### intro "Pivot to Wiki" is a proposal for a **cultural shift** in how we organize, curate, and engage with information. we need to rely less on information formats that work by grabbing our limited attention. think about it: we've only got 24 hours in a day, and you can't make more of them. all the news articles, the social media posts, the videos out there — they're all competing for each precious second of your time. the scarcity of attention creates the ["attention economy"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_economy). i recommend [Chris Hayes' *The Siren's Call*](https://www.amazon.com/Sirens-Call-Attention-Endangered-Resource/dp/0593653114) for an accessible, thorough primer on the modern attention economy and its parallels to labor issues in history. the clearest example of the attention economy at work is the [carcinization](https://www.infinitescroll.us/p/the-carcinization-of-content) of various media platforms toward short-form video. short-form video captures attention like nothing else! it's plain to see that the incentives that cause services to pivot to short-form video are toxic toward any measure of a healthy information environment. if all the money comes from views and advertising, then you get media dominated by clickbait headlines, sensationalized & decontextualized content, and detached from truth. Hayes ends his book with praise & encouragement for things such as the resurgence of vinyl record sales and the persistence of physical newspapers, both of which run counter to the dominant attention-economy forms of digital music and news media. He sees this need for a cultural shift toward resistance of the attention economy —but he does not imagine a generalized solution to the information environment. let's imagine. --- ### news journalism and social media in the aftermath of the 2024 election, i saw a lot of calls for Democrats to fix the information environment and/or build party media by way of big donors [funding local journalism](https://prospect.org/politics/2024-11-07-time-for-democrats-abandon-mainstream-media/), or by finding a ["Joe Rogan Of The Left"]. i was and am still [[local media|skeptical]] of these ideas as an answer to Democrats' political woes. sure, your hometown newspaper probably deserves your money in a way that CNN doesn't — but once you're aware of the attention economy, it becomes clear that the [decline] of smaller outlets is inevitable when their content competes for your eyeballs with combination Get-Ready-With-Me and Subway Surfers Tiktoks. consider the financial incentives for article-based news/journalism & social media businesses: - journalism derives its revenue from keeping readers informed on the news. **if it stops producing news (new information), it won't produce any revenue**. - social media, as a business, has to attract a mass audience who constantly post to keep each other's attention. **if nobody posts, there's no business**. it's not that news articles and social media don't have their place — of course they do. **the problem arises when we mistake a combination of news & social media for a complete information environment.** --- ### attention dependence if attention-dependent sources aren't sufficient for an information environment, then we must of course ask: what sources are attention-independent? obviously to consume information you have to pay attention to it somewhat, so attention *independence* doesn't mean attention-*free*. let's define attention (in)dependence as the degree to which a service must **compete** for attention for sustainable utility & revenue generation. let's also assume that "sustainable" excludes being bankrolled by billionaires. let's examine each part of the information environment: - social media is **100%** attention-dependent. nobody values social media that they don't use, and all the content is generated by users for other users. - audio — podcasts & radio & audiobooks — are **sort of weakly** attention-dependent, but that's because you can listen to them in the background while not really paying much attention. if you want to intentionally use audio to learn or teach information, they require long periods of focused listening. - video has a wide spectrum of attention dependence which depends on the particular content and platform. short-form video is **highly** attention-dependent, and intentionally used to capture attention. other video can be treated like podcasts — as background noise. but trying to deliver high informational utility with video requires the ***highest*** relative amount of your attention- you've got to both watch and listen. - direct interpersonal communication: hopefully you and your friends aren't charging fees to talk to each other. revenue is irrelevant here and so this is **not** attention-dependent. - discovery: search engines & advertising are attention-routing systems, thus **100%** dependent. - long-form written text: there are two broad overlapping subsets of longform text. generally, news media is organized around a specific **time**, while everything else is organized around a **topic**. - journalism & news media are **highly** attention-dependent, but not 100%. outlets that focus on a specific topic/theme or geographic area can generate independent value for subscribers & supporters. - the second subset, which includes books, websites, technical papers, & all other longform text, is **weakly** attention-dependent. once a book or paper has been funded and produced, its informational utility basically lasts forever, needing only a shelf space or a spot on your hard drive. you can read just a little bit at a time, pause and resume later; the book doesn't care, the book doesn't need your attention. **my conclusion: long-form text excluding news is the only part of the information environment capable of actually delivering information without constantly competing for your attention.