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“The Internet needs a quality algorithm.” This was the opening line of my essay prize announcement, and I want to revisit it now that it's done. Is there a correlation between writing quality and audience size? 

Algorithms are low-trust right now because they’re adversarial—“for you” gaslighting (usually)—and they reward engagement, popularity, monetization, etc. The 2010s-era algorithms are based on discrete events: clicks, likes, measurable things. They might look at keywords to guess the topic of an essay, but it’s effectively blind to the overall quality of a piece. Quality is nebulous, after all. Small magazines can each have their own vision of what’s good, but for a million/billion-person network, there’s no consensus, and quantity is way more important anyway.

So this essay competition was a v1 attempt to define and search for quality. The overall search space was small, but it was a chance to experiment with curation, and resulted in The Best Internet Essays 2025. It’s interesting to me that the featured writers ended up varying in audience size, evenly distributed between 10s, to 100s, to 1,000s, to 10,000+ subscribers.

Again, limited sample, but interesting to ponder: the tangible thing (reach) is a power law distribution (1% have big audiences), but the intangible thing (quality), the thing that matters more, is independent of scale. It means that for all the great writers with 10k audiences who are highly visible, there are possibly 100x writers of similar caliber who are undiscovered, in algorithmic obscurity. 

This isn’t too surprising, and the usual reply is, “well it’s not enough to write well, it’s your responsibility to be consistent, to be your own marketer and publicist, to make sure your work gets read.” I get that this is what’s been required, but what if it weren’t? Wouldn’t it be better if a platform could search for quality at scale so writers could just do their thing? This would also give visibility to those who aren't full-time writers, people who publish 1-2 essays per year around the interesting problems they’re working on, but have no bandwidth to build an audience each week.

Still have to think through v2, the 2026 prize, but the question in my mind is how can I expand the search space? Can I have agents scan the Internet, assemble RSS feeds to find great essays, design an algorithm to filter for the previously intangible, build community into the process, and then curate/share the stuff that comes through? The aspiration is to get better each year at surfacing great essays from independent writers on the basis of merit, and this book is what came through the first pass.

There is a viral video of Milwaukee Brewer pitcher, Jacob Misiorowski, throwing a 104 mph fastball to knock an apple off a teammates head, who is sitting on a chair at home plate, arms crossed, back to pitcher. Yes, it's edited, but will everyone tell? What if 5% can't? How many hundreds of kids will try this stunt? Reminds of me of William S. Burroughs thinking he could drunkly shoot a beer bottle off his wife's head and missing. I guess the allure of virality can poison anyone.

One of the thrills of the AI revolution will be how it untangles software from bad incentives. Today, software is expensive to build and maintain, and so it needs returns to fund itself. The big social media companies have annual expenses of $50m-$50b; they are in no position to operate from virtues, or to deliver on their stated aspirations of “connecting the world,” because they need to optimize for attention and convert it to revenue to fund the ridiculous scale of the operation.

But now we’ve hit the point where autonomous coding is real: Claude’s Opus 4.5 can code for 30 hours straight. I am currently “rebuilding Circle,” the community platform, except not as a platform, but as a single customized instance for my community (Essay Club). I am maybe 4 hours in and half way done. Circle wanted $1k/year, so I built my own with a $20/mo Cursor subscription.

When you can just prompt software into existence, you don’t need fundraising, an expanding team, and all the sacrifices that come with capital. Software can start reflecting the will of visionaries, rather than the exploited psyches of the masses. Of course, AI coding will also enable huckster bot swarms to sell Candy Crush clones and other brain rot variants, but more importantly I think we’re entering a new era of techno-activism.

Millions will use their weekends to spin up apps, sites, tools, platforms, and networks, not for the sake of colonizing the planet’s attention, but for the sake of gift-giving or mischief-making or culture-shaping. It could mean that we shift our attention from hyper-commoditized feeds to mission-driven places.

