I was on Bluesky a week or two ago, and someone made a comment along the lines of 'The only ones of us immune to this shit grew up shitposting 20-25 years ago' and...I think they are right.
Like, to me, the entire internet is having a profound case of Poster's Madness.
As someone who grew up on Something Awful - well, I saw many of the early cases of Poster's Madness, and effectively repeated exposure ended up inoculating a lot of us against it. It's not that I'm fully immune to the siren song of social media affirmation, but every time I see a bunch of notifications, I know they are inherently empty satisfaction; they still feel nice for a moment, but the allure of chasing them is more...minimal.
And I think that's a piece of it, too - people who have real satisfaction don't post. Or at most, post rarely; instead, they are off doing things. The problem is rich & powerful people tend to lack real satisfaction...and, well, so, Posting is now Power, because almost everyone online has Poster's Madness now.
I'm not sure what that says, exactly; I think the currents you observe are real, but I think that they can only exist so long as people continue to do the hard, real work required to keep the entire apparatus literally powered, with electricity and all that.
Sure - but like, we've all had coworkers who hang onto the job but are total fools, right?
As Chat GPT brainrots more and more people, as more and more kids pass into the work force without learning how to learn, the number of people actually capable of doing the work /right/ is going to decline.
It's going to manifest as increasing #s of incidents, longer delays on delivery, shittier service, badly done installs. Fraying for a long while before it fully breaks.
That problem seems sort of self-correcting to me, in that, if there's real value in doing the "right" work, the reward for being able to do that will encourage a sufficient supply of them to exist. But what value means there is pretty loose, and certainly doesn't necessarily mean it's socially valuable, or valuable in a kind of moral sense. But if tiktok is making tons of money melting people's brains, it seems unlikely that tiktok won't figure out a way to keep the lights on.
The attention economy creep into B2B tech has been rather perplexing.
Oh you sell software to accountants? Well good luck trying to break through, now you need to be a madman online to drown out all the other accountant-tech brands. You can't just make good software. You have to be on a mission. You can't just make, IDK, invoicing easier, you have to be fostering a new paradigm for independent accountants who are living the growth hungry grindse...🙈
Want VC attention? Better prove you have a built in audience (just like publishing).
Want a software job? I'm pretty sure A LOT of hiring managers are looking at social media stats — influence — instead of the resume.
Want to break into a new vertical? You better be a "founder-lead brand" doing "founder-lead marketing."
Shit, everyone is doing FLM? Well good thing AI is here to help with that content calendar.
Actually, the mission and the software and the feature set don't matter as much.
We just need eyeballs.
Ah, NOT getting eyeballs?
LinkedIn will be happy to let you boost your posts.
On one hand, yeah, it's like, why in the world should I care if my accounting software is made by someone with a big following on Tiktok? There is something deeply irrational there, especially with stuff as mechanical as a lot of b2b software.
On the other hand, the people who buy software are also just people. The IT manager who's running the expense management POC is the same person who likes the rage bait on facebook or dance videos on tiktok. It's all people, at the bottom of it, and it's all the same people. So of course it works, I guess.
(Also, I tend to believe that people aren't very good at having independent opinions, and largely like things because of external signals. So in that sense, the influencer accounting software thing might be somewhat rational, because the people evaluating it have a hard time evaluating it on its own. It's like people liking wine more when they know it's expensive: Having some positive impression of the brand actually changes how you see the software itself too.)
Well and you've posited before that it seems some enterprising celebrities should just have their own versions of everyday software, and like you, I'm kinda surprised that hasn't happened yet.
I'm involved in a couple small service/SaaS businesses and the present-day-marketing angle is perplexing.
That is flat out depressing! What am I supposed to do now with my daughters?? Is there an undergraduate degree in ITASiM? (Influencer Technology & Science in Marketing)
Marilyn Simon teaches Shakespeare at a Canadian university but when she was interviewed by the Republic of Letters she said that she thinks that she has seen peak fragility among the students compared with 5 years ago and that they are more willing to deal with difficult things. The only hope is that enough younger people have seen the monster that they refuse it and embrace a more analog life. These younger people may support very few established institutions however.