** now we can start to answer the question: how we can improve the information environment? are books and papers the answer? not quite. while we want solutions that do not have to *compete for attention*, they still have to compete in terms of utility. a book or paper takes time to write and is unable to compete with all the other attention-dependent formats which produce information almost instantly. books and papers are not edited after release outside of periodic new editions maybe once per year. this is the part where i finally say "wiki"! you've made it this far, thank you. --- ### wiki **[wikis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki)** and similar websites are both longform text and also act as a "wrapper" layer for the information environment as a whole (i.e., they have links to the other stuff). the properties & priorities that distinguish wiki from other websites, and make wiki valuable to the information environment are: - editability; pages are not static and are meant to be continually refined. - interlinkedness & contextual completeness; pages are designed to link to all relevant material. - organization; pages are carefully managed to achieve an informational purpose, whether that be to make an argument or simply provide an overview of a topic. - speed of information delivery; all the other properties work in tandem to make wiki the optimal format for delivering the most amount of information in the least amount of time. these properties also constrain wiki's useful scope: an overly verbose wiki is counterproductive for both author and reader. "organization" means that wiki should be paired — via linking— with books & papers & other longer-form text where appropriate. in plain english: stories should go in books, wikis should use bullet points. a few other points about what Pivot to Wiki isn't. these come from common questions & responses i've gotten to this idea as it's developed. 1. wiki isn't necessarily publicly collaborative like Wikipedia is. publicly collaborative wiki requires a lot of resources for governance & moderation, and a good culture of users and contributors to start with. if we start trying to use publicly collaborative wiki more for specific political purposes, we're going to run into a lot of division & bad actors without the resources to sustain the effort. 2. similarly, this isn't a call for everyone that reads this paper to come together and develop one singular, all-encompassing Democratic Party Wikipedia that will solve all our problems. 3. we can't rely on wikipedia itself. wikipedia is a great resource, but it has its own internal rules (ex. ["No Original Research"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research)) that make it well-suited to what it does — providing encyclopedic overviews — but a poor fit for adaptive, intentional political purposes. - the NOR rule requires that original research be published in a reliable outside source. if i wanted to, say, catalog and quickly share a database of links of bigoted posts that a person made on social media, wikipedia would not allow me to add that to their wikipedia entry unless an established 3rd party wrote about it first. again, this is fine for what wikipedia does, but it makes it insufficient on its own. --- ## pivot to wiki we've examined: 1. the attention economy & its deleterious effects on the information environment 2. the shortcomings & financial incentives of news journalism & social media 3. the degree of attention-dependence of each part of the information environment 4. the need for and value of wiki, as well as limits on its value now we can talk about what a Pivot to Wiki would look like in practice. who's it for? what are the specific benefits? --- ### a cultural shift i want to stress that "pivot to wiki" is first and foremost a mindset and a cultural shift. i've identified the format, and i have ideas about which individuals and institutions would stand most to benefit from such a change, but i can't claim to know exactly how any particular wiki would look or operate. i believe those details can only emerge organically. but we can push institutions and each other to adopt this mindset and build what we can. this website functions as my personal wiki which i choose to publish to the public; for many individuals, i expect this mindset shift manifests as little more than a few good private notes on their phone about their favorite books and most-used links. and that's okay! one aspect of this is taking our emotional response to new information and redirecting our energy away from grief & outrage toward archival & categorization. to be clear: i'm not saying you can't have emotional responses to things. but you must understand, if the magnitude of rage expressed on social media every day translated to anything lasting or durable, the state of affairs would be quite different. right? so what we have to learn to do is take the news, especially the news we feel strongly about, and not just ask, "how does this make me feel?", but "how can i use this?" what are the important parts, and which parts are useless & irrelevant? can i add the important things to some other context, a page or a list, which increases their usefulness? another aspect is that we should not only be resisting things that draw our attention but intentionally taking "attention-negative" actions. [[people can just say anything]]. but things that are useless must be discarded, not reflected upon. if a *known* bigot says something horrible and bigoted Again, the correct course of action is to add that thing to their file, not rage about it on social media for the day, or even to point and laugh. you need maybe, like, 2 reaction posts made in total, before working together with each other to file it away and move on to something new. --- ### who this is for > [!cite] 10% of Twitter users post 97% of tweets about national politics. [(Pew, 2019)](https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2019/10/23/national-politics-on-twitter-small-share-of-u-s-adults-produce-majority-of-tweets/) i recognize that asking folks to break away from, to resist the attention vortex of headlines & social media is like asking them to put down their phone and clean their house, or go for a walk, or something like that. i don't expect this