The potential downsides of platforms…
Expect enclosure; expect a few big winners; expect advertising, with all the attention-hacking that will demand. Expect, also, that writers will continue to mold their work to fit Substack’s particular ecology, rather than “merely” use the tools to pursue their independent visions and ambitions. We learned this about platforms a long time ago: following the old newspaper schematic, they aren’t the printing presses, but rather the assignment editors.
Platform reality
This is a very interesting insight. How the platform incentivizes a type of post / ideology that users will adhere to because of our human nature to want to belong to a tribe. It resonates with me given how much self censorship I’ve done during the days when I only posted on twitter. To be clear, I truly believed that twitter would change the world in the 2010s and I still believe I personally got so much value from that network during that time.
There’s one platform for which none of this is true, and that’s the web platform, because it offers the grain of a medium — book, movie, album — rather than the seduction of a casino. The web platform makes no demands because it offers nothing beyond the opportunity to do good work. Certainly it offers no attention — that, you have to find on your own. Here is your printing press.
To me that last line – the web as a printing press – was always the kernel that has stayed true and what makes me excited about the web. To me there really has been only one other technology that is similar to the web that’s grown organically with limited control exerted by anyone – and that is bitcoin. I have a complicated relationship with bitcoin, having minted one, owning a decent pile at one point and then landed on it being a terrible thing for the world. I believe that it’s the perfect package of weaponized greed and the thrall of independence from a government that appeals to my libertarian sensibilities.
Tabling that discussion for another post, I strongly believe that it’s that independence and federation that keeps the web amazing. I’ve found more people independently publishing on the web today than even during the heydays of blogging, you know back when Google had still not developed the advertising and incentive machine it has today.
Combined with my own recent journey that sometimes the friction is what makes life meaningful, what enables you to savor the outcome, this adds a trifecta to what makes life enjoyable and meaningful – you also need the independence, space and the right incentives to keep thinking of your own original ideas. From that perspective, for someone like me, posting only on social media almost made me lose my voice, my tenor, my thoughts and my authenticity. As always, ymmv.