ReHacked vol. 243: 3 wonderful years!

#ReHacked is now three years old. The idea of the newsletter is slow, filtered, curated news for you. You can name them the “old” news. I monitor and select news so you don’t have to. You can do more valuable and meaningful things instead of scrolling the news feeds.

The most valuable findings during two years of the newsletter are below. First one was included in ReHacked issue #85 (now they renamed as volumes) which states that it is good for your psychological sanity to skip the “hot” news and start to consume the old ones.

Other is prediction back from 1997, that “The currency of the New Economy won't be money, but attention.” by a radical theory of value. You can find link to the full article in ReHacked vol. 187 (search for the article “Attention Shoppers!”).

One more significant change happened to the newsletter this year - I decided to change from twice a week schedule to a weekly. Your time and attention is limited and valuable resource ad I don’t want to abuse it.

As usually on such occasion, I am sending you the volume without news to celebrate TWO year anniversary and to thank you for your attention and time reading and sharing this newsletter. Below you will find the links to the mentioned articles.

Thank you for being together, thank you for subscribing and sharing this newsletter with your friends. Hope we will stay together for one more year. And another, and another, and another…

The best gift for me and my newsletter is share of this newsletter with your friends. Sad, but same as the last year, I ask you to support Ukraine, every single dollar is important. You can choose the organisation below.

Ukrainian Red Cross | Providing emergency aid to all those in need

Urgent Action Fund for Women’s Human Rights | Supporting women and LGBTQI+ people in and around Ukraine

Voices of Children | Helping children in Ukraine affected by conflict

Support the Armed Forces of Ukraine | via National Bank of Ukraine

RSS feed is available if you don’t want to clutter your inbox.

“We’re surrounded by so much information that is of immediate interest to us that we feel overwhelmed by the never-ending pressure of trying to keep up with it all.”

— Nicolas Carr

Why You Should Stop Reading News

Most of what you read online today is pointless. It’s not important to living a good life. It’s not going to help you make better decisions. It’s not going to help you understand the world. It’s not dense with information. It’s not going to help you develop deep and meaningful connections with the people around you.

Here are the problems with the news (and the reasons for you to stop consuming the news):

1. the speed of news delivery has increased;
2. the cost to produce news has dropped significantly;
3. like other purveyors of drugs, producers of news want you to consume more of it;
4. the incentives are misaligned.

Attention Shoppers! | WIRED (1997)

A truly limited resource

But how does attention come to dominate the emerging economy? Any conventional economist will tell you that ordinary material products are scarce and presumably always will be. Technically, that might be true, but in practice, mass production spews forth so much that there's a shift in emphasis away from the material desires that dominated the old economy. For many people in the US, Western Europe, Japan, and a growing list of other places, the materials needed for basic living are more than abundant. To take one small example, in the US food is so cheap and plentiful that eating too much is considered more of a concern than getting too little.

Attention is different. It really is scarce, and the total amount per capita is strictly limited. To see why, consider yours, right now. It's going to these words. No matter how brilliant or savvy at multitasking you are, you can't be focusing on very much else. Ultimately then, the attention economy is a zero-sum game. What one person gets, someone else is denied.

Your wishes for the occasion goes here:

Thanks for reading!

Dainius