By Walt Hickey
Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.
This week, I spoke to Julia Alexander, digital strategy consultant and author of the new blog Posting Nexus.
Julia’s brilliant, she’s been one of the most insightful and compelling minds on attention — where we allocate it, how we measure that, and what becomes of that — for several years now, and when I learned about this new project I was incredibly excited to get her on a Sunday edition to hear more about what’s got her, well, attention.
We spoke about the incentive structures of the internet, attention as digital currency, and how online trends redefine culture.
Alexander can be found on X and Threads, and the project is Posting Nexus
This interview has been condensed and edited.
Julia Alexander, thank you so much for coming on.
Thank you for having me. What an honor.
It’s always great to talk to you. I've been a fan of your work for a long time, and whether it was your independent newsletter or this new thing, it is always really, really fun to talk to you about what people are consuming and watching and reading and seeing.
Thank you, I appreciate it.
I wanted to talk about Posting Nexus. It’s a new project that you are launching and it is a really fascinating dive into attention and essentially how it has become commoditized, how we use it on the internet, and where it goes. Just to back out a bit, can you tell me a little about why you wanted to go in this direction and start this thing up?
Posting Nexus came out of this obsession I have with understanding why people do what they do on the internet and how that affects what they do or don't do off the internet. I now work at Disney, and we won’t get into any of that, unfortunately, but a large part of my career was spent looking at the development of the streaming industry and the reality that people's attention was moving away from these closed-circuit traditional distributors to more open-circuit digital distributors who were operating at a pace that was almost relentless, and that was in large part because the attention we gave to digital services was relentless. When I moved into Disney, it didn't stop me thinking a lot about why people do things, where they give attention, and what they want out of attention.
So, I decided to launch Posting Nexus, which is me and a few friends who are doing this, edited by the brilliant Allegra Frank until someone very smartly hires her full time. As I say in the intro, it's not a newsletter, it's not a blog, it's kind of just a harbor for thoughts about a lot of this stuff. It really came out of this idea that you can boil down a lot of what people want and where they decide to give their attention into a matrix that I call the IPA matrix, which has nothing to do with beer. It has everything to do with identity, platforms and attention, and when you take those three circles and you put them into a Venn diagram, you get incentive structures and quite often hidden incentive structures. These exist for both the bottom up, so that's us doing things on the internet, and the top down, which are these massive conglomerates who build things on the internet.
A great example would be when we look at something like Barbenheimer, which was effectively just an offline manifestation of online attention. Part of the reason that movie did as well as it did is because it leaned into the idea that my identity, which is formed by my interests and the platforms where I socialize, where I'm getting my social capital, and the attention that I receive for participating in this culture then create an incentive structure for me to go out and participate in something in order to post.
My general theory on a lot of the tension now is that you give attention in order to receive attention, and through the democratization of a lot of the stuff that we do, we've made it much easier to receive attention by giving attention. I think that constant focus on receiving attention by giving attention leads to this kind of posting nexus.
I am very interested in this, just as you are, and our jobs touch on this a bit. You saw it with the technology of film. Charlie Chaplin used to be able to do three shows a night and hit three audiences, and the technology of film made it so that he could be in every cinema in North America, if not further. It seems like what we've had recently is the next advance of that, so now all those audiences within those audiences can entertain each other as well.
It's fundamentally inverted a lot of where we gather our attention from and how we disperse it, to the extent that I think it does terrify some people. I would love your thoughts on how this very unique moment we find ourselves in makes this such a fun topic to go into.
What's really fascinating is that what's underlying this entire structure is the idea that growth is the end state, that growth is the final destination, and if that is the final destination then there’s no real final point. If we think about that in terms of your own life, if you're listening to this, maybe you're a writer and your end point is a book, or you want to write a novel. If you're working within a large company, maybe your end point is CEO or vice president. There actually is an end point.
When we think about the way our lives are constructed, which are intrinsically more digital than they are physical at this point, there is no end point. The numbers on your follower count continue to go up and your value, you as a person, is intrinsically tied to making those numbers go up, which means you create labor for companies effectively for free, right? There's this idea that if you do it enough, some offline benefits will occur. If you're an influencer, maybe you'll get a free trip to Rome; if you’re a poet, maybe you'll get a book deal out of it. There’s this incentive to continue creating free labor for these conglomerates.
