We write because we must
Our modern economy is often seen as one of infinite recording and record; a "creator economy". It is also the opposite; of destruction and obfuscation. With so much content, why write at all?
This post was a struggle. I’ve been working on it for more than a month. It started as a vent about how all content creation feels dumb as every bit of content we create seems to distract from other content. Yet it wasn’t really that and I’ve continued to unpack. I’m not happy with this result, but I want to post it and get feedback rather than keep fighting with it by myself.
Why do I write?
I’ve written millions of emails, thousands of documents and tens of thousands of notes since I started using computers. For the 15 years I was on social media before deleting all my accounts, I posted as much or more. I can’t even guess how many SMS, WhatsApp and IMs I’ve sent. 99% of all the content that remains I've never looked at twice. 99% of my Substack archive (into which I imported all my old blog content) has never been viewed. I don't remember the vast majority of what I've written to the point that I sometimes write the same thing again and again.
99.99999% of what I write in my life will be forgotten, lost and meaningless. So why do I write?
It isn't inherently “fun”. It isn't rewarding in any monetary sense. Sometimes people I know mention what I write but it sounds more like sympathy: “… why does he waste time on that!? I should say something to reassure him…” At work, I write reports, minutes, requests that are mostly ignored. Yet I keep writing…
By any metric it's a waste of time for me to write. But the alternative feels much worse. There is something about living life with the intention to be remembered (and to remember) even if you know the reality is you will be forgotten. It's about making your life a life. And any life must be written.
… ask yourself in the stillest hour of your night: “must I write?” Delve into yourself for a deep answer. And if this should be affirmative, if you may meet this earnest question wit ha strong and simple “I must,” then build your life according to this necessity…” on page 16 of “Letters to a Young Poet” by Rainer Maria Rilke, reissued 2004.
Why do we write?
I can understand my irrational need to write, yet it doesn’t seem to translate into a logical argument for everyone to write. And we do write a lot as a global society.
We have created and continue to create massive amounts of content online (more than 1 Billion websites and 30 Billion webpages). We are also destroying information just as quickly, websites go unindexed, content gets pulled down and deleted, and every new piece of content created makes it more difficult to find something else. This is content destruction by obfuscation.
Publishing is ubiquitous (handphones, apps, laptops), publishing metrics are everywhere, content streaks are encouraged. And we feel we are being social media engineered. We are part of a “Creator Economy” where a small minority of people can make a life for themselves by writing, building or otherwise creating content. We are equally in a “Destructor Economy” where every piece of content obstructs another. People also create content online for personal interest, good will and pursuit of social cred or status.
The incentive to produce content over time should decline as more ‘good enough’ content is readily available. Yet the opposite seems to be happening. The more content we produce as a society the more content we want to produce. Considering one of the core foundations of human society is our ability to create lasting knowledge that can pass between generations maybe it is a fundamental part of our phycology to desire to create content with the right triggers. “Where good ideas come from” by Steven Johnson goes into this topic in much more detail.
We see this in the places where we create content today and the incentives we face nudging us to create certain kinds of content along the way.
Content platforms
Content platforms today seem to leverage a mix of our inherent desire to create content and a mix of social signaling and gossip triggers. And there needs to be some balance between the two. A platform of pure gossip won’t gain traction just like platforms of pure content creation without social signaling of some form don’t scale.
Experimenting with different content platforms, I noticed that whenever a site became popular, it would attract look-alike and misleading or inaccurate content. Inline with Brandolini's law, the bad content would quickly overwhelm the good. Even the good content would compete with other good look-alike content. Soon the site would become unusable to anyone who visits. Filters and orchestration would be added to address this and if the underlying platform was sticky or the nature of the content is meant to be inaccurate/gossip, people will stay so long as they can get enough content of some marginal value. Otherwise, they leave.
The success of Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, is a story of network effects and sunk cost (once everyone is there, aren’t you?). It is also a story of content engineering. Where the sites were always one-step ahead of the tsunami wave of junk ensuring that people still got the content that they wanted without too much hassle. They also respectively hit a balance of content-with-gossip that appealed to the people using the platforms. We can see this same dynamic evolving on Substack with Notes.
