Publishing in the Age of the Apphole

Craig Mod’s latest Roden Explorer newsletter features excerpts from a long speech he delivered about dopamine, smart phones appholes, and the social contracts of entertainment. You can check it out via his newsletter archive, and I’d suggest it’s as required reading if you’re an author trying to forge a living in a social media world.

Part of what interests me about the speech is the way he charts the progression of certain media outlets into dopaminergenic publications–a frequent problem with legacy media outlets transitioning into an online space, forcing them to at least partially shift their business model to capturing your attention and keeping your eyeballs on their sites in order to reap sweet advertising bucks.

When these incumbent newspapers were print only, there was only one way to “enter” the content: Through the front page. The front page was all you could see on the news stand. Once you bought the thing, you were converted to a paying participant. Make note: Design and contract parameters go hand in hand. When the front page is the only entry point, only a single page of the publication requires hyperbole to convert passers-by to readers. Online, every article becomes a potential entry point. And so there is an incentive for pervasive hyperbole in order to “convert” eyeballs in service to ads and the consumption of more attention.

Media Accounting 101: Appholes and Contracts, Craig Mod

This, in turn, changes the contract between reader and publication, and not always for the better.

Where my interest really picked up was when his attention turned towards TV business model, starting off with the reminder that once upon a time television broadcasts ended for the evening. Compare that to the present, as Mod explores it:

Netflix is a $134,000,000,000 market capped company with 6,000+ employees. Competition is rapidly rising: Disney+, Amazon Prime, HBO Go / Now, Apple TV+. Netflix is a public company. The mandate is they must continue to grow. Netflix can’t lose us as subscribers, but they also can’t charge much more. And so, one imagines an internal mandate decrying: Netflix must become a downtime habit humans cannot live without. The service must become a teat, an irreplaceable and inexhaustible binge conveyance. Unsubscribe? Unthinkable! Their current strategy in achieving this is to produce an endless profusion of well-funded shows. Some of which are superb.

…

Browsing Netflix is an endless sensation of falling forward into ever more content. Previews auto-play. As soon as one episode in a series ends, the next begins before credits finish rolling. If there’s no other episodes in the series, random trailers begin to play. The very design of Netflix itself is constructed to reduce your ability to a) think about what you want to do, and b) step away from the service. It’s designed to be a boundless slurry of content poured directly into your eyeballs. In a way, it’s training us to never step back or even consider, say, reading a book or going for a walk. The binge is dopaminergic to the max, satisfying some odd completionist instinct.

That, Mod argues, is a truly complex social contact for us to navigate compared to way subscriptions used to work.

What’s interesting about this speech is the way it contrasts with publishing strategies in the indie space. A terrain where ideas like “Rapid Release” and “Capturing Whale Readers” dominates the rhetoric and strategic vision of most writers, because they’re actively trying to replicate the capture-a-reader-once-and-never-let-them-go ideology behind most dopamine driven entertainment (and because Amazon has built the platform for it, and grown hungry for content).

Mod isn’t blind to the advantages of that approach–he openly acknowledges that the Netflix model can result in great TV and a diversity of voices getting chances that wouldn’t be there in the traditional television model–but he’s interested in the goals that publishing can embrace in the current environment.

To recap: The adversary of books is anything that eats attention — appholes. The way to fight appholes is by helping potential readers habituate the very act of reading. 

Habits are tied to identities. So the goal should be to convert the identities of wanna-be readers into full-fledged bag-o-books readers. Our goal is not to get someone to read a single book, but become a reader.

And traces some of the appeal of being a reader, particularly of hardcopy books:

…a physical book provides the simplest contract of most media today. Simpler contracts often (but not always) mean that the object or app or piece of media has our best interests in mind (that’s why the contract is simple; the befuddling nature of complex contracts is a feature for the company defining the contract, not a bug), simpler contracts make it easier for us to do “action” as opposed to “motion.”

I’m going to stop here, less I end up reposting a truly large chunk of a 4,000 word essay/speech that really is worth giving a read. These quotes are just the bits that resonated with me in the first half.

Even if you disagree with Mod, you can’t argue with the depth of his thinking. He’s always a fascinating commentator on the issues of publishing and tech, but this is one of the best things he’s done in recent years.

So go forth and give it squiz, eh?