Get in, loser, we’re doing an old-fashioned conversation-by-blog-post.

Dan Sinker wrote recently about the Who Cares Era:

The writer didn’t care. The supplement’s editors didn’t care. The biz people on both sides of the sale of the supplement didn’t care. The production people didn’t care. And, the fact that it took two days for anyone to discover this epic fuckup in print means that, ultimately, the reader didn’t care either.

It’s so emblematic of the moment we’re in, the Who Cares Era, where completely disposable things are shoddily produced for people to mostly ignore.

Then Les Orchard wrote in response that Only the Metrics Care:

The user isn’t the customer. And they’re not the product either. The real product is behavioral optimization—metrics on a dashboard. The paying customer is somewhere else entirely, and the “content” is just a means to nudge behavior and juice KPIs.

…

The point isn’t to communicate. It’s to simulate relevance in order to optimize growth. It’s all goal-tracking, A/B tests, fake doors, and dark patterns.

Both of those posts are great and you should read them, but reading them is not a prerequisite to reading this one. I just wanted to place this post in context of the conversation I’m dropping into.

A thought that I’ve been turning over in my head for a while is this: it’s quite important to know that you are heard.

We have a fucked-up relationship with attention in Western society. Probably in non-Western societies too, but this is the one I know and the only one I feel qualified to comment on. Obviously attention has been commodified by advertising economics, and the relentless pursuit of attention as measured by Engagement™ has been incredibly damaging to the social fabric. It is a cliché to say that Facebook profits off of our polarization and rage because our attention is what sells ads, and it is also true.

However, it is also incredibly fucked-up how contemptuous we-as-a-culture can be of behaviour that gets labelled as “attention-seeking”.

There’s lots of attention-seeking behaviour that is genuinely anti-social, in the sense of being detrimental to social cohesion. Logan Paul comes to mind. But “attention-seeking” is also used to dismiss a whole spectrum of behaviours that I’d actually consider quite pro-social. Protesting and all forms of so-called social justice warrior behaviour falls under this, especially if you’re a young person. (Surely the only reason the youth would agitate for a better world is for attention?) Similarly, a lot of critiques of art can carry an undertone of “who are you to think your work matters”. In other words, how dare you ask for my attention?

The dismissal that gets under my skin the most is when people who struggle with mental health engage in self-harm to cope, and are then accused of doing it for attention. It’s just a cry for help, people say. First of all, so? And second of all, right, exactly. It is a cry for help, so are you gonna help or not? Because if not then I need you to get the fuck out of the way.

Anyway. Wanting attention is not inherently a bad thing. We’re social creatures1. We’re terrified of ostracism, of being cast out from the clan or the tribe or the club or the bandwagon. Whether you think this is a good thing or a bad thing is irrelevant to its being true. The social cohesion of extremist and conspiracy groups is a big part of their stickiness. Tell someone a story about why they matter and give them a group of people who believe in the same story and you can get them to do a lot of evil. (And a lot of good, too.)

There’s a loneliness epidemic that many are attempting to soothe with parasocial relationships with our favourite podcasters and streamers and now AI, and what that says to me is that so many of us live our lives unwitnessed, craving attention from anything that provides a simulacrum of reciprocity. We need attention from one another—our identities exist in context and reflection of one another—and I suspect we can no more change this than stop breathing air, which is to say that bizarre evolutionary forces might accomplish it over the course of eons but it’s sure as shit not going to affect us in our lifetimes.

It is not a bad thing to want attention. It’s quite important to know that you are heard.

Except the internet isn’t really set up to signal that someone is listening. You can only demonstrate that you’re paying attention by taking some step to express it: a like, a repost, a reply, an email, a rambly blog post. And because these things take energy, you’re not going to get a signal from the majority of the people you’re trying to reach. (And oftentimes I don’t have anything to say! I just want to wryly smile at a nice turn of phrase.)

This is a genuine problem with interactions on the internet. Weirdly, it’s a problem that analytics software was sort of trying to solve; shame it ballooned into this privacy-destroying behemoth that undergirds the global surveillance panopticon. We’ve had page counters as long as we’ve been building websites. Often, we just want to know that we’re being heard, and analytics let us measure the hearing.

