The Difference that Makes a Difference
Information is eating itself
YouTube instructional videos often begin with a section of extended throat-clearing before getting to the useful information which, in the most extreme cases, could be compressed to a sentence or two. This opening banter is highly skippable, of course, and the top comment on such videos is often the timestamp at which the relevant content begins. There’s always filler at the end, too—the “please like and subscribe” plea—but we’re used to encountering filler at the end of things and are better at ignoring it. Every digital format has its version of this and the “creator economy” has massively exacerbated it by forcing every individual to self-promote; as platforms mature, this solidifies into best practices that define the texture of the medium. Substack and email newsletters, for example, frequently open with a call to become a paid subscriber, sometimes clearly identified as such and thus easier to scan past, but sometimes disguised as part of the text itself (I’m not claiming to be above this, by the way). Part of acclimating to any new information environment is learning to recognize these patterns so as to separate the signal from the noise.
The corollary of Marshall McLuhan’s most famous aphorism is that pure content is an unattainable ideal. Every medium imposes its own quirks and constraints on the message and shapes it accordingly. As the above examples demonstrate, those distortions are often quite prosaic, experienced as obstacles to the good stuff even if we eventually develop a nostalgic appreciation for them. With analog media, the constraints are often physical. The break between the two sides of a record, for example, is a feature that subsequent formats from CDs to digital streaming eliminate, but which still haunts any album originally recorded for vinyl: At the very least, it means the music must come to a full stop at the end of side one, and there is often a shift in tone that is difficult to fully appreciate without awareness of the break. Although digital media has fewer physical constraints, the economics of content creation impose their own. Consider the paywall: For Substack and other internet writing (if any of it actually lasts long enough to make the leap to a subsequent medium) an essay’s paywall break has a nontrivial relationship to its content. Knowing where that cutoff originally occurred would help you better understand what you’re reading—why certain material was frontloaded or backloaded, or why an otherwise inexplicable cliffhanger sentence occurs in the middle of the piece.
It’s easy to think of the internet as a conduit of pure information, but again, this is an illusion. The rapidly growing glut of digital content, now further inflated by AI, spawns and circulates within a marketplace that incites each unit to market itself—to explain why it exists and to propel itself toward ever larger audiences using its own text, which is all it really has. The content that is best evolved to circulate is increasingly made to do that and nothing else, as terms like “bait” attest. When a growing portion of digital experience comprises implicit and explicit pleas to like and subscribe—when the parts we skip and ignore begin to overwhelm the parts we want to see—the information quality of the internet is correspondingly diluted. Slopification takes this process to its logical limit; it is information cannibalizing itself. The cybernetician Gregory Bateson defined information as a “difference that makes a difference” which points the existence of the inverse: the difference that doesn’t make a difference, or stops making a difference. The distinction between signal and noise is not intrinsic to the signal but in its relationship to its surroundings. A signal can easily become noise and that process is currently accelerating. One of the internet’s more utopian promises was to disembed information from all of the cumbersome physical vessels in which it was embedded so it could flow more freely, but now we face an equally urgent need to disembed it from an immaterial crust that is just as cumbersome. Ironically, that’s something AI could actually help with—the cause of and solution to all our problems, to paraphrase Homer Simpson—but whether it actually will is a separate question. Please like and subscribe.
I’m writing a new monthly column for Vice, which has risen from the ashes. The first one is live—an obituary for millennial culture (which is the theme of the column). Go check it out!
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Reads:
Good review of Abundance and its agenda by Zephyr Teachout. “To transform a bloated corporate feudal system into a dynamic one, we need to break up feudal power, unlock the brilliance that accompanies human freedom, and allow small and medium-sized businesses to prosper.”
The benefits of living in an empty luxury supertall condo tower in Brooklyn. “Nosy neighbors have been able to poke around unlocked units, snooping to see how their views compare with the penthouses’.”
Kazys Varnelis on digital oversaturation, “a state where systems of cultural production exceed their capacity for meaningful absorption or engagement.”
