stratechery.com

A Script for Mark Zuckerberg

Building a platform is antithetical to building an ad business. A platform's goal is to feature third-parties; an advertiser's goal is to capture attention for itself. Investing in an entirely new technology, including developing hardware, fundamentally limits our addressable market; an advertiser's goal is to maximize its market size.

stratechery.com

The iPhone’s Last Stand

The reason is obvious when you think about it: enterprises are paying for their employees' time, so of course they are willing to pay for tools that make those employees more productive; consumers, on the other hand, are mostly looking to waste time, which is why attention-harvesting advertising is the only software business model that works at scale for consumer services.

3quarksdaily.com

The Use and Abuse of Joan Didion

Authors and their entire bodies of work can be encapsulated in fragments: a few underlined sentences from their books endlessly reposted on Instagram, influencers flaunting book covers on the beach, photographs of authors appearing lost in melancholy—or best of all, smoking—making rounds on the Internet.

readtheprofile.com

Will Jake and Logan Paul’s Haters Make Them Billionaires?

The behavior that makes Jake and Logan hard to take seriously is the same behavior that has kept them at the center of everything. Over the past two decades, Jake and Logan built a social media empire in public, amassing a combined following of more than 150 million and becoming a case study in growing up in the attention economy.

noahpinion.blog

Save us, Digital Cronkite!

Basically, spreading hate and divisiveness on social media is a form of entrepreneurship. As Eugene Wei has written, social media is all about getting social status. 10,000 followers on X may not sound like a media empire to rival CBS News, but for most people it's more attention than they would otherwise get in their entire life.

whyisthisinteresting

The Monday Media Diet with Tom Junod

one of the ironies of writing a book is that your publisher asks to you sharpen your Instagram skills so that you can sell it on a platform that is wildly post-literate and is the same time the home of many writers dancing as fast as they can to create attention for the product of all that sweat and toil.