I'm a tech guy doing the whole back-to-the-land thing, and at our 10 acre tropical fruit park (under construction), we've been wondering if something like an "offline-club" would have any purchase. Just no distractions, tactile experiences, lockers for phones... not sure what else, really.
And then we think, hrm, to market that, I guess we'll have to... uh, start an Instagram?
Ad in the YellowPages? (For people who ditched their smartphone.)
Guerrilla marketing/trashcan on the street corner/"Recycle Your Smartphone And Walk This Way To the Offline Club For Cool and Attractive People?"
IDK, anyway I have a lot of trees to get in the ground, still.
Perhaps if one swaps out “analog” for “virtuous”, one can embrace that and still find a target market without ditching the primary communication method of the population.
One can live a totally analog life and have next to nil virtue. Ted Kaczynski immediately comes to mind.
I've seen stories like this every so often, about how there's some club of high schoolers or college kids who refuse to use smart phones or social media (advertised through flyers taped to poles that say "Join the Luddite Club For Meaningful Connections" and “Do You Desire a Healthier Relationship With Technology, Especially Social Media? The Luddite Club Welcomes You and Your Ideas"), but they don't exactly seem to be really catching on: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/30/style/luddite-teens-reunion.html
Still, it does feel like there's a bit of a general expectation that the pendulum will swing back; what's old will become new again; etc, and people will get performance fatigue, want to be more private, and all of that. Which, I dunno? Maybe, but most cyclical fads seem to be driven by a desire to do something new and different - skinny jeans in style, so people wanted to wear something more unique so they wore mom jeans, and then people wanted something more unique, so they wore skinny jeans again. There's nothing inherent in either style that makes it appealing. But for social media, the appeal seems to come from it being engineered to appeal to very base human desires. It it seems a lot less clear how that goes out of style.
“Engineered to appeal to very base human desires” is accurate and precise. The validation of the proof is Cambridge Analytica and the engineering of Five Factor Model. That hypothesis — that one can engineer Big Data, Behavioral Science, and the FFM to communicate messages — was validated 10+ years ago.
What is the outcome of that hypothesis? Is the outcome related to the question you’ve asked at the beginning of the post?
I have no idea. I said this in the very post I ever wrote on this thing, and I think it's still more or less my perspective. Social media is not all that different than heavily arming the population. You can make arguments for why it's good, but it's probably, on net, technology that is destructive to society. And so long as it exists, it will, in its various ways, destroy society.
"Perhaps, the problem is simpler. Perhaps, just as a society in which we’re all issued an assault rifle when we turn twelve is an inherently dangerous one, a society in which anyone can find and talk to everyone in an instant is an inherently unstable one. Perhaps, just because we can build it, doesn’t mean we should."
all press is good press as they used to say could be restated as all attention is good attention. no doubt at the margins attention can make the difference between a venture that fails and one that succeeds in a competitive space. but so much of the economy is invisible. there is a certain cap on the collective attention span. wielding it is incredibly valuable but my gut says a lot of other wealth building still goes on, unnoticed.
Yeah, (despite the title) none of this is to say that attention and being viral is the only way to succeed, or everyone who plays that game has their brain melt out of their ears. But it sure seems like a lot higher percentage of successful people will go that way. And I'm not sure where things go if that happens.
(The point about there being a cap on attention spans does raise an interesting question to me though. Historically, at least in social media, we seem to think of viral stuff as being somewhat universally so. Sure, people have their hobbies, but everyone spends some amount of time on "front page news," as it were. But on Tiktok, where everyone's feed is highly curated for them, popularity becomes somewhat more...niche? Not geographically, but by interest. The biggest celebrities in my world may not even exist in yours. Which probably has some weird effects? If nothing else, it seems to multiply the "amount" of attention in the economy, because people can pay extremely close attention to stuff that the person next to them might not. Though that was always true to some degree, it seemed that your attention was probably a lot more endogenous to your neighbor's attention in the past.)
