Different social media platforms have different expectations, a different culture, a different cadence. None of that interests me in the slightest.
But I am on a mission, and I have to play the game if I want anyone to read what I have to write, to hear what I have to say. RAW.works is a reset, an inquiry. How do I want to show up on the internet? How do I want to choose to engage with 8 billion people and 8 trillion robots every day?
I certainly don’t want Elon Musk choosing for me. I don’t want Alphabet choosing for me. I don’t want Apple choosing for me.
I acknowledge and respect the power of these tools. I see that if I want to show up in a search result, there are certain things I need to do to format my website for Google. With these new AI search tools like Poe Web Search [link my old post], perhaps that game is going to change a little bit. But we still need to bend to be noticed, which is increasingly true in a world where more content can be created in a day than consumed in a lifetime.
The intentionality part is: How much does that matter to me? Does SEO matter 0% to me? Does it matter 1% to me?
How far am I willing to bend my interests and my attention, to garner the interest and attention of others?
This question is at least as old as the first living organisms. The struggle to find a niche and a complex system. Initially, it was just about survival. As more and more people ascend Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, it becomes more cultural, more psychological, more philosophical.
But we need to be careful, because wars and pandemics, climate chaos and rogue AGI have the potential to bring us all the way back to survival.
The memelords won’t have much to offer in the way of food and shelter. Infinite jest. Wirehead now. Xanadu.
How far am I willing to bend my interests and my attention, to garner the interest and attention of others?
On a more Adlerian plane…maybe the greatest social good is achieved when we don’t bend so much. Or at least we don’t spend so much time worrying about bending. We either bend or we don’t. We pick the way we’re willing to wiggle, or maybe the wiggle picks us, but either way — we wiggle, we dance.