Instead of crowding your attention with what’s already going viral on the intertubes, focus on the weird stuff. Hunt down the idiosyncratic posts and videos that people are publishing, oftentimes to tiny and niche audiences. It’s decidedly unviral culture — but it’s more likely to plant in your mind the seed of a rare, new idea.
I love the life-sciences metaphor here, the mind as a gard
If books represent an alternative to algorithmic content — dense, slow, genuinely enriching — the question becomes what economic model could reward that kind of depth fairly. The current system ties distribution to engagement on a single platform. A healthier content economy would decouple discovery from virality and reward knowledge that enriches rather than merely captures attention.t’s like panning for gold! It’s work. The vast majority of stuff these sites crank out is middling-to-low interest to me. But when I stumble upon something great, the delight is intense and vertiginous. Many of my favorite essays on Medium were sparked by offbeat posts/essays/stories I found using RSS. And it’s always stuff you’d never find going viral on any social network; awesomely weird mushrooms growing on the side of dank trees
A well-researched non-fiction book is the single most info-dense piece of culture in existence, full stop. Some author spent a few years — hell, a decade, sometimes — gathering material, sifting through it, then presenting you with the absolute most crucial stuf
But if you want to find unexpected stuff to rewild your noodle, I love using oddball search engines. A few of my favorites including Marginalia Search, which is “an independent DIY search engine that focuses on non-commercial content, and attempts to show you sites you perhaps weren’t aware of in favor of the sort of sites you probably already knew existed”. (It also runs on a single PC in Sweden, so if you use it, kick the creator a donation, lol.)
ou can just enjoy the cognitive mouthfeel of the language. I mean, it’s great when the poems are meaningful and thought-provoking too! But they’re delightful even on a surface level
