No. Although I appreciate the spotlight being put on slow experiences like storytelling, this article is fundamentally wrong. > We've trained ourselves to beli

No. Although I appreciate the spotlight being put on slow experiences like storytelling, this article is fundamentally wrong. > We've trained ourselves to believe that complexity can always be whittled down, that difficulty can always be optimized away, that transformation should be instant and effortless. This is a reduction. Consider the opposite statement: We've trained ourselves to believe that complexity can *never* be whittled down, that difficulty can *never be avoided*, that transformation *must be slow and painful*. Now you see the monster that is being fought when one is learning to summarize, learning to distill, learning to quicken the pace of understanding. > It's the logical endpoint of an attention economy that treats human focus as a finite resource to be optimized and monetized. Yet another cheap jab at social media. > Podcasters are celebrated for "actionable insights" while wandering conversations that might actually lead somewhere unexpected are dismissed as waste. Thank you for bringing up podcasts. Are they not a counter example to the point of this article? We've gone from quick-hit interviews on news programs and late night talk shows, to slow meditative discussions in the form of podcasts. "Compression culture" is a deliberate pushback against the gatekeepers. They sit in their coffee shops discussing new ways to create barriers between the peasants and themselves. *Read more books on the subject.* | *Read longer books on the subject.* | *Get certified.* | *Reach tenure.* ... And on and on. Many works of non-fiction are largely fluff. They take a simple concept and dress it up as elaborately as possible until the reader is completely intimidated and regretful. Sometimes this is done for word count, sometimes this is done because the author lacks the ability to be concise, and sometimes this is done deliberately, to make the author's small insights seem bigger and more important. Rarely is it justified. Compression culture to the rescue. Compression culture is optimistic. It's inclusive. It's there to overcome problems we were told were impossible. If that's "the transformation without the time" then so be it.