Hello hello hello out there in this weird and terrible and beautiful world we inhabit, this world of wonder and sadness and extreme fartage of many kinds. I’m Craig Mod and this is Roden and it’s 2025.
Below: SPECIAL PROJECTS 6th anniversary (!!), a book tour, notes on attention, a didactic rant on social media in 2025, and a plea for Not Bullshit.
Book Tour
I’m going on a BOOK TOUR in May / June 2025. It’s a chance to promote Things Become Other Things, but it’s also a chance to meet SPECIAL PROJECTS members face-to-face, and maybe organize some dinners (and other members-only activities?).
To help me figure out where to go, please take my:
As I wrote on Ridgeline recently (apologies for repeating myself), the forthcoming Random House edition of my book Things Become Other Things (pre-order campaign alive and active!) is out May 6. Which is VERY SOON. In tandem with that release, I will go pretty much anywhere in the world (where the book is being sold) where 40+ people promise to show up for a reading / talk. We’ve already got a few places lined up and even a couple interlocutors. More on that will be announced in the coming months. But — to help me pick places and plan the trip, please take the poll! And if you leave a comment, please also leave your email address if you want a response (the poll is otherwise anonymous).
Thank you!!
Six Years of Memberships
Today (Jan 23), by chance, marks the sixth anniversary of SPECIAL PROJECTS (née Explorers Club). As always, this is somewhat unbelievable to me — the passing of six years since launching my membership program. To say that doing so changed my life would be the understatement of the decade. Everything I’ve done in these past six years has been directly enabled by SPECIAL PROJECTS. All the walks. All the essays. All the books. All the weird projects. Even this forthcoming Random House book would not exist without the membership program (the advance only came when the book was mostly done (or, so I thought — ha ha ha you fool, cackle the Nightingalingale readers), and anyway, it would not have funded four years of literary toil). The program’s been a thing of incredible permission generation, and I am so very grateful to members old and new. (Especially those renewing their memberships today.)
What’s also amazing is the corpus of stuff (a less discerning man might call it “content”) members now have access to on the members-only site. 120+ hours of videos (board meetings, Q&As, livestreamed work sessions) and hundreds-of-thousands of words of archived pop-up newsletters. Not to mention the discounts on my books and prints.
I’m working on a little essay looking back at year six. It won’t be as expansive as the past years since we’ve locked into a workable rhythm. For posterity, here are my previous (quite long) write-ups:
Thank you thank you thank you to everyone who has joined over the years. It truly sustains everything I do. And maybe most importantly (and vulnerably), it makes me feel not so alone out here.
Podcasts?
As part of RH-TBOT launch activities, April is dedicated to media / interviews. Do you have a podcast that has published 30+ episodes? Would you like to have me as a guest? Discussing big walks, Japan, adoption, amazing mid-sized cities, photography, membership programs? Email me at media@specialprojects.jp (my assistant also gets that, which will help you get a response since I am so terrible at email). My goal is to do a couple mega-pods, and 10-15 mid-sized pods. Kevin Kelly famously did 100 podcasts for his last book, but I fear that would end my life.
Distractions / Attention
Does it feel like the last ten years were especially tough for holding onto control of your attention? As if the mass “weaponizations” of attention monsters is only growing? Exacerbated because it feels like there are no adults in charge of anything? And that the forces at play feel less social or political and more like capricious acts of nature? Of the ficklest of fickle gods? And so burying your head in a mobile game consisting of popping colorful blobs pacifies a weary soul? And that walking through a subways station is a chance to inhale yet another few Reels? And an escalator — no longer primarily a machine of conveyance, but an opening for another few seconds to blob-pop rather than look around and ponder the majesty of The Mezzanine?
Over the years, I’ve written a bunch of essays on attention and not being subject to the whims of the algoz:
I don’t know how much life you get back by disconnecting from the streams of Content Slop, but I suspect it’s a lot. And most productive, successful people (especially artists, writers) are very, very good at disconnecting, at not allowing their gaze to be sucked up by the machine. There’s absolutely no way I could have done as much as I’ve done in the past five years without being deliberate about disconnecting. (And believe me, there’s a lot more I could have done had I been better at it. Also: SPECIAL PROJECTS helped/helps motivate me to be more focused and less distracted as well.)
I haven’t slept with a phone in my room in over a decade. (The weirdest flex, yes.) If possible, I don’t sleep with it on the same floor. Chatting with Simone Giertz a few months ago, she had a brilliant idea: what if the only way to turn on the electricity in your home was to dock your phone at the front door? Me, I dock it in an avoidable corner to charge so that I don’t accidentally see it when I get up. I try my hardest to not look at it until after lunch (a phone-free morning is something I’ve been writing about for 10+ years). But even if you can’t go that far, at least get it out of your bedroom. The only networked device (only screen) in my bedroom is a Boox Palma and I love it and still use it daily after about nine months. It has two apps: Readwise Reader (for whom I’m an advisor) and Kindle. That’s it. If I wake up in the middle of the night (which is thankfully rare), I just read a little on its gently-lit screen, and am soon re-slumbering. Your attention is powerless, gutted, anemic without good sleep. If you don’t have consistent, great sleep, good luck pulling your eyeballs away from the streams, from the slop, from the torrent of news. I find I’m most susceptible to their Siren call when I’m exhausted.
