What the web is versus what we want it to be

In recently listening to a podcast from Gary Vaynerchuk, I realized how differently him and I see the world. While I respect what he does, and I follow a lot of his advice, it comes from a different direction.

In particular, Gary provides a ton of great ideas on how to generate increasingly large amounts of content. In the episode linked above, Gary says:

“I want to be right. I’m not talking about this because it’s how I’d like it to be. I talk about it because it’s how it is.”

When it comes to our clients at GreenMellen, I’m the same way. We work to get results regardless of how things “should be” (within the realm of morality, of course). Personally, though, I’m more interested in how the web could be versus trying to extract ever more from the web we have.

Our podcast and Meetup are both called “A Brighter Web” because that’s what we’re pushing toward, and I often share about technologies like RSS and owning your content that help bring more control back to users. It’s similar to Jay Acunzo and his idea of escaping the content hamster wheel to build more resonance with those that you reach.

Both?

There’s certainly a place for both. Jay’s approach is worthless unless you have some degree of reach so that people can see your ideas, but I think Gary goes a bit far into “50 posts per day is better than 40 posts per day”. He’s not wrong, given today’s landscape, but the ever increasing hamster wheel of content is a stressful and depressing future.

Thankfully, AI is likely going to kill that. In the short run, AI will just make the hamster wheel spin faster. Instead of 50 posts, you can do 500, or 5000. It’ll quickly become untenable for everyone, and humanity will find a place at the top.

Jay has a great two-part series where he talks about his dream for the future, and it’s a future that I’d love to see. Even better, you don’t need to wait for “the future” to start doing it; you can start right now, and you’ll likely find yourself in a great place when the hamster wheel inevitably catches on fire and burns out.