"Does an attached payment evoke a positive (thoughtful, appreciative, attentive, etc.) or negative (slimy, spammy, cheap) sentiment in the recipient on average? Is it possible to call attention to enclosed money in a cold email without sounding like a Nigerian prince? How does the average price selected by the sender and the average “suggested” price by recipients differ? What is the baseline acceptance rate? Is there a price tipping point that drastically increases acceptance rate? What are the types of people who receive the most bribes? I think the most useful scenario for a pay to send situation is when potential relevance to recipient is high and chance of attention is low (due to overall inbox noise)."

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A defining psychic feature of the Internet is its immediacy, its urgency, its implicit demands on our time. Hereisthisthingyoushouldseerightnow. Alsothatthingisacatvideo.

That one feature, Internet as scheduler, shapes the web as a social space. Because the same tendency that makes 20 minutes a long time to take to reply to an email, and two minutes a long time to reply to a tweet, also means that, generally, the content that lives on it has an extraordinarily short shelf life. And that’s true not just of “content” as in news stories, the stuff that loses most of its value when the term “new” no longer applies to it. It’s also true of content as a more general category: long stories, deeply reported narratives, richly researched essays — stuff that aims to endure. The stock of the Internet. 

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"Do you know why all of these social media sites want you to accept “push notifications” on your phones and tablets? Because when they report to their investors, “engagement” is the most crucial metric of all. It’s very good for them for you to have a buzz or a beep every few minutes to draw you into their service. But is that good for you? is it helping your cause in any way? No it isn’t."

"Culling is easy; it implies a huge amount of control and mastery. Surrender, on the other hand, is a little sad. That’s the moment you realize you’re separated from so much. That’s your moment of understanding that you’ll miss most of the music and the dancing and the art and the books and the films that there have ever been and ever will be, and right now, there’s something being performed somewhere in the world that you’re not seeing that you would love."

"In short, “sharing” has become a lot easier and a lot more efficient, but “being shared with” has become much more time-consuming, demanding, and inefficient (especially if we don’t ignore most of our friends most of the time). Given this, expecting our friends to keep up with our social media content isn’t expecting them to meet us halfway; it’s asking them to take on the lion’s share of staying in touch with us. Our jobs (in this role) have gotten easier; our friends’ jobs have gotten harder."

"Psychological fatigue is an erosion of enthusiasm caused by obstacles, roadblocks, or added rules and constraints. Not to be confused with sleep-related brain deficiency (haziness or memory loss, for example), Psychological fatigue is a diminution in emotional, spiritual, or attitudinal components of our skills, our contributions, and our output…The insidious part of all this is a lack of accompanying perception. Biologically, research reveals that at low to moderate levels of fatigue (both physical and psychological), people tend to be unaware of the hits they’re taking. (“I’m fine; I can make it to the next exit.”) Even when conscious of their suboptimal faculties, people are conditioned to keep it to themselves. Socially and culturally, the prevalent ego atmosphere in sports and business dissuades admission of diminished capacity. It’s a competitive sin to disclose weakness."

"I am mildly ashamed to say I often begin the day by immediately picking up my phone from the windowsill and checking first my email and then Twitter. Twitter, for God’s sake. I just feel like there is something inherently pathetic about a human being waking up and deciding their first moments of consciousness need to be spent looking at what happened on Twitter while they were asleep."

"I attend a lot of conference and events, so I have collected my fair share of visual summaries over the years. But I have never received one without directly participating in an event. Nobody ever forwarded a set of visual notes to me via email. I have never seen visual notes show up in my news feed. If the idea behind creating these visual summaries is that the core concepts expressed at some conference, summit or gathering will be more easily remembered, shared, and applied to work going forward, and they were performing as intended, then I would expect to see the visual summaries everywhere. I would expect that people would reference them more – or at all – in their work, across social media… anywhere. That simply isn’t happening."