Calliope in Computational Chains

Or, Why I Stopped Writing Part I

I think a lot about neuroplasticity. The human ability to learn new things and essentially change our brain is a superpower. Unfortunately, it’s one that wanes with age. As I’ve approached middle age, I’ve made exercising this a critical part of my life. Most helpfully and idiotically, I have twice challenged myself to do one new thing a day for an entire year. I do not recommend this unless you have an unlimited budget and time. But forcing my brain to learn new things has been one of the few smart life decisions I’ve made.

I’ve written before about my generational exceptionalism of being at the exact right age to learn the internet while still knowing the analog world. This sometimes offends those older than me who have been using the internet for thirty or more years, so allow me to be clear: that is more impressive. What us late Gen Xers/elder Millennials experienced was exceptional in that it was unusual. What those early internet pioneers did was exceptional in that it was unusually good. They overcame the hardening of our neuroplasticity to learn an entirely new world, while we followed their lead like ducklings to water. I was eleven when I first used a bulletin board system, my brain was restructured with the ease of Play Doh. We are not the same.

Where we are the same is that, unlike those younger than us, the internet will always remain slightly alien, like professional soccer to Americans. But for the younger among us, the pre-internet world will always remain archaic, like people caring about horse racing. But the history of the internet has long been a fight between that alien world and the archaic one.

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As a young man, I wanted to follow the career path of Dave Barry. He went to college, got a job at my local newspaper - the Daily Local News - worked his way up, parlayed that into gigs at bigger papers, start writing for magazines, then writing books, then had a sitcom based on his life made starring Harry Anderson. If you wanted people to read your writing – as I did - this was the way. Sure, fanzine writers were putting in the work, but this was the way.

Except before I had a chance to go to college, I started using the internet. I forged a niche writing about hockey prospects for the simple reason that websites needed people to write about this and I was a 14-year-old homeschooler with time and interest. I used that to start writing more generally about hockey and then I started my own website dedicated to the Philadelphia Phillies. And it did well! I even got invited to an email list dedicated to the Phillies that was inhabited by actual journalists, people who worked in baseball, player families, and even one particularly truculent All Star. Imagine being a no name teenager, starting to write about baseball, and within a few months getting into flame wars with Shohei Ohtani. The internet doesn’t work like that anymore. For a simple reason: it was smaller, the barrier to entry was lower. The main way you would get popular on the internet was simple: just do it.

My experience was hardly unique at the time, but it feels unique through all time. There was a brief period where the internet was not being taken seriously yet and anyone with the time and skills could put their writing in front of an audience. It was a small audience, but that audience also had a small number of choices. This was different to the Dave Barry path. He had to constantly impress gatekeepers – at newspapers and magazines and publishing houses – but doing so guaranteed a large audience. On the internet we had to build our audiences, but we had few gatekeepers. You’d find some 20-year-old CS student who started a website and needed writers and you volunteered. You went to Geocities and made your own website, then got it listed on Yahoo! That’s it.

That world was about to change. While I was busy abandoning my internet writing career to follow the Dave Barry path, the analog world began seeing the value of this new, digital one. And they began taking it over. As bigger players moved onto the internet, the first mover advantage waned, and a hierarchy began developing. Because when the analog world came, they brought their gatekeepers with them. And the way to be popular on the internet increasingly began resembling the way it was in the real world: impress gatekeepers and get a platform.

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Go to school, get a job at a newspaper, keep moving up. In the 90s there was a kid in Boston who did that, but also had some foresight and when the newspaper thing wasn’t working, convinced an AOL owned website (i.e., a corporate owned website with gatekeepers) to let him start writing as the Boston Sports Guy. Eventually the gatekeepers at ESPN gave him a bigger platform, and now a few decades later, Bill Simmons is a mega-rich media impresario who spends his time talking to people on the internet and polluting the public’s understanding of NBA history. No sitcom about his life yet, though, so score one for Dave Barry.

