Tag: books

A Critique of the Attention Economy Designed to Get Your Attention

Chris KhatschLeave a comment

Every post is bait. — In the good old days, a (good) piece of writing used to be a nicely packaged, well-organized (or aesthetically pleasing) thought. The writer exported (a version of) it from their mind, and the reader imported (a version of) it into theirs. These days, however, writing means not much more and not much less than content generation. People mainly write to grow an audience, grab attention, sell. The reader is the fish; what they write is bait. There’s nothing after the bait for the poor reader. He’s been fished; next, he’ll be fried and eaten.

Writing is advertisement — In view of the fact that “good” writing is now measured by the number of purchases, subscriptions, followers, comments, and likes one gains, it can be said that all posts are advertisements. All content generation belongs to marketing, whose survival depends on ROI, and whose return on ad spend must, sooner or later, exceed 100%. Every word, every image, every frame, every idea now belongs to — or is governed by the mechanisms of — the culture industry. Every post is a (self-)branding activity… although sometimes they come disguised as philosophy, literature, or art.

It’s a puddle, not an ocean — Depth and all of its close relatives are sacrificed on the altar of marketing. At best, there’s the appearance or the promise of depth. When you come to dive deeper, however, you’re always disappointed by how shallow the water is. The water barely reaches your knees, and the children have pissed in it. Just because you cannot see the seafloor, it doesn’t mean the water’s deep.

A following of fools. — To succeed in this day and age, one’s work better not address intelligent individuals. Since there are so few of them, converting intelligent individuals into paying clients is often an unprofitable endeavor, especially on the internet, even if their conversion sometimes means bigger ticket sizes. One must evoke Schopenhauer’s insult here but use it as a tip: “He who writes for fools always finds a large public.” And since, in our time, the larger your audience, the better, this means, from a financial standpoint, you’d be a fool if you didn’t write for fools.

Engagement farming. — Online, there are two types of posts: the type that is written to farm engagement, the type that isn’t. Unfortunately, a large majority of the posts fall into the former type, where one expresses what’s expected to be liked (or receive comments). One must ask himself, “Am I moving the audience, or does the audience move me?” In Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche writes something close to this. He says, “How small is the importance of followers we first grasp when we have ceased to be the followers of our followers.” In our times, this means that, even if one has a large number of followers, it’s better to post as if he has none, risking the number of followers to drop. (Unfortunately, the world works the other way: people post more of what already works.)

Everyone is stupider than you. — In one of his essays, Italo Calvino writes that “literature must presuppose a public that is more cultured, and more cultured than the writer himself.” Content generation, as we saw, does the opposite. To get views and shares, it must constantly presuppose a public that knows nothing. It must consider everyone stupid. The more advanced the piece, the smaller the reward. (Think of a bell curve. The worst writers and the best writers get the least engagement. Why? Because good writing is no longer considered good, it gets the same results as bad writing. The algorithm loves mediocre content with good hooks.) That is why there’s barely any literature in literary novels these days. The main goal of publishing houses is to sell, and the main aim for writers is also to sell, and since to sell means writing for a large public… well? It means you better write for fools and explain everything like they’re twelve. To presuppose a public that is less cultured, and less cultured than the writer himself, then, is the way to success. And, therefore, the way to success is… anti-literature.

Something to say. — To write in good style, says Schopenhauer, you need to have something to say first. And to have something to say, you need to have spent time thinking. Unfortunately, the Content Generation Generation (CGG) writes for the sake of writing — or, more precisely, the CGG generates content for the sake of generating content and, of course, to eventually sell something. There are no traces of thinking anywhere, and most of the things one comes across online are recycled mediocrity. Writers only pretend to be saying important things. It’s all performative thinking and pretense. Schopenhauer writes: “For example, I have just read in a new book: ‘I have not written so as to increase the number of existing books.’ This says the opposite of what the writer intended, and is moreover nonsense.”

This post was originally published on my Substack on November 9, 2026, under the title “Why Everything You Read Online is Bait (Including This Title)“.

When Love Stands in the Way of Progress

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Every other year or so, I end up reading E. M. Forster’s short story called “The Other Side of the Hedge.” Although it’s more than a hundred years old, it’s as if it were written yesterday, addressing hustle culture and, generally, all the other success-first ideologies of today. It questions our compulsion to keep moving forward no matter what in order to achieve something. It is one of those stories that makes us stop for a moment and think about the hamster wheel we’ve been put on. It asks us to cool down and have a refreshing drink. And in that pause, we find the space to raise important questions again, which had dust settle down on them ever since we graduated from university and entered the workforce.