I dunno, wikipedia says it's about "a straightforward but troubled [person] who is nearing a mental breakdown," and feels like that one's gonna hit a little too close to home.
It’s my favorite book on earth and it might clarify much of what you’re circling here. It’s the sequel to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which is also great, but in a different way.
Those are the only 2 books he ever wrote. It took him ~25 years to write the second, and then he was satisfied that he’d said everything he wanted to say.
I would like to add something though - while it seems like attention gets you the power that only hard-working individuals had in the past, it only gives it to you for a short time. What's the difference between the Kardashians and the Hawk Tuah Girl? The former took their attention and turned it into massively successful businesses and consistent power and influence. The latter, far from it.
I would say that the difference in that result is due to the Kardashians hard work, customer obsession, etc. So while that 15 minute of attention is much more important these days, it is only the plunger (from pinball). Real skill and grit is still needed.
Oh, for sure, I don't mean to imply that is a shortcut; it's still a hard path, and the people I know who are influencers of sorts put in a ton of work to do it. But it's a path that selects for a different set of skills and encourages a different set of behaviors. Being very online doesn't mean you aren't working hard. It just means you might get eaten alive. And I'm not quite sure we've reckoned with what happens when the world is run by people who've been eaten alive.
I was on Bluesky a week or two ago, and someone made a comment along the lines of 'The only ones of us immune to this shit grew up shitposting 20-25 years ago' and...I think they are right.
Like, to me, the entire internet is having a profound case of Poster's Madness.
As someone who grew up on Something Awful - well, I saw many of the early cases of Poster's Madness, and effectively repeated exposure ended up inoculating a lot of us against it. It's not that I'm fully immune to the siren song of social media affirmation, but every time I see a bunch of notifications, I know they are inherently empty satisfaction; they still feel nice for a moment, but the allure of chasing them is more...minimal.
And I think that's a piece of it, too - people who have real satisfaction don't post. Or at most, post rarely; instead, they are off doing things. The problem is rich & powerful people tend to lack real satisfaction...and, well, so, Posting is now Power, because almost everyone online has Poster's Madness now.
I'm not sure what that says, exactly; I think the currents you observe are real, but I think that they can only exist so long as people continue to do the hard, real work required to keep the entire apparatus literally powered, with electricity and all that.
I mean, people gotta eat, so they're going to keep showing up to the oil rig and the data center construction site.
Sure - but like, we've all had coworkers who hang onto the job but are total fools, right?
As Chat GPT brainrots more and more people, as more and more kids pass into the work force without learning how to learn, the number of people actually capable of doing the work /right/ is going to decline.
It's going to manifest as increasing #s of incidents, longer delays on delivery, shittier service, badly done installs. Fraying for a long while before it fully breaks.
That problem seems sort of self-correcting to me, in that, if there's real value in doing the "right" work, the reward for being able to do that will encourage a sufficient supply of them to exist. But what value means there is pretty loose, and certainly doesn't necessarily mean it's socially valuable, or valuable in a kind of moral sense. But if tiktok is making tons of money melting people's brains, it seems unlikely that tiktok won't figure out a way to keep the lights on.
That said, this post struck me as an interesting (and depressing) model of the entire internet, more or less: https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-general-theory-of-enshittification
That is 100% sure. LOL.
Great point. I was just thinking how glad I am I grew up without the internet, even though in tech, I owe my career to it
I’m not crazy
give it time!
(but until then, teach us your ways)
Ignore everything
This does seem like The Way
The attention economy creep into B2B tech has been rather perplexing.
Oh you sell software to accountants? Well good luck trying to break through, now you need to be a madman online to drown out all the other accountant-tech brands. You can't just make good software. You have to be on a mission. You can't just make, IDK, invoicing easier, you have to be fostering a new paradigm for independent accountants who are living the growth hungry grindse...🙈
Want VC attention? Better prove you have a built in audience (just like publishing).
Want a software job? I'm pretty sure A LOT of hiring managers are looking at social media stats — influence — instead of the resume.
Want to break into a new vertical? You better be a "founder-lead brand" doing "founder-lead marketing."