The more difficult it becomes to access content and the worse content that exists, the greater the incentive to find/create a place to produce high(er) quality content and develop methods of cutting through the junk. Many Facebook users filter their feed to make it meaningful. Quora which quickly became a pile of junk content has started coming back with better content orchestration and filtering.
Wikipedia addresses this dynamic with a mix of an economic disincentive (you can’t make money posting junk on Wikipedia so you spend money via your time and effort whenever you post), lack of social incentives (you don’t gain much mainstream credibility by posting gossip), and a motivated and highly active minority of users passionate about quality content and their own system of social cred. Other sites struggle with this when their underlying model is advertising based. While unspoken, an advertising driven site which is highly sticky, has an incentive to produce as much junk as possible but not-so-much that it drives away all the users.
More content = less value
Watching how these platforms have evolved and my own experiences with creating content for work and family, I think there are some universal principles. The strongest seems to be: “in any situation, producing more content does create less average-user value over time.” This dynamic seems newly created with the internet and universal accessibility of content across many previously isolated groups.
Consider if there was only one quality video about how to install a light bulb. Everyone would find that video easily, know it’s credible and gain value from it. This doesn’t last very long. The popularity of that video encourages more people to create similar videos, look-alikes, imitation and fake videos. While some of those videos will be of equivalent or better quality, the vast majority will be of lower quality (or simply a distraction in the case of fakes or spoofs). This means that over time the average user will get declining value from the average video.
Some users will find the best videos and get maximum value but the majority of users will get a similar video or a worse video. This leads to ever more complicated discovery and rating systems that attempt to filter the most relevant videos. Simply by having more than one video, the average experience declines. So every additional video produced is actually destroying value on average.
The strange dynamic this creates is an angry, violent storm of junk content, updates, videos, pics overwhelming in the mess and destruction of value. Yet that very storm of dirt also creates an incentive for meaningful content and finding ways to block out the storm (or filter/direct it in some way).
This isn’t a war which implies an eventual winner. The quality content has value because of the junk and the junk has value because it competes with quality content. We cannot ever reach a point where all content is junk because the more dominate meaningless content becomes, the larger the incentive (and payoff) for valuable content. Likewise, the less flame content produced the more valuable it is to produce (and impactful when it is produced).
We can avoid this mess with subscription or purchased content. By subscribing to (or buying) the content we enjoy (gain value from) irrespective of subjective quality, we don’t need filters or orchestration.
Looking at the total ecosystem of content subscriptions don’t change the reality that every additional content added to the bucket, dilutes the overall quality. However, it changes the individual user/our experience. As we only receive content we have pre-selected, we are likely to have a higher quality content experience without the noise. There could be a better video out there, but we don’t care because we have content that is good-enough for our needs/interests.
Considering a pre-internet society, everyone would have a reasonably high incentive to create content given their relative isolation and the difficulty of exchanging ideas at scale. Even if someone else was creating the exact same content in the next city, country or team, you wouldn’t know. Creating niches and smaller groups within the internet ecosystem offers something similar today. By focusing on a small, isolated area of the internet, we can create an area where we gain more marginal value from the content created even if similar or even ‘better’ content is available elsewhere.
Content is human
The problems with content are a feature of how we operate as human society. Human society developed based on communication, gossip and thus content. Steven Pinkler covers this topic in “How the Mind Works” including how important gossip is to social interactions. I don’t think we can ever fix the problems with content. Even if we could find a way to universally quantify ‘ideal’ content (impossible!), banning not-ideal content will just make it more popular over time. Short-term it could help to shift a narrative or two.
This dynamic explains why so many groups can be obsessed with banning or burning knowledge that differs or challenges the accepted norms. Even if the content doesn’t incite a revolution it’s very existence dilutes the focus on the accepted standards. People will eventually come up with new ideas/adopt and publish again and again. So long as the available content is sticky enough, functional and dominate, those in power can attempt to delay debate by suppressing alternative content. Yet that also increases the value of that banned content.
