Write a Better Version of the Future
Blog Writing that Changes the World
There is a way to write a better version of the future.
Have you ever stopped to ask why you scroll through feeds for hours and hours? I’ll tell you why. It’s because you’re looking for a genuine experience — a real experience . You're looking for something that confirms what you believe and like about yourself. You're looking for something that makes you feel part of something bigger than yourself.
And us magicians on this side of the curtain know that, which is why we withhold it. Which is why we invented the infinite scroll. Which is why we prevent you from ever having one, whole, perfect, pure real experience that’s meaningful to you. If we ever did that, we would be diminishing our future returns. We've sunk a lot of investment into attracting your attention and feeding your addiction to seek something real. If you ever do find something real then you will treasure it. You’ll covet it. You’ll go back to that and be content with reruns of it because those reruns actually do fulfill you. We don’t like Olan Rogers and his rare breed, for instance. We don't like him because of the replay value — because of the longevity — because of the intrinsic value of what he produces. There’s no profit, in the internet, in genuinely feeding the basic human need for a real, cathartic experience.
The profit in the internet comes by snips and fractions of cents.
It comes at the expense of your hunger that the next six inches of your scroll will provide something of genuine value to you. You aren’t paying attention to the ads. Nobody pays attention to the ads. But that doesn’t matter, because you have seen them. You are absorbing brand awareness through osmosis. Things you don’t want or need seep into your world view. The only price you pay is your inability to look away. Because the magicians on this side of the curtain have grown so damn good at keeping you scrolling.
When you find yourself in a situation where you need some blogs to capture the attention of your people, you have a choice. You have two options, really, and the magicians on this side of the curtain know it.
Your first option is to add to the scroll.
You can add to the fuzz. Gain traction, and let the internet work for you. Use statistics to fill the aggregate human attention span with a little more clean, inhuman, optimized-to-obscurity “content.” Use numbers to turn up your conversion rates, and you can try to game the system so it works for you. You can do that.
And that’s okay. It’s the done thing. It seems to have some power of raising awareness for companies out of the enormous playground that the internet opens up. I mean, when you’ve done it, you’ve essentially littered the world with a whole lot of noise. It can’t be taken back. It has limited replay value, and you’ve contributed to the basic human hunger for something real. But you converted a few cold leads to sales. The several thousand minds a little more cluttered by something without any intrinsic value aren’t really harmed by the experience. What’s the harm in a few people absorbing a hundred pointless pieces of information every day if you get some sales out of it?
It’s an eerie question. Hard to answer, but it doesn’t sit well with me.
The internet is an endless well of cold leads. It would seem that mass contact is the only viable tool to turn a few in a thousand people into customers.
This kind of blogging treats language like it doesn’t matter what it says.
It just needs to be there, and it needs to meet particular parameters for the algorithms. It doesn’t need to be nice or sensible or memorable. It just needs to take up space. They’ve taken strides towards A.I. driven content generators. They aren’t viable right now because they barf out word salad and people can tell the difference. Well, we’re spiraling towards the point where it doesn’t matter. It doesn't matter whether people can tell the difference. We’re spiraling towards the point where people don’t care because people aren’t reading the stuff anyway. People have no expectation of anything real or relevant. It doesn’t matter if it makes no sense. A lot of the human-generated content is produced at such a poor quality with so little regard for anything except quantity and SEO that we’re already steeping to our eyeballs in a morass of nonsense anyway.
What I want to know is how sustainable is it? Because there’s two kinds of customers: there’s one night stands and there’s relationships. I don’t know which kind you prefer, but I know which kind I do.
So write a better version of the future.
That brings me to talking about the other kind of blogging, the kind that’s changing the world. The blog writing method that helps the world.
It’s got two elements, really.
Element one: it’s written to matter. It is still possible to get your SEO in order. It's still possible to make your blogs internet-friendly in all the right ways and still write something worth paying attention to and remembering. It isn’t hard at all to do that stuff.
It does take more time.
Which is the second part of this method: cultivate a little patience. Time is allegedly the enemy of internet marketing. I question this, though. I question the viability of the current trends and forces that say you must be first and fastest. Rising to the top too fast doesn’t mean anything if you can’t maintain your position. If you get your flash of attention I don’t know what you’ve gained. You've gotten your spike of awareness, then it collapses because you never shared anything that anyone cared about. You gamed the system to monopolize attention but never delivered anything of intrinsic value, and never planned to.
A following of a million is a big deal, I suppose.
If they don’t care about anything you’re doing…then what are you doing?
If you are producing blogs that have intrinsic value, you may not gain as much attention as fast as the content machines. You will gain firmer traction in the hearts and minds of the people you reach. Because you will fill that hunger driving the infinite scroll. Your content will cause people to stop, think, feel, and to remember you. You fulfilled the reason they hungrily keep scrolling. You fed them, and you will win their loyalty.
Blogs that matter, that are well written, valuable, educational, and provide real experiences, they act as lode stones on the way the internet works. For every minute you take attention away from the compulsive scroll and clicking between meaningless content sites, you are denying revenue from them. The infinite scroll is only profitable while you are scrolling. Meaningful blogs that you bookmark and come back to and share directly with your friends interrupts the model and makes it less attractive. Only by the tiniest bit, but many tiny bits together gets stuff done.
People hunger for something real.
It's why blogs tend to be meaningless and forgettable and why you can scroll forever and never reach the end. You have been tricked into believing that you will find something real behind the next link. You are a cow worth cash, but only if we can keep you clicking. We will never keep you clicking if we ever truly fulfill you.
Or you can feed the human desire for something real. You can halt the cycle, and in so doing you can start a relationship. Hi, I have something to say. I genuinely appreciate that you are taking the time to read this; I hope this can be the beginning of a long friendship.
Make people love you. Why not? Everyone just wants to be loved.
One night stands or relationships.
Those are the options.
That’s the system. It's the blog writing method that helps the world become a better place. We live in this world, and that’s how it works. Those are the rules.
It’s in my nature to be dissatisfied with the world’s rules.
You can disrupt your world if you understand you are being bamboozled all day. You can improve your world if you cling jealously to anything real that you find.
On this side of the curtain, we magicians can change the world too. We need only aim to be real if we aim to disrupt.
Changing the world one human experience at a time. That's how to write a better version of the future.