Velocity Is the New Authority. Here’s Why

Om Malik:

The point of the internet now is mostly to hook attention and push it toward commerce

We’ve made an entire system that rewards “motion first and judgment later”:

We built machines that prize acceleration and then act puzzled that everything feels rushed and slightly manic.

Reminds me of this quote from Eric Gill:

We have elected to order manufacture upon inhuman lines; why should we ask for humanity in the product?

You get the sense from reading Om here that speed is not conducive to wisdom.

We get a culture optimized for first takes, not best takes.

The system rewards whoever speaks first, not whoever lives with it long enough to understand it […] It’s that the structure pays a premium for compliance and levies a tax on independence. The result is a soft capture where creators don’t have to be told what to say. The incentives do the talking.

Side note: Nicholas Carr’s book Superbloom is a treatise on this exact topic: how velocity in a communication medium is everything.