Cold Takes
The cure for the common hot take
This week, I’m back in London. As such, I find myself doing this strange dance with the internet, in order to best consume the information I normally do in real time.
For example, I’m an episode behind on Game of Thrones because I couldn’t stay up until 2am to watch it last night. I’m struggling to stay up-to-date on Cavs/Warriors because, again, the whole 2am thing. Today’s WWDC keynote is potentially problematic because it will be dinner time here in Europe. And so on.
The upside of this perceived downside is that I avoid all the hot takes. That is, the content people spew onto the internet as fast as humanly possible (and sometimes faster) in order to have something for people searching for information on said topic to click on. I used to do this for a living too, which is maybe why I seem to hate it so much now.
Just think about it for a second — or even, gasp, a minute — how likely is it that the best take on something is going to be the one put up within minutes of news spilling out? Pretty low. Instead, if you wait six or twelve, or even a whole twenty-four (!) hours, you’re likely to find far more rational, well-written, thoughtful, and thought-provoking takes. I see this time and time and time again. It’s the main reason why I’ve grown to love The Economist so much. It doesn’t focus on being the fastest take on the news, it focuses on being the best take, often in a concise manner, which I always appreciate.
Anyway, this was top of mind this afternoon when news broke very early in the U.S. morning that Microsoft would be buying LinkedIn. Suddenly, I was thrown back into the real-time stream of takes so hot they were practically magma. And there I was, clicking on said posts and being continually disappointed — both in the content and in myself for wasting my own time.
I should know better. And I do. But I still can’t help myself. Which reminded me of something I read this weekend. Teddy Wayne, in a piece for The New York Times — very similar in theme to something I wrote last year — pondering the end of reflection, notes:
“That hints at the way that, as our technologies increase the intensity of stimulation and the flow of new things, we adapt to that pace,” Mr. Carr said. “We become less patient. When moments without stimulation arise, we start to feel panicked and don’t know what to do with them, because we’ve trained ourselves to expect this stimulation — new notifications and alerts and so on.”
What this often translates to in the discourse of the internet is demand for immediate and perfunctory “hot takes” rather than carefully weighed judgments, whether they’re about serious or superficial matters.
I read the hot takes on Microsoft/LinkedIn because I felt the urge to read something, anything about this exciting news, and I wasn’t willing to wait until the more deliberate takes came out. I had time to kill and so I killed it.
In the future, I think I’ll stick to Twitter for the hot takes. It’s not only a faster dopamine hit, it’s often a far funnier one. See you there in a few hours for WWDC.
