Hi, There! Welcome to the Monday Edition of Intellectual Sunglasses, a newsletter by Tiwaloluwa Onibonoje about culture, global trends, and some neat stuff in between. If you’d like to know more, please check out the About page. And if you wish to come aboard, click the subscribe button below. You can also do me the privilege of sharing with friends, relatives, exes, workplace rivals, mortal enemies, … really, I won't mind. The comments section is open at all times.
Ninety percent of everything is crap. Theodore Sturgeon wrote that many years ago in an angry response to what he saw as unjustified Science Fiction criticism. There's a subtle irony to this statement since if ninety percent of everything is crap, then there's a good chance his opinion belongs to that ninety percent. Nevertheless, his words still have very powerful implications for the world we live in today.
Our world today is defined not just by social media memes and Climate Change crises, but equally by a vital disdain for ignorance in any form: an exponential increase in the amount of data we encounter. You are not just able to know when, why, and how Agatha Christie wrote her famous novels; if you are enterprising enough, you can find out what she was possibly wearing at the time too. Herb Simon saw all this coming. In what's already a successful famous prophecy, - only successful prophecies are famous, the others tend to disappear very quickly - He announced:
In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means the dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients.
To put it less smugly, the rapid growth of information makes attention the most valuable resource around. This insight has led to some very successful companies. Netflix ditched its ratings system when it realized that getting to know your tastes better meant paying more attention to what you paid attention to rather than what you wrote you enjoyed, since ratings like any self-narratives are aspirational rather than factual, especially when they have to be communicated. If you have been wondering why diaries are much more honest than social media updates, that is why.
So, Herb Simon's insight is indeed powerful: in a deluge of massive information, attention is a scarce and valuable resource. Yet, by virtue of Sturgeon's injunction, massive information also translates to massive trash. And in an era of both, what is much more valuable than individual units of attention are filters, people or algorithms who legitimately control attention by telling it where to go. Filters are all around us. Google is a filter for information. Netflix is a filter for entertainment. One of Amazon's core businesses is being a filter for consumption.
It's obvious that in a world of scarcity, the creators hold all the cards, and in a world of fully quality abundance, the audience holds all the cards. What’s a little less obvious is that within a world of disorderly and differentiated abundance, filters hold all the power as consumers often don't have enough time or know-how to make their own choices. If you think the first two worlds describe ours, I am confident that you have spent less than thirty-five minutes of your entire life on Twitter.
WHY THE NEWS ISN’T ENOUGH
Filters may be more powerful than they have ever been, but they have also been powerful for a long time. Traditional News Media, an industry that has existed for hundreds of years, is arguably a giant filter of information. To last that long, you have to be fundamentally useful. And traditional news is unsurprisingly very useful at certain things: disseminating knowledge, providing indicators of global trends, familiarizing you with names of obscure Middle East towns… Still, broadcast/print news media have several constraints that can generate massive oversights.
To start with, substantial distribution costs require that the news appeal to the lowest common denominator; it's called mass media for a reason. Traditional news is additionally the handmaiden of certain psychological instincts. These instincts are fear, surprise, excitement, and outrage.
The oft-repeated trope that the news focuses only on negative emotions is very far from the case. The news instead focuses on strong emotions such that cutting edge innovations which inspire excitement, regardless of the stage or existence of the innovation, are awarded more attention over real but unentertaining progress. The news is addicted to negative emotions only because they are much stronger for evolutionary reasons.
The news also need a face, a human element, a plausible plot, even when much of the time, it's a distracting sidenote from what's truly going on. It's a harkback to Thomas Carlyle's 'Great Man' version of History, which didn't make a lot of sense back when monarchs were running empires according to their personal whims, and makes even less sense now in an interconnected, interrelated world. All of which means on the narrow chances that audiences are legitimately up-to-date, they hardly understand what it is they are up-to-date about.
I cannot blame the news for those flaws. There's a note of undeserved hubris in deciding that the work of many intelligent and ethical people is rather unnecessary. The dissemination of knowledge will always be important, but more than ever, knowledge must be supplemented with understanding and depth.
WHERE THIS NEWSLETTER COMES IN
It is at this juncture that having Intellectual Sunglasses comes in handy. The visual metaphor of sunglasses is consciously chosen because sunglasses come in various kinds and models, and I believe the only way to grasp the world is to be able to slot things into many different perspectives and get a fuller picture. Some may call these mental models, and although they are quite similar in being instruments of perception, everyone on Earth already operates with some mental models. What matters are mental models and tools of perception that cut through the clutter and fog of society. An intellectual sunglass is, for lack of a better word, a bespoke mental model. And as a nice little bonus, sunglasses also make us look cool. Understanding the world can and is often difficult, but it doesn't have to be boring.
We can either expect the world to become more understandable or we can get to work on understanding it as it already is. The only way, or at least the better way, is for us all to choose the second option and grasp the world together. In the spirit of these objectives, this is as much a newsletter as it is a partnership.
In this exciting journey through global trends, big ideas, and understanding what is really going on behind the veil of isms and conflicting opinions, I will be, with your permission, your guide. The world is a crazy, funny, impressively wild thing. We will be driving forwards to get a closer and clearer look.
HEY! OVER HERE.
If you've read the About page, you will know that every Sunday, I will be analysing works of fiction and non-fiction that were initially published before 2005. I also promised I would be leaving hints regarding the book to be reviewed on Sunday. The first five persons to guess the title correctly will be entitled to free access of this newsletter for the entire month. Since this newsletter is still fully free, and will be for a while, all rewards are currently intellectual bragging rights.
You can send the answers here to Tiwaonibonoje14@gmail.com
Monday's Hint: Kyoto, Japan
TILL NEXT TIME, STAY COOL.
I'm glad I landed here. I think the shades I'm wearing are a lot like yours. The knowledge we have access to is too large and at the same time incomplete. It's also not always trustworthy in places, so my advice has always been that we should talk to each other as if we didn't have it. But I think your sunglasses analogy is better.
I found you from your excellent response to Noahpinion, tamping down his crypto cheerleading. (His writing is high-knowledge/so-so understanding, but he's trained as an economist, so his project, generally speaking, is turning data into knowledge).
My own newsletter is mostly in the form of boxes and stacks of legal pads because I hate typing, but each time I find a good writer here, I get a bit more inspired to do the work.