right so I’m going to do a fucken rant about twitter. i cant do a thread about it, i get self conscious worrying about how it’ll be perceived by twitter mfs. i tried to do a Proper Essay about it but at this point I think I’m just giving up on all proper essays, they’re all just me writing with a stick up my ass. fuck that. fuck it. fuck everything. ok? now we can maybe say some real shit. let’s go. tweets are short. they are containerized, originally to 140chars, now 280chars. you can do longtweets if you want but nobody really gives a shit about those. (there are some exceptional use cases for real artists, but let’s leave that aside).

the important thing to know is that people expect twitter to be short texts. that’s the whole point. it’s gotten more covoluted now that people can post images, videos, threads, quote-tweets, etc. but fundamentally the unit of currency on twitter is the tweet. this is one of those things that’s so simple that people somehow miss it, overlook it. it has second-order effects.

the most important of which is: people come to twitter expecting to read tweets. why is that a big deal? because those are the expectations you’re working with. think about how a library feels. people expect it to be quiet. think about how a bar or a nightclub feels. think about how the waiting room in a hospital feels.

you can’t fuck too much with expectations unless you really, really, really know what you’re doing. one of the best versions of this i’ve ever encountered is in an Ad for a Masterclass by Ru Paul. The ad alone was enough to sell me on the core message. Ru Paul says, if you like money, if you want money, wear a suit. It has nothing to do with you, it has to do with people’s expectations. people just assume that a person in a suit has their shit together, and they’re likelier to give them money. I’m 100% convinced, though tbh I still haven’t gotten around to getting a damn suit LOL but that’s on me for other reasons

so. again. tweets are expected to be short. and people log on to twitter expecting to spend relatively short amounts of time, in between whatever else they’re doing, to skim and scan and see insightful, interesting, funny things. or, well- things that piss them off, things to fight about, etc, but I don’t really like to talk about things that I don’t personally care for, so we’re talking about my view of twitter here, rather than twitter “as a whole”, which is basically incomprehensible and almost entirely an extension of an observer’s biases, maybe subconscious yearnings, etc etc.

even without talking about affordances – and we should really talk about affordances, maybe later – every medium has its own set of expectations. a tv show is different than a movie. watching a movie on tv is different than watching it in a cinema. a tiktok is different than a youtube video. even if you upload exactly the same content, because the expectations are different. the user behavior is different. one of the slightly crazy things about social media is how little control we have- basically none- over how our material is framed and contextualized by other people’s stuff on other people’s feeds. i’ve often noticed, for example, that when i click on the profile of someone who is unconscionably belligerent in my mentions, that they’re engaging with all manner of high-arousal political content. which is to say they log onto the bird app to get mad and yell at people. and spend all their time in their hallucination of twitter where everyone is mad and yells at people. and those are the cultural norms for them, and so in a way they’re unprepared to run into another “part” of twitter where the norms are different, and people treat each other with respect and curiosity.

I’m not saying that they are hallucinating twitter and I am inhabiting the True Base Reality Twitter. no. everyone is hallucinating everywhere all the time. and we still have not developed new etiquette, new intuitions, new understandings for how to navigate this. think about the babelfish problem described by douglas adams. and i’m remembering now also about how people were scandalized by some of the rooms on clubhouse. our ancestors definitely did not have such immediate and direct access to the thoughts, feelings, minds, cultures, etc of other people who lived in completely different realities from them. and navigating this artfully is going to take a lot of work.

writing things makes me take a deep breath and kinda smile and laugh at how silly it all is. we give ourselves and each other such an unnecessarily hard time sometimes, for dealing imperfectly with absolute pandemonium.

I recently read most of mcluhan’s Understanding Media – for some weird reason I didn’t finish the last couple of chapters or so – but I remember thinking that he was very clued into this stuff. I’m not sure if I should write a separate thing about it… I guess I should do a blogpost with some notes. I know that I like to quote what Pius said… and I can’t really remember what other things I would want to quote, lol. But I have a bunch of reference notes, lets skim them… yea it’s coming back to me now. it also pairs well with some of the things Alain de Botton said in The News, about basically how we use the media to educate ourselves. and so much of culture is downstream of media, in ways that are almost imperceptible because we think via media, we think in media… there’s also connections to what huxley said in doors of perception. as i type these things out i find myself thinking, bro, you’re just listing out sources without even properly pointing at the important parts in them. and i’m like yea, i kno, i kno, that’s why i’m taking so long with these essays, there’s so much reference material to work through and i dont want to get stuff wrong.

