When you write 5-10 articles a week for six years straight, some get away from you. Even your best ideas can come out clunky, academic, overwrought. That's what happened with these two Splice Today essays about the COVID-era content gold rush and the great ideological migration of 2015-2020.1
The bones were good. The ideas were solid. But the writing felt like someone trying to install a bunch of kitchen sinks in a long row in lieu of leveling the entire house in pursuit of clarity. I lost the thread of what I do best — telling stories about how people really operate, getting at the heart of why things happen the way they do.
So I'm revisiting these pieces here, behind the paywall, for you true believers who've stuck with me through thick and thin. Same facts, same insights, same gossipy tea spilled, but stripped down to the essentials. No more clauses imbricated one atop the other like the scales of a fish — just the straight story of how politics superheated by a pandemic turned posting into a profession for some new players, and how these operators gradually followed the money from left to right.2
Think of it as a director's cut, except instead of adding scenes, I'm cutting away everything that didn’t serve the story. Sometimes less really is more.
Let's dig in.
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