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A view inside the sausage factory. To manufacture a “hit” you have to thread the needle between hooking relevance to major current attention zones to bleed off some attention for yourself, but oblique enough to not all draw toxic culture-war “bad” energy.
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In peaceful times, it’s easy to do that. Erring on the side of irrelevance merely gets you ignored. Erring on the side off too much relevance just drowns you in news cycle churn by not aging well.
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In culture-wartime writing, if you suspect you’ll stray into the live fire zone, you’d better be explicit about the battles you pick and show a few weapons. If you stray too far out, there’s too little attention and you have to specialize/target some protected niche instead
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Premium Mediocre is one of my few successful recent needle threadings. Compared to similar peacetime posts like say The Locust Economy, it required ~25% more work/attention on radiation hardening/immunization so it could go viral without inviting a toxic shitshow down on me.
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The easiest kind of writing to do to today is with a comfortably-smug vibe, with a posture of “I’m more nihilistic than thou” greater acceptance of apocalyptic futures than your reader.
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Writing something that’s not a move in the culture wars, yet informed by the context of it, and supplying some non-comfortably-smug energy is a bit like trying to pull an airplane out of stall by going into a steep dive to gain airspeed to pull up again
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Of course all this is only true if you want to do broad appeal public interest writing. Narrow-interest stuff for people privileged enough to have secured retreat zones from zeitgeist is no different from 2014/15. Reviewing the latest iPhone is the same as it used to be I think.
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Comfortably smug is not nihilistic, I’d argue. He’s a conservative who recognizes the flaws of his side and makes fun of them by pretending to double down on them.
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