Are journalists, writers, creators always necessarily in competition? The attention economy is a zero-sum game, in the formal sense meant by mathematicians: a scenario where the pie can’t be grown, only divided. Everyone has a biologically limited amount of attention to spend, whether it’s on a book, a TikTok, your job, your family. Anyone seeking more attention must develop a strategy to steal it from something else. A child screams. A headline mentions Taylor Swift. A YouTuber invents conspiracies. Authors seek blurbs from Stephen King, or just hope that early readers will tell friends that the prose is like, so good. (There are strategies, and there are dreams.)
Finding optimal strategies for non-cooperative zero-sum games was the Nobel-winning work of John Nash, the tormented mathematician of Sylvia Nasar’s biography “A Beautiful Mind,” later a film starring Russell Crowe. I pause here to honor Nash’s accomplishment under the circumstances. London Review of Books:
With a nice sense of the dramatic, Nasar starts her story on a May afternoon in 1959, with Nash, 30 years old, and with ‘a vast, distorted universe whispering in his head’, flopped in an armchair in the secure lounge of Maclean Hospital, an asylum near Boston where he had been committed for observation by MIT psychiatrists and by his 26-year-old wife, whom he was threatening to divorce. His visitor, the Harvard mathematician George Mackey, pained by Nash’s pronouncements about alien beings, asks how he could believe that extraterrestrials were sending him messages to recruit him to save the world. ‘Because,’ Mackey remembers the reply, ‘the ideas I have about supernatural beings came to me the same way that my mathematical ideas did. So I took them seriously.’
Nash’s theory of a competitive equilibrium, a point after which a player in a zero-sum game can’t gain by changing strategies, was “based on the absence of coalitions in that it is assumed that each participant acts independently, without collaboration or communication with any of the others.”
To vulgarize Nash: One problem with every news outlet independently deciding to cover Taylor Swift is that they all start looking the same; the competitive advantages of covering Taylor erodes. But deciding not to cover Travis Kelce’s marriage proposal in lieu of other news may still result in losing attention, so there’s a good argument for all the players to still do it. That’s a theoretical equilibrium.
But what about forming coalitions for attention and playing a more cooperative game?
The content creator starts from zero and goes to one. As 20th century models of media production collapse, many journalists are shifting from newsrooms — filled with colleagues and divisions of labor, busy with editing regimes and team coverage — toward independent production. (It’s a similar story in the legacy entertainment industry as projects dry up.) The streamer in the basement joins the novelist in the garret as a symbol of solo creative work. The consumer rests in the living room, watching YouTube on TV.
So how does the creator compete to maximize their position — get attention, get an audience, and squeeze from that audience money, fame or social change?
Emerging forms of content creation increasingly involve cooperation, not for divisions of labor but multiplications of it: cross-posting, guest appearances on each others’ pods, Substack subscriber recs, hyping peers on BookTok before your own publication date, moving to Austin together to tell R-word jokes for the broletariat in this brief time on Earth before your souls burn in everlasting Hell. Every time I see a clip of comedian Caleb Hearon, he’s roasting the shit out of a new guest who then becomes known to me. (Like his egregiously hilarious mom.) The collab is an elegant solution to the attention economy’s zero-sum game. If a consumer can only watch one thing at a time, a natural equilibrium is for three competitors to go on camera together. The video chat podcast is the content creator’s chamber of commerce.
Even the most antisocial behavior of newsletterers — beefing over insane narcissisms of small difference — is like a pop-up farmers market where competing producers can aggregate their customers. (Or induce new demand. The intelligentsia gets bored and likes combat sports like anybody else.)
God knows what the algorithm wants from you on any given day. What you need is a scene.
We tend to think of mathematical savants as lone geniuses, but even the troubled eccentrics could be fabulous collaborators. Paul Erdös “worked on more problems, made more conjectures, proved more theorems, collaborated with more people, and written and co-written more mathematical papers (over 1500) than any mathematician in history,” despite his own tremendous social dysfunction, per Brian Rotman in LRB:
Hungary was by then in the grip of a rising tide of anti-semitism and Erdös decided that being a Jew would hinder his chances of doing mathematics; so he left and travelled the world as an itinerant mathematical wizard. He never had a permanent job, gave away money he made in excess of his needs, took to offering small money prizes for problems that caught his fancy, never learned to cook, drive a car, wash his clothes or become anything other than an appalling house guest, who thought little of waking his hosts in the middle of the night to shut his windows. He seems to have loved children, sought out mathematical prodigies to nurture, organised his moral sense round a personification of everything bad he called the Supreme Fascist, and died a virgin. He was devoted to his mother, travelling for many years with her in tow, from one university mathematics department to another, until her death. After that he travelled alone, discovered amphetamines, and for the last 17 years of his life criss-crossed a global net of collaborators at a frantic 15 cities a month. He’d turn up at fellow mathematicians’ doorsteps, declare ‘My brain is open,’ and wear them out with a gruelling 19 hours of speed-driven problem-solving punctuated by microsleeps.
I couldn’t possibly recommend attempting life like this (apart from throwing your brain open and the stuff about detesting a fascist folk demon). But there are theoretical proofs out there for how loners, confined by life’s circumstances, can exploit the conditions to live cumulatively.
I know there's been plenty of talk of re-bundling, but it's sorely needed, for both media folks and consumers. All the cross-promo, cross-posting stuff makes sense, distribution must be shared and diversified, with enshittified platforms and the hyper competitive, fractured landscape. But also, why don't you just team up more formally!
You mentioned, the collab, the conversational layer of media on YouTube/podcast, also makes great sense. But still funneling back to solo media. Media on top of more atomized media. The tools are there to create lower overhead media collaboratives or consortiums. Anecdotally, it seems like more substacks are popping up with 3+ writers. I hope to see more of it. I'm not acquainted with all the dynamics in play here, but it doesn't have to subsume the audience's trust/affinity to each individual.
I continue to find a writer or expert I like and follow them. Sometimes I search them out and accept the collab. Mostly, it feels like that person I most want to hear from is now diluted. It’s rare I like ongoing collabs. I will never subscript to the NYT for the 5 writers I like. I still prefer Paul Krugman’s solo writing to his interviews - whether he is interviewer or interviewee. The best scenario is a created community. For example: JVL’s The Triad (the Bulwark), comment section. So collab is different than community. Media as community? Perhaps we need more bundling locally, like a farmers market is ultimately local? I’m already in over load with the variations on multiple POVs on the latest in news. Maybe local needs a new definition?