idea to get mass adoption. i am specifically talking to you, the high-information, high-engagement users who are already reading this essay. you are who i expect to do better, to *want* better from their information environment! i am also talking to institutional actors in the information environment and in politics. news outlets, publications, and political parties should all be in the practice of building and operating wikis, moving beyond the old models of internet "virality" which no longer hold, moving beyond the models where information is conveyed solely by Posts and Statements. --- ### a Joe Rogan Of The Left? if you've spent any time in online politics since the 2024 election, you've likely heard arguments for (and more likely against) Democrats' need to find a "Joe Rogan of the Left" (ultra popular internet entertainer who also benefits them politically), and their spending toward that effort. i'll skip over the specifics regarding Rogan himself and say this: it would be a full-time job for even the best internet entertainer ever just to trawl the incredibly fragmented, uncoordinated Democratic communications & messaging that we've got. think about this: if you were a talented, unknowledgeable, currently nonpolitical communicator who wanted to get into arguing on behalf of Democrats, what resources would you turn to? maybe you'd first try Googling the Democratic Party, then navigating to the "Where We Stand" section of their website, which hasn't been updated since 2024? ![[oops.webp|Screenshot of the democrats.org website's "where we stand" section, with the URL modified to point to the year 2026. the page does not exist and displays an error.|501]] a Pivot to Wiki mindset would tell you that a political party, instead of burning cash on a fantastical quest to discover a messaging unicorn, should instead focus on building effective knowledge systems with what it's already got — such that the best entertainers and communicators can organically arise, using these systems as a knowledge foundation. this doesn't just apply to podcasters/streamers. it's also important to build these systems for people organizing locally. imagine in the year 2026, trying to persuade a voter who asks, "what do Democrats stand for?" and the best page on your party's website still refers to Joe Biden being President of the United States. when the media doesn't act the way you want it to, are you going to just make a few posts about it or are you going to build something that carries your message? --- ### practical implementation > [!question] ask yourself this: > 1. what's one thing i care about, or something i know a lot about? > 2. if i was too busy to discuss it directly, how quickly could i teach / inform someone about that thing? > 3. what resources would i send them? articles, books, youtube videos? > 4. how much time will it take for them to learn something about the topic with what i send? does a short wikipedia article cover everything? or do they need to read an entire book to understand? my guess is that if you do this exercise, you'll find that you know a lot about the things you care about but it would take quite a long time to even begin sharing it with someone else. not everyone needs to build a full personal wiki, of course. you can start small: - **take good notes** about the things you care about. try to keep them organized and shareable. - reduce repetition: if you find yourself in the same discourses, referencing the same social media posts, linking the same articles- turn those into a note. - ask other people for their notes on topics. don't rely on their recollections. - always be thinking about the potential connections between what you know and the new information you encounter. if there's a connection in your mind that's not out there on the Web... make a note of it! don't let that only exist in your mind. support wiki tools with your money. start to critically analyze information formats. ask your favorite publications, news orgs, and social media accounts to consider adding these kinds of resources into their toolkits. lastly: >[!danger] DO NOT BE CONTENT TO EXPERIENCE REALITY AT THE SPEED OF HEADLINES. i really believe we could do a lot of good for the world by pivoting to wiki. if i've not yet convinced you, please direct feedback and suggestions regarding this page to me on [bluesky](https://jortscity.bsky.social). --- ### further reading [From Users to (Sense)Makers](https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.06345) [The Economics of Attention](https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jel.20241665) [Chris Hayes' *The Siren's Call*](https*://www.amazon.com/Sirens-Call-Attention-Endangered-Resource/dp/0593653114) [Kevin J. Elliott's *Democracy for Busy People*](https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/D/bo194847654.html) %% ### random unsorted bullshit it's not WHO, WHAT, but WHERE is truth fences by Flo pay for *news*, you will get *news*. pay for *documentation* and you get *documentation.* "it's bad on purpose to make you click" (already said i believe) maggie appleton internet gardens biglaw spine index [[wiki list]] - reducing the cost of truth. if it is costly to update and hold truths, then people will not do that, and instead opt for the less costly behavior of believing things that confirm their priors ### trust harris dominated with people who actually read news, are informed. we have the advantage with educated people- and education is a formal thing, not tiktok spam, so our extra-educational systems should be formalized as well.. **our base is different**. we have to be high trust, they're fighting a guerilla war against truth (cooper lund), we can't beat them by doing the same thing --- ### organizing information with purpose **building things with utility** does anyone want to build things that are useful and last? instead of things that are read once and discarded? ### things i didn't touch on but are related - billionaires buying outlets e.g. Bezos, WaPo - musk hating wikipedia / creating Grokipedia - Democrats "distraction" - Trump "2 weeks" %%