Today, I think a single person could spin up a million-person writing-based network for under $100k/year (my guess is that’s <0.2% of Substack’s cost). If you clone something exactly (like Twitter>Bluesky), there’s little reason to switch because you lose the network effects. But the oozification of code & interface means that we can start experimenting with better social architectures. How might a network built for human flourishing actually function? A novel concept paired with a small critical mass (just a few hundred people) might be enough to trigger a cascade of platform switching.

The irony is that AI coding is only possible because big companies have been able to amass extreme amounts of capital, resources, and data, but in doing so they’ve released something that could erode their own monopolies on attention, the last scarce resource. Now I think it comes down to what people decide to build. If everyone can build anything, will we each try to build our own empire of extraction, or will we contribute to a culture we want to live in ourselves?

You don’t have a phone problem, you are just poisoning yourself. I'm tired of people lamenting over phones, smartphones, screens—it's not the glass! I want to make a case why smartphones are essential for flourishing in our modern life. The real problem is with “inbound feeds,” and that’s not just social media, but email inboxes and task lists. By installing software with infinite refresh, the possibility of novelty consumes you. I say this all out loud to my wife, as the guy next to me is absorbed in a sloptunnel on TikTok, and it’s 50/50 if he heard me.

Even if a SM feed is filled with all of your favorite ideas, friends, and thinkers, it would still be poison from the sheer volume of randomness. Even the act of seeing two things in feed, forces you to shift from one context to another, forcing you to shift frames, destabilizing and disembodying you.

Alternatively, if you had a feed of a hundred things, but they all revolve around the same content, all spawned from a singular intention, I think it would be less dizzying; it’s more enables depth into your present, embodied frame. There is less of a “slot machine” effect. 

It’s not that feeds or algorithms are bad; they only became bad when they strip context. The logic of most feeds, however, do not care if you feel oriented. They have a simple reward function, show you as many different things as they can, to see which ones drive behavior. They are running a real-time self-adaptive experiment on your preferences, in the hope to discover which patterns might nudge you into their desired behavior (whether it’s towards an ad or towards an on-platform paid subscription by a beloved writer, they are effectively the same—it’s an algorithm that is not being real with you, and not respecting your attention).

I feel like a broken record in prescribing a solution, but it’s basically Plexus (RIP): show nothing until you post, and then from what you post, share a feed of semantically related posts. Substack, as a writing network, is a unique position to build this. It has a lot of long form content: not just notes, but essays, podcasts, and videos. It should be looking at the granular units, semantically embedding paragraphs, and then those become atomic objects that help populate the “semantic feed” generated after every Note.

Whenever you open an app you give it permission to shape the grooves of your attention. Through its interface, it suggests and implies a limited range of ways you can interact. This all sounds very abstract, and what I really want to say is that I think my Things app (the #1 best selling productivity app, I assume) keeps me in a kind of productivity hell. I have, what, 84 things to do today? Tasks lists should not be ambient all-day guides. I should leave it in the closet, go in there and whiff it for 5 minutes, max 10, commit to memory whatever is important, and then not go back until tomorrow.

My head is tilted down 60 degrees, and I’m cut off from the people and world around me. My cousin’s cousin was actually in the shop, and I almost missed her. Reading Emerson while waiting online feels extremely rude. Isn’t reading a physical book in public just as bad as reading on your smartphone?

Of course, books aren’t evil. Neither are screens. It’s the action/context mismatch that’s wrong. I guess the problem is that screens make it easy to have all your books with you at all times, and so it’s convenient and normal to be rude.

What you reveal when you say screens are bad for society is that you don’t have the ability to wield tremendous power. It’s not the smartphones to blame, but the apps on them, and so often we realize how mindlessly we install them, and how long we’re willing to be mesmerized by a bad information architecture. When we reach the iOS vibe code singularity, there will be no excuses.

