How novelty effects and Dopamine Culture rule the tech industry
Dear readers, First off, hello from Substack! I am writing from andrewchen.substack.com where you’ll find me from now on. After 15+ years of writing via wordpress on andrewchen.com (and its predecessors), I’m going to try Substack. I’m long overdue, of course, led the company’s Series A in 2019. I will be maintaining my archives at andrewchen.com and will occasionally refer back.
My (very bad, very lazy) excuse is that I wasn’t very active on blog anyway, being heads down on my book, and as a result, I didn’t want to undergo the big project of transitioning platforms. For now I’m going to keep andrewchen.com where it is for the SEO juice, and will just do my writing here.
Everything on the left is real/offline. Whereas everything on the right is virtual and online. This is, of course, because what is real/offline tends to take more intent and longer engagement, since you have to physically go somewhere. But it also means it’s very convenient to exist in the digital world.
Moments are measured in seconds not days/years. In slow/traditional culture, where everything on the left takes years to produce, and often hours to consume. And of course, this also restricts the supply and thus there’s a smaller supply of books than, say, articles, and then even fewer than of tweets. So we have more, but they are fleeting.
