Even the worst of yellow journalism and penny-dreadful bits were, I think, on average higher value than stuff we put up on the internet simply because the cost is so low. Jevon's paradox. We're almost at the thermodynamic limit, putting pure noise into distribution.
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In fact, even the very ideas of reach and distribution smack of industrial age thinking. They evoke metaphors of dumb pipes connecting static producer brains to static consumer brains. There is no room in "reach" and "distribution" for context-awareness, relevance/salience etc
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Really what we want is ideas that are produced just in time, and intruding on the attention of the right people, juxtaposed against just the right context at just the right time to produce maximum "aha!". Max redpilling per joule or something.
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In a way, though we like to hate on modern targeted advertising, that's really the cutting edge. Unlike other bits, advertising bits MUST seek out the lowest redpilling (=buy decision/conversion) costs.
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Ironically, the way to get past the trap of ad-supported models might be for "real" content to become more energy/targeting efficient than ads themselves. Today "real" content at scale rides advertising rather than the other way around because it is dumber. It has to.
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John Wanamaker famously said "I know 50% of my advertising works, I just don't know which 50%" ... I'd guess, historically, "real" content has always had lower, and less legible, effectiveness than the advertising it rode.
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Thought experiment about the challenge of media in the future. Rupert Murdoch started like 60 years ago and is shaping global geopolitics in 2019. If you are in your early 20s today and want to be the Murdoch of 2079 geopolitics, how would you go about building the empire?
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Would you try to build a max-reach/min-brain zombie army led by generals like Tucker Carlson etc.? Forget about the ethics/morality of it... would that even be the most effective path to influence via the pen? To make it clearer, consider the pen-and-sword analogy...
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"The pen is mightier than the sword" they say. Well, "swords" evolved from literal swords through precision firearms to smart missiles. "Reach" with swords evolved from a large mass rushing screaming at the enemy and dying in large numbers to pushing a button to launch a missile
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The pen, by contrast, is still in the "screaming melee rush" stage of evolution in reach. We have just invented the precision firearm. Long way to go to get guided missile level reach smarts. If you were young Murdoch today, you'd be building media missiles, not forging swords.
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As a random aside, technically, fiction has gotten sophisticated far faster than nonfiction, but has hit an earlier fundamental ceiling. Nonfiction tech is lagging but has fewer obvious limits (and here I mean tech at the level of humans handling language, not computers)
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