(I Built Nothing.)

Lessons from the Attention Economy.

Most of the work I’ve done has been no work at all. The kind of “work” that’s often referred to as “computer work” or a “laptop job” or an “email job”. The kind of unwork that AI will eventually take over because it’s pointless and any midwit can make a passable go at it. (And AI is midwit supreme.)

When I dropped out of college, I started writing reviews and short blog posts that were listed on an old job site called Elance. That eventually led to doing web design jobs, a couple consulting jobs, a brief (but well-paid) stint making slight tweaks to link colors for a garbage company promoting online casinos. Then I made my way into video, which I’ve reluctantly been doing since 2018.

What have I achieved? Nothing. The work is ephemeral, unimportant, and dead. The reviews have since been rendered obsolete, the blogs taken down, the companies folded, and the videos amass views (frequently in the hundreds of thousands) and then disappear into the content void.

The actual product of all these jobs is not what I’m making, but the attention they get.

And attention is a neverending game. If you’re not getting it, you’re losing it. So, nothing you make ultimately matters as much as the next thing you’re making. The work you might be most proud of goes unnoticed and the bottom-of-the-barrel lowest-common-denominator stuff does numbers for a while until everyone forgets about it and you forget about it because it didn’t matter anyway.

But every once in a while, something real comes up…

A few weeks ago, I spent a Saturday in a crawlspace drilling out holes, being fed wires and routing those wires under the house and feeding them back up. We were installing a tankless water heater, which took the entire day. Lungs full of dust, clothes smeared with mud, a sore back that didn’t make itself known until the following morning. And in the end, hot water that reminds me every day of something I did that actually mattered. Worth more than all of the “professional” work I’ve done before combined.

I’m at a point where labor that just feeds the Machine sans actual result, actual product, actual meaning, isn’t worth any amount of money. Eventually, I wouldn’t be surprised to find myself spending my weeks growing my own food and building F-style mandolins and my weekends hawking both at farmers markets and bluegrass festivals.

No TV. No news. No Internet.

No attention whatsoever given to the ruins.