Folks concoct all sorts of crazy reasons for keeping their phone in their room, the weirdest being “it’s my alarm clock.” Just buy a nice little Braun. (The iPhone alarm is famously inconsistent, anyway.) Or buy a HomePod Mini and keep it next to your bed. (Hey Siri, wake me up at eight.) If you’re worried about missing emergency calls, you can also have the HomePod notify you (I think?). I find even the mere presence of the phone changes the way my brain feels — and so not having it in my bedroom is a cornerstone to sanity.
On my Mac, I’ve been using Freedom (imperfect but works) for years to great effect. (Robin Sloan is also a productive, once-professed fan (not sure if he’s still using it, though).)
Recently I bought a BRICK — it’s a little NFC doohickey that allows you to “brick” your phone — that is, turn off a bunch of “fun” / addictive apps. You tap it when you leave the house and your phone is rendered boring. And you tap it when you come home and it can go back to eating your soul and sleeptime. An open source version of BRICK was recently released that I plan on investigating: Foqos. The only modification I’d love to make to BRICK/Foqos is the ability to “unlock” the apps for five minutes a day without the NFC tap. That’s all you need, IMO. Five minutes on Insta or Threads or Bluesky or whatever is probably enough to check in and get out. Anything else is pure diminishing returns.
What about news?, you say: My favorite way to get news is to ask a little Homepod Mini in my kitchen to “play the latest BBC global news podcast” as I make breakfast. The bonus: for the BBC, the world is more than just the US, so you get a broader sense of what’s happening than standard American news sources, and the chaos factor of the States is diminished.
Older readers may be thinking: Why are you so weak? (As a friend said to my face the other day.) Weak? Weak?? Hell yeah, I’m weak. It’s delicious, that sloppy feed, in the same way a “chicken” sandwich from McDonald’s is delicious. Ignoring that, or self-shaming into not “being stronger” is to let the soon-to-be-trillionares win. Don’t diminish your efforts, just be smart about how you control your attention. The goal is to increase the “fullness of days” — something utterly incompatible with feed slurping.
More thoughts on social networks below.
Toyama Pick
My New York Times “52 Places” pick this year was: Toyama City in Toyama Prefecture. Big props to Toyama City for handling the selection with such grace and preparedness (and no no no, they don’t know they’re going to be on the list; in fact I pathologically try to hide my having gone to the city as much as possible).
I did a slew of newspaper and TV and radio interviews over the past week. Simply to “explain” why I picked the city, with the hopes of them “getting the most” out of the selection. I want to visit again soon, but my travel and work schedule for the next six months means I probably won’t be able to swing by until late summer or fall at the earliest.
As some of you may have guessed: Toyama is indeed the location of Train Man at kissa Blue Train. Normally I wouldn’t highlight such a “hyperlocal” or “classic” shop in such a high-profile media space as the Times. (It’s just too much attention blasted onto too small a target.) But. My intuition is that Blue Train doesn’t have much time left (maybe I’m wrong, maybe it’s got twenty more years?). When I visited in October, I sat there for two hours and not one other customer came in. The owner is, I’m pretty sure, nearly deaf in totality (his wife is sprightly, though!). I ate an egg sandwich (delicious) and drank coffee (yummy) and clacked away. And watched. The owner played with his trains. (A different clacking.) It’s been open for forty-five years and the guy still harbors an affection for his trains that inspires. It’s beautiful — plainly, a beautiful shop. People should visit! And I figured — heck, why not spotlight this place? Why not give it a little boost in the twilight of its operation? Might that be fun? I’m not sure, but I think it has been well received (so say the newspaper and TV people I’ve spoken with). Anyway, I hope they’re enjoying it and I really want to get back again later this year.
Social Media
Warning: Didactic rant incoming.
Disclaimer: Social media has always made me uncomfortable. I was confused by the breathless oversharing on Facebook in the aughts. And when Twitter arrived, I bounced off it like a bag of sand thrown on a trampoline. Even the name freaked me out: Twitter? Twitching? I could feel my eyeballs twitching, even back then. BUT — I engaged, with great reluctance, and it was somewhat useful for building an audience, or at least capturing the attention a widely-shared essay might bring. (“Thanks for reading. Whatever you do, don’t follow me on Twitter.”) Thankfully, mercifully, not long after joining Twitter, I launched this newsletter and began directing all attention-capturing to email, which has paid a billion times more in dividends than Twitter ever did.
Twitter has been 99% cut out of my life for some time now (18 months-ish? I have a niche professional need to keep my account active because Japan is still, largely, a Twitter-first country and so all my Japan media stuff happens there) but as I said, I’ve always been suspicious of it, and largely against it. This is all true, I swear. Not revisionist. Even my engagement at the beginning was fraught with the complications of becoming intimate with a strange devil.