but ok back to the ranting, what if i didnt have all these things to reference and had to just give a talk about my personal feelings based on my personal experience? that’s something that i have the right to do, within the container of my own blog. and again i could do this on twitter too if i really wanted to, but if i did that i would have to… ignore a lot of the replies. because twitter readers aren’t patient. because that’s the culture on twitter, those are the norms… people are scrolling and skimming, which means they aren’t typically reading very closely, and there’s some kind of behavior/reward loop (bla bla) where like, people just like to say shit in response to things.

the great thing about the essay as a format in contrast is that the container challenges the reader to read the whole thing. not all readers will read the whole thing, but those are the expectations. the tradeoff is that most people these days don’t really feel like they have the time or energy to read essays, even many essays from authors that they actually want to read. and this is even more pronounced with books.

i guess let me segue into talking about my books real quick. i particularly wrote Introspect as a book to consolidate everything I know and care about in the area of self-knowledge, self-actualization, troubleshooting one’s own problems, investigating one’s own narrative, and so on. An eternal frustration for loads of creatives, I’m sure, is being asked to explain one’s work. To some degree, if the work could be properly encapsulated by anything simpler than the work, then they would have just written the simpler thing. So when people ask me “so what’s introspect about”, a part of me inwardly shrieks and screams, “it’s about everything!!” lol.

But I understand the other problem too, because I was a reader, tv watcher, etc before I was a creator, and I had to deal with the problem of there being too many things to read, too many things to watch. and so one of the greatest gifts a person can give a media enjoyer is- i won’t say a “summary” because that has a way of implying a simplified condensation, I hate the “summary” as a medium/format as it is popularly conceived of. the greatest gift is something like an evocative overview, a comparison, a metaphor, something that compels someone to check something out. the laziest review you see on book blurbs is something like “unputdownable” or “riveting”. that tells you absolutely fuckall. my favorite was someone reviewing sudhir venkatesh’s ‘gang leader for a day’ with, “it’s like The Wire, for Economists”. gorgeous. I hadn’t even watched The Wire at the time, but i had enough background info to fill in the details. someone similarly, quite recently, around 2-3 years after I published FAN, described it as “like marcus aurelius’s meditations for twitter addicts”. descriptions like these are extremely powerful, in my view they actually increase the “objective” value of the original thing by helping people appreciate it, giving people a lens through which to appreciate it.

ideally artists should be able to do these things for themselves, for their work, but i think in practice it’s kind of inevitable that we get a bit precious about it, or shy, or we don’t quite have the right distance from our work (it’s our work!) to see the clever compressions. you can train this by practicing describing your favorite works to other people. and this is how a scene or cluster of artists, authors, etc can help each other out, by giving each other the gift of perception, and insodoing, help them reach their audiences better.

and here’s the thing – I think if you find a really good, evocative description, the thing should not in any way diminish the work. you’re not presenting people with like, a list of simplified takeaways that people will then put into their notetaking app or whatever and ignore forever. you’re giving them a way of seeing. and o my fuckin god, again, this is the core essence of what i am trying to do with my substack essays, and why i am taking such a tediously long time with it. but i trust i’ll figure it out. probably the thing is i need to have a whole lot more conversations with other people about it, to find fresh ways of seeing what i mean when i talk about fresh ways of seeing. if I can figure out the right frame on this, i feel like i should be able to directly help a lot of creatives become non-trivially more powerful in a remarkably short period of time. but even that is the “you telling me i can dodge bullets?” outcome. there’s something more powerful still, and that’s helping regular people get better at navigating the chaos of our modern media landscape, get better at sense-making, understanding themselves and each other, presenting themselves in honest and creative ways… in short it is my hope that i might be able to contribute in some way towards helping people flourish in the chaos of our times.

this was supposed to be about twitter, lol. right so tweets are bite-sized containerized thoughts, which are easy to read, easy to share, easy to comment on. but the nature of the medium is such that it incentivizes certain kinds of thinking over others. and this isn’t an intrinsically bad thing, but it’s something to be mindful of. and the tricky thing is, more generally, that people aren’t very mindful about media. which is the interstitial tissue of how we do our communications, how we do our thinking, how we do our perceiving. i’ve heard from multiple people over the years about how twitter seems to have driven some people quite mad. i’ve seen it myself. it probably has to do with some kind of availability bias. as i said earlier in the broken telephone post, all communications is lossy. but twitter is almost too fast, too hectic, too chaotic, for people to have the time to really process this fact.

