In 2011, 21, and full of the naïve ambition to be the most interesting person alive, I signed up for an email newsletter.
It was to sendmeastory.com (eventually rolled up into longform.org, which shut down in 2022), which sent you one longform non-fiction story a week.
These weren’t necessarily current longform journalism. No, these were stories loved by journalists and editors from the archives of publications such as Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, and Esquire, etc.
Examples:
- Can You Say…”Hero”? – A profile of Mr Rogers – Esquire 1998
- Kid Cannabis – How a pizza-delivery boy became a drug kingpin – Rolling Stone, 2005
- The Last American Man – At age 17, Eustace Conway moved into the North Carolina woods. He hasn’t compromised since – GQ 1998
(Oh, that last one? A younger Elizabeth Gilbert wrote that.)
I didn’t read everyone, but I’d make a point of putting each issue on my Kindle. And the ones I read? I treasured.
I’d be taken on voyages of lives and experiences, cultural and historic moments, in the genre of longform non-fiction. A form that lets the imagination roam, and lets the characters and facts show the story, not tell you the insights.
It wasn’t in 140 characters.
It wasn’t in a carousel.
It wasn’t in a god-damn reel.
And it was recommended by a person.
As I’ve read and reflected on the increased tribalism of our times – the source of extremist politics, conspiracy theories, and that inescapable feeling of nihilism in our cultural world – I’ve found it hard to not come to a single conclusion:
Things are crap because we replaced human editors with algorithm editors.
Not just that 2015/16 marked the era of Twitter and Instagram going away from chronological to “Best for you” feeds (remember: 2016 was the year of political polarization).
…but more about how Facebook convinced news and content publishers to pivot to video based on false metrics, which led to the gutting of a generation of journalists and editors1The Internet Con by Cory Doctorow, and algorithms have plugged our demand for journalism since.
…Or that when Myanmar finally opened itself up to the internet, it was the fact Facebook was the literal portal to the web2When Myanmar opened itself up to the internet (almost overnight), Facebook allowed its app to be used with no data charges (anyone remember the Net Neutrality debates?). In a chain of consequences that’s documented far better than I could hope to do, Yuval Noah Harari in Nexus explains how this led to Facebook becoming the only way millions of Burmese saw the Internet. The BBC captured the results perfectly with this quote: “During the years of censorship, if you wanted to know what was going on you had to go down to the tea shop and chat with people. When Facebook came along, it gelled with that way of doing things – a digital tea shop.” BBC, Myanmar coup: How Facebook became the ‘digital tea shop’. BuzzFeed News, This Is What Happens When Millions Of People Suddenly Get The Internet., that helped drive the Rohingya genocide.3Again, Nexus by Yuval Noah Harari, specifically Chapter 6, but also Amnesty International, Social Atrocity: “algorithms proactively amplified and promoted content on the Facebook platform which incited violence, hatred, and discrimination against the Rohingya. A UN fact-finding mission in 2018 concluded that Facebook had played a ‘determining role’ in the ethnic cleansing campaign. There’s no sugar-coating this: while Wirathu and other extremists created inflammatory anti-Rohingya messages, it was the Facebook algorithms (designed to maximise engagement and thus promote outrage) that spread and amplified these messages to an unwitting and digital-naïve population. The results were predictable and horrifying.
Since 2024, it’s not that I’ve been withdrawing from social media, it’s that I’ve been withdrawing from algorithmic editors. Outside of books, when I want that quick hit of information, education, or entertainment, I’ve been trying to fill it with human curated stuff. My Instapaper backlog, printed editions of magazines or periodicals, email newsletters thoughtfully put together by an editor or writer.
A professional sacrificed their time to put these together. And while that’s no guarantee of value, it’s a proxy for why its likelier to be more relevant, more insightful, and more meaningful than AI slop4Knowledge workers reading this would have experienced what the FT calls a “slop cannon” (paywall) – when colleagues or managers feed you mountains of AI-regurgitated stuff to give the appearance of productivity (Cal Newport, before AI, already criticised and called this phenomenon “productivity theatre”), and the feeling if you bother to read it leaves you banal, empty, and hollow. Compare that to a pre-Teams/Slack dread of knowledge work – being copied into a large email chain with no context. As you digested the human-written correspondence, you’d get an impression of the personalities and power dynamics in the chain. Useful context, which, while an utter distraction and a waste of time (email chains create push productivity dynamics rather than pull productivity dynamics), would create a sense of relatedness at work – a source of meaning., or algorithmic junk food.
There have been personal benefits (more creativity, more calm, a less judgementy-tribal way of viewing the world), but the biggest benefit has been knowing, that my time and attention is not enriching companies who have strip-mined our attention spans in the pursuit of advertising profits.
Because of all this, I’m starting something new: The Heasman Human Curation newsletter, or The HHC for short (yes, I’m vain).
This will be a fortnightly newsletter curated by yours truly. It will be a curious collection of five to ten stories, clips, quotes, data, hot-takes, essays, whatever – just stuff I’ve found and curated.
The promise? Everything will be human-curated. Nothing in there was discovered via an algorithm or fed to me by some swanky AI aggregator.
It’ll also include my latest and bestest stories so that you never miss a single thing I create.
This keeps me accountable to continue finding and curating interesting stuff in our increasingly algorithmically driven world. To read more offline than online.
It also means that your reading will become more offline. Less algorithm and more human-driven.
I hope you’ll treasure that as much as 21-year-old me did.
The first issue will be hitting your inboxes in a week. After that, it’ll go out once every two weeks.
I’ve never committed to a regular broadcast schedule. Fears of burning out, or shipping mediocrity for the sake of shipping, have always hounded me. But this? I could do this for the rest of my life.
If you’re not a subscriber yet, sign up below for the first issue.
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Human-curated stories and crafted data essays that help you understand the world.
Subscribe now and get instant access to the exclusive three-part data story: London’s Affordability Crisis. You’ll get the first issue of The HHC when it’s released.