As proof, here are my first three tweets from 2007 (first at bottom):
Early social media was fun (if it ever was fun) only in the sense that it was a public group chat with interesting people, often people that you admired. (This was in a golden, far simpler era before there was such a thing as an “influencer.” Back then, influencers were just dorks who knew how to write HTML and CSS.) That — watching smart people think — was the extent of it. Without the algorithm, conversations were sanely bounded, and dopaminergic “jackpots” (going viral and suddenly being in front of a million eyeballs à la TikTok or Threads) didn’t exist. The heroin was, you could say, pretty diluted, a nice gentle analgesic high. Today, I suspect Discords, Slack, and private message groups have replaced whatever it was that early Twitter used to embody. I love my private group chats. They’re great. (Though most of the software is terrible, definitely not fast.)
Social media today is so far from whatever that reverse-cron timeline was in 2007, that it’s delusional to call them the same thing. Threads is a perfect example of the contemporary perversion. It suppresses links (indeed, for many of us, the main purpose of much early social media consumption was to find great links; Flipboard even built a once-nearly-billion-dollar-company off aggregating social media links), and optimizes for making your posts go viral, outside your follower group. This turbocharging of engagement is where most of the venom lives. Certainly most of the dopamine. Going viral is one of the worst things that can happen to a post or human. The responses are rarely generous, rarely convert to follows, and almost never convert to sales (if you’re selling something like, say, a book). And the algorithm and interface collude to incentivize invective. (Nothing gets replies like abuse.) You have no control over your reach on a platform like Threads; it’s broken as a simple one-to-many broadcasting tool.
“All our best minds went to be quants,” the saying used to go twenty years ago. Now they opt-into being paper-cut-assaulted by randos, and aren’t even getting paid.
Me? I’m doing email. (And not the Substack kind.) I am SO GRATEFUL FOR EMAIL. Good lord. I love email. I love “stupid” email services. I love inboxes. I love it all so much. And you know what else I love? The open web. And POSTAL INFRASTRUCTURE. I love that I can make books and send them nearly ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD (as soon as Russia gets their head out of their ass, we can send them there again, too). I love that these systems are largely apolitical. Are public goods. And available to all. Are not managed by one single capricious human surrounded by insufferable sycophants. I love that these systems don’t smash concentration (well, email, somewhat, sure; but nothing like an algorithmically activated feed of dingdongery) and support creativity and are DURABLE and sustainable (as proven by history).
So again: What are we doing opening those feeds?
For now: Most of my (extremely limited) social media energy is going to Bluesky. I’m sure it will rot in some terrible way given time. But presently I’m there simply because: a) it doesn’t suppress linking to things, b) it’s actually sort of fun and “nice,” c) there is very little “going viral”, and d) it’s the punk rock option, the B-side option. Lord only knows I’ve been blessed and stung by my incessant need to Be Indie my whole life (I’d be so much goddamn monetarily wealthier if I just “sold out” (W. David Marx tells me this doesn’t exist anymore, and that launching a new tequila or gin brand isn’t selling out; you’re simply publicly aspirationally maximizing your potential net worth) and stopped listening to my gut).
Social media, for me, has always been a broadcast platform for things made elsewhere. It isn’t the place where the art is created. It’s never been about arguing or fighting or scandalizing. Sometimes, rarely, it’s engendered friendships, but how many pounds of flesh have we traded for that (and I feel like I would have connected with these friends in other ways given time)? At its best, social media was a lightweight, efficient, reliable and consistent, one-to-many broadcast system. And now, in most places, it’s no longer that; as such, I find its utility to be dramatically reduced, and the negatives of engaging with it as high as ever. Instagram is mostly a place for me to check in on friends via Stories and chat. I almost never scroll the feed. But like I said at the top: The best online “feeds” for me are group chats. I’m also back on the RSS train. Oh, and amidst the muck, Kottke’s comments section is a joyful haven.
To connect this with my attention notes up above, I find the sensation of “chasing virality” to be wholly at odds with doing the kind of work that makes me feel “good” — that is, the kind of work enabled by SPECIAL PROJECTS, the kind of work that makes a day feel full and full of meaning. (In practice: Big walks, long form essays, and books.) Perhaps my allergy to viral engagement is a neurosis of my own making, perhaps I should be chasing virality, leaning into it, inhaling it like pure adrenalin, rubbing it on my gums in the morning, ignoring what it makes me do — the inanity of the viral hunt — and that on my deathbed I’ll lament the lack of viral reach, I’ll lament the clicks and views that never were … but for now, I don’t intend to tickle the tail of that dragon anytime soon.
Just, please, whatever you do: Don’t make your work — your art — dependent on a single platform.
Thus concludes our spicy start to 2025.
Here’s a palate-cleanser cat:
Thank you all for reading this far. (What a slog!) I hope your January has been as sane as it can be amidst the insanity. Several friends of mine have lost homes in LA. There’s a lot of incomprehensible stuff happening on an incomprehensible scale right now.
So — If you have a roof, the means, the space in your mind and heart, please: Make good stuff. Make bad stuff. Make anything. Hunt full days that can’t go viral. Transmute it all into Not Bullshit. Not Bullshit becomes more and more valuable the more slop is out there. I’ve got a to-do list as long as my arm, written in 0.0003pt font. Back to the mines. More soon! xx
