Communication – Julie Fredrickson

Day 2023 and The Signal

And I have nothing to say today as I have spent my entire day inside of chats making sure The Signal flows. From corporations and journalists to friends and even a large law firm there was a lot of coordination that happened around my nodes. The spice must flow? Nah the Signal must transmit.

It is getting harder and harder to get through to anyone. Dont be fooled by former signs of productive communication. No one uses email anymore except the LinkedIn class. They might not even be writing their own emails either. Are they writing their own posts? That’s unclear to me as well.

If that’s a dead corpus of communication amongst people running stolid corporate offices, then what else is a dead medium we think is living? I shudder to consider that the limits of the attention economy might be the actual crash we should worry about and not normal data points like treasury yields or Brent crude.

The office set may or may not be aware of the lossy amounts of unreality percolating through their various channels of coordination. It’s possible this happened to Slack as well but I haven’t actually used Slack since….2018? I genuinely don’t know.

It’s entirely possible that Twitter, having wrapped up its own experiment in Dead Internet Theory knows more about this than anyone else. What constitutes a live player space anymore. What percentage of humans in the loop constitutes living?

I do begrudge the Yancy Strickland set who decided the Dark Forest Theory was a valid interpretation of not exactly adversarial forces, but certainly subsections of cultural influence who didn’t like his kind and wanted him to know.

Decamping from the public sphere for cozy spaces is fine for regular people but anyone attempting to work within the wider sphere has to grapple with the dangers at some point. Usually when you have something to sell.

So that’s all for today. I fed the Signal. I’m not entirely healthy. I don’t know when that is going to fix itself. Fingers crossed as I thought I’d be back at full capacity by now.

A meme came across one of my group chats yeh other day that my friend said contained “strong Julie energy.” My response was oh yeah “phone calls are violence” and promptly turned it into a tweet.

Obviously I’m leaning into another extremely online joke with “thing is violence” which made for a good viral moment. But I really do hate having phone calls on my calendar. Not everyone agrees with me. I heard a lot from folks who insist that the human connection of one to one phone calls is superior to the written word.

Honestly I call bullshit on this. It is some Luddite nonsense to insist that written communication platforms are inherently inferior to voice. We thought phone calls were dangerous and weird when they were invented.

Unless I’m speaking with an entrepreneur (or my mother) I try to encourage folks to communicate with me asynchronously. Voice communication is slow and lossy. It lets you ramble and insist that tone and human emotion are more crucial than you being a crisp thinker. Which is maybe true in certain situations. Emotions and tone and context are important. But it’s not a substitute for you being a shitty communicator.

I’m not going to waste 30 minutes on something that can be communicated in a few sentences if you just think ahead and collect your thoughts. Call me an asshole but it’s not worth me slowing down my day so I can listen to someone struggle to organize their point.

And I get it, folks want to think things through together in a group. You know how much that sucks if you are the one pulling all the weight in the call? A lot! It’s exhausting. Stop expecting other people to think for you. It’s a dick move. Honestly fuck that noise.

I’m not getting on a damn phone call until I’ve exhausted all over ways of communicating and organizing a topic. Only then is all this nuance and emotional context shit a worthwhile endeavor. Do your homework before you insist on scheduling a call. It will be more productive and take less time.