Shit, everyone is doing FLM? Well good thing AI is here to help with that content calendar.
Actually, the mission and the software and the feature set don't matter as much.
We just need eyeballs.
Ah, NOT getting eyeballs?
LinkedIn will be happy to let you boost your posts.
On one hand, yeah, it's like, why in the world should I care if my accounting software is made by someone with a big following on Tiktok? There is something deeply irrational there, especially with stuff as mechanical as a lot of b2b software.
On the other hand, the people who buy software are also just people. The IT manager who's running the expense management POC is the same person who likes the rage bait on facebook or dance videos on tiktok. It's all people, at the bottom of it, and it's all the same people. So of course it works, I guess.
(Also, I tend to believe that people aren't very good at having independent opinions, and largely like things because of external signals. So in that sense, the influencer accounting software thing might be somewhat rational, because the people evaluating it have a hard time evaluating it on its own. It's like people liking wine more when they know it's expensive: Having some positive impression of the brand actually changes how you see the software itself too.)
"people aren't very good at having independent opinions" - ! THIS!
Well and you've posited before that it seems some enterprising celebrities should just have their own versions of everyday software, and like you, I'm kinda surprised that hasn't happened yet.
I'm involved in a couple small service/SaaS businesses and the present-day-marketing angle is perplexing.
For entirely anthropological reasons, I would absolutely love it if Timothee Chalamet released a CRM
🤣
That is flat out depressing! What am I supposed to do now with my daughters?? Is there an undergraduate degree in ITASiM? (Influencer Technology & Science in Marketing)
#Parenting Fail#
I'm not sure this is going to make you feel better, but....yes? There is that degree?
https://www.setu.ie/courses/ba-in-content-creation-and-social-media
ARE YOU FOR REAL
And there are somehow *36* required subjects???
Marilyn Simon teaches Shakespeare at a Canadian university but when she was interviewed by the Republic of Letters she said that she thinks that she has seen peak fragility among the students compared with 5 years ago and that they are more willing to deal with difficult things. The only hope is that enough younger people have seen the monster that they refuse it and embrace a more analog life. These younger people may support very few established institutions however.
I'm a tech guy doing the whole back-to-the-land thing, and at our 10 acre tropical fruit park (under construction), we've been wondering if something like an "offline-club" would have any purchase. Just no distractions, tactile experiences, lockers for phones... not sure what else, really.
And then we think, hrm, to market that, I guess we'll have to... uh, start an Instagram?
Ad in the YellowPages? (For people who ditched their smartphone.)
Guerrilla marketing/trashcan on the street corner/"Recycle Your Smartphone And Walk This Way To the Offline Club For Cool and Attractive People?"
IDK, anyway I have a lot of trees to get in the ground, still.
Perhaps if one swaps out “analog” for “virtuous”, one can embrace that and still find a target market without ditching the primary communication method of the population.
One can live a totally analog life and have next to nil virtue. Ted Kaczynski immediately comes to mind.
I've seen stories like this every so often, about how there's some club of high schoolers or college kids who refuse to use smart phones or social media (advertised through flyers taped to poles that say "Join the Luddite Club For Meaningful Connections" and “Do You Desire a Healthier Relationship With Technology, Especially Social Media? The Luddite Club Welcomes You and Your Ideas"), but they don't exactly seem to be really catching on: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/30/style/luddite-teens-reunion.html
Still, it does feel like there's a bit of a general expectation that the pendulum will swing back; what's old will become new again; etc, and people will get performance fatigue, want to be more private, and all of that. Which, I dunno? Maybe, but most cyclical fads seem to be driven by a desire to do something new and different - skinny jeans in style, so people wanted to wear something more unique so they wore mom jeans, and then people wanted something more unique, so they wore skinny jeans again. There's nothing inherent in either style that makes it appealing. But for social media, the appeal seems to come from it being engineered to appeal to very base human desires. It it seems a lot less clear how that goes out of style.
“Engineered to appeal to very base human desires” is accurate and precise. The validation of the proof is Cambridge Analytica and the engineering of Five Factor Model. That hypothesis — that one can engineer Big Data, Behavioral Science, and the FFM to communicate messages — was validated 10+ years ago.