But if you're the conglomerate — and this is what I like to spend a lot of time on in Posting Nexus. It's not just why we do what we do, it’s how are we incentivized by companies that are then incentivized by their own ambitions. If you look at what they've started to realize, it’s that they've run out of space to grow, and by space I mean they've literally run out of people. They cannot reach any more people than they're going to reach. If the planet is the best example of finiteness, that's where they are, but they’re designed to incentivize growth, so what do they do?
If you're on Instagram, all of a sudden you're posting photos, but have you thought about posting a video on this new form of entertainment called Reels? If you’re on YouTube, it's Shorts, and if you are an Uber customer because you love taking cars somewhere, have you considered getting your food via Uber? It's finding different ways to capture more slices of pie within someone's attention based on the necessities of their life.
Getting into the mixture of business strategy and cognitive behavioral reasoning really starts to help us illustrate why we do what we do on the internet. What I want to do with Posting Nexus quite a bit, and maybe this is going to sound a little naive or a little childish, but I want to figure out a way for us to build a better internet that we understand.
If we know that we do this for Facebook, that might not stop us from posting because we like to connect with our friends. Or on Twitter, I like to post to get likes because I am also addicted to the dopamine rush from when we do those things. But if we intrinsically understand that what we're doing is operating within this growth state and we want to get to a steady state where actually just the right level of attention and just the right level of input is going to provide a much happier and a much more mentally healthy lifestyle, how do we get there by working on what we can do and what we can control versus what we can't do?
I want to dive into so much from there, just because you hit on something really interesting that got me thinking. There are basically 330 million Americans and there are 24 hours in a day, so that’s essentially 8 billion hours that you can have from America. That is the total addressable American time.
I think what you’re getting at is that we are brushing up on that; there’s a point at which growth really can maximize. Let’s say you’ve got 2 billion hours for sleep in the aggregate, and another 4 billion hours for work.
We are getting to the total addressable market of American time if we really think that growth is the only way to go about it. I would love for you to speak more to that element of it, because that was really interesting.
I think about this joke from a few years ago that you'll remember. The prompt for the joke is that at one point, Netflix's former CEO, Reed Hastings, said “Our only competition is sleep,” and then a few years later, the Pokémon company came out with Pokémon Sleep. All of a sudden it was like, well, Pokémon figured out how to beat sleep. The eight hours a day you actually don't have my attention, finally they figured out a way to get into it.
It almost feels matrix-y, right? It feels very dystopian.
The thing about growth is that we don't talk a lot about cost. A great example of this comes from this great economist, Herman Daly, who died in 2022. He pointed out that GDP is a really weird factor of just looking at the economic value of a country. It’s the growth of product, and when we look at the growth of product, it's been 50 times what it was 50, 60 years ago — in large part because of private companies, because of Reagan economics, you can get into a whole economic debate about it. We don't talk about the cost, both of resources and of time and health that go into creating that product. And if we look at the cost, actually, is it a net benefit or is it a net consequence?
Attention by nature plays on two core strings: It plays on how I view myself and my value, which is then the attention I want, and it plays into where I know I can get that attention, and right now that's platforms. It used to be that your growth was in a very limited base. Your growth was in a group of friends, at a company, maybe on your soccer team. There was a very limited group where you had tangible benefit or tangible consequence. Both are good, depending on the attention you sought out.
When we add in platforms and the ability to go and seek that out, tie what you know works to your identity, and take in all of this dopamine as well as all of this increased anxiety, when we have that playing out the same time you see third-party spaces disappear so people are not spending as much time with each other in real life, what you get is this growth that’s going to end in total, not just disruption, but total destruction for a lot of people. You cannot keep going this way. It used to be, to your point exactly, Walt, that you would stop for eight hours to sleep, and now you stop for six hours to sleep. Or you would go to bed with a book and now instead you go to bed with your Twitter feed.
