Publishing online regularly to think “with the garage door open” is a concept I like a lot, it also inspired me to set up this website.
But a recent discussion on the New Models Discord raised an issue with publishing online: the mechanics of the currently dominating social media platforms reward brevity, sharpness and originality. These are all qualities of good writing, but they also have their downsides:
- excessive brevity deletes nuance and uncertainty of ideas
- extreme sharpness makes statements more polarizing, fueling the social media outrage spiral
- forced originality creates redundant complexity and disguises preexisting strains of thought
How to avoid these effects of the medium on the message?
I think accepting a reduced virality of the content posted online could be a first step. Longer form writing on blog platforms is a good first step to avoid the worst effects, but you have to live with the reduced reach and impact. But how many people do I HAVE to reach anyways? “Working with the garage door open” and “Doing a discount yard sale from the garage” are structurally similar things, but with different goals. So it might come down to honesty of objectives towards myself: do I want to work on things I would have worked on anyways, or do I actually want to sell something (to many people preferably)?
Another thing I see in many digital gardens^[epistemic-statuses-are-lazy-and-that-is-a-good-thing] & like: disclosure of the epistemic status of ideas. “I might be wrong” can go a long way and the inclusion of possible counterarguments can work against the monocausality of “Hot Take” writing.
Lastly, on originality: I used to think that I have to come up with original and funny terms for my ideas all the time. After a while I realized this does not scale well, because it leads into weird rabbit holes of a claimed substance that in fact was not much more than a reframing of existing ideas. Same things should be called the same to avoid intellectual redundancy and the trap of building personal frameworks to explain the world aka conspiracy theories.^[
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