Why are we conditioned to worship productivity?
Is what we call progress really progress or a simulacrum of progress?

…

One of my friends is so addicted to work that spending time with his family feels like a waste of time for him. All he wants to do is “keep building” his body, his business, etc. He never says it like that, of course, but you can infer it when you read between the lines of what he speaks. When we’re having a beer, he (almost exclusively) likes to palaver about his adventures at the workplace, and he’ll talk and talk as a toddler babbles in his crib after a long day when it’s his bedtime. And whenever he talks about family matters, it’s always how time with the wife and kids, chores, and errands kept him from what he wanted to achieve during the week, the month, the year. It’s as if, using different words, he’s always saying, “Only if I didn’t have a family, I’d attain my dreams.”

My friend, as you see, is a proud man who has his eyes set on business objectives; everything else is an obstacle getting in his way. Although there was a time when he claimed that getting married and raising children he loved was the dream that he was after…

It’s funny how what you do turns you into someone who does that thing. My friend worked hard to start a family. Then, his family became the thing that kept him from working hard, which was something he initially did to achieve the initial dream — starting a family. He worked hard for such a long period of time that he became a person who works hard for no reason but vaguely defined progress.

And now, it’s like he’s constantly trying to “get back on track” because life interfered with business, leisure interrupted work, love stood in the way of progress…

Some people (have been programmed to) believe that the good life is achieved when, in reality, the good life is practiced. Improving your life materially is often necessary for most of us, but it’s only one part of the game. We must also be present spiritually to reap the joys we have planted.

The Lake of Honey

Chris KhatschLeave a comment

Lara was aware she was doomscrolling. Part of her wanted to throw her phone away, but she couldn’t stop watching those short videos that were made to grab her attention and keep her wanting more. Her eyes were stuck to the screen, and her thumb was programmed to ceaselessly swipe up. “I don’t want to do this anymore,” she wanted to cry. “Why can’t I do anything about it?”

It was 1:04 AM. She was in her spacious, fashionably furnished bedroom, sunk in a plush velvet sofa by the window. The sheer alabaster linen curtains were open, allowing the moonlight to invade her bedroom unimpeded. Everything in the bedroom seemed to be in its rightful place, except her. She was lying on the sofa when she should have been in bed, sleeping, dreaming, resting.

The more she scrolled, the angrier she became at herself, but every video postponed that anger another minute. Every last video she planned to watch was followed by another video, each more unfulfilling than the last. She kept wanting to watch one more, and she did. She scrolled.

Then, in the split second between the video she had just watched and the video she was about to watch, she imagined herself drowning in a lake of honey. The new video started playing, but her attention had now turned inward, and she saw herself sinking deeper into honey, and she wondered whether she could swim in honey if she were ever thrown in such a lake. She then thought, “Are the videos I’m watching supposed to be the honey I’m drowning in? I’m more like a fly stuck to a sticky flypaper.” But that thought was short-lived. She started imagining pulling herself out of the lake thanks to a rope that a good-looking stranger threw her way. The stranger looked like he was in his mid-twenties, five or so years younger than her. He was a muscular man with broad shoulders, wearing only swimming shorts. Thick veins ran down from his biceps and forearms and disappeared only when they reached his wrists. His whole body shone in the moonlight. And in that darkness, he was like the light a dying person saw at the end of the tunnel. Lara held on to the rope he threw and pulled herself out of the lake. When she reached the lakeshore, the sun replaced the moon in the sky. The moon seamlessly faded out as a hot Mediterranean summer sun faded in. The good-looking stranger extended his hand to help her stand up. “Thanks,” she said. “Welcome,” he said. She gazed into his ice-blue eyes. His face… she did not know what face to give him yet. But standing there in front of him, she felt the honey trickle down her body, and she realized she was naked, and she was naked because at that moment she desired to be… She made the man with the ice-blue eyes fulfill her wish. Her lust was the puppet master. She made him pull her towards him, made him lick all of the honey off her, and then she made him… Her phone rang, and she was pulled back into the real world where she was lying on the sofa by the window with her phone, which was now vibrating, in her right hand. Her left hand was in her underwear. The call was from an unknown number, and it was 1:09 AM, which meant it was either someone calling a wrong number or a call she did not want to answer. She wanted to return to the arms of the stranger with ice-blue eyes. She longed to go back. Before declining the call, she wondered whom it could be. She waited a minute to see if the same number would call again, but no call came. So, she allowed herself to drift back into her fantasies, and this time she gave the young man a face, the face of the bartender with the nice smile and ice-blue eyes who served her drinks two nights ago.