A Blog Post, About Blog Posts

In which I refute "you wouldn't download a car", then announce a paywall

I. Metablogging

Me when I get to blog about my blog

I’ve had this blog for, uh, *checks notes* almost 4 years now. (wtf!) Over the course of that time, I’ve taken this blog at times more seriously, and at times less. I have always sort of vaguely always meant to turn this into a thing I do every week. There have been stretches of time in which this blog has been weekly, or close to weekly, but I’ve never really managed to actually hold on to the weekly schedule. I have been thinking about why, and I’ve come up with at least two reasons. The first is that, well, this has been relatively low on my list of priorities (often even lower than the sister twitter account), and I’ll talk more about that later in the article. The second reason, though, has more to do with how I write my posts.

A blog post about how to write blog posts is maybe the most bloglike topic ever created, so I figured it was worth writing about. One of the pieces of feedback I got from the Climate Change Post was that it made decent points but really should have been two blog posts. That was a fair criticism. It definitely bundled two things together - a discussion of democratic mishandling of climate change, and a discussion of republican mishandling of tariffs. I bundled them together because the situations genuinely are quite similar. I also sort of implicitly wanted to make the point that studying democratic tactical errors is just as important as studing republican tactics, which many of my republican colleagues seem loth to do.

Nevertheless, these really were two different topics, and they could have been two different blog posts. I kind of do this a lot. “YIMBYism Has Developed Palestine Syndrome” was two posts - one about the problems facing Palestine protesting specficially and left-activism more generally, and one about how YIMBYism was falling into common left-activism problems. The Mars post was actually three posts - one about Starship, one about long-term space prospects, and one about That One Time American Industrial Policy Actually Worked. I kind of jammed what should have been a full post on California High Speed Rail into the bottom of the post about Amtrak more generally. The best posts - “Ezra Klein is a Republican”, The Wine Post, Old People Are Killing America, People Were Better Off A Century Ago - generally don’t do this.

I think this is because I have a lot I kind of want to say, but I know that I don’t blog that often. I’ve written something like 40 posts in 3 years, which is now that I say it feels like a large number - but it’s certainly lower than my rate of idea generation. Plus, I do also sometimes write about Current Events (most recently, Trump trying to fire Lisa Cook). Knowing that I don’t write many posts, and wanting to write about both things, I end up trying to weave together a narrative which ties together some abstract philosophical point and the actual current event. This strategy… kind of works? It also feels like it’s making my posts worse.

Making things worse, it’s also pushing up the typical amount of work I have to do to write a post. Which means I write fewer posts. Talking to some other people who write blogs (specifically, a conversation I had like 6 weeks ago with Nicholas Decker) I’ve noticed that my posts are unusually long. They’re long compared to Slow Boring posts. Astral Codex Ten (and its predecessor, Slate Star Codex) has enormous variance on post lengths, and some of them are pretty long (I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup springs to mind). But the typical post is not quite as long. One other problem I’ve had is that I sometimes go to cite previous things I’ve written on here. I usually am correct in that I have, once, written about it… in section IIIb, on a post about something else.

I would like to write more, and I would like to be able to cite myself more, which means I’ve got to stop writing posts about several things at once. I’ve put designated Blogging Time into my schedule for this quarter, so I should be writing more posts in the future. Hopefully, they will stay on message, and I will follow my own advice in the future.

But that’s advice for future me. Present me is going to write one, last post about two things at once. Namely, the ways in which low costs have distorted media economics… and why I’m introducting a paid option.

II. Marginal Media Costs

I’m told that before the internet, they printed newspapers on this thing called “paper”.

Modern media economics in the 21st century is in an awkward place. The first problem is that marginal costs are near zero. This was, at one point, not the case - distribution required newspapers, casette tapes, movie reels and so on, physically moved from place to place. But if you want a piece of media in 2025, there are pretty good odds you’ll find it online, for free. Music is maybe the strongest example - nobody has needed to pay to get music since 1999. But since then, that basic fact has expanded to basically all forms of media. Movies and TV are free on 123movies, sports are available on [insert your sketchy pirate website here]. Newspapers are free on removepaywall.com or 12ft.io, depending on where you read your news, and so on.

But that just makes modern media a club good. While those tend to have business models that make per-unit consumption harder to think about, it’s not unheard of. The unusual part is that capital production costs have, also, fallen to near zero. In the age of the dinosaurs, if you wanted to make piano music, you had to acutally get your hands on a piano. Nowadays, you just open GarageBand or Audacity and import “piano_riff_12.mp3”. Text media can also be produced with no capital expense - I’m writing this on a computer I would have owned anyways. I’m sure the process is basically the same for the highfalutin people at the New York Times Opinion.