the fact that any of us are ever able to communicate with anybody else is kind of a miracle to begin with, even without bringing media into the equation. trying to communicate via short bursts of texts? that is arguably the hardest thing, because so much context is stripped away, there’s no body language, no facial language, no tone of voice for emphasis. we’re completely reliant on our reading of sequences of symbols. i’m confident there’s a good chance you may have read about like, people arguing about the norms of tone in emails. is emoji okay? is punctuation okay? is it aggressive to use fullstops instead of exclamation marks? is there an exclamation mark inflation going on (“no worries if not!”), such that everyone is increasingly obliged to put on this cheery tone just to avoid being misconstrued as aggressive? it’s deranged! and here now I’m reminded of how our predecessors complained about how when postage became cheap and convenient, people writing shorter letters. now we reduce things to texts – and there’s this whole cottage industry, almost, of people taking screenshots of text exchanges on dating apps to mock or shame other people for being bad at texting. sometimes i laugh at it, sometimes i find it kind of sad and grotesque. like, texting as a medium is barely a couple of decades old, and really when we talk about like, ubiquitous texting, it’s only really taken off since the smartphone. and there are parts of the world where people aren’t comfortable texting and send voice notes instead, which i think might be a more natural form of communication for most people. those of us who are hyperliterate, hypertext literate, are probably actually in the minority. and it’s kind of troubling to realize what an advantage that is. in my case I read a lot of books as a kid and then spent a tremendous amount of time on internet forums, so i have a very high sensitivity to all of the idiosyncrasies of plaintext. this is a sick advantage to have in a world where so much “business” is conducted via text. and i doubt it’s taught in school, and if it were taught in school i doubt it would be taught well. television is about as old as donald trump, and i’m not sure as a culture we even really understand television yet. which I think again was one of the things Mcluhan was talking about. at some point he quotes an author – I think Flaubert – who said something like, some war might’ve been averted if people had simply read and understood some book he’d written. Which I think is actually kinda plausible, though I’m certainly not well-informed enough to know for sure.

Twitter is incredible. I’m not sure people realize how incredible it is. Anybody on earth can sign up for free, and send texts to basically anybody else who also has that free account. which is hundreds of millions of people. This is something that many of our predecessors would have killed to have, including mcluhan himself (he wrote a letter to ezra pound basically lamenting that they weren’t able to properly coordinate a bunch of great minds/people to get into the same place and just think and vibe together. this is something I have witnessed several of my twitter friends accomplish with remarkably little effort, and I think/hope that we’re just getting started.)

But to use twitter well you have to have a strong sense of self, a strong sense of other people, and at least a decent sense of culture and media. I’ve described it before as something like a global parlor of hallucinations. we get to see thousands of people’s emotional responses to things. every day people intentionally or accidentally admit to all sorts of shit that I find kinda shockingly intimate. I’m sure people like Freud and Jung would’ve had a field day just scrolling through twitter and seeing what the fuck everyone is going on about. You can almost see the megamind, the psychofauna, the mass cultural hallucinations, like giant squid and jellyfish and aliens and so on, streaking across the skies. I’m almost always in awe, every time i log on. It takes some amount of focus for me to tear away from it for a bit so I can really hear myself think. Which is itself an interesting admission, isn’t it? What does it mean that I have to tear myself away from twitter to hear myself think? Well I don’t think it’s all that dramatic in terms of like “technology is enslaving us” or anything of that sort. it’s more like… I have this really amazing coffeeshop that I can always access, and my friends are always on there, and basically an infinite set of other interesting people too, and I can always catch snippets of really interesting conversations happening all the time. It’s a roiling sea of thought, dripping with possibilities and opportunities. But if you’re not careful, you can be overwhelmed by it, and, somewhat figuratively speaking, drown in it. One of my favorite essays– The Information: How The Internet Gets Inside Us, by Adam Gopnik, written in 2011, drew a comparison to the Palantir in The Lord Of The Rings – “Its risk is real: evil things will register more vividly than the great mass of dull good. The peril isn’t that users lose their knowledge of the world. It’s that they can lose all sense of proportion. You can come to think that the armies of Mordor are not just vast and scary, which they are, but limitless and undefeatable, which they aren’t.”

That’s the problem. Pandora’s box is open. Everyone now has access to magical cursed artifacts – magic mirrors and crystal balls. Remember, the wicked witch in snow white was driven to villainy upon learning that she wasn’t the fairest maiden anymore. access to such cursed artifacts requires a very strong sense of self, sense of people, it requires wisdom. the baseline amount of wisdom we need people to have in order to operate in the world is, I think, honestly higher than it’s ever been. i wouldn’t claim “and it’s never been in shorter supply” – honestly I think it’s possible that if you could plot a chart of human wisdom, we’re actually doing pretty ok relative to history. but we still need to be wiser than ever before, if even only to contend with our own tools.