’t think of any non-computer alternatives.

I still use my iPhone for texting, phoning, music streaming, audiobooks, checking the weather, looking up facts, reading Kindle books, etc. The iPhone has become the greatest Swiss Army knife of useful tools ever invented. I don’t think I could ever give it up. Whenever the power goes out, Susan and I go through withdrawal anxiety. Sure, we miss electricity, heating, and cooling, but what we miss the most is streaming TV and the internet. We’ve experienced several three-day outages, and it bugs us more than I think it should.

One of the insights Jonathan Haidt provides is his story about asking groups of parents two questions?

  1. At what age were you allowed to go off alone unsupervised as a child?
  2. At what age did you let your children go off unsupervised?

The parents would generally say 5-7 for themselves, for 10-12 for their children. Kids today are overprotected, and smartphones let them retreat from the world even further. Which makes me ask: Am I retreating from the world when I use my smartphone or computer? Has the iPhone become like a helicopter parent that keeps me tied to its apron strings?

That’s a hard question to answer. Isn’t retiring a kind of retreat from the world? Doesn’t getting old make us pull back too? My sister offered a funny observation about life years ago, “We start off life in a bed in a room by ourselves with someone taking care of us, and we end up in bed in a room by ourselves with someone taking care of us.” Isn’t screen addiction only hurrying us towards that end? And will we die with our smartphones clutched tightly in our gnarled old fingers?

Is reading a hardback book any less real than reading the same book on my iPhone screen, or listening to it with earbuds and an iPhone? With the earbuds I can walk, work in the yard, or wash dishes while reading. Is reading The Atlantic from a printed magazine a superior experience than reading it on my iPhone with Apple News+?

Is looking at funny videos less of a life experience than playing with my cat or walking in the botanic gardens?

Haidt ends up advising parents to only allow children under sixteen to own a flip phone. He would prefer kids wait even longer to get a smartphone till they complete normal adolescent development, but he doesn’t think that will happen. I don’t think kids will ever go back to flip phones. The other day I noticed that one of the apps I had was recommended for age 4+ the App Store.

Are retired folks missing any kind of elder years of psychological development because we use smartphones? As a bookworm with a lifelong addiction to television and recorded music, how can I even know what a normal life would be like? I’m obviously not a hunter and gatherer human, or an agrarian human, or even a human adapted to industrialization. Is white collar work the new natural? Didn’t we live in nature too long ago for it to be natural anymore?

Aren’t we quickly adapting to a new hivemind way of living? Are the warnings pundits give about smartphones just identifying the side effects of evolving into a new human social structure? Is cyberization the new phase of humanity?

There were people who protested industrialization, but we didn’t reject it. Should we have? Now that there are people rejecting the hivemind, should we reject it too? Or jump in faster?

For days now I’ve been restless without my apps. I have been more active. I seeded my front lawn with mini clover and have been watering and watching it come in. I contracted to have our old bathtub replaced with a shower so it will be safer for Susan. I’ve been working with a bookseller to sell my old science fiction magazines. And I’ve been trying to walk more. However, I’ve yet to do the things I hoped to do when I decided to give up my apps.

It’s hard to tell the cause of doing less later in life. Is it aging? Is it endless distractions? Is it losing the discipline of work after retiring? Before giving up all my apps, I would recline in my La-Z-Boy and play on my iPhone regretting I wasn’t doing anything constructive. Now I sit in my La-Z-Boy doing nothing and wonder why I’m not doing anything constructive. I guess it’s taken a long time to get this lazy, so it might take just as long to overcome that laziness.

JWH