CategoryFreddie deBoer

• My piece about the 1990s was a great success – it had tons of views, hundreds of comments, almost 900 new mailing list signups, dozens of tweets, and shared all over the place, including Substack.
• Many critics were wrong – the 90s was not a good period for me personally yet I enjoyed it despite the conditions of my life, not because of them.
• Negative feedback misunderstood the project – I was attempting to simultaneously permit myself an exercise in romantic nostalgia while knowing that things weren’t as good as all that and all good things must end.
• I aim to cultivate negative capability in my work – being capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.
• My value proposition is my writing – anyone can replicate the same political perspective, but not my writing ability.
• I have a niche – a leftist who maintains a commitment to civil liberties and procedural fairness, and who has serious criticisms of social justice politics, who’s nonetheless not willing to follow many “anti-woke” writers.
• The financial viability of this newsletter depends on my writing – people want to be moved and it’s the only thing I’m good at.
• I hope to pursue my idiosyncratic interests while still satisfying the expectations of my readers – so that I can entertain people with unconventional topics while holding down enough conventional topics to stay relevant.
• Success has little to do with who deserves it – a publishing house came to the conclusion that they can make money selling a book I wrote, and they will be proven right or wrong by the market.

Published February 22, 2023
Visit Freddie deBoer’s Substack to read Freddie deBoer’s original post Making the Sausage

• The video is nonsensical, not in some avant garde way but to fulfill its economic purpose, leaving the viewer confused as to what exactly is being conveyed is a feature, not a bug – the more people are baffled by the video, the more they’ll comment on it to register their confusion, the more times they’ll send it to friends to try and figure out that which cannot be figured out.
• The videos I’m talking about here are those that drive people to click and, crucially, to linger through the video until it finishes through confusion and unsatisfied expectations. They exploit people’s dislike of “not getting it” to drive engagement.
• A big trope in the genre is to post anodyne footage of a beach setting, footage in which nothing scandalous happens, and attach some leading language, creating an expectation that is never fulfilled.
• Bad math is a constant, with meaningless symbols added to equations under the pretense of demonstrating a trick for solving math problems.
• Pointless “riddles” abound, with the text having the cadence and format of a riddle, but the question posed having no answer.
• Artificially delaying the arrival of the actual point of the video is common, driven by the algorithm or the monetization scheme that reward videos where viewers watch to the end.
• Many of these videos are faked, with their creators very well aware that they don’t work at all, but they get the clicks anyway.
• The internet is like a person you know who you think can’t possibly stoop any lower, and then manages to pull it off, over and over again, driven by the values that we baked into online life years ago.

• Content Farms: Content farms churn out endless fake hacks that do not work, and get clicks regardless.
• The Marketplace of Attention: Low-quality or dishonest content still gets clicks, so platforms have no reason to do anything about it.
• Dangerous Hacks: Some of these faked cooking hacks are legitimately dangerous, and platforms are not doing enough to prevent them.
• The Race to the Bottom: So long as advertising is the dominant funding source of the online world, any and every creative platform will be a race to the bottom.
• Alternatives: Legacy media, crowdfunding and other options exist that do not rely on manipulation of attention and are more likely to result in quality creative work.

Published February 20, 2023
Visit Freddie deBoer’s Substack to read Freddie deBoer’s original post The Bitter End of “Content”