Although only a few years behind, this was a vastly different thing from the early internet successes. It was facilitated by gatekeepers, pushed by corporations, and with a much greater reward. None of this is to disparage Mr. Simmons – I would save that for his opinions – but rather to show how the internet world was changing, and it was reverting to the analog world. There’s an obvious reason for this, which is the internet was exploding in popularity. The stakes were getting higher.

But the internet was about to strike back at the analog world again.

If you ever want to do a good impression of a mid-00s elite writer, just make jokes about how the word “blog” sounds dumb. This was the go-to for television, newspapers, and magazines. And for a reason. Blogs changed the game. They totally took over some areas, notably, politics. If you used the internet in the early to mid 00s, you were probably spending most of your time on blogs. Even the small difficulty of creating your own website was removed, and it opened up the floodgates. A plethora of writers took advantage of this early mover advantage and nailed the initial blog style. Irreverent, completely unprofessional,¹ writing obsessively, interacting with readers, and did I mention publish a lot? It did not matter your niche, there was a blog. Some were legitimately good sources of journalism. Some were legitimately good sources of analysis. Many were just fun. This was how to get popular writing on the internet.

The reaction to blogs was much quicker than to websites. For example, in 2001, a relatively unknown writer going by the name of Perez Hilton started a celebrity gossip blog. To massive success.² In 2005 a celebrity gossip blog was launched called TMZ To massive success. Was this some random writer? No, it was a joint venture of AOL and Warner Brothers. The analog world was striking back more ruthlessly than the Empire. Many created their own blogs, but most just wisely snapped up the popular bloggers. If you look at the Substack leaderboards they are full of either legacy media journalists who adopted blogging early, or early bloggers who were hired by legacy media. We were speed running the transition we saw in the 1990s. The gatekeepers were winning.

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The Great Lie of the Internet is that the gatekeepers lost their power. That anyone can just go out and start a YouTube channel, a blog, a website, a Twitter profile, a Twitch stream, etc., and bypass traditional channels. Which is true, in the same way you can bypass record labels by singing in the shower. If you don’t care about having an audience, anyone can put content on the internet. But if you do, you care about having an audience. Which is what gatekeepers guard.

I’ve already alluded to the exception: a first mover advantage. If you’re one of the first to a new content distribution platform, you have a chance to break past the bigger names. A chance. Although you can never know if a new platform is the next Substack or the next Rumble. But at least there’s a chance because if it is the former, it will become big, not just in audience but in creators. Which is where the problem comes.

In 1997, you went to Yahoo! which was less of what we now think of as a search engine and more of a directory. Because the internet was small, you could just submit your website and it would get put into the directory. This could not scale. Google won. And Google uses an algorithm which gave birth to search engine optimization, aka SEO.³ As our experience interacting with the internet became increasingly through the prism of Google, the value of the platform someone was writing on became more important.

You can call it the PageRank Principle. At the early stage of any platform – which once meant the internet itself – content diversity is high. Popular develops organically and creators and users flock to the platform. But as the content grows, the ability to sort it manually becomes impossible. Algorithms are introduced to serve content to users. The creators of the algorithm have to choose certain metrics to prioritize and frequently one of those is popularity. This leads to the popular creators – or those porting their popularity over with them – to become even more popular. Creators learn to optimize their content for the algorithm’s preferences, which leads to a homogenization of content. Which creates a feedback loop where the algorithm reinforces what it was already creating. And so on and so forth until we get, well, look around.

I’ve repeatedly used the term “gatekeepers” throughout this piece, and I suspect many of you read it with a negative connotation. But that’s not how I wrote it. Whether an editor at a magazine or St. Peter at the Pearly Gates, gatekeepers can be good. Earlier, I used the example of Bill Simmons as someone who was not organic but chosen by gatekeepers. But you know why they chose him? Because he’s a great writer! Even if the internet was a true meritocracy, you would see a lot of similar outcomes.