Today, bans and burning are generally seen as ineffective and often detrimental, so the preferred tactic has become obfuscation via massive content production and manipulation of filters and orchestration. Social content is the engine of this content dynamic. We can see the impacts of this dynamic with generally declining trust in traditional content institutions like news media and government. In the short-term we see people more easily influenced by flame content, yet that too creates an incentive for more ‘trusted’ sources to appear and in some pockets seems to be driving better governance and decision making. The more the sphere you are part of is dominated by junk and misinformation, the larger the incentive to create a trusted space. The damage is the price we pay to work through this process.
There isn’t an internet “end-state” where the internet becomes unusable. It will remain a constant process of content creation, obfuscation/destruction and attempts at orchestration. The internet is an entire spectrum between never-ending pile of refuse and a diamond mine of actionable knowledge. Every possible variation in-between can be orchestrated based on what each person wants to consume and create. There isn’t a single internet content sphere. Any given community on the internet will ossolate based on the incentives of the people involved and the prevalence of different kinds of content.
Unintended consequences
There are some consequences to our approach to content generation in the internet age. From digital subscriptions to fast-fashion we continue to removed physical, archival copies of our society and become fully dependent on content archives which both decide what is retained and retain full control over our access.
We have replaced the habit of creating physical copies of our knowledge with the comfort that “someone else” will ensure copies are backed up. We don’t spend time reviewing, cleaning, organizing our knowledge creations. We are actively encouraged to “just save everything and search for what you need”. Organizing was once a necessity due to storage limits and difficulties in search and retrieval.
Knowledge management issues haven’t been solved with digital. We just got comfortable with alternative ways to find needed content and let go of our discipline or culture of knowledge management. Even Large Language Models (LLMs) seen as a fix for this content overload are another form of destruction. LLMs use deconstructed knowledge to train and learn from creating connections via feedback and emergent properties from the complexity of their models and content. This is predicting the next word based on billions of sentences before. It churns existing knowledge extracting some value and imagining connections.
The larger the content sphere that you participate in the more the incentive will be to create and not look back. While a smaller community is more likely to be concerned with relevance and prior content. Often the things we forget and leave behind have even more meaning because they are forgotten. Even if the digits sit somewhere, they are lost to our awareness and effectively gone forever. The sea of content that we create each second overwhelms every chance to retain in an unorchestrated mass.
Trying to consume all the content out there isn’t logical or human. Pre-internet we rarely faced such a dynamic and we seem yet ill-equipped for trying to consume an infinite amount of content. We fear being bored or idle as there is always something happening, content demanding our attention. Smaller communities can recrate those smaller-group social dynamics while benefiting from the general accessibility of global networks. Good ideas often come from idleness and boredom. We don’t gain value from the large-scale content production and consumption possible today. We can create communities where we get the best content possible for our needs.
The massive content platforms have created economies where a small minority of people create the majority of content. This is a lost opportunity for the rest of us. Platforms like Substack and even just writing a book or journal offer us something even more important. A way to leave a record. If you don’t find a reason to post content on a mainstream social platform, find a place where you can.
Write because you must
Within this destruction, ossification content economy, I found this quote from the “Letters to a Young Poet” quoted at the start of this post most fitting: “…ask yourself in the stillest hour of the night: must I write? Delve into yourself for a deep earnest question with a strong and simple ‘I must,’ then build your life according to this necessity…”
There was never a time in history where the pointlessness of writing was more evident. We spend our time to post, reply and respond with absolutely no link to the physical. We agree to no recourse for anything that we create when we join the platforms. We create nothing of great value and destroy with our efforts by obscuring the content that exists with ever more content. Thus, we cannot write because we expect something in return.
The time we spend signaling online isn’t repaid. Only a small fraction of people who create content online will make a living. Instead of feeding an advertising machine, consider why do you write. By any logic, we should opt-out of this internet content mess. Yet we don’t. We continue to write, post and share.
When you write for work, social, love or friendship. When you write to argue, inflame or intimidate. When you write. Remember your writing destroys. Whatever you write makes it more difficult to find and read something else. After you write, things will be different. So find places where your writing matters to you and hopefully to others.
Write because you must. Don’t write because you think you should. And if you don’t find a reason to write today, go and spend some time with your community, build things, make things that can be felt. There are people who need you more in real life who can pay you with social cred far in excess of the time you invest.
Then try again tomorrow. Write as part of life. Write to live your life.