We haven't given ourselves a chance to recover from the trauma of the last decade, especially the last five years. We've been running nonstop ever since basically the invention of the internet, but really the launch of the app store. We’ve been in this moment for the last 15, 16 years, and at some point, the speed we’re running at — the necessity for growth, which is just finding ways to take more of your attention, more of your free labor, and create something out of that and ask you to keep sticking with companies — is going to run out.
What I really want to try and figure out with Posting Nexus is where is the health, the net benefit? The net benefit is socialization, it's communication, it's connectivity. That is a net benefit. It’s entertainment — entertainment is a net connectivity. We have more democratization of creators, which means we have more voices, which means we have more points of view. That's a net positive.
It was a net positive for publishing back in 2010. You were getting stories on maybe Gawker or HuffPost or BuzzFeed that you were not going to get in The New York Times. It didn't mean that one was less valuable; it just meant there was a different POV that the democratization of publishing allowed for. But at some point when everyone had an opinion, when everybody was publishing and Google didn't know how to rank it, you lost authority and you got more disinformation. That became a really bad thing.
With Posting Nexus, the underlying point is that we have such finite attention to give, even though it's sold to us as an infinite level of attention. We have a finite level of attention we can receive, even though we’re told it's an infinite level of attention, and if we keep striving for growth, growth, growth, eventually you create a world that is unsustainable. With Posting Nexus, it's effectively an equation: How much can you do for net positive before you do too much and tip over into net consequence?
That's such a good point, that from the perspective of the companies, they're arguing that growth could continue indefinitely. We can always make more money, but time is definitionally the one thing that you can't make more of.
That’s the thing with Posting Nexus that’s really fun. For people who might not know my background, I started as a blogger for Vox Media, Polygon, The Verge, and then I went into being a strategy consultant, which was great.
Recently, I wrote for a publication called Puck and there was a column dedicated to streaming, what was happening with streaming, and trends that were happening with streaming, which was, to your point, effectively an attention story. It was “YouTube is taking attention away,” that kind of story.
What I've missed is this idea of being able to have thoughts longer than a tweet and put them somewhere. For example, we've got a bunch of really interesting stories coming out with Posting Nexus. We're looking at the value of The New York Times in 2024, kind of tied around a lot of the Biden coverage before he stepped down. We've got things on decreases in posting and how social media platforms turn into entertainment platforms and what does that mean for how we approach them.
We also have really funny things, like a piece on how J.D. Vance as the first main character candidate was always going to happen because he’s the first VP candidate ever who has an online history, like in terms of actually posting when he was 20. That's something we've only really seen with influencers over the last decade, and seeing how they've gone through it gets us to this moment where we can inevitably see where Vance goes.
So we've got a lot of really fun stuff, but it all plays into this idea that we give our attention to things and our attention rewards through monetary incentives. Both Walt and I have worked in digital media, and when you give the attention to people, it then gives them a monetization pathway, and that’s the number one incentive structure. If we think about how we give attention, how we then better focus that attention on something where we know the end result actually is a fiscal reward for a lot of companies or creators, how does that change the way we operate on the internet? And how does it change the way we want to receive some of those benefits, if that's something we want to do?
We're getting into a world where your level of posting is the only growth that people have left to chase. This is all these companies have: that you're spending your time consuming Instagram stories. We need you to post in DMs because we know that's where you're spending time because the future of the internet is much smaller. We need you to create a post in a DM that steals from a post that's in your feed in order for us to then serve your data. There's all of that. People intrinsically know this.
The New York Times? Our mutual friend, Ryan Broderick. Casey Newton, who writes Platformer. They are very good at writing about this. What I want to get at is the underlying incentive structures that we don't always talk about that are inherently tied to everything you do. If we break that apart, both from a strategic standpoint and a psychological standpoint, how do we better understand the internet that we are helping to create?
This has reminded me of genuinely one of the first conversations that we had, which was us talking about Wattpad. A few weeks ago they IPO'd, and I think they still remain an incredibly interesting company. It just grounds some of these headier ideas we're talking about. Wattpad is a good example of a company that became a very wealthy company and a very valuable company because of the broad, dispersed labor of a lot of other people.
