Pluralistic: Christopher Brown's 'A Natural History of Empty Lots' (17 Sep 2024)


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Pluralistic: Against Lore (27 May 2024)


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Pluralistic: How plausible sentence generators are changing the bullshit wars (07 Sept 2023)


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Pluralistic: Private equity plunderers want to buy Simon & Schuster (08 August 2023)


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Pluralistic: The art of Daniel Danger (23 July 2023)


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Pluralistic: Revenge of the Linkdumps (13 May 2023)


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Walking the Plank

You may never shake the fear, but you might change how you feel aboutĀ it.

A pair of legs and feet traversing a plank, high over a city street. The street below has a hypnotic spiral. The feet are blurred. The plank has a subtle ā€œMatrix Waterfallā€ effect worked into its grain. The end of the plank fades into nothingness.
Heinz Bunse/CC BY-SA 2.0 (modified)

Richieā€™s Plank Experience is a terrifying VR game first released in 2016. In the game, the user rides up a simulated elevator to a rooftop that is 525 (simulated) feet above street level. Then, the user steps out on a (simulated) plank and walks out on it, over a vertiginous (simulated) drop.

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Doing the Work

How to Write When YouĀ Suck

A giant typewriter sculpture at Burning Man, with several people admiring and climbing on it.

Iā€™m out on tour again, my first in-person book tour since 2019. I had four books come out during lockdown and ā€œtouredā€ them over Zoom, which was as good as many talented and dedicated publishing PR people, booksellers, and co-presenters could make it.

Now, after three years, Iā€™m out on tour again. Itā€™s an odd kind of tour, because itā€™s a different kind of book. Chokepoint Capitalism isnā€™t a novel from a Big Five publisher, itā€™s a nonfiction critique of monopolies and cartels. That includes the Big Five, which is why we went with an indie, the storied Beacon Press, praised by the likes of Albert Einstein and Howard Zinn for a publishing program that promotes progressive values.

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So Youā€™ve Decided to Unfollow Me

Weā€™re good, seriously.

A double exit-door, open to reveal a Matrix-style code waterfall. Over the door is a green exit sign with a green halo.
Sascha Kohlmann/CC BY SA 2.0 (modified)

Itā€™s hard to overstate how liberating the early years of internet publishing were. After a century of publishing driven by the needs of an audience, we could finally switch to a model driven by the interests of writers.

That meant that instead of trying to figure out what some ā€œdemographicā€ wanted to read about, we wrote what we wanted to read, and then waited for people who share our interests to show up and read and comment and write their own blogs and newsletters and whatnot.

When the first ad networks came along, they leaned into this model: ā€œHere is a writer whose audience has this approximate composition and interests; if thatā€™s a group youā€™re trying to reach, then hereā€™s a rate card to show those people ads.ā€

Back in those days, it seemed that ad targeting would enable more niches, more ā€œlong tailā€ publications tailoring to the esoteric, gnarly interests of writers and readers.

But that was wrong. As behavioral ad targeting took off, and with it, social networks and recommendation algorithms, the money shifted to follow readers around on the internet. Some readers were worth more than others. Showing an ad for a contingency liability lawyer to someone with a mesothelioma diagnosis was worth a bundle, for example, but you didnā€™t have to write about asbestos or lung cancer to score ad revenue from that user.
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Pluralistic: 27 Jun 2022


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