Cal Newport's Blog, page 4

Can You Tweet Your Way to Impact?

Earlier this month, a group of scientists from universities around the world published the results of an ingeniously simple experiment in the journal PLoS ONE. Every month, for ten months, they randomly selected an article from a journal in their field to promote on their Twitter accounts, which, collectively, added up to around 230,000 followers. They then later compared the success of these tweeted articles with control articles randomly selected from the same issues.

The result? No statistically significant increase in citations in the promoted articles versus the controls. There was a difference, however, in the download numbers: more people took a look at the tweeted citations.

In this narrow look at social media and science a more general lesson about this technology emerges. Maintaining an aggressive presence in these online spaces can increase the number of people who temporarily encounter you or your work. But these encounters are often ephemeral, rarely leading to more serious engagement. It’s exciting to receive increased attention in the present, but it may have little effect on your impact in the future.

Book authors understand this lesson. It’s valuable, for example, for me to do a long-form podcast interview about my book, or to tell my long-time readers on this newsletter about it (ahem, see below). These activities are the equivalent of a professor giving a talk about their paper at an academic conference or posting an announcement in a relevant publication.

At the same time, more than a few authors have learned in recent years that large numbers of TikTok, or Twitter, or YouTube subscribers do not always amount to much in terms of sustained sales. The relationships with these social media audiences is different: less trust, more antsy energy; exciting, but shallow.

Content platforms that compensate your energies largely with the ego-boosting embrace of digital attention can be compelling and fun. They can also be useful for seeking out feedback or new connections (see my recent conversation with Adam Grant for a nice discussion of this point.) But don’t mistake them as somehow vital to your goal of finding a serious audience for your deepest efforts.

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Speaking of deep efforts, I have two quick administrative notes…

As part of a major article that I’m writing, I’m looking to hear from college students who have used tools like ChatGPT to help them write class paper assignments. If this describes you, please send me an email at author@calnewport.com with the subject “ChatGPT Writing.” You can assume the contents of your email will be confidential and off-the-record.My book Slow Productivity continues to chug along. It’s now spent its first three weeks on the Amazon Charts! If you have not yet bought the book, please consider doing so! (You can learn more here, or find it wherever books are sold.)

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ChatGPT Can’t Plan. This Matters.

A brief book update: I wanted to share that Slow Productivity debuted at #2 on the New York Times bestseller list last week! Which is all to say: thank you for helping this book make such a splash.

If you still haven’t purchased a copy, here are two nudges to consider: (1) due to the rush of initial sales, Amazon has temporarily dropped the hardcover price significantly, making it the cheapest it will likely ever be (US | UK); and (2) if you prefer audio , maybe it will help to learn that I recorded the audiobook myself. I uploaded a clip so you can check it out (US | UK).

Last March, Sebastien Bubeck, a computer scientist from Microsoft Research, delivered a talk at MIT titled “Sparks of AGI.” He was reporting on a study in which he and his team ran OpenAI’s impressive new large language model, GPT-4, through a series of rigorous intelligence tests.

“If your perspective is, ‘What I care about is to solve problems, to think abstractly, to comprehend complex ideas, to reason on new elements that arrive at me,'” he said, “then I think you have to call GPT-4 intelligent.”

But as he then elaborated, GPT-4 wasn’t always intelligent. During their testing, Bubeck’s team had given the model a simple math equation: 7*4 + 8*8 = 92. They then asked the model to modify a single number on the lefthand side so that the equation now equaled 106. This is easy for a human to figure out: simply replace the 7*4 with a 7*6.

GPT-4 confidently gave the wrong answer. “The arithmetic is shaky,” Bubeck explained.

This wasn’t the only seemingly simple problem that stumped the model. The team later asked it to write a poem that made sense in terms of its content, but also had a last line that was an exact reverse of the first. GPT-4 wrote a poem that started with “I heard his voice across the crowd,” forcing it to end with the nonsensical conclusion: “Crowd the across voice his heard I.”

Other researchers soon found that the model also struggled with simple block stacking tasks, a puzzle game called Towers of Hanoi, and questions about scheduling shipments.