Wattpad is a great example. I will say in full transparency, I do own shares in Wattpad. I went in when they were public, and this is not financial advice. I think those are the two disclaimers I have to have.
Wattpad’s very interesting. Wattpad — which is now Webtoon. They merged with a South Korean online comic company a few years ago — existed as a place where people could go and upload their fiction, often a lot of fan fiction. You had 14-year-olds writing stories for other people on the internet. What was interesting about Wattpad was that when it started around 2010, it was one of the first mobile app success stories. It worked because of the iPhone and Androids.
You had people who'd go on and they would read their little stories and they would follow creators, but there was no actual financial incentive because you weren't paying the creators. The incentive was building a follower base. You had a lot of people at 14 who tended to be the audience for Wattpad, especially 14-year-old girls who were dealing with a lot of self-negativity in their real life, because they're teenagers coming of age in the time of Tumblr and Instagram and there's a lot of self-negativity on those platforms for young teenage girls.
This was an opportunity where they could share their very specific, niche interests. They could write fan fiction about One Direction, or they could write fan fiction about their favorite anime, and they can write their short stories and have a really solid community of people — like LiveJournal for us — come out and say, “This is really great. You're talented, we'd love to continue reading.” And you could see your success and that attention you're receiving grow literally in the number of followers you had. It became this wholesome space away from the internet in a different way.
I can't remember exactly the year they did this, but then Wattpad starts introducing financial incentives. There's this idea that you can charge for chapters as you're releasing them and people can subscribe to you for early access. As Wattpad continues to develop and they realize there's this really strong audience of content creators who are creating pretty well-thought-out content that would make for really good movies and TV series, Wattpad then launches its film division and says, we want to work with creators on this platform and bring their work to Sony Pictures, to Netflix, to Disney. We want to get them books.
So you have movies like To All the Boys I Loved Before and that genre, which did not start on Wattpad, or you had After, which did start on Wattpad, and you had all these movies coming out that were gaining a larger audience. These authors then create a cycle of further posting, right? Because now people are saying, I can do that. I have access to Wattpad. I think I'm a good writer. And you see, which we've seen over and over again, how it goes from 1,000 subscribers to 10,000 to 10 million to 100 million users who are all posting in an effort to get attention.
What's really interesting is how we define the value of that attention, because it used to be that the value of attention on the platform when people first started was from other 14- or 15-year-olds. It was a very peer-to-peer situation. It was, you are writing for someone like me.
Now that value is defined by a Netflix executive in their 50s who says, I really think there are 14-year-old girls who would like this type of movie. That's really popular on the site, so we're going to work with Wattpad. The value has now become entirely backed by a financial reward. And if it's not backed by a financial reward, it’s still within the follower count. What you get now is this company who — again, I bought shares in it — I think has a really strong business operation, because you have an endless supply of content coming in. You only need to pick a handful of titles that you think will appeal to these larger companies, and then you work with the author on getting them into this three-picture deal with Netflix.
All of a sudden you’re in between a very traditional world of moviemaking and television series, and you have this constant supply of free ideas and free content coming in that you technically can own the rights to if you work with a creator. No 17-year-old writer at this point is going to say no to having a movie on Netflix. So you get into a really interesting constant flow of supply with very high levels of demand that you can then cherry-pick.
The other version of this — which is another company I have shares in, and this is not financial advice, for transparency — is Reddit. Once Google aligned and said, hey, people want more familiar answers when they're searching for “do I have cancer,” Google said, we can just pull from Reddit. It's going to help us with our AI and we can just serve that instead of having to pay The New York Times to have this.
All of a sudden you’re in this world where Reddit becomes the future of the internet because Google is the still the main pathway to the internet. And if you're pulling from Reddit, what does that do to authority? What does that do to the incentive structure to be popular on Reddit? Which for a while was just, did you show authority and knowledge within your own subreddit community? Now it takes on a whole new world.
The business applications of controlling the supply of attention, putting it through a very narrow passage by cherry-picking demand, and how you can sell that demand, is kind of where we're at right now with a lot of these user-generated-content platforms.
