Expectations we bring to this market are somewhere past the far end of the deterministic-to-lottery spectrum. The game is illegible, not like slots or blackjack where you know the odds and can expect to win sometimes with or without skill. Hyper-lottery?
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I find work feels like work, conventional play feels like play, and casino gambling feels like deathly tedium, not “fun.” Attention economy activity in the hyper-lottery tends to feel like an unpredictable mix of all 3.
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It’s fine-grained but unconscious. Even a single tweet might feel like 25% work, 45% play, and 30% casino death-tedium. You won’t know till after you hit send.
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People who are not Very Online are rightly skeptical of our claims that “being on Twitter/Facebook is part of my work and is the reason money comes out the other end.” I know 33% of my tweets are work I just don’t know which 33%.
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That illegible fraction ultimately pays our bills through a butterfly-chaos causal chain. I’m not exaggerating. I can attribute several 100k of income in the last decade to Twitter. I just couldn’t have predicted the emergent Rube Goldberg machine operations that made it happen.
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There’s risk to trying to make the causal pathways more legible and deterministic than they want to be at this stage of the medium’s evolution. You might kill the golden goose. You want to play in the hyper-lottery, you have to accept a certain deep messiness and “inefficiency”
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Afaik, there is literally no better way to participate in the sensemaking gold rush frontier. If you are already rich, you might unleash an army of data scientists and computers at it I suppose. If you’re a clever programmer you might build and sell tools. Pickaxes to miners.
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Vanderbilt grew rich-er off the California gold rush getting miners to the frontier. Platform capitalists are doing the same to us. That’s obviously a less risky investment than actually trying to strike gold. But you need starting assets to operate there.
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One reason crypto blew up the way it did was it is a rhyming hyper-lottery of the sort us attention economy gamblers had already learned to recognize and navigate. I bet you’d find unreasonable correlation between Very Online lifestyles and getting in on crypto profitably early.
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Anyhow, I’d *like* a less stressful, chaotic lifestyle. Hyper-lotteries are very cortisol inducing if you have to rely on them 100% for a living. But apparently that’s where there’s a strong, liberating, product-market fit between me and this postcapitalist weird economy.
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People who don’t know me well tend to assume I could easily be doing apparently similar stuff like hedge fund analyst work, traditional media (journalism or books). Nope. They call for wildly different kinds of aptitudes.The sense-making hyper-lottery is poles apart.
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