What about these problems stumped GPT-4? They all require you to simulate the future. We recognize that the 7*4 term is the right one to modify in the arithmetic task because we implicitly simulate the impact on the sum of increasing the number of 7’s. Similarly, when we solve the poem challenge, we think ahead to writing the last line while working on the first.

As I argue in my latest article for The New Yorker, titled “Can an A.I. Make Plans?,” this inability for language models to simulate the future is important. Humans run these types of simulations all the time as we go through our day.

As I write:

“When holding a serious conversation, we simulate how different replies might shift the mood—just as, when navigating a supermarket checkout, we predict how slowly the various lines will likely progress. Goal-directed behavior more generally almost always requires us to look into the future to test how much various actions might move us closer to our objectives. This holds true whether we’re pondering life’s big decisions, such as whether to move or have kids, or answering the small but insistent queries that propel our workdays forward, such as which to-do-list item to tackle next.”

If we want to build more recognizably human artificial intelligences, they will have to include this ability to prognosticate. (How did Hal 9000 from the movie 2001 know not to open the pod bay doors for Dave? It must have simulated the consequences of the action.)

But as I elaborate in the article, this is not something large language models like GPT-4 will ever be able to do. Their architectures are static and feedforward, incapable of recurrence or iteration or on-demand exploration of novel possibilities. No matter how big we push these systems, or how intensely we train them, they can’t perform true planning.

Does this mean we’re safe for now from creating a real life Hal 9000? Not necessarily. As I go on to explain, there do exist AI systems, that operate quite differently then language models, that can simulate the future. In recent years, an increasing effort has been to combine these planning programs with the linguistic brilliance of language models.

I give a lot more details about this in my article, but the short summary of my conclusion is that if you’re excited or worried about artificial intelligence, the right thing to care about is not how big we can make a single language model, but instead how smartly we can combine many different types of digital cognition.

The post ChatGPT Can’t Plan. This Matters. appeared first on Cal Newport.

Come See Me Saturday in DC + TikTok Falters

I know it’s been a minute since I’ve published one of my normal essays. I’ll be returning to these soon as the chaos of the Slow Productivity launch dissipates.

In the meantime, I wanted to share two quick notes: one about the book, and one about something interesting (but completely unrelated) that several of you have sent in my direction recently…

A note about the book

On Saturday, March 16th at 3:00pm, I’ll be appearing at Politics and Prose on Connecticut Avenue in Washington, DC. I’ll be joined in conversation with David Epstein, the New York Times bestselling author of Range. We’ll talk Slow Productivity and take questions from the audience. (For a preview, see my recent interview in Dave’s excellent newsletter.)

This is my first live event of the book tour, so if you’re in the DC area, I’d love to see you there! (More details.)

(You might also be interested in my most recent essay for The New Yorker, titled “How I Learned to Concentrate,” which discusses how my early years at MIT shaped almost everything I’ve written about ever since. I had fun writing this one: lots of Stata Center nostalgia!)

A note about something completely unrelated

Several readers have recently pointed me toward a fascinating article from the Wall Street Journal titled “Why Some 20-Somethings Are Saying No to TikTok.”

TikTok users between the ages of 18 to 24 dropped by around 9% between 2022 and 2023. Which is a lot for a single year.

The article’s author, Julie Jargon, talks to some of these ex-TikTok users to find out why they left. What she discovers is that many were unnerved by the application’s addictiveness.

One subject reported neglecting laundry and dishes to keep scrolling TikTok. Another reported that he lost the ability to do anything without the app in sight:

“He took out the trash while watching TikTok, but could only carry one bag at a time because his phone was in the other hand. When he cooked, he would stop chopping ingredients to scroll to the next video.”

This is all vaguely icky, but what caught my attention more was the fact that once these users broke their TikTok addiction, they were happy to move on. It was hard to put down, but ultimately not that important.

As I wrote in The New Yorker in 2022, this is the fatal flaw of TikTok. By focusing exclusively on addictiveness instead of slowly growing a hard-to-replicate social graph, like those that provide the foundation for legacy social platforms like Facebook and Instagram, TikTok gained lots of users quickly, but maintains only a weak grasp on them.

