Substack Economics

The media world is splintering into a mililion different fragments. Is that good for humanity?

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I: Cautionary tales

About two years ago, I was chatting with an influential writer who has amassed a large digital following among Americans on the political left— primarily Democrats and former Republicans who despise Donald Trump.

As an independent writer with a significant independent platform, they felt liberated from the confines of traditional media, writing on their own schedule, exploring ideas that they found interesting rather than following editorial overlords with corporate bosses, free to engage in the entrepreneurial spirit of being a journalist and publication owner.

But they also had one significant misgiving.

“Whenever I write a piece that even mildly criticizes Joe Biden,” they explained, “I can watch, in real-time, as I lose thousands of dollars in future revenue through people cancelling their subscriptions. And even though I still try to criticize Biden when he warrants it, I wonder if I’m ever subconsciously hesitating to write something—or just not hitting the publish button—when I know exactly what’s about to happen to my income.”

Even more intense pressure affects political influencers who make their millions from the MAGA cult, as just one insufficiently “loyal” Truth Social post can transform someone from red hat disciple to right-wing social outcast in a matter of seconds. The ratcheting extremism of the MAGA base is driven, partly, by this dynamic.

These are parables of the hidden dangers of audience capture—the phenomenon in which writers, “political influencers,” artists, or politicians end up feeling significant pressure to adjust their viewpoints or behavior to cater to the people who (financially) support them. And it’s not just a risk confined to politics, but to every realm that has a tight and narrow link between the person producing articles or videos and the eyeballs consuming them.

Perhaps the most grotesque example of audience capture was memorialized by

Gurwinder

Bhogal a few years ago, in an astute essay that opens with wise words from Virginia Woolf: “The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.”

In that essay, Bhogal chronicles the disturbing case of Nicholas Perry transforming into an unhealthy cartoon caricature of himself—a YouTube character known as Nikocado Avocado—all to amass millions of clicks drawn to the grotesque:

In 2016, 24 year old Nicholas Perry wanted to be big online. He started uploading videos to his YouTube channel in which he pursued his passion—playing the violin—and extolled the virtues of veganism. He went largely unnoticed.

A year later, he abandoned veganism, citing health concerns. Now free to eat whatever he wanted, he began uploading mukbang videos of himself consuming various dishes while talking to the camera, as if having dinner with a friend.

These new videos quickly found a sizable audience, but as the audience grew, so did their demands. The comments sections of the videos soon became filled with people challenging Perry to eat as much as he physically could. Eager to please, he began to set himself torturous eating challenges, each bigger than the last. His audience applauded, but always demanded more. Soon, he was filming himself eating entire menus of fast food restaurants in one sitting.

In some respects, all his eating paid off; Nikocado Avocado, as Perry is now better known, has amassed over six million subscribers across six channels on YouTube. By satisfying the escalating demands of his audience, he got his wish of blowing up and being big online. But the cost was that he blew up and became big in ways he hadn't anticipated.

The accompanying before and after photo from Bhogal’s essay about Nicholas Perry’s transformation into Nikocado Avocado is a chilling visual reminder of the disturbing lengths that people will go to capture attention in the digital creator economy.

These two parables provide contrasting lessons. The Nikocado case, which is an appalling reflection of our capacity for collective social baseness, showcases how digital audiences can create incentives for individuals to harm themselves for the amusement of others. It’s about the pressure of the masses damaging an individual in pursuit of clicks, money, and fame, but with limited social consequences for everyone else.

By contrast, when people who create information are driven to pander to loyalists and zealots, that can accelerate dangerous polarization, particularly when the writer focuses exclusively on socially divisive issues. It becomes a particularly insidious, symbiotic form of audience capture wherein the masses and the person producing the information radicalize in tandem, feeding off one another.¹ When those groups are large enough and become part of the information ecosystem at scale, it can be disastrous for everyone.²

That has, quite clearly, already happened.

II: The insurgents vs. the traditionalists

Too often, people tend to sort themselves into one of two ideologically rigid camps around the fragmented “attention economy.”

In one camp are the insurgents, those excited anti-establishment crusaders who want to burn it all to the ground. Stick it to the elites. The hell with the outdated lamestream media, it’s the creator economy now, baby!

In another camp are the traditionalists, who may gripe about media outlets and their coverage choices, but still believe there’s an essential role for carefully vetted news coverage. They understand, correctly, that the resources needed to embed journalists on the frontlines in Ukraine, or to conduct years-long investigative journalism into government corruption, are not easily replaced by the independent insurgents on Substack and YouTube.

They also understand, quite rightly, that the democratization of information production has created a hell of a lot of dangerous, false sludge.

The Democratization of Information Production is Killing Democracy

The fact that I write this newsletter and also write for The Atlantic reveals my view that there is merit in both camps. I do not see my writing in each outlet as mutually exclusive, but rather as complementary, with different strengths and weaknesses. Some of my favorite, but more experimental, quirkier writing probably would have been torpedoed by editors. Here, I can explore new ideas, never pressured to follow the cultural or political zeitgeist of the day.³ I genuinely love writing for you.

On the other hand, my editor is wonderful, challenges my writing, and expands my reach. Some of my Atlantic articles have been viewed by millions of people and have driven policy debates, which is currently rare within the enclave of newsletter writing.

But it’s also clear to me that the overly simplistic debate about digital media fragmentation misunderstands information dynamics in significant ways. Audience capture can even be wonderful, in the right context. It can also be toxic, rotting brains, polarizing publics, and unleashing fresh hives of conspiracists who previously were happily tucked away in the confines of their mother’s basements—yet now govern countries.

The way to spot the difference (and to better understand the potential and pitfalls of an informational world increasingly built on the Substack model) is by understanding selection effects, selection pressures, and population uniformity, three concepts from evolutionary theory that are exceptionally well suited for evaluating the new media landscape.