A place to discuss the newsletter in the title.
This a comment on an older newsletter, but it’s one I was reading today.
One of my interests is how the idea of “curation” is such a major component of the way our culture evolves. 30 years ago, and more, if you wanted to reach a lot of people you had to get accepted by a publisher who had a fair amount of resources. Newspapers, TV, book publishers. There were not a lot of them. But as a side effect of that, it was more likely that a person you met had been exposed to the same culture you had. You’d likely have something to talk about. And only the reasonably accessible/digestible content would join the hive mind. Fringe stuff existed, but it was hard to track down. (Which was a good and natural thing.)
One perspective says that it’s good that anyone can now publish their own words, videos etc. There are good things about that, but now we have a million voices all jabbering away at once. A thousand cable channels, a million web sites, billions of social media accounts that anyone can follow.
What exactly is the process that we use to decide how to spend our attention? Algorithmic recommendations are the junk food of attention and focus. They are designed to give you a quick dopamine hit, but they leave no significant culture in their wake. Just flash-in-the-pan memes. In the early days of the web you had to find links to new cool websites by spending times on other web sites or forums that you trusted not to exploit you. That’s what makes the memory of that era so compelling. You had to do work, and you got rewarded with good stuff that meant something.
You had to find your own cool stuff, and you could share it only with people who thought you were cool and visited your web site, or the shared spaces that you hung out at.
Only about 10% of those 4.5 million podcasts are actually active. The rest are “podfaded” relics - three-episode arcs that began with bright-eyed enthusiasm and ended when the creators realized that talking to a void is harder than it looks.
Those 4 million dead podcasts are not a problem, nobody looks at them from A to Z. What’s really making you suffer is that there is no ecosystem, no web of trust and curation.
The blogs I follow most closely are still mostly words that I don’t read. But I scan them and some have a very high hit rate of pointing me at interesting things. So the moral of the story is: Do the work. Find the good stuff. Share it with people who are important to you.
The junk food version of curation is: I smirked when I saw this meme, so I will click the like button. It’s a hollow, meaningless interaction in the shape of curation.
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