I’ve been a fan of Om Malik’s writing for decades. There was Red Herring magazine and his GigaOm website. He’s tapped into the tech scene, thoughtful, and insightful.
As you peruse the news, do you get a feeling that it’s just announcement after announcement, video scene after video scene?
You don’t have time to breathe, let alone think, between the decreasing intervals between news cycles.
Check out Om’s Velocity Is the New Authority. Here’s Why.
Why does everyone feel overwhelmed by information? Why does it feel impossible to trust what passes through our streams? We tend to blame individual publications, specific platforms, or bad actors. The real answer has less to do with any single media entity and more with structural changes in the information ecosystem.
People once told me they labeled news sources as politically liberal or conservative. I told them they were missing the point. It was really something like sensational (to capture and hold your attention) or very sensational.
The early 1990s Internet, followed by blogging at the turn of the century, and social media a decade later all helped me do that main thing. In the mid-2000s I embraced Dave Winer’s mantra of “sources going direct.” As far back as 2009, I outlined the coming changes in my essays “How Internet Content Distribution and Discovery Are Changing” and “Amplification and the Changing Role of Media.”
I empathize and followed a similar path.
For the past decade and a half, the whole information ecosystem has become much larger, faster and noiser. It is hardly surprising that nothing works. And we feel a collective sense of overwhelming disappointment.
So, why does nothing work?
Authority used to be the organizing principle of information, and thus the media. You earned attention by being right, by being first in discovery, or by being big enough to be the default. That world is gone. The new and current organizing principle of information is velocity.
What matters now is how fast something moves through the network: how quickly it is clicked, shared, quoted, replied to, remixed, and replaced. In a system tuned for speed, authority is ornamental. The network rewards motion first and judgment later, if ever. Perhaps that’s why you feel you can’t discern between truths, half-truths, and lies.
With so much coming at us all the time, it is difficult to give any single story or news event much weight. More content means already fragmented attention fractures even further.
What’s the new meme?
Velocity has taken over.
Remember the good old days of Facebook and Twitter before the rise of algorithms?
Algorithms on YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter do not optimize for truth or depth. They optimize for motion. A piece that moves fast is considered “good.” A piece that hesitates disappears. There are almost no second chances online because the stream does not look back. People are not failing the platforms. People are behaving exactly as the platforms reward. We might think we are better, but we have the same rat-reward brain.
We built machines that prize acceleration and then act puzzled that everything feels rushed and slightly manic. The networks of the past were slower and at a scale that was adaptable. I wrote about this years ago, and nothing since has disproved it. So when the author of “beliefs outrun facts” says nothing works, now you know why.
For example, YouTube.
Let’s use YouTube technology reviews as a case study, because they are universally understandable. Take the launch of a new phone: when the embargo lifts, dozens of polished video reviews appear on YouTube. They run about 20 minutes, share similar thumbnails, and use the same mood lighting. The reviewers had access to the phones before everyone else, so they had time to prepare their reviews.
In the old days, before the current phase of content abundance, folks like Walt Mossberg, Ed Baig, David Pogue, and Steven Levy were often the first to get Apple products for review. Sure, these folks had big platforms, but that head start gave them a lot of clout, which meant many non-Apple companies offered them early access to their products. I never felt cheated or misled by their reviews, though I did notice what they omitted after using the product for a few months.
These days, things are markedly different. For YouTubers, access is the currency of survival. Access, of course, means suggested talking points. Again, nothing new. What’s different is that every reviewer knows that if they paint outside the lines, they’ll lose access. If you don’t have the review out when the embargo lifts, it doesn’t matter if you have a better review; no one is going to notice.
The system rewards whoever speaks first, not whoever lives with it long enough to understand it. The “review” at launch outperforms the review written two months later by orders of magnitude. The second, longer, more in-depth, more honest review might as well not exist. It’s not that people are less honest by nature. It’s that the structure pays a premium for compliance and levies a tax on independence. The result is a soft capture where creators don’t have to be told what to say. The incentives do the talking.
I’m not sure to what extent this has invaded the manufacturing technology space—but I have met a few who are trying. As for me, I’m a thinker and prefer waiting and evaluating. If you don’t like that, it is OK. I am what I am.
Om concludes:
The cost of all this isn’t abstract. It’s the review that took three months, and no one will read it. It’s the investigation that requires patience. It’s the work of understanding before passing judgment. All of it still exists, still gets made. It just doesn’t travel. In a system where only what travels matters, we’ve made expertise indistinguishable from noise.
I like signal rather than noise. Read his entire essay. It’s worth it.
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