About six years ago ago I decided to move my blog off of Wordpress to a static site generator. In an ongoing attempt to de-Google-ify my life and reduce my electronic footprint, I skipped installing Google Analytics, and man did I notice that absence immediately. It’s not like I was a prolific blogger using metrics to optimize building my audience or whatever, I just liked knowing it was there. The fact that, if I didn’t promote something I’d written on social media (an activity I hate) I would mostly have no idea whether any human saw it at all was so bizarre.2

Creating a thing and putting it out into the world is a vulnerable act. Not knowing how people are responding to it, even whether they’re seeing it at all, can be lonely and alienating.

I launched a new project recently, something that is extremely close to my heart and my values. I intentionally didn’t set up analytics on that project, because tracking is against the core project ethos. And honestly, it’s kind of agonizing not to know whether this thing I’ve poured so many hours into is actually reaching people or being used. Someone asked me recently what my traffic numbers were and it’s embarrassing to simply not know!

Except, I am choosing not to know3, even though I am desperate to be heard. And this tension is very important to me.

It is maybe not functionally possible to design social networked technology geared towards listening. I don’t know, I’m not that smart. But the fact that the internet doesn’t have a mechanism for listening means that we’ve invented these kludgy quantification mechanisms to try and detect attention, and it is easy, so incredibly easy there are multiple books written about this, to confuse the thing you’re measuring for the metric itself.

I want to know who is visiting my site and whether they’re returning visitors and what pages they clicked through and for how long because it gives me the illusion of knowledge and control. Maybe I’ll know my project is connecting with people if I just hit some arbitrary threshold of pageviews, subscribers, conversion rate.

But none of that will tell me the thing I actually want to know, which is: am I making a difference?

Truthfully, that may be an unanswerable question. So much of organizing is about planting seeds4, pushing towards a more just world against an array of seemingly insurmountable forces in the belief that all our small actions will add up to a better future.

If that is a question that can be answered, the answer will not come via clickthrough rates and visitor counts. The answer will come in conversations and in community, in personally building solidarity with the people you’re trying to reach. The seasoned labour organizer who tells me she’s using my site to keep up track of things would be a single insignificant blip on the analytics radar, if I had one. But hers is the experience that actually matters.

When you have numbers to look at, it’s easy to care only about the numbers. If we want to truly care, we gotta kill the metrics in our heads.

In the 24 hours between starting this blog post and getting ready to post it, I read a third piece by Jesse Hirsh titled A Letter From the Future - How We Won:

You stopped pretending everything needed to be explained, and instead focused on what needed to be shared.

That was the beginning.

It didn’t happen on a debate stage. It happened at libraries, community kitchens, co-ops, clinics, church basements, discord servers, pirate radio stations, and among the ruins of broken institutions.

We call it the Great Listening. It was messy. Unprofitable. And unbearably slow.

Often when I start writing I discover lots of other people are writing about similar themes quite eloquently and decide maybe I didn’t have anything new to say after all. That is still the metrics-poisoned perspective, even if it’s not directly quantified, because it is still rooted in being unique or the first or whatever. The care-ful way of looking at this is that these moments of confluence are themselves an indication that we exist in global conversation with one another, and that people are, indeed, listening.

  1. I’m not going to deluge you with social science citations on this, because I am trying to treat this post as one volley in a casual conversation rather than an intellectual fortress to defend, but I don’t think that is a controversial statement. ↩

  2. A couple years later I caved and installed Matomo, an open source first-party tracking tool that I could be confident isn’t leaking cookies all over the internet. I broke it a few months ago and haven’t gotten around to fixing it, and the knowledge that this post is gonna go out with no visitor stats is annoying me like an unreachable itch. ↩

  3. This is a slight exaggeration, I know who subscribed to the newsletter and I know how much bandwidth the site consumes. But I have no idea how bandwidth translates to visits in the year of our internet-of-bots. Plus, as the project’s About page states, I genuinely don’t want your email! I want you to be able to access this info without giving me your data in return. I will likely never know if this particular goal was successful. ↩

  4. Please appreciate how much I resisted putting a Hamliton quote here, because even though my political analysis has outgrown its worldview, I am still at heart a basic musical theatre bitch. ↩