About the inevitable decline of Notes

You like it less now than you used to. You'll like it even less soon.

You’re not built for this. None of us are.

I don't really use Substack Notes. (I tried again this week, just to see, and it had not improved.) Substack isn’t really happy about that. It places Notes front and centre in the app and makes sure to fill it up with far more people than I chose to follow.

Here's what I'll say in the algorithm's favour: these people are from every part of the political spectrum, creatively varied, and enamoured of diverse interests.

Perhaps because I rarely comment, click, or like anything, I'm not (yet) being shoved down a particular rabbit hole. I can't tell if that would be the case if I al­lowed myself to be sucked in like a pigeon greeting a jet engine, so I can't offer Substack full or confident credit. But I like to be fair.

Here's what else I like: full, nuanced, complicated, lengthy thoughts. Uncomfortable ones. Incomplete ones. A swimming pool of context where my toes barely touch the bottom. Even if it’s just about how much someone loves their cat. Especially if it’s just about how much someone loves their cat.

Anything that’s worth thinking is worth thinking at length.

Fuck pithy, packaged, shareable thoughts. I liked them once; I tried to create them, too. Radiating certainty and smugness and the depth of a Thought of the Day calendar. But Twitter didn't turn into a toxic wasteland ( just) because of who bought it and who was allowed to use it. Its disintegration was inevitable because its format was unsustainable. Brevity might be the soul of wit when it comes to a punchline or a beautifully constructed truism. But there is real harm in compress­ing political realities and meaningful personal experiences into trite soundbites. Real loss in crushing down complicated opinions into slogans and shibboleths.

אלו ואלו דברי אלהים חיים. These and those are the words of the living God.

There are so many ways to a truth. And two—or more—things can be true at the same time. The complexity of human thought, belief, behaviour… these are features, not bugs.

Don't talk to me about attention spans. I literally have fucking ADHD. Confirmed by an expert and everything. The condition might be reduced to a handful of initials, but the re­port that tells me so spans a couple of thousand words of detail and a load of supporting evidence. The long version is where you find the specifics of what would help me particularly. Which might not be the same as things my ADHD friends and family members need.

De­tail is not a dirty word. There’s a reason it’s where we find both devil and deity.

Back in 2017-ish, so before GenAI scared the bejeezus out of wordspewers, a friend of mine who does not enjoy reading told me about Blinkist. It’s an app that summarises ‘key ideas from books, podcasts and experts’.

My kneejerk reaction was horror: what’s lost when you push 100,000 words through muslin? My more considered reaction was contemplative: what’s gained when someone who wouldn’t—or, more importantly, couldn’t—ingest those 100,000 words any other way slurps up a few tablespoons of concentrate?

But also: would the tempting availability of an easy-access thought-strainer mean that fewer people would consider trying to slowly wade through 100,000 words, with the attendant pausing and sitting with and ruminating over that turns 100,000 words of input into 300,000 words of thinking?

In the end, Blinkist and its ilk can’t be purely good, bad, or indifferent: it depends who’s using it, if the majority are using it, how much they’re using it, and what that does to attitudes and habits in the long term. I might well not be around long enough to know; the conclusion might never be neat. But I think on the whole it might lean towards the overall bad for humanity when we make thought too easy to digest.

Yes, there are nuances of access. No, I’m not talking about gatekeeping information. But this is Jamie Oliver and the Turkey Twizzlers again. There are foods that can be the difference between kids eating or not eating—so how on earth can we demonise them? But also: they’re not healthy, and there’s no point pretending it’s a good thing if we all make them a major part of our diet.

With Notes—as with all brevity-driven social media before it—we’re Blinkist-ing our own self-expression. We’re pre-chewing and part-digesting it and dribbling it into the open baby penguin beaks of our nearest and most distant. We’re compulsively driven to scream into the void in the hope it screams back. But we’re supposed to hear back from a small-ish community to people we really know. There’s supposed to be a back and forth over years. Instead we’re instantly carpeted by in an avalanche of fast-melting brainflakes. There’s too much. And, at the same time, not enough.

Look, I’ve made lifelong friends through some of those brain-reordering hellscapes. Good can come from what is overall a bad idea. You get to decide if you feel that’s a price worth paying for also being steadily drip-fed a diet of half-baked nothings. I think I’ve decided it’s not, but I’m open to a long and detailed argument that it is. I really am. I’m still going to use AI to summarise stuff, sometimes. After all, it’s right there.

I like it here. I won’t read everything you write even if I follow you, and sometimes I will read a lot and not react in a way which lets you know how much I enjoyed it. Occasionally I’ll come back at a second bite of the same and still not tell you. But I doubt I’ll be bothering with Notes again. And if you feel like it’s hurtling into a queasily familiar chaos… it’s not just you. We’re simply not built for simple.