Why Polarity Pays

A blog post can move mountains. Prose, wielded correctly, is an explosive, world-changing energy. But, because writers are often constrained by the revenue and cost structures of a media business, they can only capture miniscule portions of that value. Writers are valued by society for their independence and good judgment, not for their ability to make money—and the ways in which writers make money are always somewhat suspect.

Therein lies the polarity in tech coverage: unabashed, reckless boosterism from tech bros and cruelly negative coverage from the traditional press. 

We can explain away both the techno-utopian media and depressed, grumpy Slate articles by examining the incentives driving their respective businesses. Every single market force pushes writers toward starry-eyed optimism for sway, or toward jaded negativity for scale. These are the economics of tech writing. I’d like to think this publication has succeeded in the vanishing middle between these two gravitational fields, but that’s not an easy thing to do (and, as a result, has created a smaller business than if we were to embrace either of these extremes).

Tech companies continue to get richer, more powerful, and more ambitious—figuring out how to read the tea leaves about what they’re up to will give you an advantage in your life and career. Understand incentives and you’ll understand the world.

Incentivized polarity

The issue is this: Technology analysis is a shitty enterprise. A company that has to fight for every dollar of additional revenue struggles to hold the costly moral high ground.

When a media company makes something of value—say, a poignant or revelatory article, video, or podcast—it’ll be rewarded with social capital (trust, awards, inclusion) and with distribution (subscribers, readers, social media attention). Still, the economics of publishing on the web are so dreary, ever incentivizing gluts of free ad-subsidized extremes over well-researched and nuanced work, that it's hard to make much money even with a large audience.

However, in business media, there’s another option: Rather than scale, you can find a way to profit off equity. Cultivate favor with a small crowd of powerful people, and then find ways to get a piece of what they are building or investing in.