Think Week #5
The State of the Internet, Gates and Shipper, Genius, Unpredictable Rewards, and DAMN.
The State of the Internet
I remember the first time I had split-pea soup as a kid.
The bowl in front of me looked like green slop.
It's still the most unappetizing thing I remember having to eat growing up. We were visiting family friends for dinner and my Mom made me sit there until I consumed every last drop of the homemade soup. It was rough.
The internet is full of slop right now. Far worse than that soup I’m still scarred by.
My fellow Philadelphia Phillies fan,
, argues that the internet has become overrun with slop. Slop, he defines, is content created solely for optimization and engagement metrics rather than genuine creativity or interest.Optimization is slowly killing the internet.
You can see it most clearly on X, because tweets are the simplest content to make, and because likes are the fastest form of feedback. There, slop has taken over. Slop is the newly popular term for the garbage you see in tweets, LinkedIn posts, YouTube videos, and websites more broadly that is so superficial, mediocre, and banal that the only reason people could possibly create it is to drive some metric they’re optimizing for: likes, views, clicks, whatever.
— Source
I believe Substack is the anti-slop forum.
A lifejacket to save writers and thinkers from drowning in green pea soup. The current state of the internet is over-optimized. People have gamed algorithms to death and clever tricks just don't work anymore. The good news is everyone feels the pain and is hungry for something new. Disruption is closer than I thought.
Bill Gates and Dan Shipper
In the 1980s, Bill Gates started his "Think Week" tradition.
On May 26, 1995, his 7 day escape to a secluded lakefront cabin gave birth to The Internet Tidal Wave, an internal memo that changed the course of Microsoft's history.
What if you had a whole week to think?
The media powerhouse, Every, had their very first Think Week back in April.
Dan Shipper talked about how they set out to give their writers space to get off the hamster wheel. To sit back and allow time to slow down. To conjure up questions that matter. Not only in the short term, but a decade from now.
I had my very own Think Week recently. Six days of reading, writing, thinking, reflecting. Most importantly, I met with friends and old colleagues who I hadn't spoken to in a long time. Writers and creators that are a few steps ahead of me.
I buried myself in all the essays I'd saved in Readwise and stepped into the minds of those I admire most. What a joy this was.
Have you taken a Think Week?
What did you read and write?
Where did you escape to?
Unpredictable Rewards
Not knowing if you received a like, comment, follow, or retweet until you open up Twitter will keep you coming back for more. The anticipation is relentless. The hit of dopamine, intoxicating. But this isn't sustainable. It's terrible for your mental health.
Not seeing the notifications that you hoped for will lead to doom scrolling and envy. Endless check-ins throughout the day will only increase the number of negative feedback loops your brain goes through.
Set a social media budget for yourself and resist the urge to constantly check-in throughout the day. Otherwise, you're just another gambler at the casino.
There's a lot of science behind gamification.
helps all of us explore the ways we're fooled in the digital age. He recently talked about The Skinner Box, developed by Harvard psychologist B. F. Skinner, which led to three key insights.Immediate rewards work better than delayed, unpredictable rewards work better than fixed, and conditioned rewards work better than primary. In the 20th Century would be used by businesses to shape consumer behavior. From Frequent Flyer loyalty points to mystery toys in McDonalds Happy Meals, purchases were turned into games, spurring consumers to purchase more.
— Source
Let the excitement wear off
New thoughts or ideas are fluid in short-term memory during conversations, but are more rigid on paper. One the page, it's easy to see what holds up.
Your brain has time to process it.
Time is great filter for determining if an idea is worthy of further investment.
Excitement wears off and reality sets in.
Most of what you think about will fall a part on the page.
has spent a great deal of time meditating on how we think through writing.When I write, I get to observe the transition from this fluid mode of thinking to the rigid. As I type, I’m often in a fluid mode—writing at the speed of thought. I feel confident about what I’m saying. But as soon as I stop, the thoughts solidify, rigid on the page, and, as I read what I’ve written, I see cracks spreading through my ideas. What seemed right in my head fell to pieces on the page.
— Source
It's been well established that writing is thinking. Writing helps you refine your thoughts, stories, and ideas. If you don't write down what's floating around in your head, you'll never achieve a level of clarity that someone who writes has.
Ideas aren't fully formed yet. Not fully encoded into memory, where they can morph, evolve, and merge into novel things.
Remixing can't happen, and remixing is where you differentiate yourself from the crowded internet town hall. It's how you win the the great online game.
There's nothing new under the sun and we’re all creating on top of the shoulders of those that have come before us.
Challenge the status quo
Spike Lee's first feature film cost $175,000 and grossed (worldwide) $7,100,000.
The film was shot in only twelve days during the summer of 1985. At the time, and sadly still to this day, Hollywood had a monolithic narrative about Black life in America, mostly focusing on crime and poverty.
Spike Lee, fresh out of NYU, had no desire to assimilate into the dominant culture. Lee took a shoestring budget and created a cult classic that centered around a strong, independent black woman. Remember, this was the mid-1980s during the devastating crack epidemic. The film was a massive success for the upstart filmmaker but production was a struggle.
Spike didn't have all of the money to complete post-production for the film.
During a rough cut at NYU, Lee addressed the audience: "I'm Spike Lee and I hope that you liked the film," Lee said afterward. "I'll be calling you soon about becoming financially involved in helping us complete it."
Don’t be afraid to challenge the status quo. His courage inspired others to help finance his projects and he built a loyal following that exists to this day.
Spike Lee’s early success stemmed from going against the Hollywood grain. If you deeply believe in something take the risk and share your experience with the world.
Show me a Genius and I’ll show you their Tutors
We tend to glorify genius and brilliance but we don’t talk enough about how these people came to be. Here’s what we should be talking about... the professional help that served as the foundation for their success.
highlights this in Whey we stopped making Einsteins.Einstein had multiple tutors growing up in subjects like mathematics and philosophy, such as his uncle, Jakob Einstein, who taught him algebra. In fact, there was a family tutor of the Einsteins who went by the name Max Talmud (possibly the best name of a tutor _ever_), and it was indeed Max Talmud who introduced the young 12-year-old Albert to geometry, prefacing young Albert’s eventual transformation of our understanding of space and time into something geometric. Maybe we don’t make Einsteins anymore because we don’t make Max Talmuds anymore.
— Source
Let your work do the talking
In 2018, Kendrick Lamar won the Pulitzer Prize in Music. He became the first non-classical and non-jazz artist to win the prestigious award.
When the news broke out, it not only shocked the music industry but also redefined what could be considered a masterpiece in the literary world.
It's noteworthy that Kendrick himself has been relatively quiet about the monumental win, letting the work and the impact it has had speak for themselves.
This aligns with his broader philosophy of allowing the art to take center stage.
Let your work do the talking.
For now it is. But I think it’s only slob free because the users choose to make it so. If the soup mindset hits here there is no stopping it.