TikTok provides pure entertainment. If it unnerves you, as it has for the many 20-somethings who recently quit, there isn’t much cost to leaving — no careful collection of friend links or follower relationships to lose. You’re instead only walking away from an abstract stream of brain stem stimulation.

In my New Yorker piece I predicted that this trend toward pure distraction would lead to more turnover and tumult in the attention economy application space. We may be seeing the beginning of this trend starting to play out.

The post Come See Me Saturday in DC + TikTok Falters appeared first on Cal Newport.

How the Acquired Podcast Became a Sensation

My podcast producer recently turned me onto a show called Acquired, which features its co-hosts, Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal, diving deep into the backstories of well-known brands and companies, from Porsche and Nike, to Amazon and Nintendo.

It turns out I was late to this party. In the eight years since Acquired was originally launched, it has grown into a huge hit. The show now serves more than 200,000 downloads per episode. As Rosenthal revealed in a Fast Company profile last summer, they now face the problem of their audience becoming too large for their advertisers to afford paying the full fair market price for their spots.

What interests me about Acquired, however, is less what they’ve accomplished than how they did it. The conventional wisdom surrounding new media ventures is that success requires frenetic busyness. You need to produce content perfectly-tailored to your audiences’ attention spans, master The Algorithm, exist on multiple platforms, and above all else, churn out content quickly to maximize your chances of stumbling into vibe-powered virality.

Acquired did none of this. Gilbert and Rosenthal’s podcasts are very long; the two-part treatment of Nintendo I just finished clocked in at a little under seven hours. They also publish on an irregular schedule, often waiting a month or more between episodes. Combine this with the reality that they largely ignore YouTube and have no discernible social media strategy, this venture should have long ago crashed and burned. But it instead keeps growing.

What does explain the success of Acquired? The answer is almost disappointingly simple: it’s really good. Gilbert and Rosenthal don’t just look into the histories of the companies they profile, they master them — tracking down obscure books, reading every relevant article, pouring through investor filings, interviewing people who were involved. Fast Company reported that for their episode on Nike, Rosenthal prepared a 39-page script and Gilbert created a 4,000-word document listing insights to mention during the taping.

The key to this quality is effort. Early in the show’s history, Gilbert and Rosenthal spent around 5 to 10 hours researching each episode. Today, this number has grown to around 100 hours, and for good reason. “What I do know is that every time we’ve done more work,” Rosenthal explained, “the reaction and the results, both in terms of what people say qualitatively and the numbers, go up.”

I’m telling this story because the growth of Acquired helps explain a seemingly curious choice I made in my new book, Slow Productivity. In this work, I present three principles for embracing a more sustainable and meaningful approach to your professional life. The first two principles are clearly related to slowness: “do fewer things” and “work at a natural pace.” The third, however, seems somewhat out of place: “obsess over quality.”

As the Acquired story emphasizes, however, it’s this third goal that supports the other two. When you decide to obsess over quality, as Gilbert and Rosenthal did with their podcast, slowness becomes self-evidently the only way forward. Gilbert and Rosenthal didn’t monkey around with YouTube, or social media strategies, or optimal customer growth strategies, because all of that fast effort would get in the way of the slow pursuit of excellence.

We’re used to the idea that slowing down might help improve the quality of what we do. But in many cases, this relationship can also exist in exactly the opposite direction.

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Speaking of Slow Productivity, the book comes out on March 5th, but if you’re thinking about buying it anyway, please consider pre-ordering it, as this really helps draw attention to the title. If you do pre-order, I want to thank you with some bonus material about the philosophy.

The process here is simple: (1) pre-order the book from your preferred book seller; (2) email your receipt to slow@preorderbonuses.com.

That’s it. We’ll verify your receipt and then immediately send you the bonuses. (More details, including how to pre-order a signed copy from my favorite local bookseller, are available here.)

The post How the Acquired Podcast Became a Sensation appeared first on Cal Newport.

Heschel on the Joys of Slowness

In 1951, Abraham Joshua Heschel published a monograph titled simply, The Sabbath. It consisted of ten short chapters, comprising of less than a hundred total pages, illustrated with original wood engravings by Ilya Schor.

