Andrew McCluskey

As TikTok video essayist Rayne Fisher-Quann wrote in her Substack essay on “micro-individuality”, “everyone seems to be more obsessed with individuality and differentiation than ever before, while simultaneously participating in one of the most intoxicating lifestyle reproduction mechanisms in human history.”

Decentralization is the kind of thing that only matters when troubles arise. It's like an insurance: most of the time you don't need it, but for the few times you do need it, you REALLY need it. Since we can't have "intermittent decentralization", turn it on & off with a switch, this means we need it permanently

I often think of the Noah Smith quote: “Fifteen years ago, the internet was an escape from the real world. Now, the real world is an escape from the internet.”

People will, if given the opportunity, read a 5,000-word essay on their phone. And they’ll do it right there, with their head still on the pillow. In those cases, it’s not terrible; it’s wonderful. And if you can capture that, if you can direct that attention to things worth attending to, it’s incredibly powerful. So if you’re a writer, why not go

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Serious-minded persons, for example, are continually condemning the habit of going to the cinema, and telling us that it leads the young into crime.

People naturally remember musical language, and I would encourage writers to inject their prose with a bit of music. When you’re writing, think about repetition and variety. Crescendos and rests. Pace and punctuation. Read your work out loud, and feel the rhythm of the words in your voice.