50

A(nother) slight diversion from my Democracy series…

This is my 50th newsletter. 🎉

When I started writing Little Teapot, around the middle of last year, I didn’t really have any particular expectations for it. I was just thinking on things and wanted the challenge of turning that into writing that was cogent enough that other people might think on them too.

I didn’t come here with an audience. I wanted my writing to stand alone because that—to me—was the only way I could really judge if it was valuable and not just bluster. My first newsletter got sent to no-one; the subsequent few newsletters were sent to a tiny handful of people who mostly found me via the community over at

The Kākā by Bernard Hickey

, where I chime in occasionally in the comments.

However, as I reach 50 published newsletters I actually still don’t count a single pre-Teapot friend or family member among my subscribers. Not because they wouldn’t support me, but because none of them actually know I write this… My wife has regularly expressed the suspicion I might be “secretly writing a book or something”, but even she doesn’t actually know the truth!...

On the contrary, many of the ‘bigger’ writers here came with household name recognition: Journalists, politicians, artists, chef, published authors, high-profile Twitter or Instagram or YouTube personalities; and with a profile that ensured hundreds or thousands of subscribers before they’ve even got as far as writing that ubiquitous 2-word “Coming soon...” first newsletter.

I’m none of those things. I’ve intentionally not gamed my “meatspace” reputation to bring subscribers here, and you still won’t find me cross-hawking my wares on X or Threads or elsewhere. I don’t write especially topically or about click-bait subjects… I always far preferred you found me by pulling the thread of a thoughtful comment you saw under the thoughtful writing of another author.

You might consider me a little late to the party taking that particular approach, but I still like it. There is a small group of writers here who have toiled away, producing valuable writing over years, on that path, building their audience from absolute scratch and without gimmicks. I have a lot of respect for that. I like the challenge of being validated by people who have no incentive to validate you.

And, regardless, none of that would change the personal pride I have in the 100,000-odd words, likes, comments, and subscribers now found under the Little Teapot banner.

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The internet, and especially social media, has this impressive trick of supplying us with an enormous audience, while making it seem like we're still just “chatting to ourselves” in the quiet of our offices or homes. I've actually done my fair share of public speaking over the years, and I am quite comfortable with audiences generally. But in that part of my life I’ve never come close to the topics I might cover on here, and doubt I would do anywhere near as readily as I type these things out, on a comfortable chair in the sun.

That’s a sobering thought when placed adjacent to arguments about the value of “digital town squares” and “freedom of digital speech”.

Still, whether all that is a net-good or bad is something worth thinking about. Plenty of the world's worst opinions are sprayed about with reckless abandon, and many are grotesquely amplified simply because raised eyebrows have proven more ‘valuable’ than raised ideals. But, equally, would my inside voice be heard anywhere but for the ease of platforms like this? Would some of the insightful thinkers I’ve fortified my own ideology with be being heard?

It’s fair to wonder if those things, taken together, don’t represent an impressive self-own in the age of both information and attention. And it leads me to wonder how we might even define ‘human scale’ now. After all, I’m publishing these very musings on a platform designed expressly to amplify ‘reach’ far beyond ‘value’. And all the platforms are like that.

Kind-of an aside, but I was recently reading that the fastest-growing YouTube channel right now (Cosmo TV)¹ is someone literally filming their phone screen while they watch other people’s videos, and then drawing some coloured circles…

Dear Future-Generations-Who’d-Like-Us-To-Solve-Climate-Change,

Sorry.

Love, 2024

Anyway. Fifty newsletters in, I like to think there’s some interested ideas among them. There’s certainly some other interesting ideas scattered across my dysfunctional notetaking systems that I hope to turn cogent enough for you to find interesting as well.

So, if you’ve been here for a while, genuine thanks: Nice to reach you.

And if you’ve only recently found our (lower-case) tea party, it’s excellent to have you here: Feel free to jump back and boost the readership numbers on some of that earlier writing… that’s what I’ll be telling my wife, family, and friends to do (now I’ve got something valid to show them).

-T

1. I’m not linking to it. Because it’s horseshit.