Early in the book, Heschel establishes the unique importance the Bible places on rest:

“It is, indeed, a unique occasion at which the distinguished word qadosh [a transliteration of the Hebrew term for ‘holy’] is used for the first time: in the Book of Genesis at the end of the story of creation. How extremely significant is the fact that it is applied to time: ‘And God blessed the seventh day and made it holy.‘ There is no reference in the record of creation to any object in space that would be endowed the quality of holiness.”

As Heschel elaborates, this idea was new. In pagan religions, places were holy; a sacred mountain, say, or a deified river. But the Abrahamic faiths found something Godly in a ritual of rest amid the flow of time.

Even here, however, it’s easy to lose the core meaning of this scriptural wisdom. Aristotle identified rest as important for recharging in preparation for more work. As Heschel make clear, this is not at all the purpose of the Sabbath:

“The Sabbath is a day for the sake of life. Man is not a beast of burden, and the Sabbath is not for the purpose of enhancing the efficiency of his work.”

To Heschel, as for the many billions of Jews, Christians, and Muslims who have practiced variations of this ancient insight, weekly rest is not about taking a break from the world around us, but instead about experiencing the joys of the world to come. It aims to makes the current moment more holy, not to render future moments more efficient.

These are heady ideas, but when viewed from a secularized remove they provide some useful insight into our ongoing discussion about slower notions of productivity. Work is important and good. (Did God not labor for six days of creation before resting on the seventh?) But it’s not everything. When slowing down the pace of our efforts we must, if only occasionally, sidestep instrumentality. Doing less should sometimes be about enjoying the beauty of right now.

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Speaking of slower notions of productivity, I wanted to thank everyone who responded to last week’s request to pre-order my new book, Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment without Burnout. On the day of that announcement alone, we sold 800 hardcovers, and dropped the book’s Amazon rank all the way down to #54!

If you haven’t yet pre-ordered the book, please consider doing so. As mentioned last week, I’m offering a collection of bonuses as my way of saying thanks (learn more about pre-ordering and the bonuses here.)

I also wanted to announce an exciting new development: You can now pre-order signed copies of the book from People’s Book, the independent bookstore right down the street from my house. Even if you’ve already purchased Slow Productivity, please consider also ordering a signed copy as a gesture of support to local booksellers. Even better, if you live near Takoma Park, MD, come check out the store in person!

The post Heschel on the Joys of Slowness appeared first on Cal Newport.

My new book: Slow Productivity

It’s hard to believe that we’re less than two months away from the publication of my new book, ​Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment without Burnout​, which comes out on March 5th. As promised by the subtitle, this book describes a groundbreaking new philosophy for pursuing meaningful accomplishment while avoiding overload, based around three principles that will sound familiars to long-time readers of this newsletter: (1) Do Fewer Things; (2) Work at a Natural Pace; (3) Obsess Over Quality.

It’s here that I want to straight-up ask you a favor: If you were thinking of buying the book anyway, would you consider ​pre-ordering now​ in advance?

(Pre-order numbers turn out to be really helpful for authors. The major retailers, for example, look at them to determine how seriously to treat a new title. They’re also critical for bestseller list placement.)

To help thank you for helping me, I’ve put together the following collection of bonuses for those who buy Slow Productivity in advance:

Chapter-by-Chapter Audio Commentary [released on publication date]: On March 5th, I’ll be releasing an exclusive chapter-by-chapter audio commentary for Slow Productivity, allowing those who pre-ordered the book to enjoy a behind the scenes look into my thought processes and the insights that shaped my writing of the book, as well as ideas and advice that didn’t make the final edit.

A Slow Productivity Primer [available instantly]: Dive deeper into the slow productivity movement with an annotated collection of my best writing on the topic from the past four years.

A Slow Productivity Crash Course [available instantly]: In this targeted video course I explain the main ideas behind slow productivity, detailing the three main principles of the philosophy, and providing for each a piece of concrete advice you can implement immediately. This crash course will allow you to begin to enjoy the benefits of this approach to work right away while waiting for the book to arrive.

In case you’re still on the fence, here’s what some other people I admire have been saying about the book:

“With profound insights backed by research, analysis, and examples from the lives of scientists and artists, Cal Newport explores a better way to work—one that promises more calm, clarity, and creativity.”

