Why Nerds Are More Clippable

Summary

Summarized wtih ChatGPT

Someone else at a16z recently asked me, “What would Marshall McLuhan think about TBPN?

Highlights from Article

The main reason nerds are unpopular is that they have other things to think about. Their attention is drawn to books or the natural world, not fashions and parties. They’re like someone trying to play soccer while balancing a glass of water on his head. Other players who can focus their whole attention on the game beat them effortlessly, and wonder why they seem so incapable.

This is the essential bit: nerds are interested in a lot of things. They find the world too interesting. And so nerds often present as scattered, distracted, or even clumsy with their presentation or their approach to a topic because they have so many things going on in their mind.

They enhance some innate human capability, letting us do it louder, faster, farther.

They make obsolete some incumbent set of capacities we already have.

hey retrieve some older tradition or deep subconscious competency,

hey reverse into antithetical properties when pushed to their limits.

It retrieves talmudic commentary; contemporary executive version. Inside of companies, the highest signal information is often comment chains between executives talking about the subject matter in a Google Doc, which is then linked to as “For source of truth, see this comment.”

• Love this quote

Compared to other works by McLuhan (including his essential book Understanding Media, which can be admittedly challenging to the uninitiated), his four Laws of Media are pretty approachable. He insisted that all forms of media have four essential characteristics, which McLuhan calls the “Tetrad”:

• New media formats have four characteristics: enhances the experiences, make an old set of capabilities obsolete, retrieves some older tradition and reverses into some other type of engagement (document -> chat)

Podcasts enhance a very specific form of idea exposition: “take all the time you need to find the path to the clippable form; you probably don’t even know it yet at the outset, we are going to find it together.”

These two factors, together, I think explain a large part of why nerds are going viral more. The thing nerds are bad at - the linear storytelling format, which rewards linear storytellers - has become obsolete.

Salons plus pamphlets created the same mechanism as “podcasts plus clips”,

All material owns to the authors, of course. If I’m highlighting or writing notes on this, I mostly likely recommend reading the original article, of course.

See other recent things I’ve read here.