Waymo is the greatest invention in the last 5,500 years. Sometimes I take a Waymo to downtown Austin just to do a roundtrip home. AC slammed at 60, windows down, seat reclined, music blaring. Its magical. Every Waymo you pass, if it has a rider, you’ll see them smiling ear to ear.

Something I missed most when living in New York was the car experience. No state of the art sound system or quality noise cancelling headphones can replace the joy of speeding down the road in a private metal cube blasting your favorite tunes. I’d suffer even more at work if I didn’t pull into the garage after 20 minutes of yelling lyrics to my favorite songs.

Waymo strips the driving experience down to the best parts. You still have a private metal cube that takes you where you want to go. You don’t have to worry about parking. You’re riding in modern luxury. The car is always clean. A computer will never automate the deescalation of your nervous system but when it handles a difficult left turn its close enough you’d win the argument in court.

My life is guided by music. Its a soundtrack to my life and a way I connect with friends and strangers. I don’t know how I would wake up or wind down without music. I wouldn’t dance as much. I would cry without hope. When I meet someone who doesn’t understand music as an ancient ritualistic happiness generator its a bit worrying but I don’t blame them.

Now, I can optimize my Waymo trip to provide sonic excellence for my journey downtown but its usually after exhausting the limited number of skips I get on the stations provided and the process of skipping results in missing out on a significant percentage of the sight seeing gifted to me by my robot chauffeur.

The Proposal

Pay me whatever. Overwork me. I don’t care.

I’ve spent a year building watchavideo.net which you can read about in the archives of jackcmac.com. The site exists to replicate the experience of 80s MTV. A time where you had people who cared showcasing videos that mattered. Video killed the radio star (or so they thought). The jockeys had a real purpose and responsibility, but everyone is a jockey now. Which is great.. sure.. but if you can’t snap out of the demonic San Franciscan techno capitalist trance you’re shrouded from the magnitude of the responsibility now placed upon you.

Waymo radio stations are great solely because it offers a masquerade of choice, an outcome of the hypnosis the algorithms have placed us in. When the gnomes in your computer get close to what you care about its fateful only because you had to slosh through arthritic scrolls of braindead garbage to reach that thing. A perfect algorithm will always be one that is manual.

If you’re not Waymo and you’re reading this and you think you’re better at coming up with ideas and you’re thinking,

“Well what if Waymo just offered bluetooth?”

That is idiotic. That’s too much freedom which would be abused.

“True True we actually do need Jackcmac don’t we?”

Yes, bro, obviously… anyways, I know this proposal is a little pointless without my resume so I will be going live Monday morning on watchavideo.net/the_future to showcase my abilities as a 22nd century disc jockey.

The future is now, Waymo, and if you want to beat out Robotaxi you’re going to need my help.

P.S. I’d offer you my email for contact but I don’t check that so just comment below. I’ll also spam every person I find on Linkedin who seems like they have any pull at the company.

P.P.S. I am dead serious. If you made a reality show about people who care about success in their job and the final was between someone performing urgent brain surgery and me jockeying the Waymo radio station the judges would end the competition early to hand me the trophy.

I just failed. It is the second time I failed at the same thing and I failed because I skipped a step. Right now I feel beat down. The hours are tallying up and the project is getting more expensive. My deadline is almost here and I don’t know if I’ll be able to finish the shirt in time.

But if I can deliver a product that makes my customer smile it all goes away. They won’t be aware of how much time I spent trying to get it perfect. Ironically the more perfect I make it the less impressive it is. I will never match the perfection and capacity of a computer but I’m okay with that. I do this because it brings me joy.

The edit is the single most important piece of contemporary media and a driver of every single thing. Earlier today I attempted to post an edit of Quincy Hall winning the gold medal in the mens 400m and Instagram swiftly removed it citing copyright infringement. [Attached below]

NBC, listen to me, you did not win the gold medal, you did not run in the race, you did not sacrifice your whole life chasing greatness, so you do not get to prohibit me from giving Quincy Hall the privilege of seeing what the race looks like with Ye's Runaway playing on top of it.

To Instagram, stand up for something. You are a scared loser. Let the video stay on the website. Make NBC pursue me. I did it. I deserve to fight my own fight.

But here is the truth. NBC comes for me. They knock on my door. Countless men pouring from Escalades.

"Boys, we got him".

I stand there arm outstretched. Instagram reels open.

“QUINCY HALL IS COMING BACK. QUINCY HALL IS DIGGING DEEP. QUINCY HALL IS RUNNING PAST ALL OF THEM.”

We drink Pepsi or whatever.

It is ok NBC. It is ok Instagram. I will still have no money. None of this is making me money that is supposed to be your money. Let me have my little video on your short form video content platform. I promise I do not mean harm.

And if you stop for a second and watch the video you will understand why it was posted. Slow down. Take a breath. You are doing great just remember why you are.

People on the internet love to talk about "no more third spaces". Your third space is the internet. Everything points to the hubs so everyone goes to them. But they are the end of the road. You will never discover anything except for a quest that sends you into the dark. Stop waiting for the quest to be given to you. Skip the middle man he is fat and gross.