I love that. They found a way to sell, or at least monetize, like in Reddit's case, respect and reputation in the form of karma. And with Webtoon, I was shocked to see that they're like a $2.8 billion company now. There have always been web comics on the internet, but they were the first to really roll them up into Webtoon. There has always been fan fiction on the internet, but they were among the first to roll them up into this package.
AO3, Fanfiction.net, they’re not trying to develop a flywheel to give you more attention. They're excellent communities and they retain a lot of that original character. But the thing that Webtoon was really interested in is that they realized the currency of their realm is attention and followers, and now they are a multibillion-dollar company.
That, I think, was one of the more compelling stories from this summer. When I saw that you were coming out with Posting Nexus, I was like, oh man, there could not have been a better moment for this. There could not be a better moment to really think about how attention works online.
Yeah. And I know you'll appreciate the underlying part of this, because I know you are, and I mean this with all the love, a giant nerd.
Gigantic.
But one of the best stories I wrote when I was at The Verge — not in terms of it being a good story, but in terms of me liking it — was when I talked to the Wattpad team, the Webtoon team, and said, how do you incorporate data? You have huge numbers of chapters being uploaded every single day from all these authors that come on.
They developed a tool, which will sound very familiar to anyone who's ever worked in SEO, where they look at every single word and they look at very specific trend words and try to figure out if it's reaching an audience cluster or cohort that is in demand from other studios. For example: Latino werewolf. Is there an audience for Latino werewolf romances? They can track it, and they do track it. Then they play around with the recommendation algorithms and some of the product placement, and as that grows, they then say, okay, we want to hyperfocus on this in order to sell.
That, to me, is the other underlying part of the attention story. There was a really great article by John Herrman, who works at New York Mag, and he talked about whether Twitter is back or not back. He ends his article by saying it doesn't really matter, because according to Twitter’s CEO, it is back. According to Elon, it's thriving. It was this idea that Twitter inherently feels very small because communities have gotten smaller. What you think is important is what's appearing on your feed, right? This is how something could be super viral on TikTok for you and no one else has ever heard of it.
That idea started with companies like Wattpad and Reddit. They started with this idea that has a really strong impact on this audience and the equation they do. And I worked with companies — not Wattpad, not Reddit — as a consultant on this exact equation, which was: How monetizable is this small audience compared to that small audience? If you're going to look at your cost, where are you going to get the strongest return on your investment?
We do that now across a million different cohorts every single day. It’s just, where do we think the attention that we're receiving, because they are getting attention from the small group, actually transfers into an action that we can better monetize versus what’s the attention that we’re seeing that is not going to transfer into a monetizable action. You do that equation, and what that ends up doing is restructuring culture.
Imagine Twilight today. Someone would’ve been like, queer vampire? We think that audience translates into highly monetizable. Now you have Simon and Schuster, Netflix, YouTube — you have all these companies saying, okay, there's a trend here. So we're going to see a new volume of content support that trend. Then a year later, all of a sudden, The New York Times writes a story about how everyone's into queer vampires.
It's like, well, that started because someone looked at a cohort of strong attention and said, that's monetizable. It just blew up into redefining what culture is. That's pure attention online that transfers offline.
That idea of “this niche is monetizable; this one's not” feels like that's been every success story on the internet for the past decade.
When you were describing that, I was reminded of my favorite genre collision, which created something that could not have existed before the internet: the success of D&D podcasts and D&D content, whether it’s Critical Role, or you see all this stuff on Dropout doing phenomenally well right now. That only happened because there was a group of niche fans that really, really clicked with something. They realized that this stuff is easier to produce than scripted content sometimes, and you could just see the value proposition make sense to people in real time. Now they’re selling out Madison Square Garden.
Seeing this very market-based thing, as you were describing, was like, oh man. We’ve seen this happen. That’s really cool.
I'm so happy you said this, because it's kind of the end point of what Posting Nexus wants to get at. The fact that things happen in one area and then move somewhere else happens all the time. You watch your favorite football team and then you go watch them play at the stadium. You discover your favorite singer via an album and then you go watch them play a concert. That's super traditional.