If you give an infinite amount of monkeys a typewriter, with an infinite amount of time (obviously theoretical because neither a being or time can be infinite) not only will one of them produce Shakespeare, but the entire Western Canon would be re-derived from scratch in every moment of reality. This captures the difference between astronomic values and infinite values. In astronomic values, given an absurd amount of time, one monkey will eventually do the the impossible and write Shakespeare. But with infinite values, monkeys are inventing Shakespeare as the grammar of space-time. The astronomical shows that the impossible could happen once, but the infinite shows that the impossible could become the fabric of a reality.

And Sora is, like the 2005 Facebook feed, just the start of something new, but something that might actually be as nauseating as the infinite. If you have agents that can reproduce endlessly (potentially infinite “creators”), with the ability to remix/generate one piece of content against every other node in a growing cultural matrix (actually infinite), with limited time/cost (not infinitesimal, but fractional), that leads to every possible reality happening in every moment, at a cost that’s bearable to tech corporations.

I think I find this all interesting now, because something as abstract as the infinite might shape the future of creation/consumption. And to tie this to our talk last night about optimism/pessimism, I think the difference comes down to those who have the agency and discernment to plug in to the infinite on their own terms. It could be as simple as, if you plug in to OpenAI, Meta, or X, and let them use your data to create a generative algorithmic for you, you will be swept away in limitless personalized TV static. But if you know how to build your own tools (hardware, software, social communities), then you have a chance to harness it.

In Sora, I’m currently in a Bob Ross K-Hole, and it triggered an unexplainable interest in trying to explore the edges of Bob Ross lore, which is, now that I write this, so random and pointless and misaligned, but when I do it I’m cracking up and can’t really stop.

Contrast that with my own theoretical "infinite system," where every new log surfaces the 100 most related logs, and then each of those logs becomes the seed for an essay generator, each of which gets rewritten endlessly (for hours, days, or weeks) via an EA software feedback loop, until I decide I want to read it.

And so if you dive into the infinite, even if it’s something you love, it can easily destroy you, and instead we need to make our own systems/agents that can surf those edges for us, and bring back just the right amount of information that we can meaningfully work with.

I'm ashamed to admit that a meme on Sora got me to laugh and cry so hard that my head was in pain and I had to close the app. It was Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream Speech,” but AI replaced the text with the script from the meme of that 4-year-old who can’t describe his dream (“Have you ever had a dream that you, um, you had, your, you— you could, you’ll do, you— you want, you, you could do…” etc.). There is something about seeing a great American orator mumble endlessly that I apparently can’t handle. Technically, I “made” this meme, which makes it worse, like I’m laughing at my own jokes.

What makes Sora an incredibly weird experiment is that, in 10 seconds, anyone can upload their “likeness.” Basically, you spin your head around, you say some words, and you get a photorealistic avatar that you can lend to your friends so they can prompt you into absurd situations. Of course, Sam Altman is one of the default avatars available. 50% of the app is Sam Altman fan fiction. You will find him stealing graphics cards from Target, smoking weed and saying “we’re cooked,” debating Cartman in court, using Pikachu to power a fusion reactor, etc. Also if you like Pikachu, there is now infinite Pikachu content. It is all very dumb, but it is endlessly novel.

This feels like a preview of a culture who only communicates through Superbowl commercial skits. I hope it doesn’t work, but I fear it might. I assume most people are questioning “why would anybody make their likeness public?” The answer is attention. I imagine that, within a week or two, Sam will have the montages and metrics to sway influencers and celebrities. It will be pitched as the new way to engage your audience: “let them create through you.” They know they can’t use the likeness of real people; I wonder if the point of this app (a wrapper over their underlying video model) is to get people to hand over their identity for free.

I am debating if I should delete this from my phone (I don’t allow any feeds on my phone … except Substack), or, if I should lean in, sell my likeness, and write about the consequences. This feels like an essay-worthy moment, but I can’t find the terms and conditions, and I get paranoid when I imagine the possibilities.