Rough Drafts

Rough Drafts

Motivation and inspiration

It’s been almost exactly a year since I left a salaried job and went independent. This is now the third time I’ve been an independent entrepreneur (not counting the times I’ve launched publications or products within existing corporations), and each time I’ve taken a different approach: 1999: seed-f

Dylan Tweney Aug 4, 2016 2 min read

Rough Drafts

Slot machines, magicians, and app designers

Around the turn of the century, people started talking about the “attention economy.” A natural outgrowth of the ad-supported Web, this stemmed from the idea that people’s time and attention would soon be valuable commodities, because of their scarcity. The phrase has dwindled in popularity but the

Dylan Tweney Aug 3, 2016 3 min read

Rough Drafts

My brain was begging me for relief from social media

Taking control of your social media use may be the most rewarding life hacking technique I know of, given its ratio of benefit to effort. I like social media. Networks like Facebook, Twitter, and Snapchat have a powerful ability to keep us connected with other humans. For me, Twitter has functioned

Dylan Tweney Aug 2, 2016 3 min read

Rough Drafts

31 days of writing

Like many people, my attention is fragmented and my concentration broken. I’m going to try working my way through this with the skills I know best: Writing and editing.

Dylan Tweney Aug 1, 2016 1 min read

Rough Drafts

The people who believe themselves to be white

Ta-Nehisi Coates, in Between the World and Me, repeatedly refers to “the people who believe themselves to be white.” This curious phrasing opens up the possibility of hope in what for me, as the father of two black children, is otherwise a terrifying and disturbing book.

Dylan Tweney Jul 26, 2016 5 min read

Rough Drafts

A future we may not want.

Kevin Kelly paints a disturbing vision of the next 30 years: A world governed by alien AIs, with screens on every surface, crowdsourced advertisements and influencer marketing campaigns assaulting us from all directions, and overwhelming flows of ephemeral data and “facts” making it impossible to ju

Dylan Tweney Jul 20, 2016 4 min read

Rough Drafts

Narrative specificity.

Narrative specificity means avoiding generalizations and using details to make your story come to life. Leave it out, and your words will be hollow and dead, like empty snail shells strewn across the dirt. It’s not surprising that many writers miss this point, particularly in politics and business.

Dylan Tweney Jul 19, 2016 2 min read

Rough Drafts

Alcatraz.

Yesterday I realized a dream I’ve had ever since I started open water swimming around 2010. I swam from Alcatraz back to San Francisco. It’s about 1.25 miles though we covered a bit more water than that due to fighting the current a little. In all, it took me one hour and 13 minutes in pretty […]

Dylan Tweney Jul 14, 2016 4 min read

Rough Drafts

Bay Parade Swim Report

Today’s Bay Parade swim went super well. It was a beautiful day on the Bay, the water wasn’t too cold (maybe 58 degrees near the Gate, 62-plus in McCovey Cove), and we had a fun bunch of swimmers aboard our boat, comprising two teams: “Flood Tide” (my team) and “Frijoles Frios.” There was some initi

Dylan Tweney May 22, 2016 1 min read

Rough Drafts

When a clickbait headline leads to national outrage.

So Gizmodo publishes a story whose headline reads “Former Facebook Workers: We Routinely Suppressed Conservative News,” and the Internet goes predictably apeshit. There’s just one problem: The story doesn’t deliver what the headline promises.

Dylan Tweney May 19, 2016 2 min read

Rough Drafts

Breaststroke.

The breaststroke has a faint sense of femininity attached to it these days. There’s the name, of course: Anything beginning with “breast” seems inevitably female, at least a little bit. But it’s also a slower stroke than the crawl, otherwise known as freestyle. You could use the breaststroke in a fr

Dylan Tweney May 8, 2016 3 min read

Rough Drafts

7 thoughts on the tech media in 2016

The media is in a state of upheaval. 2015 was a stormy year, and signs indicate that 2016 will be even more turbulent. Last month brought the news that Al Jazeera America will shut down, that Facebook multimillionaire Chris Hughes is throwing in the towel on his ill-fated attempt to bring the New Re

Dylan Tweney Feb 9, 2016 6 min read

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