Note: This is a slightly edited (for the web) issue of a previous email newsletter. (If you’re not subscribed, join here, it’s free.)
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Since writing the previous newsletter, The Human Moat, I read two essays by the impressively talented journalist, podcaster, author, and staff writer at The Atlantic, Derek Thompson, which inspired me to write this follow-up email.
This is, partly, about why Tiny still wins.
I have deep intuitions about the rapid decline of attention, and worse, the fading capacity for deep, critical thinking across society.
“Americans in the digital age don’t seem interested in, or capable of, sitting with anything linguistically weightier than a tweet.” (Source)
This should terrify us.
David Foster Wallace’s genius was to treat this decline as a two-part inquiry. Infinite Jest (1996) diagnosed the externalized problem — our cultural addiction to stimulation. The Pale King (unfinished, published posthumously in 2011) offered the attempted cure: meaning found through attention, boredom, devotion, presence.
My intuition is a simple one, which I’ll start with. What then follows is a more structured unpacking, pointing to arguments from people far smarter and more articulate than I am.
These intuitions have proven stunningly accurate over the years, and the deepening crisis of attention and critical thinking we see today only strengthens my conviction.
Before I reveal my intuitions, I feel it’s important to give credit to someone who has helped shape my early thinking, Seth Godin. This quote, in particular, clarifies the distinction:
“Motivating the committed outperforms persuading the uncommitted.”
(This quote resonated deeply with me and my late friend, Peter Spaepen. For years, we carried it in our email signatures — a small vow we kept together, a quiet reminder of the power of less. Of the power of tiny.)
As creators, we choose who we do business with. Through our writing and communication, we attract (and gently repel) our best “pocket of people.”
There are people like us who care about craft, doing deep, meaningful work, and mattering within a world that’s seemingly going to shit.
People like us who choose to actively resist the pervasive forces (and the incentives bound within these forces) that commodify attention into mere transactions.
We build “digital worlds” with thoughtful and immersive engagement, not merely a backdrop for passive consumption or manipulative tactics.
We don’t capture attention just to convert it quickly. That dynamic attracts people who, on some level, want to be distracted — the uncommitted.
Megan Garber of The Atlantic, in a brilliant 2023 essay, WE’VE LOST THE PLOT, wrote, “We will become so distracted and dazed by our fictions that we’ll lose our sense of what is real. We will make our escapes so comprehensive that we cannot free ourselves from them. The result will be a populace that forgets how to think, how to empathize with one another, even how to govern and be governed.”
The antidote, then, is to ignore “the uncommitted.”
They’re not our people.
“For five straight years, Gen Z has told pollsters that the thing they most want to be when they grow up is an ‘influencer.'” (Source)
I heard an astute observation shared by a friend the other day, attributing it to someone we all know — but I’ll keep them anonymous: “The influencer market ate the guru market.”
If we value serving people who care, who (also) actively resist these pervasive forces, we need to build and cultivate digital worlds “people like us” actively want to inhabit.
A minimum viable audience (framing from Seth I love) of engaged citizens who are enrolled in their journey and invested in creating and sustaining meaningful long-term connections.
The project of Tiny Digital Worlds is for people who choose to build meaningful businesses with integrity for “people who care,” whatever these businesses are.
The antagonists are many, but their strategy is the same:
To keep us scrolling, consuming, reacting — never reflecting…
The billion-dollar platforms incentivizing creators to keep playing the short-term attention-capturing game…
The traditional direct-response digital marketing playbook, weaponizing fear and scarcity as “easy” levers of persuasion.
What I’ve come to realize is that these pervasive antagonistic forces target a type of person — someone who, willingly or not, is OK with forgetting how to think, ceding their attention because they care more about passive consumption than meaningful engagement and growth.
However, this reality doesn’t, by definition, include everyone, and never has.
Just like the 2004 article by Chris Anderson in Wired Magazine titled The Long Tail, the internet makes it possible for countless niche products and interests to find their audience.
As Tiny Digital World Builders, we get to target a different type of person — if we choose to (it’s always been a choice).
Someone with the power and agency to “look up from their screens” and demand a higher-resolution, more thoughtful experience in exchange for their valued attention.
