I'm not convinced that we started with the right amount of information and then compressed it lossily and now we are missing nuance. We started out with an expansion culture. It wasn't enough to have a succinct idea. You needed to have enough to fill a book or an essay, or something that took up enough physical paper that other people felt like they got something when they bought it.

We started from there, with the economics of book selling dictating how long an idea was supposed to be, and we have moved smaller and smaller, as the economics have changed. Substack actually increased the expected length of writing. If people are paying for a newsletter, they want to feel like they got something. I haven't found any substacks that reliably contain more substance than shorter blog posts by the same author.