— Gretchen Rubin, author of The Happiness Project

“This brilliant and timely book is for all of us who’ve grown disillusioned with conventional productivity advice, yet still yearn to get meaningful things done. With his trademark blend of philosophical depth and realistic techniques, Newport outlines an approach that’s more human and vastly more effective in the long run.”

— Oliver Burkeman, author of Four Thousand Weeks

“Slow Productivity is an opportunity to understand why we so often feel frustrated with the demands of the world we live in—and what we can accomplish if we choose to turn inward, once again.”

— Meera Lee Patel, author of Start Where You Are

“If you are stretched thin and having trouble getting everything done, you need to speed up, right? Wrong. In Slow Productivity, Cal Newport does what he does best, delivering counterintuitive secrets that just might save your career and sanity.”

— Arthur C. Brooks, author of Build the Life You Want

To secure your pre-order bonuses, simply ​pre-order Slow Productivity​, then follow the steps listed at:

​https://calnewport.com/slow​

Thank you for all of your support over the years. I’m excited for Slow Productivity to come out and am truly hoping it sparks a new conversation about the way we work.

The post My new book: Slow Productivity appeared first on Cal Newport.

On Slow Writing

Someone recently forwarded me an essay from a blogger named Henrik Karlsson. It opens with an admission: “When I started writing online, the advice I got was to publish frequently and not overthink any single piece.”

Karlsson was not alone in receiving this suggestion. As social media erupted into cultural dominance over the past decade, it carried in its wake a force that thoroughly disrupted written media: virality. An article or post that hit the Twitter or Facebook zeitgeist just right could summon hundreds of times more readers than average. Because it was difficult to predict which pieces might ascend to this cyber-blessed state, the optimal strategy became, as Karlsson was told, to publish as much as possible, maximizing the odds that you stumble onto something sticky.

What makes Karlsson’s essay interesting, however, is that he decided to test this hypothesis on his own work. “I’ve now written 37 blog posts and I no long think this is true,” he writes. “Each time I’ve given in to my impulse to ‘optimize’ a piece it has performed massively better.”

Using new subscribers as a metric of success, Karlsson calculated more specifically that spending twice as long on an article yields, on average, more than four times the number of new subscribers.

A useful way to approximate these dynamics is to imagine plotting skill level versus the number of people producing work at that level. Roughly speaking, the more time you spend on a creative endeavor, the higher the skill level you achieve, and the higher skill level you achieve, the fewer people there are also producing at that level. Spending more time, in other words, makes your work more valuable.

They key is understanding how fast this curve falls. In my experience, in many creative endeavors, it falls fast (to be nerdy about it, at least quadratically). If you double your skill, for example, the number of people producing at your level probably falls by much more than a factor of two. This helps explain Karlsson’s results. As he spent more time optimizing his essays, the pool of competition diminished rapidly, greatly increasing the value to his potential readers. The best strategy for growing his newsletter therefore became to write the best things he was capable of crafting.

This slow publishing approach, of course, does decrease your chances of virality. But for a writer, virality is not so important anyway. The temporary attention it brings soon dissipates, while the subscribers left behind have only a tenuous connection to your efforts. Meanwhile, a more languid but regular pace of really good work is a consistent formula for steadily building an intensely loyal readership.

The good news is that recent changes to the operation and cultural positioning of social media have greatly diminished its promise of virality. More creators are awakening to something like Karlsson’s realization. Speeding up in pursuit of fleeting moments of hyper-visibility is not necessarily the path to impact. It’s in slowing down that the real magic happens.

The post On Slow Writing appeared first on Cal Newport.

On Metrics and Resolve

One of the least understood components of my time-block planner is the “daily metrics” box that tops every pair of planning pages. Given that we’ve recently arrived at the beginning of a new year, an event that inevitably suffuses our culture with talk of reinvention and self-improvement, it seems an opportune time to look a little closer at this under-appreciated idea.

The mechanics of metric tracking are easy to explain. At the end of each day, you record a collection of symbols that describe your engagement with various key behaviors. These metrics can be binary. For example, you might have a specific symbol to indicate if you meditated, or called a friend, or went to the gym. If you engaged in the activity, you record the symbol. If you did not, you record the symbol with a line through it.

