Tensions
October 16, 2024
3-Item Status
Current location: Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA
Reading: How Sanctions Work by Narges Bajoghli, Vali Nasr, Djavad Salehi-Isfahani, and Ali Vaez
Listening: Last Time We Never Meet Again by Sarah Kinsley
Quick Notes
Voting: If you’re in the US and keen to vote on November 5, you can find all sorts of info about your local voting situation here: vote.org
New Project: One more nudge for my first piece on Some Thoughts About—working on the next one and looking forward to sharing it!
Question: This week’s question is about consumption.
(If you have a moment, reply with your own 3-Item Status and/or Quick Notes about what’s happening in your life.)
Tensions
Writing and sharing words would superficially seem to be the same thing no matter where you write and share them.
But the number of words, the sorts of words you use, and the amount of focus (or lack thereof) folks on the other end can be expected to invest in your words changes the nature of writing and sharing: publishing a novel isn’t the same as writing short-form copy that’ll appear over a TikTok video, nor is writing a script for a long-form YouTube explainer the same as scrivening a made-for-stage play.
The same general concept applies to evolutions in presentation (shared visually on social media versus read-aloud as an audiobook) and monetization options.
On that latter point, there was a time when a few basic business models (ads/sponsors, freemium, one-off paid, subscription, and freebies-plus-things-to-buy) would cover 99% of creators’ needs once they figured out the proper fit for their work and audience.
Today, though, our communication channels are so awash with marketing messages and our budgets (especially for subscriptions) are so strained that while there have never been more and more powerful (and intuitive) tools for setting up personalized money-making infrastructure, it’s become a very winner-takes-all ecosystem in which a few success stories break through, a few more than that can make a meager living on their work, and everyone else is scrambling (despite in many cases producing incredible work) to make enough to pay for groceries.
The entities running the platforms on which the majority of creative work is shared, these days, will sometimes gesture at providing some kind of revenue based on metrics that are meaningful to their bottom lines—usually ad views and engagement, (which allows them to charge more for those ad placements)—but these additional resources also tend to accumulate with the fortunate few at the top of the pyramid, reinforcing that substantial imbalance rather than upending it.
Because of these (and similar) dynamics, there’s tension between what many of us would like to create and where we’d like to share those creations, and the sorts of things we’re being incentivized to make and where we’re encouraged to share them.
I can’t tell you how many people I know (many of whom have been very successful under the current and previous publishing paradigms) who would like to just be writing all day, but who are instead forced by the nature of this contemporary setup to spend the majority of their time making short-form videos (and similar content) to feed the algorithms that determine whether or not they’ll be able to pay their bills with (what they consider to be) their actual work.
It’s possible to ignore these systemic nudges and make whatever we want, wherever we want, however we want, of course.
But the deck is stacked against us if we don’t embrace these globe-scale Schelling Points and follow the money wherever it’s currently accreting, filtering and reshaping our work so it fits within the confines of the medium of the moment, all while hoping that something of what we wanted to say makes it into its final, ultraprocessed form.
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Interesting Links
The word knight doesn’t even appear in OD&D. But there is one group of people who act distinctly knight-like. The wilderness contains castles, ruled by fighters, magic-users, or clerics. The fighters will challenge players to a joust (using Chainmail rules), taking the loser’s armor and offering hospitality to the winner. This has a sort of Arthurian chivalry to it, but Pendragon it is not. Gygax carefully avoids calling these folks “knights.” They’re fighting-men, with retainers (monstrous and human) and armies, looking very like the ones players can acquire. Furthermore, castle-owning fighting men are just as rare as castle-owning magic-users and clerics. The Outdoor Survival game board, which forms the default OD&D map, has a land area of 25,000 miles, half the size of England. There are about six castle-owning fighting-men in that area. In other words, castles of the wilderness aren’t dominated by an analogue of a knightly order, leavened by a few fantastic spellcasters. It looks, rather, as if they were built by a small handful of adventurers, appearing in roughly the class proportions of a typical adventuring party. (Fighters are, if anything, under-represented.)