What is the outcome of that hypothesis? Is the outcome related to the question you’ve asked at the beginning of the post?
I have no idea. I said this in the very post I ever wrote on this thing, and I think it's still more or less my perspective. Social media is not all that different than heavily arming the population. You can make arguments for why it's good, but it's probably, on net, technology that is destructive to society. And so long as it exists, it will, in its various ways, destroy society.
"Perhaps, the problem is simpler. Perhaps, just as a society in which we’re all issued an assault rifle when we turn twelve is an inherently dangerous one, a society in which anyone can find and talk to everyone in an instant is an inherently unstable one. Perhaps, just because we can build it, doesn’t mean we should."
If you have some established customers for the fruit like restaurants they may partner with you on a promotion for the offline club aspect.
I would first make it a viable business with selling the fruit and then see what other agro-tourism companies do to market themselves.
all press is good press as they used to say could be restated as all attention is good attention. no doubt at the margins attention can make the difference between a venture that fails and one that succeeds in a competitive space. but so much of the economy is invisible. there is a certain cap on the collective attention span. wielding it is incredibly valuable but my gut says a lot of other wealth building still goes on, unnoticed.
I think that's true — the unnoticed wealth building — for incumbent brands and companies.
But I don't think any new business in any category can avoid slavery to the content grist.
Yeah, (despite the title) none of this is to say that attention and being viral is the only way to succeed, or everyone who plays that game has their brain melt out of their ears. But it sure seems like a lot higher percentage of successful people will go that way. And I'm not sure where things go if that happens.
(The point about there being a cap on attention spans does raise an interesting question to me though. Historically, at least in social media, we seem to think of viral stuff as being somewhat universally so. Sure, people have their hobbies, but everyone spends some amount of time on "front page news," as it were. But on Tiktok, where everyone's feed is highly curated for them, popularity becomes somewhat more...niche? Not geographically, but by interest. The biggest celebrities in my world may not even exist in yours. Which probably has some weird effects? If nothing else, it seems to multiply the "amount" of attention in the economy, because people can pay extremely close attention to stuff that the person next to them might not. Though that was always true to some degree, it seemed that your attention was probably a lot more endogenous to your neighbor's attention in the past.)
You would enjoy reading Lila by Robert Pirsig.
I dunno, wikipedia says it's about "a straightforward but troubled [person] who is nearing a mental breakdown," and feels like that one's gonna hit a little too close to home.
It’s my favorite book on earth and it might clarify much of what you’re circling here. It’s the sequel to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which is also great, but in a different way.
Those are the only 2 books he ever wrote. It took him ~25 years to write the second, and then he was satisfied that he’d said everything he wanted to say.
Both also deeply explore the concept of insanity.
Ok that's a pretty good recommendation, Im sold.
I guess I'm still good at my job.
adding this to end note 5 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFBOQzSk14c
Do I write these things and then get distracted by writing some footnote and forget what I was trying to say? It has perhaps happened.
Fascinating take
*Senator Mike Lee
good lord
Acute observations as always Benn.
I would like to add something though - while it seems like attention gets you the power that only hard-working individuals had in the past, it only gives it to you for a short time. What's the difference between the Kardashians and the Hawk Tuah Girl? The former took their attention and turned it into massively successful businesses and consistent power and influence. The latter, far from it.
I would say that the difference in that result is due to the Kardashians hard work, customer obsession, etc. So while that 15 minute of attention is much more important these days, it is only the plunger (from pinball). Real skill and grit is still needed.
Oh, for sure, I don't mean to imply that is a shortcut; it's still a hard path, and the people I know who are influencers of sorts put in a ton of work to do it. But it's a path that selects for a different set of skills and encourages a different set of behaviors. Being very online doesn't mean you aren't working hard. It just means you might get eaten alive. And I'm not quite sure we've reckoned with what happens when the world is run by people who've been eaten alive.
We become cannibals? :)
"tastes of chicken"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MA3k9qCJ-tI
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