expansive experience in the era of compression.

Today, I wrote the above on tweeter and found it needed more than 280 characters to explain. I'll try again here, with 300 words.

"difficulty curve" = accessibility

"artificial" difficulty curve = barriers created solely to impede progress (often with monetary purpose)

I was thinking about media broadly, in cross-medium terms -- from books and essays, to movies and music, to video games and art.

Looking back, the media that lingers with me most is often tied to everything else I was experiencing in life at the time. It makes sense, then, that media experiences with depth would have the most impact, as there is more "sensory input."

And yet, with attention spans as short as they are in the modern era (exemplified by platforms such as TikTok and BuzzFeed, which are designed specifically to smash content into its most base form), it seems that we are, as a society, intent on compressing experience into one acronym:

"tl;dr"

Fine. We are awash in "noise" -- in waves of content that pile higher by the day. There is no way to consume close to all, yet humans strive to consume as much as humanly possible (thus "FOMO").

This creates a mad scramble to be the easiest to digest -- hence the bite-sized media snacks.

That is one approach -- but it has already been paved so smooth it has lost all character, and tension.

I find that boring.

So: how does one create an expansive experience in the era of compression?

The approach that interests me is modular and cross-medium -- something that "web3" is ripe for.

What does that look like?

I don't know (yet), but it seems as though I am beginning to get a feel for the shape.

Join me, if you'd like, on that walk through these webs: deca.art/weary/rage