It started in my first job in DC. In addition to the TVs on our desks continuously broadcasting the news, we wired ourselves up with all manner of emailed political news, starting with a minute-by-minute headline service provided by the party's "war room," and extending to services, paid and free, by the DC upstart news establishments in vogue in the early 2010s. I opened my day with Mike Allen (maybe he'd mention us!) and closed it with a quick perusal of what would print tomorrow. Those hours a day added up to thousands of hours of news reading a year. Did any of it matter? Some might have, to the extent the job required bits of topical copywriting, but mostly it did not. I was trying to be as close to the action as possible. The trouble was, if you wanted to be near the action, then reading about it was just about the worst thing you could do. Rather than getting on the field, I was angling for the best spectator view. There I was, sitting in my bed in the morning or at my desk during the day, reading about the procedural exploits, negotiation gambits, and decisions of power made by someone else. If you had to read about it, then you weren't close to the action. This was clear to anyone: if you weren't giving the interviews or leaking the tidbits, then you weren't making the news—you were reading it.
Another trouble, less visible to people aspiring to matter in DC, was whether what mattered to beltway political journalism counted for anything at all. Upon reflection, a decade or two later, while I thought I was really connected, I spent a huge amount of time reading breathless coverage about the tide. It went in and out every day, and the scribblers were there to tell me about it. The occasional long-read or investigative or magazine piece was analogous to coverage of the phases of the moon. A good Farmers Almanac, if they had a version for politics, might've saved me a great deal of time. And there would've been nothing in those tide charts about earthquakes and tsunamis. While we were worried about the "fiscal cliff" and the "debt limit" and whether wily ol' McConnell would repeal Obamacare, what really mattered was the brewing storm that swept Trump into power (twice!). Maybe someone saw it, but nothing in the minute-by-minute political journalism I voraciously consumed in 2015-16 did. (And this isn't really partisan: the same continuous, breathless coverage almost entirely missed what actually mattered about the 2024 election.) As a newsreader, I wasn't blind, but my vision was filled completely with what was easy to see, and that ease-of-sight meant the stories didn't matter.
One could take any number of lessons from this (be less concerned with keeping track of other people than with making progress on your stuff; stop wasting time with busywork; etc.), the most lesson I want to focus on today comes from that last thought: what we can see, and are interested in, and can easily understand isn't what actually matters. What captures our attention and entertains us indicates futility. To wit: the mid-2010s was addicted to counting votes, who was in/out of the Obama White House, and how the insiders reacted to Romney's failures, and all of that attention ensured we completely missed that which caused Clinton's doom and Trump's triumph. The stuff we couldn't see, because we were busily looking elsewhere, those unseen forces are what mattered. The more you were plugged in to discourse, the less you were likely to understand. This applies not just to political news ten years ago—it's all around us.
Take, as an example, the link below from the fine folks at Colossus, a publication most notable for breathless, credulous coverage of software people in the AI age. I've linked to them before. Their writing is pretty good and they have perfected access journalism, so their subjects are unique, too. They're right in the center of current tech/business discourse. The example piece below and its concept of "invisible companies" is one that I just can't stop thinking about. After years of following capital and tech in the headlines, the Colossus journalists are surprised (shocked?) to have found out that not all decent moneymaking concerns garner headlines and awareness, even in our oversaturated media landscape. They've found that business models and stratagems not regularly in the discourse have ended up mattering more than those that are. Rather than chalk this up to the myopia of popular business journalism or the narrowness and shallowness of the discourse, the writers chalk it up to a masterful discourse-related gambit: because these companies aren't falling over themselves to appear in DealBook must mean that they are pursuing what any good laptop-toting MBA describes as a strategy—invisibility.
Is not being in the discourse really a purposeful tactic practiced by the neglected? Or might it be that the frenetically focused discourse reader just misses a whole lot about the world? The folks at Colossus can't imagine the latter, so they've written a whole long essay about the former: of course not being notable must be something business leaders choose on purpose. Otherwise, the discourse-addled journalist assumes, why would a business leader do anything at all?
Whether you find self storage or local industrial parts suppliers or similar concerns boring almost doesn't matter. The discourse writers don't care about things they find boring, and with nothing written about these boring businesses, the avid reader (and writer) won't know what he doesn't know. When desperately connected writers go to work, they aim to add to the discourse—they want in on the spectacle—and so we get pieces like this one about how even trend of companies flying under the journalists's radar is more about the company trying to be secretive rather than the limits of the journalist's radar. (One wonders if the operators of a string of Ford dealerships or McDonalds franchises or Holiday Inn Expresses thought their choices not to retain PR flacks, attend all the best conferences, and flamboyantly aim for the attention of J-school grads were indeed strategic or simply obvious wastes of energy.) Being charitable to our journalists, they have realized that what really matters often isn't driving headlines or ever-present in the discourse.
I can't help but assume that the lack of headlines for these unknown businesses and their boring leaders is more a fault of the headline-writers than anything else. Billing unsung profit-making companies "invisible" and, rather than noting the lack of attention as a failure of journalists to avoid anything but the already-entertaining, declaring invisibility to be a grand strategy, they've found a way to force non-appearance itself into the discourse. In other words, these journalists declare that invisibility is a tactic deployed by companies in pursuit of a longer-term goal to eventually get into the discourse. It's an ouroboros where all that matters is attention and participation in the spectacle.
In other words, it's nonsense. The discourse misses what matters because its practitioners seek, above all, entertainment and spectacle. Us readers don't get off easily—we participate in the spectacle as much as any writer. They are giving us, now more than ever, exactly what we want.
I'm mostly talking to myself, both now and fifteen years ago. It is better to unplug from the discourse and the headlines and the latest breaking news; better to ignore the breathless spectacle. The tide goes in and out a few times a day: the person who snaps a picture of the high-water mark isn't doing anything notable. Instead of thousands of hours on the discourse, focus your attention on what sits below and behind it, on what actually matters. A good weighing mechanism is that what matters isn't in the headlines or the comments, the trade papers, or on LinkedIn. It's not even what you hope to talk about on a panel at an event. It's what might you do today that'll matter in a decade. For me: I focused on some difficult work for long enough to get it right; I showed up for a friend; I taught my kid how to swing a golf club; I saw the ocean.
Reading
Invisible Companies
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