A theory: The human-facing internet tends to evolve to occupy its users’ spare attention. The ‘spare’ part is key—we all have other things we could and probably should be doing, but as complex endurance predator hunter-gatherer group primates we bore easily and are easily distracted by other monkeys talking.

Shifts in the population of users and in the underlying reservoirs of attention accessible to the internet drive the form of human-facing internet content. If there is any era that feels in retrospect like ‘good internet’ (for your linguistic and social group), odds are that you were closer to the center of the bell curve in terms of the broad user population, and possessed more of the attention reservoir that was currently being most effectively explored (or exploited, if you’re nasty). If you were a desk worker in 2006-2014 or so, you were a member of a large cohort who could spare a bit of time to read Dr Who recaps or nerdy sports analysis on a blogging platform, or to check their favorite webcomic, when they should have been doing something else—and those essays and blogs and webcomics flourished as a result. If you were a tech-savvy person in the 80s or 90s, the internet’s user population was largely made up of folks like you: you were interested in tech and nerd stuff (because otherwise how & why were you online?), and you had free time either because you were 12 or because your code was compiling.

Changes in material conditions and affordances change the user base, and the wells of attention available to be tapped. The rise of the ubiquitous and dependable smartphone, so stable that whole generations regularly use one of the most advanced computing systems ever made without having to know what a filing system is, radically transformed the user base, and rendered available vast new wells of attention. Of course content would evolve in response. An internet that was previously optimized to make use of (relatively) affluent, educated desk workers’ spare cycles gave way to one optimized for retirees and children, whose spare time far outstrips that of those within the caretaking sandwich.

In the wake of this change, it makes sense that we’re feeling the limits of critical lenses like ‘poptimism,’ the music-criticism movement which postulated that things being popular meant they were good—opposed to the “you’ve probably never heard of them” school of exclusive niche-protection record store snobbery that must exist because everyone seems to think it does, but which I cannot directly remember encountering in the wild. (Of course, I’m a 6’ white dude who, well, looking in the mirror I have to confess that I have big ‘owns a turntable’ energy.) Poptimism came to prominence during an era of the anglophone (anglolexic?) internet where the main users and attention reservoirs were students (cool) and relatively recent graduates (who at least remembered what cool used to look like); perhaps it worked, to the extent & for the time period within which it worked, because the internet population at the time might have looked like a mass market, but was in fact the largest niche market in the history of the world.

Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad is the first book I remember reading that gave a local habitation and a name to this dynamic; a late chapter of that book chapter takes place in a future where even the smartphone has given way to the clicker, a postliterate device that lets you point at anything in the world and click on it to engage with it & express your affirmation / buy something / hear a soothing computer voice tell you more / etc. As a result, in the book, all cultural trends are now driven by toddlers, who really like to point at stuff and have a lot of time to do so. A bit of hope is offered when our central characters, now on the far side of middle age, rediscover the blues, which stands in for adult artistic engagement with human life, time, and suffering—which might never again be the dominant form of culture or expression in the world of toddler internet, but why do any of us have to care? Toddlers and grown adults have different needs.

Internet essay rules suggest that I should think up a cutesy name for this idea for purposes of thought-leadership-maxxing; I’d spend more time on it if I had more time (which is part of my point), or more conviction that this idea was particularly novel, as opposed to an arrangement of interesting pieces from others’ work. Goon Squad Theory might serve, if the goon squad (which stands for time and change in the book, which may not avail to break the friendships etc, but does come for us all in the end anyway) hadn’t come for ‘goon’ as a lexical unit. Egan theory? Clicker theory?

One implication of this theory for those of us who try to spend substantial amounts of our time making things, is that human-facing internet content as a whole may be, broadly speaking, inimical to that practice, because it attempts to exploit spare cycles that don’t exist during focused work, and (more insidiously) robs them from our rest. Complex long-form work requires deep engagement (which leaves little attention spare); long stretches of deep engagement demand real rest for the entire system—including the dancing monkey-mind (so eager to learn, click, explore). Maker time vs. manager time is a useful concept here, but it’s the flip side that interests me, the quality of attention coded in these senses of time; predator-attention (hunting with 100% engagement, recovering by plotzing in the shade) vs. scavenger-attention (ever-searching, ever-curious, exploring, never altogether asleep), say. Certainly there are other qualities of attention as well! Gardener attention, herbivore attention, wrestler attention… At any rate, I’ve been fucking around & not respecting this recently, and have certainly found out (though, thankfully, for the most part on an affective and internal level, addressable by spending time with friends, dialing in exercise, & getting enough sleep), so it’s been on my mind a lot.

Maybe this seems a bit heavy? But considering it all makes me feel lighter, & not just because I slept well last night. Not all things are demanded of all folks; what you need now may not be what your environment seems, at first, to offer, even if it once did. As the baboon said to the leopard: sometimes you have to go into new spots.

Thank you all so much for supporting the release of Dead Hand Rule! It’s been wonderful to see it out in the world, to hear theories and reactions, to watch the ever-developing shape of the thing. I really appreciate your kind words, your encouragement, and enthusiasm for this series—it fills my cup as I sit with the draft of the next project. I have one more public-facing event scheduled at the moment: if you’re in greater Boston, please join me at Pandemonium Books & Games in Cambridge, MA for a reading and Q&A this coming Wednesday, Nov 12, at 6:30pm. See you there!

If you’re in the UK, This is How You Lose the Time War is a Kindle Monthly Deal throughout November. You can get it through any ebook retailer for just 99p. Happy reading.