HOW DO YOU USE THE INTERNET CORRECTLY?

Figure out your safe spaces. The sites between discovery and the mainland. A room where you can recuperate, get some sleep, and make something cool without needing to plug in. Your safe space must be unexplored [see chart]. My recommendation is watchavideo.net but it is built for me. Build your own. It does not have to be youtube videos. It can be paintings or books, pictures of your family, blue things, green things, engineering marvels, optical illusions, sounds, a live video of a camera pointing at you from the corner of the room.

There is no tech advancement that makes the site better. You are building a masquerade of an algorithm. Everything you view has been placed. You are changing pixels on your screen like you would your bed and your dresser. If your online experience seats you in reality then you will return faster while not being as drained by the 5G tower next to you.

I think videos are the most exciting. When you watch videos that random people made and you are looking in the right places you see cinema that equals whatever Orson Welles was doing 200 years ago. Nothing great is being made anymore is bogus. There is so much greatness that you are accustomed to it. Everyone is a hipster and that is awesome. Everyone thinks more differently than ever and that is beautiful. If you don’t understand then turn on your computer, give it some memories and start collaging moving pictures and sound. Listen to music. If you need something you can hop on the internet and find it. Once the browser is open you know where you are headed, a mentality you should always have when using the internet. If you are in a place it should be intentional and the next thing you see should be predictably life changing. There should never be a click or a scroll that does not lead somewhere interesting.

GETTING STARTED

Go to rateyourmusic.com and find your favorite album. Click on the genre and sort by new or old or popular and find a few albums that you judge by the cover. Find songs you like and then go to youtube. To recap, you found this article which has less than 10 readers, you went directly to a website and searched your favorite album, you were "recommended" an album you should like, and now you are on youtube with a clear objective.

Search [artist name] [song name] [live OR music video]. Find a video with less than 80,000 views and watch it. (You do not have to watch the whole thing but if you choose not to know why you chose not to. Repeat the process a few times meditatively). Focus solely on the internet. A lot of times internet guilt is from not accepting that you have chosen it as your present activity. If you want to use the internet then use it but learn to think while using it. If it is truly your one activity then you should understand what you are meant to be doing after a few videos.

FINAL STEP

Go do something.

1. video player

2. algorithm adjuster

3. safe space

4. internet explorer

VIDEO PLAYER

watchavideo.net is a website where you can browse youtube videos. Most of them are from smaller artists. Every video should slow you down and offer something real that feels better than your usual feed.

ALGORITHM ADJUSTER

Interaction with the videos while logged in to YouTube should shift your algorithm to a calmer space. More creative. Less Noise.

SAFE SPACE

The action button on my iPhone opens watchavideo.net

If you are stuck in a scroll in a place you don't want to be go to watchavideo.net and watch a video. It gives you a second to choose a different direction so start planning where you would like to go.

INTERNET EXPLORER

Click the link on the video. Read about who made it. Find them online. Be curious. The more you do this the more you should feel like making things again.

HOW TO USE

Put it on a monitor slightly smaller than full screen. Press play. Then go do something you have been meaning to do. You can watch, or just listen. Both work.

watchavideo.net

A little over a year ago I was wandering around and found a book on the curb. After waiting a time that felt sufficient enough to claim the book as my own I untied the closure and read

101 NEW USES FOR YOUR BRAIN

Psychology of Creativity

Dr. Kenneth Phillips

Each page has a short blurb written on a loose piece of paper. There is something interactively fun about taking the page out and laying it somewhere. If you wanted to you could fold it up and put it in your wallet. Of course, the book will slowly lose its purpose but now you can read it on the go. And for many of these pages they are worth reading on the go.

I have yet to figure out why the book was made or find another printing of it, but it has pushed me down a rabbit hole deep enough to connect isolated pieces of the last 24 years of my life in a significant enough way to remind me who I am.

Standalone the book is a masterpiece. 101 new uses for anything is sufficient for years of discovery. You not only have to read it but understand it, implement it, learn it, eventually realizing you could never reach a conclusion for each use since things change ignoring the fact you still have 100 new uses to test out.

Naturally I started by trying to find Kenneth Phillips. As of now I only know him through a memoriam written by a friend of his. The book begins to make more sense as you learn who Ken was. He was a modern day explorer.

[Link here]

Like I mentioned at the start I found this and moved on to a new thought taking it with me but only in the passive storage of my mind for it to return when we crossed paths again. I showed many people the book and rambled about how odd and "interesting" it is, but could never explain it.

1/1/2024

I discovered Printernet. A service that packages up your favorite words found through digital exploration into a neat little physical booklet. I purchased two, one booklet determined by the writer based off my digital footprint and the other with the writings I adore most or want to experience outside of a screen.

The story about Ken was one of the pieces I included in my print. As I read about Ken yet again I drifted far away from the anxieties shrouding me. Steve Jobs once said "One of the ways that I believe people express their appreciation for the rest of humanity is to make something wonderful and put it out there." I know from my own time spent making there is a spiritual joy to successfully finishing the thing that was once just an idea. And from the consumer's view that joy can be felt if it was made with purity. Ken's creation embodies this and my Printernet booklet reminded me of this.

