The best of "The Future, Now, and Then," 2022 edition
The whole point of this Substack was to get back into writing again. For the past few years, my best ideas have mostly been thumb-typed into long Twitter threads.
The advantage of being a Twitter-intellectual is that it so low-stakes. You just start writing, with no real plan in mind. There’s no time spent outlining or editing. It’s a nice way to informally work out some ideas, to think-by-writing. And, if you’re in parenting mode, it can sometimes be the only way to work out those ideas. (I have small kids. I’m constantly in parenting mode. I love them so much and I am so very tired.)
The downside of public-thinking-via-tweet is the impermanence and informality of the whole endeavor. This was true even before Elon started wrecking the site. Twitter threads are a nice place to jumpstart your thinking. They’re the wrong place to end. And it began to stunt my writing. I got worse at the things I’m naturally bad at, and leaned too heavily on the bits that come easily to me.
Over the summer, I had a bad bout of writer’s block. I spent about three months spinning my wheels on an essay that eventually turned into “Will Netflix Be Alright?” I started fiddling with it in April, back when Netflix’s stock was in freefall and everyone was wondering what it meant. I knew what I had to say. It was timely and, I think, pretty original. But I couldn’t cut through my own bad habits and write a real draft while it still fit into the broader attention economy.
So I made a mid-year resolution to write something every week, and post it where people could see. Some weeks that would be a long essay related to the history of the digital future project. Other weeks it would be something on digital politics, or climate change, or whatever else was occupying my mind. Writing every week is habit-forming. If nothing else, it clears out the brain space and empties my to-do list. (The audience for pieces like “the anti-politics of Stewart Brand’s environmentalism” isn’t supposed to be huge. But I spent over a year dwelling on the ideas in that essay, emailing notes to myself and filling word docs with draft text. It’s written now. I can move to the next thing.)
All told, it has gone well. I wrote 41 Substack posts in 2022. Some were tentpole essays developing ideas that will go into the next book. Others were timely commentary on tech and politics. I still write the occasional long Twitter thread, but I now try to use those threads as a starting point for a longer post that isn’t tethered to the sinking ship that is Twitter dot com.
The readership has grown as well. I started the year with just over 100 subscribers. There are now over 2000 of you. I have no idea if that is a large or small audience by Substack’s standards, but it has been a great reinforcement mechanism that keeps me enthusiastic about this effort.
Here are my top five pieces from 2022, based on overall readership:
Tech Futurism’s Blind Spot. This is a big-picture essay on the three major visions of the future that have been promoted by Silicon Valley over the past year — the Metaverse, Web3, and Artificial General Intelligence — and the harsh realities that their promoters have ignored.
Staring Down the Twitterpocalypse. Written in late October, just days before Elon took over the website. I laid out a couple of scenarios for what I thought would happen to the site. I was pretty sure that Musk would ruin Twitter, but expected it to play out slowly, over the course of a year. What’s interesting, in retrospect, is how even my pessimistic expectations assumed much more stability than we have actually seen.
Against Jackpot Longtermism. This is the one that surprises me. I expected there would be a readership of like six people for such an obscure topic. Turned out a whole lot of people had the same questions and misgivings about William MacAskill’s late-summer publicity tour.
Elon’s Twitter-Tilt. A week into Musk-Twitter, I described the wreckage through a poker metaphor. This is more of a timely-news-analysis piece than a big-picture essay.
Talking Bretbug in the Classroom. I guess it’s no surprise that my most popular writing in 2022 was based on my moment of internet-fame from 2019. It’s a nice summation of the underlying dynamics in the Bret Stephens incident, and about as close as I plan on coming to writing it up as a first-person case study.
And here are another five essays that got less traffic but I’m ultimately quite proud of:
-Thousand True Fans, revisited. This is the type of piece that I most enjoy writing. Ideas like “Thousand True Fans” are taken very seriously in tech circles. It seems like they are never examined critically, though. The beating heart of the “history of the digital future” project is to take these ideas seriously, understand where they came from, pay attention to what happened next, and generate some lessons from their shortcomings.
-Will the climate crisis be a boon for authoritarians? I hate this title and wish I could take another shot at it. I’ll probably revisit the underlying concept sometime in 2023. The main point I try to make here is that the key divide in American politics isn’t between two ideologically-coherent poles (liberal vs conservative), but rather between two fundamental views of politics and policy as (“it’s complicated” vs “it’s simple”). The result, from a political communication perspective, is a tilted playing field, because “it’s simple” offers a more compelling story, while also being demonstrably false.
-What Facebook is good for, and why it can’t be good anymore. Again, bad title. The underlying idea — the theme that I find comes up again and again through the history of digital media — is “big money ruins everything.”
-What Facebook’s animatronic dog gets right. Written after the Super Bowl commercials. I revisited this recently, and think it articulates some of the deep grooves I see in how the past decade of internet time has unfolded. (Plus, this one has my favorited snarky aside of the entire year.)
-Rethinking Political Innovation. The first in a series of essays that picks up on ideas from my book, The MoveOn Effect and draws lessons from how digital politics has evolved in the decade since it was originally published.
I plan to keep writing at least once a week in 2023. I have a half-dozen big picture essays in various stages of draft. I’ll also be working out some more granular ideas from the book project as I conduct my second readthrough of the entire WIRED archive. And of course the tech elites and political elites will need heckling, and I’ll gladly oblige.
Thanks for reading, everyone. And Happy New Year.
-DK
Thanks for reminding me how much I enjoy your writing. Long may you wave, and good luck with the kids.
Thanks for writing, and here's hoping you have a great 2023. Also, I hope you get some sleep.