“Does Anything Really Matter or Did We Just Evolve to Think So?” — an intro text version of Sharon Street‘s evolutionary argument against moral realism
Carlin was not the first to notice hard core irony of escapes or comedy as being tragedy --Sigmund Freud wrote "The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious" about it. He postulated that we laugh because our subconscious desires and unacknowledged intuitions are being verified and fulfilled.2 This makes Carlin more impressive, considering how far down the rabbit hole he goes. Only in the context of standup could a theater full of people be made to give an ovation for what is, essentially, a diatribe in support of humanity's greatest fear: death, and the extinction of our species. A people-less earth was his grand vision for the finale of his 1992 special, Jammin' in New York. He remarked, "I'm an entropy fan...I thought, what a wonderful thing! ...there's nothing wrong with the planet. The planet is fine. The people are f*****... the planet isn't going anywhere. We are. We're going away. Pack your shit, folks."3 In any other context, suggesting that the extinction of all humanity just might be a good thing would, safe to say, probably not inspire applause. But somehow, Carlin made even this quite literally inhuman point of view--sub specie aeternitatis--not only palatable, but preferable. Through Carlin's eyes, his fans became god-like observers of an inanimate and ego-less universe, and it didn't depress them. On the contrary, the vision was serene. They were made to grapple with an instinct that rarely comes up in the daily humdrum of conversation: maybe all this wasn't made just for us. Maybe we are not that important. This is one of the oldest revolutions in thought that we know of-- we are not the center of the universe, nor are we the point of it all, and it's kind of funny that we thought we were in the first place. Apparently if you take the heliocentric revelation of Galileo, and pepper in the word "f***," it makes people laugh. Freud from Morava
Ezra Klein has a very good post on this topic. He notes that for The New York Times:
…home page traffic has fallen by half over the last two years. This is true even though the NYT’s home page has been beautifully redesigned, and the NYT’s overall traffic is up.
The value of the company is up as well. And then:
…home page traffic has fallen by half over the last two years. This is true even though the NYT’s home page has been beautifully redesigned, and the NYT’s overall traffic is up.
The value of the company is up as well. And then:
This is the conventional wisdom across the industry now: the new home page is Facebook and Twitter. The old home page — which is the actual home page — is dying a slow, painful death. I’m skeptical. The thing about “push media” is someone needs to do the pushing. Someone has to post an article to Twitter or Facebook. That can be the media brand. It can even be the journalists. But when articles work it’s really coming from the readers.
Those readers of course are often the dedicated ones who find the article on your home page. Ezra makes this additional point in passing, which I think is a neat example of how counterintuitive microeconomics can hold in the world of the internet:
Some of the most committed users are still clicking through the RSS feed (which is one reason Vox maintains a full-text RSS feed).
I would put it this way: the fewer people use RSS, the better content providers can allow RSS to be. There is less fear of cannibalization, and more hope that easy RSS access will help a post go viral through Facebook and other social media.
When a blog is linked to the reputations of its producers, rather than to advertising revenue, the home page remains all the more important. That is who you are, and many people realize that, even if they are not reading you at the moment. I call those “shadow readers.” For MR, I have long thought that the value of shadow readers is quite high. (“Tyler and Alex are still writing that blog — great stuff, right? I don’t get to look at it every day [read: hardly at all]. Why don’t we have them in for a talk?”) In other words, a shadow reader is someone who hardly reads the blog at all, but has a not totally inaccurate model of what the blog is about. For Vox or the NYT the value of a shadow reader is lower, although shadow readers still may talk up those sites to potential real readers. For companies which run lots of events, such as The Atlantic, the value of shadow readers may be high because it helps make them focal even without the daily eyeballs.
What if everyone were a shadow reader? What is the MRS between real readers and shadow readers? And which are you? Can a shadow reader sometimes be better to have? After shadow readers don’t get so upset with you and don’t so much expect that you will write to please them!