What we're seeing now is a continuation of that, but it's fascinating to me. I think about this with Critical Role; I think about this with the Pod Save America guys. Effectively what they're doing is taking this attention that you've given them and monetizing it in a new way that feels weird to us because it's different from a superstar musician or a team sport that has always existed in the offline. This is a group of talent, a group of people that we associate solely with being online. And we have that really strong parasocial relationship with creators, because we literally watch them in our bed, even more so than TV. They're in our bed and we listen to them on their podcasts, because they can't just have a YouTube, right? Now they’re podcasting, and they’re finding different ways to capture more attention.
It says a lot about how much we cling to human connectivity. This is my general barbell thesis, is that the world going forward, online or offline, is implausibly big — implausibly big like Christianity, or Taylor Swift — and addressably small. Which is still good; it just means monetizable, like Pod Save America or Critical Role.
The whole goal of the first one is that you don't actually have to do 90,000 different things. People will come to you because that's what they crave. They crave that connection. And the second one, the more opportunity you give people to come and see you physically and have that connectivity, have that connection, the more you're going to be able to split how you want your attention eight different ways. Now that they've seen you, maybe they'll buy the book you're selling as opposed to if you just had the podcast.
When we give attention and when people demand our attention in different forums, how does that then create these trends within business, within culture, the way we look at religion, the way we look at physical spaces? How does that impact our life offline? So again, it's that general thesis of why people do anything they do online, and how does that translate to what happens offline? That’s the obsessive point for me.
You've been so generous with your time, I want to make sure we bring this one home. You and I have both worked for the biggest entertainment company on the planet, you and I have both had independent newsletters that were profitable, and it is comforting to realize that it’s not simply everything gets eaten or nothing survives. There is a vibrant version of the internet that has all of this.
My favorite topic, which I annoy everyone in my life with, is history. I realize that makes me the most boring person on the internet, or just the most average person on the internet, but the thing I really like about history — whether that’s ancient, modern, whatever it is — is that nothing is new. Everything happens again and again, so the internet and the fight for attention is like forms of religion battling it out during the Crusades. I mean, it was far more violent, and I’m glad we’re not in those times, but it’s this idea of what you're choosing to give attention and therefore power to, how we then take that power and tie it to our identity, and our way of communicating and the incentive that we have at the basis of all this is the same.
What the internet has done is create unprecedented scale and rapidity that we can't even comprehend. We don't even have time to sit and think, oh, that's crazy that that thing happened. The publishing industry was wiped out, but we don’t even have to do that because there's this new thing that's happening and it’s newsletters. Which by the way are just pamphlets, which by the way are what people used to print the 1600s, right?
It's not new, and yet for us because of the abundance of information that we have coming in, the abundance of content, of entertainment, of distraction that is demanding our attention, we don't have time to sit back and think, what was then five minutes ago and what will be five minutes from now? As we look at some of the biggest power players that build out a lot of these demands — whether it's user-generated social media, whether it's entertainment, whatever it is — bring it back down and really sit and think: What have I given my attention to today and why did I do that? What did it bring to me? And actually, what if I didn’t want to do this?
You kind of see this with Gen Z, by the way, who are like, I want a phone that's not connected to the internet. Them realizing this is not actually good for me, but what do I need in order to stay connected and feel that really strong presence of humanity?
Big question. To your point, it's a super heady topic. What I try to do with the blog is bring it down into a topic that makes sense, that we can actually, tangibly grasp, while asking that question, which is why do you do anything and how has it affected you offline today?
In your intro post you had a line saying it's a humongous topic, and there are a million tendrils to pull on. I am very excited to read those million tendrils. It is called Posting Nexus. I’ll be sure to link it out.
Julia, where can folks find you? Where can they follow you? Where can they see what you’re up to?
Wow, this is the first time I’m not in a publication. This is crazy. I’m still on X and Threads at @loudmouthjulia, and Posting Nexus is being hosted on Ghost. I’m trying that one out.
Hey, a million flowers blooming. It's a fun time.
This sounds like such a fun project, and I’m very eager to keep following where you’re going. Thank you for your time. I really appreciate it.
Thank you for having me. It's always a pleasure talking to you.
Edited by Susie Stark.
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