When attention is very scarce, and you have some discretionary ability to boost signals, any act of public curiosity becomes a political act. Whatever the content of your opinion on X, simply being publicly curious about X (minimum=liking a tweet) sends a message.
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Unlike private curiosity, public curiosity of thought leaders deploys more than their own attention. It’s a public attention allocation decision. When you tweet or RT something, you’re deploying num_followers*clickbaitness*avg_time attention, Like national park hygiene norms.
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In an attention scarcity (or information overload) environment people are desperate for meta-signals on what to pay attention to. Hell, there’s even a
@pmarcaslikes account that RTs things@pmarca likes. That’s how starved the information economy is for quality meta-signals.Show this thread -
The “fiat news” concept from
@Aelkus is useful here. It’s a billion channel universe and you have some ability to mint fiat news whether you are aware of it or not, so be mindful what you boost.Show this thread -
I have always tended to self-censor public curiosity to things I think will harmoniously interest others in that space. This is from before I had any sort of platform. I suspect this is a basic personality trait. I just don’t like making a scene. I take all conflict offline.
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I've been thinking about this and the idea of specialization in activism. It seems obviously okay and practically necessary to specialize your activism on one topic/group of people, but at the same time it seems obviously not okay
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as too much specialization (from an individual, from a sub-community, from a community, from a platform?) becomes scapegoating.
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