Infinite long tail

I miss Old Twitter. Many critics believe journalists were obsessed with Twitter because they were the cool kids table in the cafeteria. Not really. It played to the strengths of the field: prodigious information processing and quick wit. X is about manipulating outrage, as my experiment tweaking of Knicks fans proved. 

The best media products now are group texts. They’re private, curated and without the algorithmic peacocking. They’re in many ways like Old Twitter.

That’s the idea behind PvA Field Notes, a new project that we’re opening to intrepid beta testers. The idea behind Field Notes was to take our WhatsApp group we use for prep and open it to PvA listeners who are also immersed in connecting the dots of how media, culture and society are changing at the direction mostly of tech. 

Test PvA Field Notes

Couple other reminders:

I was delighted at last night’s Air Mail party to find elevated pigs in a blanket. They’re the ultimate American suburban cocktail party snack: unpretentious, best served with a hot mustard, universally beloved. 

Pigs in a blanket are totems of post-WWII American abundance, centered in the suburban experience. People got big houses with big lawns and wives with big hair. That required them to entertain in order to show off their abundance. 

We are entering a new period of media abundance. AI is making the long tail infinite. And in the process devaluing originality with a flood of derivative content. 

The long tail didn’t swamp legacy media immediately. In fact, many titles were in denial up until the financial crisis. Glossy magazines were like phone books in the early 2000s. But in retrospect, it was inevitable the long tail would swamp the head of the tail. The long tail led to an explosion of websites, which is now coming to every form of media. Human attention, it turns out, remains finite, the final scarce asset in a world of abundance.

We have abundance – books nobody reads, apps nobody downloads, newsletters that go unopened, podcasts nobody listens to, and videos without viewers. Media always goes first because it’s easy to manipulate data and the industry is hopelessly fragmented and disorganized. Wonder CEO Marc Lore is promising robots that make 500 burrito bowls an hour and a future where anyone in the world can create a restaurant in two minutes and $10 a month. The Aisle’s Jason DelRey asked the obvious question in response: Who wants this?

AI promised us more. It never promised us better.

Competing with infinity is impossible on quantity. The attention economy is a race to the bottom. The short-term pressures of programmatic ad markets have always been tilted to volume. That’s a bad bet now. McClatchy’s newsroom understandably has doubts about the usefulness of a Content Scaling Agent™. We have been down this road.

The problem with AI isn’t just the volume, it’s the sameness. We saw this with the last generation chasing algorithmic distribution. It altered their outputs. Everyone was in the Game of Thrones recap business. When I evaluated one of these trending topics tools, I asked why this wouldn’t just lead us to produce the same stuff everyone else who uses the tool does. 

Author Yann Martel told writing influencer David Perell that using AI would be like paying someone else to have sex. It was somewhat sad to see The Economist has to tell internship candidates not to use AI to write a sample article. Gen Z directing sensation Kane Parsons is unimpressed. The New Yorker proved the Iron Rule of Headlines: the answer to any interrogative is no with its inquiry, “Can AI produce writing we actually want to read?” Sam Criss writes of the shapeshifting AI “demon” turning up everywhere “replacing all meaningful language with reams and reams of genuinely meaningless drivel.” 

Enter the slopulists. These are financial elites who gamely stand up for the merits of slop as the fruits of “democratization.” They cast the critics – artists, journalists, designers – as the true elites. They bravely stand shoulder to shoulder with Tung Tung Tung Sahur. This is hand-waving nonsense, of course. Reading is a process, not merely buffering interfering with an information download. 

This shortcut mentality has moved onto AI design, which has developed its own aesthetic tells. Soon the world will both look and sound like Claude.

The problem with using AI too much is that it removes too much friction. Effort is friction. Cliff’s Notes founder went to his grave insisting his summaries of the classics were not meant as a substitute for reading them, even if that was most of the use case. Effort is a signaling mechanism to the market. It’s why design matters: It tells people you give a shit. 

It also tells people you’re real. AI is arriving at a time when phoniness is a liability in many market. Look at politics. Graham Platner’s insurgent candidacy would have been sunk long ago in previous cycles. He’s weathered these controversies over Nazi tattoos and sexting because people would prefer someone with a full life of ups and downs than a politician seemingly made in a lab. Platner presents as giving a shit about regular people.

The same holds true for media brands. Overly engineered media is something people sense and tend to reject now. The centrifugal pull of AI to sameness will open a lane in media for esoteric brands built organically. Brands that spring up naturally have an advantage over those engineered in whiteboard sessions. 

The open web, freed from the page constraints and SEO requirement, could have a comeback. There will be a structured “site” for agents with information organized for robots, and another made for humans. 

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To discuss partnering with The Rebooting, send a note to Dustin Marucci: [email protected]