Hooman, All Too Hooman

The attention economy in overdose

No, this is not going to be a discourse on the work of Nietzsche as seen through the mind of a cat (though I can’t promise I won’t do that at some stage). The title is there purely because my mind handed it up to me yesterday and demanded I do something with it. Putting it in your heads is the only thing I can think of. You’re welcome.

My brain does that, relentlessly. Years ago it dropped “Don’t Fear The Beeper” into my consciousness and so I had to conjure the idea of writing a piece about an unexpected renaissance in the use of pagers. That hasn’t come to pass and yet the phrase still lurks there, popping up occasionally and requesting attention, and not only when I happen to hear the Blue Oyster Cult classic. Similarly, a week ago I had to come up with the notion of Slash from Guns ‘n’ Roses falling on hard times and being reduced to writing music for adverts, purely to have somewhere to mentally park the line “Welcome To The Jingle” that my brain had randomly forced upon me.

I don’t know why it does this, or sometimes causes me to enjoy speaking deliberately ungrammatically, and not only to cats. It seems to like playing with words, all the time. Which it hasn’t done here on Substack in the last few weeks, I’ll concede. Couple reasons for that (have no fear, this is not going to be a self-indulgent navel-gaze such as I encountered recently, when a guy spent about four thousand words, far too many of them in one-sentence paragraphs, explaining why he hadn’t posted since February).

The first reason is I’ve been deep in the word mines chasing a couple of self-imposed deadlines. Possibly pointlessly. The second is this wise observation:

“What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”

— Herbert A. Simon

That quote was from fifty years ago — and holy cow has it got worse since then. I don’t even subscribe to many Substacks but dear god they pile up, voracious zombies forever attacking the perimeter of your quiet mind, and I feel obscurely guilty about consigning any one of them unread to the Archive. As a result I’ve been culling quite a few (but don’t you guys get any ideas). I finally wearied to death of Jeff Tiedrich’s sweary “President Poopy-Pants” schtick. I’ve paused a number of journalists of far greater depth, simply because I don’t need to be told “Hold the line, we’ve got this, fam,” a dozen times a freaking day — and also called time on a bunch of industry stacks reminding me how relentlessly fucked the film and TV industry is.

Reading the same stuff, over and over again, even if you agree with it, costs attention. We’re not built to cope with so much information being shoved at us all the time. I want to make you feel richer, not poorer.

And so here’s five tried-and-tested Substacks I actually do read, cover to cover (ah, those were the days) every single time they drop into my inbox.

The Londonist

A wonderful resource for anybody remotely interested in London, featuring deep-dive pieces on the city’s history and lore and unexpected curiosities, along with a gazetteer of London-centric events. As a London map geek I’m particularly relishing Matt’s wonderful hand-coloration of the seminal and extraordinary Rocque map of 1746.

5AM StoryTalk

If you have any interest in screenwriting or film in general, Cole’s stack is a fantastic resource. Frequent pieces on process, interviews with notable practitioners, and downloadable links to classic scripts to study — curated by a real screenwriter.

Software Design: Tidy First?

Kent is a hardcore and indeed somewhat celebrated programmer, and even though my own understanding of the field is limited to vibe-coding python scripts for use with ScriptBar, or css snippets to pimp the geek-favorite notes app Obsidian, Kent’s posts are always fascinating: whether insights into coding as an art and practice, or broader looks at creativity and other mental processes. This is a smart and subtle guy.

A Book Designer’s Notebook

An engaging and informative look into the process of creating compelling book covers (and interiors), and the visual design process in general. Nathaniel’s stack is the fast lane to learning how to stop things looking shit.

And no, I’m not going to mention Paula’s stack — even though I do read it all the way through, every time, not merely she’s my wife but because she’s both weirdly interesting and endlessly wise. I’ll get in trouble, but I’m not mentioning it. And definitely not providing a link. I have principles. I can be bought by neither money nor love.

So anyway, what’s up with you?