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Breaking out of the megacorp media consumption habit

The concept of the "attention economy" isn't new - Jenny Odell wrote about it in 2019, in her book How To Do Nothing. I read this book when it first came out, and though it's not the finest piece of literature I've ever read, some of the core ideas stuck with me. Primarily, being mindful of what we consume - much of our digital life has been engineered to get us to keep scrolling, regardless of how we feel about it. Odell writes about sitting in the park near her house often enough, and without distraction, to learn the different bird songs and names of plants and flowers.

Similarly, Cal Newport wrote a book called Deep Work (2016), in which he emphasizes the necessity of learning how to focus. The development of this volitional muscle will enable you to "quickly master complicated information and produce better results in less time." Though that sounds good to me in theory, I don't like the underlying assumption that we need to learn how to be more productive. That feels like a pro-capitalist doomer mindset, which I want to stay extremely far away from.

I also had the realization some time ago that I don't spend that much time on the internet just browsing anymore. It used to feel fun and exciting to get online, because there was so much out there, and it felt organic to explore. There also were some online communities I used to be a part of (shoutout diabloworld and various car forums) that had major impacts on my life, both online and in the real world. That slowly changed over the years, to the point where in the past decade or so, the websites I was visiting were limited to reddit, instagram, youtube, and a few news pages. Getting on the internet doesn't feel like it used to, now I'm mostly passively consuming rather than participating in communities or exploring.

Also, in writing this, I remembered that recurse has a webring so I'm gonna join that right after this is published.

Anyway, I've been thinking loosely about all of this over the years while slowly developing my own media consumption pipeline. The goal for me is to be selective about what appears in front of my face, with the intent of reading deeply rather than skimming a ton of articles every day. So here are a list of things that I like to use that help me escape the black hole of algorithmic mind control. I like a mix of curated emails, RSS reading, and completely open ended tools that let me explore. Email newsletters are nice because they are opt-in, and most only show up once a week.

Freeform:

RSS:

Newsletters