Metrics can also be quantitative, capturing not just whether you engaged in the activity, but to what degree. Instead of simply recording a symbol that indicates that you went for a walk, for example, you might augment the symbol with the total number of steps you took throughout the day. Instead of capturing the fact you did some deep work, you might also tally the total number of hours spent in this state.

The resulting information might seem an inscrutable cipher to an outsider, but once you get used to your personal metrics, they will provide, at a glance, an elaborated snapshot of your day.

Consider, for example, the sample “daily metrics” box from above. In this case, its terse scribbles might capture the following about the date in question:

You did not exercise (crossed out ex).You took 9000 steps (s:9000).You ate clean (ac).You spent three hours working deeply (dw:3).You read two book chapters (r:2).

The key question, of course, is why you should bother with this tracking discipline in the first place. Goal setting and time management are all prospective, in that they look boldly toward your desired future. Metrics, by contrast, are retrospective, merely leaving a record of what has already occurred.

This latter activity, however, turns out to be closely connected to the former. The dynamics at play here begin with motivation. In many ways our motivation centers are cruder than we like to imagine. You can tell yourself a complicated story about the importance of fitness in your vision of the life well-lived, but in the end, the desire to avoid letting down your future self by having to record that shameful crossed out ex metric might prove significantly more likely to inspire you to pick up the weights.

Once you’re making consistent and disciplined progress on small things that reflect your larger values, your identity evolves. You begin to see yourself as someone with discipline; someone willing and able to do hard things in the moment to obtain meaningful rewards in the future. It’s on this foundation that you will find yourself better able to stick with grander forward-looking goals.

Tracking daily metrics, in other words, is like a training regime for your will. Like many, you might be embracing the new year with a long list of ambitious resolutions. This is great. But perhaps before you dive into your big plans you should spend a month or two first tracking the small.

The post On Metrics and Resolve appeared first on Cal Newport.

Standing Up to Technology

In the fall of 2016, I wrote an op-ed for the New York Times that pushed back against the conventional wisdom that social media was important for your career. “In a capitalist economy, the market rewards things that are rare and valuable,” I wrote. “Social media use is decidedly not rare or valuable.” Aided in large part by an attention-catching headline — “Quit Social Media. Your Career May Depend on It” — my piece touched a nerve, soon hitting the top of the paper’s Most Emailed chart.

This sudden prominence generated a fierce backlash. I was invited on a radio program only to be ambushed by two surprise guests invited to refute my ideas. A well-known communication professor began emailing me invitations to debate. One online publication described my call to use less social media as a call to disenfranchise marginalized peoples. (I’m still trying to figure that one out.) Perhaps most notably, two weeks later, the Times took the unusual step of publishing a response op-ed — “Don’t Quit Social Media. Put it to Work for Your Career Instead” — that went through the main points of my piece one by one, explain why each was wrong.

In my most recent essay for The New Yorker, published earlier today, I revisit this incident from seven years ago. As I write, my distinct impression of this period was that of being targeted by a cultural immune reaction: “The idea of stepping away altogether from powerful new tools like social media just wasn’t acceptable; readers needed to be assured that such advice could be safely ignored.”

In 2016, American culture was gripped by what the late social critic Neil Postman called a “technopoly”; a social order in which we fully capitulate to the technological:

“[In a technopoly] innovation and increased efficiency become the unchallenged mechanisms of progress, while any doubts about the imperative to accommodate the shiny and new are marginalized. ‘Technopoly eliminates alternatives to itself in precisely the way Aldous Huxley outlined in Brave New World,’ Postman writes. ‘It does not make them illegal. It does not make them immoral. It does not even make them unpopular. It makes them invisible and therefore irrelevant.’ Technopoly, he concludes, ‘is totalitarian technocracy.'”

This was the setting in which my call to cut back on social media was so thoroughly and immediately rejected. It represented a glitch in the technopolic matrix that needed immediate repair.