Even video media is running in this direction. Jet Lag, The Game is shot on iPhones, and so are most product reviews. TBPN feels as high-grade as CNBC, but the former started as two guys with a probably-an-iphone camera and Airpods Pros for microphones running a setup that amounts to a slightly glorified twitch stream. If you want to make something really cinematic, it’s going to be pretty expensive. If you want to use CGI, more expensive still, but I’m pretty confident that mixed AI-reality footage will be able to replicate that effect.

Behold, the pinnacle of automotive journalism production quality

Granted, it’s very much possible to spend lots of money making media. But, outside of the quality, seriousness, and committment of the people involved, does that actually matter?

With most things, money usually makes things better. A more expensive car will have a bigger engine, better sound deadening, and a long list of minor improvements. More expensive bread tastes better, cheese curds are better and more expensive than french fries. Paying more money for more compute gets you a better AI product.

III. A Rubric of Good Media

But more money doesn’t produce higher quality in everything. I have already written, more expensive wine doesn’t really buy you a better product, it just allows you to signal to other people that you spend lots of money. I suspect media is like this too. But to properly make this claim, we need to define good media first. Actually, now that I think about this, my media consumption breaks down into three categories - emotional, informational, and active media. So what makes each of them good?

IIIa. Emotional Media

My “emotional media” category encompasses most of what “media” has been through most of history, and involves most storytelling through history, across both visual and text spectrums. Movies almost always fall into this category, and so do lots of books. I consume emotional media to feel something. At the same time, consumption experience matters, and the best movies manage to do both.

Consumption experience is arguably the most controversial section of my take so I’ll start with that. The consumption experience spans both the quality of production, and the quality of the script. The floor here is basically defined by production quality; a movie that looks grainy is unwatchable regardless of how good its story is. Dune lies at the pinnacle of production quality, with an excellent universe, soundtrack, and set design. Despite that though, the characters are kind of unrelatable. I have to admit that in terms of scripting, The Martian wins easily. Mark Watney - and I specifically mean the author’s character, not Matt Damon himself - is hilarious. The characters attitude and low-level problem-solving contributions to the plot makes the movie a fun watch despite the average universe and mostly uninspired high-level contours of the plot.

I’m not kidding by the way, The Martian really is that funny

In addition to good scripting, plot, and universe, a good story also has to be emotionally resonant. I don’t really care about what emotion I’m feeling, so long as I’m feeling it strongly. That emotion can be “hell yeah” (The Martian, The Social Network) or “the world is a dark and evil place and will cause immense suffering” (Ex Machina, Blade Runner 2049), it doesn’t really matter. All that matters is that the plot is able to get me to care about its universe, and then engage with the concepts the author presents in a way that grabs my emotions. Better films hit deeper or more complex emotions, but basic pride in humanity at the end of an intense project is good enough. Heck, even being really funny is good enough. The Bay Area House Party series over on Astral Codex Ten are funny enough to be on a top-N list of best emotional media pieces.

Anyways, if I ever write another movie review, you can hold me to this stuff. Maybe I’ll even change my rubric if I realize I’ve missed something.

IIIb. Informational Media

This one is the most boring category, and it’s also most of what I consume. I watch youtube videos about making stuff. I listen to podcasts about various pieces of supply chain news (Odd Lots is the go to but I also am an automotive nerd, so This Car Pod is my guilty listen). I read Construction Physics every week - Brian Potter is quite possibly the best journalist to ever present detailed information.

To succeed in this category, there are basically only three criteria:

1. Present information in a genre I care about (or other people, I guess)

2. Present correct, detailed information, ideally indicating when you’re editorializing or summarizing so the audience can go and make sure your summary is honest

3. Present information in a way that is clear, well-organized, and easy or entertaining to read. Clarity is most important, but also the easiest. Organization is rarer, but still important and relatively expected. Readability and humor are by far the least improtant for utility, but it also defines the best writers.

None of these are particularly difficult things to do, which makes it all the more impressive how often journalists fail these criteria. If I had to pick the best Informational Media creator though, I think the only answer is Dwarkesh.

IIIc. Active Media

This section is basically the Take Bakery. When I go to engage with a piece of active media, I am in some sense looking to update my worldview, or generate a Take. This category contains most of my twitter consumption, but it covers some podcasts and books as well. Books like One Billion Americans or How Democracies Die fall into this category. So, too, do some works of fiction - I read The Player Of Games recently, and like lots of good Sci-Fi, the ethical questions and framing raised by the worldbuilding ended up occupying much more of my mental space than the plot itself.

There are also podcasts that fall into this space as well - I like Politix (Matt Yglesias’s podcast) and the Ezra Klein Show. Keen readers will note that these two are well to my left - and I kind of think this is unfortunate. I haven’t managed to find a good Take Bakery podcast that’s identifiably right-wing, but the world definitely needs one.