The Collapse of Self-Worth in the Digital Age
When I was twelve, I used to roller-skate in circles for hours. I was at another new school, the odd man out, bullied by my desk mate. My problems were too complex and modern to explain. So I skated across parking lots, breezeways, and sidewalks, I listened to the vibration of my wheels on brick, I learned the names of flowers, I put deserted paths to use. I decided for myself each curve I took, and by the time I rolled home, I felt lighter. One Saturday, a friend invited me to roller-skate in the park. I can still picture her in green protective knee pads, flying past. I couldn’t catch up, I had no technique. There existed another scale to evaluate roller skating, beyond joy, and as Rollerbladers and cyclists overtook me, it eclipsed my own. Soon after, I stopped skating.
It Took 70 Years to Find My Inner Artist. At 82, I’m in My Studio Every Day
The first time Norma Geddes successfully cut and shaped a piece of glass, at the age of 69, she was so elated it shocked her. “I was one of five people in a class where we were learning how to make stained-glass panels and everyone was 30 years younger than me,” says the former nurse and healthcare manager. “I became so excited at seeing this moon-shaped piece of glass come to life in my hands that it almost made me feel embarrassed. I didn’t know doing something so simple could be so fulfilling. I knew I had to carry on.”
(If you want more links to interesting things, consider subscribing to Aspiring Generalist.)
Question
Today’s question is about consumption.
Consider answering in the comments (via the button below) or hitting “reply” to answer via email. Here’s the question:
What’s your favorite consumption-oriented device (used for reading, watching, listening, playing, etc), as opposed to tools you use for creation?
I try to be careful to balance my inputs and outputs, keeping things balanced so that I can get a lot of inspiration from what other folks are making without accidentally investing so much time and energy in consumption that I forget to make and share my own stuff.
That said, while I do a lot of browsing and reading and playing of games on my laptop, and I listen to a lot of podcasts on my phone (I play a few games and read a lot on my iPad, as well), my favorite consumption-only device is my Kindle Paperwhite, which I use to read (primarily) fiction each night for somewhere between 15 and 60 minutes before going to sleep.
Ebook readers are just really under-appreciated technologies, in my opinion, and though they’re not very good (in their current form, at least) for anything else, when it comes just reading a book? They’re wonderful.
Outro
After about six years, I bought a new Kindle Paperwhite to replace the (previous generation) one I’ve been using every day for all that time, and I couldn’t be happier with my decision (even though I received it just a few days before a brand new model was released).
The one I traded in (for a discount on the new one) still worked but was becoming a little sluggish, at times, and it charged via an older (and now somewhat obscure) USB cable, while the new one uses (the better and increasingly abundant) USB-C standard.
Bizarre that most of what Amazon makes (hardware-wise, especially) is just really not good, but Kindles (the e-paper products, at least—the tablets are fairly blah) are rock-solid (though they’ve got a lot more competition these days, and I’m keeping my eyes on alternatives for potential future replacements).
Also—and I bring this up because a lot of people don’t seem to realize it—did you know you can side-load ebooks you buy anywhere to Kindles (and other ebook readers)? And did you know you can easily get ebooks (and audiobooks) from your local library and read them on these devices, free?
It feels a bit silly to gush about a replacement gadget, but I really do get immense value from this thing, and I wish more product categories opted for the “barely ever updated, but work well and last a long time” model of production, rather than opting for the planned-obsolescence hype-cycles that have become so pervasive.
Make any purchases that you’re feeling really good about, lately? Drop me a message and tell me about it, and/or take a moment to introduce yourself—I respond to every message I receive and would love to hear from you :)
I've never considered it a 'favourite' device, but perhaps most convenient is my phone. I use it for meditation, podcasts, music (via headphones and bluetooth in the car), shopping lists and shop scanner app, to-do lists, recording snippets of songs I'm working on, jotting lyrics down when the moment of inspiration strikes.
I still journal by hand but the flexibility a phone allows (strange I still call it that when the number of phone calls I make per week is in the single-digits) for these other items is great when used mindfully.
My favorite consumption device is a bicycle. This might be a left field answer, but I would argue that is a good one.
A bicycle is my way of consuming landscapes, weather, and good conversations. There are so many textures, sights and smells of my city and surrounding countryside, and I am more apt to appreciate and notice them when my heart rate is at 120bpm. Like the beloved kindle paperwhite, they last quite a while if you use a little lube and replace your chain every 1000 miles.