The goal of my new essay, however, was not mere negative nostalgia. It goes on to highlight a more recent positive trend that has been largely overlooked: the age of technopoly seems to be ending. Increasingly we see resistance to the blind acceptance of all technological progress as inevitable, whether this be in the form of the Writers Guild of America banning certain uses of artificial intelligence in the creation of television shows, or the Surgeon General suggesting that maybe we should just stop letting kids use social media.

I recommend that you read the full essay for specific details, but my general conclusion is that a new, more critical engagement with tools that I call techno-selectionism is becoming more viable. As 2023 rapidly gives way to 2024, maybe we’ll see this new philosophy really began to spread. I’ll be doing my part to help it along.

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Neil Gaiman’s Radical Vision for the Future of the Internet

Earlier this week, Neil Gaiman was interviewed on Icelandic television. Around the twenty-five minute mark of the program, the topic turned to the author’s thoughts about the internet. “I love blogging. I blog less now in the era of microblogging,” Gaiman explained, referring to his famously long-running online journal hosted at neilgaiman.com. “I miss the days of just sort of feeling like you could create a community by talking in a sane and cheerful way to the world.”

As he continues, it becomes clear that Gaiman’s affection for this more personal and independent version of online communication is more than nostalgia. As he goes on to predict:

“But it’s interesting because people are leaving (social media). You know, Twitter is over, yeah Twitter is done, Twitter’s… you stick a fork in, it’s definitely overdone. The new Twitters, like Threads and Blue sky… nothing is going to do what that thing once did. Facebook works but it doesn’t really work. So I think probably the era of blogging may return and maybe people will come and find you and find me again.”

In these quips, Gaiman is reinforcing a vision of the internet that I have been predicting and promoting in my recent writing for The New Yorker (e.g., this and this and this). Between 2012 to 2022, we came to believe that the natural structure for online interaction was for billions of people to all use the same small number of privately-owned social platforms. We’re increasingly realizing now that it was this centralization idea itself that was unnatural. The underlying architecture of the internet already provides a universal platform on which anyone can talk to anyone else about any topic. We didn’t additionally need all of these conversations to be consolidated into the same interfaces and curated by the same algorithms.

The future of the internet that most excites me is also, in many ways, a snapshot of its past. It’s a place where the Neil Gaiman’s of the world don’t need to feed their thoughts into an engagement engine, but can instead put out a virtual shingle on their own small patch of cyberspace and attract and build a more intimate community of like-minded travelers. This doesn’t necessitate a blog — podcasts, newsletters, and video series have emerged as equally engaging mediums for independent media production. The key is a communication landscape that is much more diverse and distributed and interesting than what we see when everyone is using the same two or three social apps.

This vision is not without its issues. The number one concern I hear about a post-social media online world is the difficulty of attracting large audiences. For content creators, by far the biggest draw to a service like Twitter or Instagram is that their algorithms could, if you played things just right, grant you viral audience growth.

Take myself as an example. Over the past fifteen years I’ve slowly built this newsletter to around 80,000 loyal subscribers who really seem to connect with what I have to say. If I had instead directed my energy during this period toward a social platform (which I somewhat infamously refused to do), I probably could have gathered ten times more followers.

I’m not sure, however, that I care. What exactly is a social media follower anyway? A couple years ago, for example, publishing houses began signing major social media influencers to book deals under the assumption that their huge follower counts would yield automatic sales. Things didn’t work out as planned. I think I’m happy with my 80,000 subscribers, many of whom I know by name, and who have been reading and commenting on my work for many years. It feels like a family while the social media influencers I know often experience their audiences more like an unruly mob that they’re struggling to pacify.

An online world in which it’s hard to be a superstar, but easier to find a real sense of community, sounds like a good tradeoff to me. I’m hoping Neil Gaiman is right that the Age of Twitter really is coming to an end, and that a return the quieter, deeper pleasures of a more homegrown social internet will soon return. I remember fondly read Gaiman’s blog during the early 2000s. There were no likes or virality, but I did feel connected to an author I liked. Can’t that be good enough?

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In Other News: On the ​latest episode​ of my podcast, Deep Questions, I take a critical look at the idea of “laziness,” exploring more effective ways of thinking about struggles to get important things done. (​watch​ | ​listen​)

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