Tiny Digital Worlds is a pursuit and embodiment of 1,000 true fans, inspired by Kevin Kelly’s essay, 1,000 True Fans.
We can use product launches but not be bound by their perpetual use (because the engine of a Tiny Digital World-inspired business is not product launch-driven).
We can use elements of direct-response marketing without being bound to coercive marketing tactics.
We can use social media platforms as channels for reach and distribution without ceding our sovereignty to the whims of their algorithmic feeds.
Tiny Digital Worlds is about creating an environment that citizens want to inhabit. This world attracts better prospects, creates truer fans, and fosters long-term customers.
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Before you read on, my suggestion — reread The Human Moat. It’s a quick read. It’ll “load” pre-framing into your working memory, so that everything here lands with more impact and salience.
Deep breath.
Stay with me — this is where the shape of the problem becomes visible.
This is where Derek’s framing becomes crucial…
In Everything Is Television, Derek argues that all forms of media (and by extension cultural attention / public discourse) are converging toward one dominant form: the medium of “television-flow” (continuous, recommended, short-form video, algorithmic feeds) rather than discrete, bounded works (think: books, long-form essays, thoughtful emails like the the ones I try to write as much for myself as for you).
In Derek’s words: “television seems to be the attractor of all media.”
By “television” he doesn’t mean strictly the legacy broadcast medium, but rather the idea described by Raymond Williams in Television: Technology and Cultural Form — the shift from discrete works (books, for example) to “flow” (ever-streaming images and sounds).
“Even America’s smartest teenagers have essentially stopped reading anything longer than a paragraph. Last year, The Atlantic’s Rose Horowitch reported that students are matriculating into America’s most elite colleges without having ever read a full book.” (Source)
As I said earlier, this should terrify us.
The thesis is that because of technological, economic, and attention-system changes, culture is migrating from bounded media…
… to unbounded flows of short-form video (feeds) and, in doing so, the qualities of “television” — brevity, immediacy, spectacle, algorithmic recommendation, low investment by users — are now filtering through all media: social networks, news, culture.
In Everything Is Television, Derek cites a previous essay of his, The End of Thinking, which offers an equally troubling look at the cognitive shift of society (people losing capacity/interest to think deeply).
“The decline of writing and reading matters because they are the twin pillars of deep thinking, according to Cal Newport, a computer science professor and the author of several bestselling books, including Deep Work. The modern economy prizes the sort of symbolic logic and systems thinking for which deep reading and writing offer the best practice.”
“The one-two punch of reading and writing is like the serum we have to take in a superhero comic book to gain the superpower of deep symbolic thinking,” Newport said, “and so I have been ringing this alarm bell that we have to keep taking the serum.”
“The most common question I get from parents anxious about the future of their children is: ‘What should my kid study in an age of AI?’ I don’t know what field any particular student should major in, I say. But I do feel strongly about what skill they should value. It’s the very same skill that I see in decline. It’s the skill of deep thinking.”
It’s been easy to sense these shifts, yet it seemed bleaker now than ever after reading Derek’s jarring framing.
As Cal says, thinking benefits from a principle of “time under tension.” It is the ability to sit patiently with a group of barely connected or disconnected ideas that allows a thinker to braid them together into something that is combinatorially new.
I’ll end with this framing from Derek, near the end of The End of Thinking:
The contours of a framework came into view. I decided that the article I would write wouldn’t be about technology taking jobs from capable humans. It would be about how humans take away their own capabilities in the presence of new machines. We are so fixated on how technology will out-skill us that we miss the many ways that technology can de-skill us.
Enjoy your weekend!
~ André
P.S.
Tiny Digital Worlds is the deliberate practice of crafting places worth returning to. Places where attention isn’t extracted, but expanded.
P.P.S.
While writing this, an idea surfaced — maybe from Cal’s “time under tension” metaphorical framing, I dunno.
The idea was: intentional constraints.
I may explore that in the next newsletter. We’ll see…
P.P.P.S.
If this landed for you, and someone in your world might benefit from it too, here’s a web version you can pass along.
https://andrechaperon.com/attention
You rock!