Mindless Sharing Machines
Guy with newsletter shares thoughts on sharing
These last few months, I’ve been doing more freelance work and toying with my personal website quite often. One thing that’s pretty shocking is the long list of places you can follow me and get a reasonable cadence of relatively thoughtful posts.I consider myself a decent follow. Presumably you do too, seeing as you’re here and all.
Most of these platforms are awesome. Like Letterboxd, which is the Goodreads for movies, if Goodreads was actually good. Imagine an America where Strava is the only social media: obesity rates plummet and, with a little bit of social pressure, so does my average mile time. Fitness influencers are still annoying in this imaginary world.
But here’s the thing with all this sharing: the whole is NOT greater than the sum of the parts. The parts are great, but their totality is turning us into machines. Content in, sharing out.
There’s an essay I love from Thomas J Bevan, The Tyranny of Numbers, in which he argues that the overuse of numbers is the cause of many of the problems we face today. As someone who conducted a DIY Wirecutter experiment to find the best sleep tracker, before having a bit of a come-to-Matthew-Walker moment, this really resonated with me. But you can replace every reference to numbers with “sharing” and it’s just as relevant.
There is a real tendency in the modern world to count everything but see the significance of nothing.
This, I fear, is the direction all this sharing has taken us. Sharing everything, but seeing the significance of none of it. In a world where sharing is so instant, we no longer give ourselves a moment to reflect on how things make us feel. There’s no time to really sit with anything before sharing and moving onto what’s next. Sharing is obviously not inherently bad. However, this shotgun approach with which we seem to be sharing things today has removed all intention. And when we do something so mindlessly, what’s the point? I suppose that’s why I love curation as an art form – it’s sharing with the utmost intent. So let’s keep sharing, but like an ideal happy birthday Instagram story, let’s do it in moderation.
Jack Black Begs Led Zeppelin
I believe that discovering Led Zeppelin plays a very important part in the development of a well-adjusted human. No matter what “Gen” you are, going through a Zeppelin phase is crucial (not least because it allows you to deploy eye roll-worthy phrases like “Get the Led out” and “Zeptember”). This video of Jack Black pleading with the band to use “Immigrant Song” in the movie School of Rock resurfaced for me recently, and it was a nice reminder of Led Zeppelin’s enduring place in the musical landscape, and that Jack Black at his best is pretty funny (for further evidence, peep his cameo in Girl Skateboard’s Pretty Sweet video.)
—Justin
Ari Emanuel Takes On The World
Ari Emanuel is one of those figures that business and media folk tend to have a clear perception of. It’s usually either “He’s the guy that they based Ari Gold off of for Entourage,” or “He’s the super agent who is the brother of former White House chief of staff Rahm and renowned doctor Zeke.” This New Yorker profile by Connie Bruck paints a much more nuanced and complicated picture that makes for a fascinating read.
—Justin
Wren – Offset your carbon footprint
Happy Earth day! Check out Wren to offset your carbon footprint. You fill out a little survey on your lifestyle and they estimate how much you’ll need to offset. I pay about $18 per month. Really cool idea, completely transparent in their spending and your impact. If you sign up using my link they’ll protect an extra 10 acres of rainforest for both of us.
–Andrew
The Line
Podcast discovery is quite difficult. I actually think Product Hunt Podcasts (RIP) was the best discovery platform, focused on individual episodes. But one method that really works is when an old podcast feed introduces a new one to its existing subscribers. I was scrolling through, deciding what to listen to, and saw those methodically-marketed capital letters: SEAL. This podcast is actually part of an upcoming docu-series and only 4 episodes in so far. Feels like Heavyweight meets Serial, with the potential popularity of Serial.
–Andrew