The value of human gatekeepers is that they can evaluate the one metric algorithms cannot: quality. Are they sometimes wrong? Yes. But an imperfect judge of quality is still fundamentally superior to one who cannot judge it all. The biggest flaw of gatekeepers is there are not enough of them. Much like those hard-working Yahoo! employees learned, there’s just too much internet.

The other part of the PageRank Principle is that it increasingly shapes what users think of as valuable. This is true even here on Substack, a platform that does a much better job using gatekeeping than algorithm than almost any other. But users have almost two decades of algorithmic influenced behavior to learn from. And what we’ve all learned is that the way to be popular on the internet is to churn content.

Do you want to become popular on X? Tweet multiple times a day. Doesn’t matter if you have multiple thoughts worth tweeting. Do you want to become a popular YouTuber? Establish a consistent schedule of uploading videos, whether your video is worth it or not. Do you want to become a popular Substacker? Have a consistent posting schedule. These things make you more popular, being popular makes you more popular, ouroboros. Do you see the problem?

One of my favorite YouTubers is Napoleon Blownapart (I love the internet) who publishes the highest quality MMA documentaries I’ve ever seen. Through sheer quality he has over 100k subscribers. This pales in comparison to the subscriber accounts for MMA channels that just churn content. But if he churned content, it would not be nearly as good. And something enjoyable would be lost.

Over the last two years, I’ve subscribed to many Substacks. Today, there is only one I still pay money for, in part because starting a law firm is expensive, and in part because I didn’t feel I was getting my money’s worth from anyone else. I still pay money to The Tomkins Times because it is the highest quality Liverpool FC content on the internet. That it is a sports Substack is not a coincidence. The very nature of sports means an endless cycle of news. Every few days I have a craving for new analysis. Almost no other subject provides that opportunity. I used to subscribe to many Substacks on news/politics/culture war type beat. But after a few months, even the most talent writers are just saying the same thing over and over. There could be a new “news story” but I would already know what they were going to say.

That’s not inherently bad. If you go see a band, you don’t want them to exclusively play their new album.⁴ But I’ve spent my life sharpening my neuroplasticity, and part of that is constantly exposing myself to new ideas and – when I write – writing about new ideas. Do you know what I don’t have? 52 new article worthy ideas every year! I wrote a six-part series on the environment. I’m done. If you want to know my thoughts on why we should have a tech focused approach to climate change, go read them. I’d be better off rewriting those pieces every few months. But I don’t want to. Writing is the greatest form of thinking there is, and I want to think about new things, but if I want anyone to read those thoughts, I need to be popular, and if I want to be popular I need to be consistent, and if I want to be consistent I need to reformulate things I already wrote and revisit subjects. So, I’m going to do that.⁵ Maybe someday I’ll be as popular as a Dan Carlin and can only create content when I feel I have something worth it. But until then, I will give the internet what it wants.

The internet is still new and the form of it our future generations use will be starkly different from this one. The fear is that it will be one where the PageRank Principle has enjoyed final victory. The hope is that it will be the flourishing of content in both quantity and quality that we know it can be. But it needs new gatekeepers. One which combine the human ability to judge quality with a machine’s ability to consume unfathomable amounts of content.⁶ We need a Cerberus who isn’t charmed by the music of popularity and content churn. We need a new gatekeeper.

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1. This is a tad bit unfair, but it’s meant in jest. However, reading anything from that time period it is amazing how poorly it holds up.

2. In law school a favorite hobby of mine was looking at what my classmates were doing on their laptops during class. If I had a dollar for every time I saw someone reading Bill Simmons or Perez Hilton, I could probably make student loan payments.

3. This is a ludicrously oversimplified version of all this, and I do intend to write about the effect SEO has had on the internet. But if I went even remotely in depth on this issue, this article would take a day to read, and this is already my longest article.

4. I’ll see you in hell, Third Eye Blind.

5. Over the year I was off I did write about 25 pieces that I haven’t published yet. Including content that comes up over the next year and some of my “revisiting” pieces I have worked up, you can safely expect new content from me every week until at least September.

6. And if you take this idea, create this, and make money off it, you are honor bound to pay me.