memetic Manifesto
We have an attention problem.
It doesn’t matter which end you’re on, giving or receiving, it’s the same mess.
Too many channels. Too many messages. Not enough time.
If you’re on the paying side, some say the battle’s already lost. We’ve turned into goldfish and the game is rigged.
If you’re on the buying side of Attention, two strategies dominate:
- Shrink the message to match the shrinking attention span. “
Content snacking,” they call it. - Shout louder. More posts. More volume. More at-bats.
Both solutions, sometimes combined, add to the problem.
Like using gasoline to put out a fire.
For about half of my life now, I have been both a marketer and a human (don’t mention it), and finally, painfully, found my way out of this problem.
The core ingredients are Relevance and Respect.
It’s pretty simple. And pretty hard.
Relevance
The right message, for the right person, at the right time. You would think digital marketing cracked this one years ago right? I think we’re not even close.
Better targeting and distribution won’t fix our relevance problem. The pipes are not at fault here, it’s what goes through them. Content that’s thoughtless, generic, or pointless doesn’t get better just because you timed it well.
Fix the message first. And perhaps, fix the business before the message. And perhaps, fix the humans before fixing the business.
Relevance is a simple concept, but a never-ending challenge.
Respect
Respect starts with compression. Not in the “make it shorter” sense, but in the “respectfully packaged” sense.
Compression means you’ve taken time, so they don’t waste theirs. It’s not about intellectual spoon-feeding, but about eliminating your own laziness from their cognitive workload.
People still read 500-page books and binge 4-hour podcasts. But they’ll only start, and stay, if you respect their attention from the first second and onward.
Blaise Pascal (or Twain or Einstein, as the internet likes to misattribute) said something along the lines of: “I apologize for such a long letter – I didn’t have time to write a short one.”
This is the meaning I give to “memetic”.
The fine art of compressing ideas so they can travel.
The ultimate question though, even before compressing, is to ask if the content should be produced in the first place.
Cognitive Sovereignty
What about the rest of us, most of us, the receivers? The ones trying to “pay” attention?
We’re under siege. Our attention is being targeted by organizations with close to unlimited resources. Their entire business model is based on hijacking your attention.
So no, I’m not blaming individuals for their crumbling focus, any more than I blame consumers for the climate crisis.
But we do have agency.
We can, we should, build attention enclaves. Curate our inputs. Apply the same filters of relevance and respect to what we consume.
This manifesto isn’t just for marketers. It’s for anyone who cares about where their mind goes and why.
We have to declare sovereignty over our cognitive space. Now is the time.
Work in progress
If enough of us prioritize relevance and respect, maybe we can shift from an attention economy to an attention ecology.
You saw the word “pledge” on the homepage. This is mine.
I commit to crafting messages that prioritize relevance and respect.
I’ll try to build worthy attention spaces and defend them.
If you’re reading this, I hope you will too.
Work in progress, like everything worth doing.