I mean. I guess Ben Shapiro fits that mold but he’s just not pro-progress enough for me to like him.

IIId. Cost Contributions

Now that I’ve laid out success criteria for all of these, it’s worth pausing to check the original thesis, which was that spending more money on media creation doesn’t make it better. In the case of movies, this is kind of true and kind of false. Set design and animation are expensive, and saving money means worse set design or animation, which does have the potential to ruin a movie. But, assuming good set design and animation, a good movie is mostly decided by good writing. Good writing takes lots of brainpower to do, so good scriptwriters and directors are expensive, but they take almost no physical input or grunt work. A smart person by themselves could execute the most crucial part of a good movie, for free, if they were so inclined.

This is doubly true for the other categories of media. Excellent, non-movie emotional media can be written be written by a motivated smart person for nearly $0. So, too, can most informational media. But nowhere is this more true than active media - for years, nobody was paid for twitter, but it was still the default place to argue for argument’s sake and influence for influence’s sake.

That actually feeds into another fact about media, which is that people who make media tend to like making it. People didn’t need to be paid to post on twitter in order to post on twitter. People who like making music don’t need to be paid for them to make at least some music - just look at all the bad SoundCloud rap out there. It’s made purely out of a love of the game. Most of the blogosphere has long been unmonetized. Especially in the modern era, most media created in the world exists because its authors like to create media.

Astute readers will notice that thus far, my position is basically communist. Or I guess voluntarist? I promise I still like markets guys, keep reading.

This isn’t to say that money has no role. Firstly and most obviously, brainpower does still cost money. You can’t spend all of your waking hours working for free, or you’d be broke. Paying people for the media they create allows them to push their production possibilities frontier outwards, some fraction of the way from “all the media they can produce in their spare productive time” to “all the media they can produce in all their entire productive time”.

There are diminishing returns to that, of course. But beyond just expanding the possibilities frontier, paying for the media you consume is sort of like voting. If you don’t vote, you will of couse continue to recieve government services. But you won’t have any say in the way the government operates if you don’t vote. In the same way, you could only consume free media, but paying for media sends a signal to media producers to produce more of the media you’re paying for. This is true even if you’ve already hit the point at which a media creator is using all of their productive hours on media creation.

To take an example, Matt Yglesias makes lots of money off of his blog. We all know this. If I subscribe to Matt Y’s blog, I’m probably not going to get him to make any more Slow Boring posts - he seems like he’s running near max productive output as is. What I will do is signal to other bloggers that they should be more like Matt Yglesias. That also works in reverse. If I see something I don’t like, I can always unsubscribe, sending a negative signal to both Matt and other bloggers, even if it’s not going to change Matt’s output specifically.

IV. Why Are You Telling Me This?

Well, because it’s my blog, and I’m psyching myself up into offering a paid version of this blog. If I’m honest, I have a pretty middling opinon on the quality of my own blog. At best it’s weekly, at worst it’s monthly. The topics are maybe intersting to a niche corner of people, but I don’t have enough capacity to do any original research.

If my blog opinions have any value, they come from novelty, in one of two ways. First, I can bring up information that my readership isn’t likely to notice - Chicago studing Maglev as an alternative for the Red Line Extension is my favorite example of this. Alternatively, I have discovered that I do have the capability of generating serious takes by thinking unusually far out of the box. I’m a particular fan of the time I said that fixing NYC’s housing crisis would require doubling the city’s population. The time I said that buying every meal on Doordash is the obvious future of eating in the United States while pitching bike lanes to right wingers is perhaps another.

But I shouldn’t toot my own horn for too long. My posts are too infrequent and too erratic. I hate proofreading wholeheartedly, so I don’t proofread these posts and will continue to not do so. But I am told that’s a problem. If I were paid for these posts, I would be motivated to make sure they really are every week. I would push out other things to improve the quality of data presentation (ie, stop and make more charts myself, rather than relying on other people’s charts or “trust me bro”). I might buy and review more books. I might even proofread. (Okay, no, I still won’t do that.)

Maybe more importantly, a paywall would allow me to write takes that may be upsetting, controversial (okay, more controversial than usual), or otherwise unpalatable to the public but which I still want to write. So here’s the deal. I’m going to write a post a week. At first, I wanted to set the subscription to $2 a month. Unfortunately (and enragingly, what the fuck, Substack), the minimum monthly subscription is $5 a month. So $5 it is. If you want to pay more you can, but it won’t get you any more than that. If you pay the $5, you will also get access to a paywalled post, which I will write every month. The paywall is an amenity to me as well as to you guys - it means that I have a space to put posts which are more controversial, and allows me to write things for a more specifically trusting audience.