Why We’ve Always Sucked
ALL ACCESS Private Newsletter
OK. This one is an extreme experiment and, to be honest, also definitely a forced experiment. Here’s the story. It’s Wednesday night at 7:15pm ET. A couple things went wrong this week, and a couple other things went well this week, all of which came together to result in me having had zero time to write. You’ll see the gaps in my public writing if you haven’t already.
So what do I do? I told you all I’d take a week off every once in a while and I’m due, but I hate doing it. So I’ve got three options:
Send you all an apology tomorrow and take the day off (I don’t want to do that).
Finish one of the three posts I have in the hopper that I’m not proud of yet (I don’t want to do that).
Recycle an old post like a rerun with some extra commentary…
Lame. But wait. What if I recycled an old post from 15 years ago?
Hmm. I’m listening. To myself.
I dug up this old post up because I was having a (polite) argument with a friend last week where my side was: “Discourse is bad, but it’s not getting worse. It’s been bad for ages.”
So this post serves three purposes:
It really isn’t worse, for what that’s worth. I wrote this because of exactly how bad the discourse was in 2011, at the tail end of Intrepid Media’s run (solo-built Medium before Medium, profitable and successful for the prior 12 years, but we had been stagnant for two years at that point and would last one more year).
It’s another way for me to do what I do, the sort of “don’t believe the hype, this is what is really going on” thing. In this case, the world isn’t going to hell in a handbasket, this is all just more of the same.
The experiment part: I really believe the AI-slop slathered future of human writing is going to focus more on the human writer and the human readers. I don’t need to “educate” you folks about AI or thought-lead you or anything like that, but just write good shit and maybe discuss it if you’re interested, from an educated perspective in the areas of business and tech and startups and culture and all that.
Let me know by rating it.
And also let me assure you, I know I can only do something this far out of left field every once in a while.
This is about discourse, all kinds, but mostly online, and it’s called…
