Bad Systems & The Republic of Newsletters

Criag Mod recently did a six-week walk across Japan during which he purposefully removed himself from the phone as a tool of social media.

Of course, such things aren’t new these days. 2019 seems to be the year everyone stopped and looked at social networks with a critical eye, evaluating the space they occupy in our lives. This is particular true of freelance artists and writers, for whom the promise of connection the internet offers is of great interest indeed if the cost-to-benefit ratio can be managed.

What separates Mod out is his background as an essayist, and in particular an essayist who frequently meditates on the intersection of technology and publishing. This mean he’s got a capacity to turn a lovely phrase when noting particular ironies:

 I consider “bad” to be design patterns that subvert impulse control. Anything that obviates agency over one’s attention. Bad is being manipulated by an algorithm in favor of the company over the human.

Bad is being stuck in a “tiny loop” of the mind and body — a senseless series of actions that span minutes, hours, days, consume years, and add up to nothing or almost nothing, and that benefit (ideally: tranquility, growth, curiosity) no one but the company (in reality: engagement, ad views) who owns the container in which the loop takes place.

To be a bit reductive, for example: Bad is Tinder getting you addicted to the pseudo-pornography of hundreds or thousands of potential mates, the high of a “match,” as opposed to helping you find, and sustain, a meaningful relationship. There’s a business model in helping you find true love, but it doesn’t have the same growth curve as making you think you can hump half of Manhattan.

Roden Explorers — 027 — June, 9, 2019, Craig Mod

It also means that when he sits down and thinks about his engagement, there’s a solid theoretical underpinning behind the decisions. He’s not rejecting technology outright, but looking at it with a calculating eye and figuring out what keeps it working as a useful tool. The internet is, at its heart, just a series of publishing engines, repurposed to deliver slightly different effects than reading a book or newspaper.

One of the insights that fascinates me, given my retreat from social media and more focus on both blogging and email newsletters, is his desire for seperate production and consumption systems.

Both the SMS and podcast publishing systems are “open” systems, with no single controlling entity like a Facebook or Twitter. And they are “quiet” systems, in that production and consumption spaces are separated. You don’t have to enter a timeline of consumption in order to produce.

THE GLORIOUS, ALMOST-DISCONNECTED BOREDOM OF MY WALK IN JAPAN, Craig Mod in Wired

Every now and then, I talk to writers who perplexed by the idea of a weekly newsletter: what do you write about every week? How do you produce something that doesn’t irritate people?

The answer, of course, is that I do irritate people and have the unsubscribes to prove it, but the content is almost never a problem. I post about the same things people post about to Facebook and Twitter. I gather thoughts and links and news, shepherd them together into a miniature zine that goes out every week (more or less), talking to the people who have elected to receive it.

It may be a less efficient distribution of information than sites like Facebook and Twitter, but that only matters when you think about reach. The newsletters’ role as a quiet system matters to me, as does the deeper engagement it offers. But it’s not just that, and again I can link to Mod being smart:

Ownership is the critical point here. Ownership in email in the same way we own a paperback: We recognize that we (largely) control the email subscriber lists, they are portable, they are not governed by unknowable algorithmic timelines. And this isn’t ownership yoked to a company or piece of software operating on quarterly horizon, or even multi-year horizon, but rather to a half-century horizon. Email is a (the only?) networked publishing technology with both widespread, near universal adoption, and history. It is, as they say, proven

Oh God, It’s Raining Newsletters, Craig Mod

Increasingly, I subscribe to newsletters instead of following people on Social Media. I’m starting to prefer the idea of reading what people really want me to read, rather than trusting in the algorithms to deliver what I’m looking for.