The man who wrote about Ken is Mike Hawley. An equally fascinating person. At one point in his life he shared a living space with Steve Jobs and assisted in the writing of Steve's 2005 Stanford commencement address, a speech which I included in a project 6 years ago. A speech about why you need to live.

The prompt for the project was to show a feeling through video. I chose the feeling of being happy. Looking back the cinematography could be improved but I hold the idea heartily if not with more value now that I understand it a little more. In 2018 my happiness was found through exploring, and I am realizing the meanings of the word explore are as endless as the act of doing it.

To my benefit or not I have an immutable urge to explore, so I remade an old booklet to make the journeys easier. If you are reading this there is a good chance you have found one of these booklets.

I hope you understand why this essay exists as a story more than instructions and you can find use in the booklet you found.

I wanted to show my appreciation for humanity and I hope you can find a way to show yours.

The beautiful thing about reflecting and finding these signals of sadness is you can build systems to prevent them or prepare for what is about to hit. For example, I am the type of Spotify user who has one playlist labeled “Liked Songs”. It consists of every song I have ever liked in the app. I tend to only listen to it in order from the top and my daily listening changes as I discover new artists and songs. 

Frequently, I forget songs that used to be the light of my life but that is exactly why i love this method of curation. These older songs store the emotions from the time i was first listening, and the ones above and below align with the passing of time. There are pockets of my memories packaged as their own little playlists. There is no conscious organization and it tends to be a wide array of genres, but it's all underlain by past feelings.

For me it is the best way to listen to music. It’s my combat against the fact I will never consume every thing. Whether music or books or whatever there is not enough time to see it all, so I let the art explore me. 

I may try to listen to older songs more often, but there is something about music that doesn’t want me to tell it what to do. 

So what is the song to listen to when not even your favorite feels palatable? I’m starting to learn the answer is silence. Certainly there is some benefit of a Mazzy Star or Radiohead tune to empower your dump of a day, but I’d rather use them for the recovery. The time after the war happened in my head and the sky opened up and I’m ready to try again. Maybe not full of energy quite yet, but something to remind me that the bad days pass by. 

When I look at the list of most listened to songs on my account it always surprises me. It’s never close to a list I would make of my all time favorite songs but all the songs are attached to very specific moments of my life that were rich in life. This is why I have grown comfortable with my life recorded by my phone through data. As it collects more you can use it to bring back in to the real world as an explanation for your sub conscious. 

This essay has made me want to go back and find these songs that are attached to me in the most significant ways. I think that defeats the purpose of my method though. By leaving it to chance there’s more power to the music. It finds me. It always has and it always will. 

I know I am entering a depressed mood when I don’t even want to listen to music. Right now I am loving music. I’ll share some new ones for you the reader to enjoy, but truthfully to remind me what I am missing next time life doesn’t seem so bright.

I'm lost. I wander. Not physically. I wish I could. I probably can, but I am stuck. Sitting inside and comparing myself to those around me. Not people who I know, but some I wish I did and others who I spectate to make myself feel better for my lack of happiness. 

My colleagues are chatbots with voices and free will. Sometimes they turn their cameras on. Thirty minutes of communication under an umbrella of a career I am not convinced anyone is enjoying. My life is in my hands, but unconvincingly so. 

Inaction has rendered epiphanies useless. 

A comedy enjoyer who forgot the purpose of a joke is laughter and not an admittance of understanding said joke.

A mathematician who revels in others' failure to solve a problem for which he read the solution in a forum. 

A lonesome cynic thinking attention will turn him to a renowned critic.

I "collect" books, records, movies, art, toys, and things. They collect dust and I stare at them blankly waiting for a reason to pick them up and enjoy them. I preach endlessly on how to be happy to those too scared to admit I am the one needing the advice the most. 

My philosophy is built on the outcome of hard work. Hard work put in by others who I expect to pick me up, announce my success, and declare that I am just like them. Realistically to an empty crowd in which my throne is not the shoulders of greatness before me but a broken man in a dark room shriveled to a dehydrated carcass of self-defeating prophecies.

Aware that suicide would be an outcome of fear, but living a life in which natural death will be reached delicately as I tip toe through a promising future avoiding any chance at excitement because anything less would be the worst.

"Art classes taught me the benefit of working through failure" I tell myself, but much like everything I learn I fabricate it as accomplishment and find the next thing in hopes one day a crowd stops to stare and shout to those walking past that "this is the kid who learned something new". 

You think you are a loser until you start winning, and I am losing less than others, but believing I am not last is enough to keep me from actually trying to win. I think acknowledgment of my depression is heroic, I think my suffering is a choice, I think that I am doing exactly what needs to be done to pursue happiness.

I was told once to question whether my productivity is a masquerade. I hold it as some of the best advice shared personally. But now this essay concludes and you realize what it really is, why it was written, and you bookmark the tab to wipe your feet on after a day of accomplishing something I am too scared to try.