Breaking from the Pace of the Net

Less is more...human

Hamster running on wheel. credit: Mylius

Excerpted from a new monologue on Team Human. Here the whole thing here.

I can’t do this anymore. 

Oh, I’m happy to write and podcast and teach and talk. That’s me, and that’s all good. What I’m finding difficult, even counter-productive, is to try to keep doing this work at the pace of the Internet.

Podcasting is great fun, and if it were lucrative enough I could probably record and release one or two episodes a week without breaking too much of a sweat. That’s the pace encouraged by both the advertising algorithms and the patronage platforms. Advertisers can more easily bid for spots on a show with a predictable schedule on specified days. Likewise, paying subscribers have come to expect regular content from the podcasts they support. Or at least the platforms encourage a regular rhythm, and embed subtle cues for consistency. 

Substack, while great for a lot of things, is even worse as far as its implied demand for near-daily output. If I really wanted to live off a Substack writing career, I would have to ramp up to at least three posts a week. That might work if I were a beat reporter covering sports, but - really - how many cogent ideas about media, society, technology and change can one person develop over the course of a week? More important, how many ideas can one person come up with that are truly worth other people’s time? 

I don’t even read the semi-weekly output of Paul Krugman, Tom Friedman, or any of the NYTimes a-list commentators. I feel like I’m reading the same column, again and again, with slight variations. For that experience of variations on a theme I’d rather listen to the Grateful Dead channel, where each concert version of DarkStar is a unique instance of something fundamentally familiar. 

Making matters worse, the pace of the Internet actually increases with the growth of the platforms. Where print or television may have been a regular grind, the Internet is an accelerating grind. No sooner do you get used to one pace of production than the platforms seem to demand more. More posts, more microcontent to support those posts, and more networks on which to post and cross-post all of that content. A platform’s profits can’t grow exponentially without accelerating the hamster wheels on which its users run. 

I get it. It’s just the indsutrial age expressing the values of increased productivity to all of us through platforms that can substitute for the commands of the taskmaster with pacing and leading of the digital environment itself. Where freelancers like me used to internalize the mean boss, now our technologies do that for us. 

And while I love being able to engage with readers and listeners and Discord members through many modes, I am coming to realize my sense of guilty obligation to all the people on all these platforms is actually misplaced. The platforms themselves are configured to tug on those triggers of responsibility, the same way Snapchat uses the “streak” feature to keep tween girls messaging each other every day. They’re not messaging out of social obligation, but to keep the platform’s metric rising. It’s early training for the way their eventual economic precarity will keep them checking for how much money a Medium post earned, or how many new subscribers were generated by a Substack post. 

Most ironically, perhaps, the more content we churn out for all of these platforms, the less valuable all of our content becomes. There’s simply too much stuff. The problem isn’t information overload so much as “perspective abundance.” We may need to redefine “discipline” from the ability to write and publish something every day to the ability hold back. What if people started to produce content when they had actually something to say, rather than coming up with something to say in order to fill another slot? 

I’m going to try that. It’s how I always worked in the past. I remember when Blogger started, I would use the platform to write one thosuand-word piece every couple of weeks. People would comment that I was using it “wrong” - that it was supposed to be a daily web log, thus “blog.” But I ended up growing an audience anyway, and I think they appreciated that I’d only ask for their eyeballs if I thought what I had to share was worth their time. 

Now I’m doing a podcast every week, which means finding guests to fill slots rather than finding slots to share friends and ideas with you. That’s not fair to anyone, particularly when there are so many podcasts and radio shows on which many of these same guests and friends are appearing. (That’s likely why my interview shows have significantly smaller audiences than the monologues.) Back when we started the Team Human podcast, I remember listeners emailing to say that our episodes were so rich that they wanted more time to digest them. They complained that our weekly output was just too much to process. They wanted to have time for a second listen. So we dropped to once every-other-week, which did feel more natural. But that was before Covid and the loss of speaking gigs, before Medium shut its magazines and stopped paying writers, before I had to start paying college tuition bills and before I found myself enmeshed in the value system of views, opens, and CPMs. 

It’s not worth it. What I value most and, hopefully, offer is an alternative to the pacing and values of digital industrialism. That’s what I’m here for: to express and even model a human approach to living in a digital media environment. So I’m getting off the treadmill, recognizing this assembly line for what it is, and trusting that you will stay with me on this journey in recognition of the fact that less is more. 

Listen to the whole monologue, including how AI fits into all this, on the new Team Human show right here.