I totally get the sentiment but I also see the flip side of it.
I just…don’t have the time. And a lot of lengthy mediocre experiences could really use a summary.
I’m not sure I’m even agreeing with the concept of compression culture being a real thing when we are seeing things like streaming shows with incredibly long runtimes taking over cultural popularity over movies. Something like Stranger Things should really be a movie or movie series rather than a show with 34 hour-long episodes.
I would pay extra money for a compressed cut of some of these media properties.
I have never heard the term “compression culture” before, but speaking as a human experiencing the world in 2025 the tendency to compress things is certainly understandable. There is a contradiction or a tension betweem me as a worker and me as a consumer. Both of which have an insatiable apetite for my time. I don’t see how anyone can blame people for demanding brevity when time is the most precious resource we have any autonomy over.
Thanks. I came to the a similar realization after trying Blinkist (book summaries) a few years ago. The summaries is no real substitute for reading the whole book.
Although I thought the writer put forward an interesting point, ironically it felt like parts of the writing were overly flowery and repetitive. The paragraphs of similar metaphors got old quickly and started to feel GPT-like.
I do think that people's lack of ability to process nuance and our platforms' inability to convey it are real problems though. Not sure what the large scale solution is, but on a personal level I stay skeptical of conclusions that seem "too black/white" - the reality is likely to be somewhere in the middle.
It's a symptom of too much information. Each individual has to determine how to spend their time. A summary is one of the best tools we have now for doing that. Also, people are just lazy. We need better ways to filter. AI will be able to do this. Probably already can, someone just needs to build it and let people fine tune it to their tastes.
I'd say it depends. If someone writes a research paper that can be 2 pages long but make it 8 pages cause that's the requirement, then I rather not spend my time reading all 8 pages and compress it just for the interesting bits. (this is true for almost every prompt engineering paper I've came across).
Isn't the diminishing attention span the more conventional term to express the authors point, rather than "compression"? I think it was in culture of narcissism, a book from the late 1970s, that the author (Christopher Lasch) showed some research that the American attention span was rapidly diminishing since the 1960s or something. Its an old phenomenon and has predictably gone much worse the more attention-sucking tech we get.
I see people of all ages saying stuff like "I don't have the patience to watch a full movie uninterrupted". I think its the same thing.
PS. didn't have time to read the huge article, can you summarise?
I think it is perfectly reasonable to ask for a summary before committing to reading a book. There are just too many books. In fact this article mentions a bunch of books and summarizes them inline. Good. Gives me more information on whether I should read those books
There are books and post that we should sit down and read for hours and hours, and even reread it from time to time.
There are blog post that is simply not worth my effort.
Unfortunately the first one is rare and the second one is literally everywhere. There is also the difference when one has accumulated enough knowledge on a subject, most of the article are a refresh of those knowledge rater than bringing anything new. The major problems lies with people who dont have those knowledge and fundamentals but jumped to summary and conclusion.
There are two kind of person who ask for a tldr:
Someone who doesn't understand or care about the depths of works and only want the information because of this.
And people who appreciate it but lacks time.
If I see the markers of something I judge bad, or if I dont have enough time right now, I wont consume this content in depth.
There’s too much low-quality information. Compression/summarizing is a defense against getting mired in slop. The challenge is to switch out of skim/compression mode when truly meaningful content is found.
I don't think that it's that big a deal. It's something that has been said for many generations. Each generation complains that our art has been "lost," by folks without the patience to learn it, etc. In my day, we complained about Cliffs' Notes, and calculators in the classroom.
I grew up, overseas, where the TV sucked, and I became a voracious reader. I didn't read James Joyce or Chaucer. I read J. R. R. Tolkien, Alistair McClean, and C. S. Lewis. I have always said that it's important to read, even if what we read is "junk," because it makes it easier to consume the tougher stuff.
I've read a lot of tech literature, as well. I don't read it anywhere nearly as quickly as the fiction, but I have been able to read it well.
She's not really wrong, but I don't know if the "you" in the title is particularly conducive to getting folks to take the lesson to heart.
I have found that making it an "I" and "We" thing, helps to carry the message more effectively. Of course, no good deed goes unpunished, so people tend to say that I'm "making it all about me," so there's that.
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.
I think this can be worse than ignorance. It's the illusion of knowledge coupled with the confidence that comes from thinking you understand something you've never actually encountered. These people walk around armed with headlines masquerading as insights, ready to deploy half-digested talking points in conversations that require actual thought. They've become human echo chambers, amplifying signals they never bothered to decode.
This is such a good summary of what I feel like I've been observing (including in myself) for the last 15 years or so
Around 10 years ago, I learned to root out people who read reddit based on this principle. My thought at the time was the site made you feel informed. But everyone knew same facts leading to the same incomplete picture and having the same attitude problem of constantly correcting people. “Well actually..” and “that’s misinformation” were thrown around a lot on reddit and the lazy readers end up copying that bad behavior IRL
. But the confidence was high and the picture incomplete. And the worst part of it all, the behaviour was
Donald Rumsfeld didn't do much good during his life, but this quote by him lives in my head rent free like the kids say:
> Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don't know we don't know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tends to be the difficult ones.
Even before social media and AI summaries, when we only had land lines and libraries, my passion has been lowering the amount of unknown unknowns and increase the amount of known unknowns.
My grandfather shared the same passion and owned a series of books that had stuff about _everything_ on a surface level. The one of them on the shelf next to me is from 1952 and is called "The Book of Skills". And has stuff like how to water your plants, detailed instructions on bookbinding, how to build a boat and fix (1950s) electric components.
Basically I don't pretend to know everything about everything, but I do enjoy knowing something about a bunch of things.
If I know a solution for a problem _exists_ so if I (or someone else) need it, I know it has been solved - even though I don't have a clue how - but I know too look for a ready-made solution. Then I can go look it up and stand on the shoulders of giants so to speak.
Nowadays I use LLM summaries for similar things, I don't claim to know everything but I absorb enough surface level information so I can go look for more if I need the full data later on. Basically building an index instead of a full-ass library.
That’s certainly one way of looking at it, but those who think humans walking around armed with half an understanding and making claims about reality is a recent thing would, on face, seem naive to thousands of years of history. Nearly every scientist was persecuted in their time (worse as you go further back in time) because the entire world thought they knew better. Wouldn’t you consider climate exchange advocates to be in an echo chamber? What about Nazis, or towns with high klan membership? Were they not living in their own echo chambers too? Every “movement” and belief system is a de facto echo chamber; no one has a meeting to promote their ideals by spending the entire time sharing contrary facts. In fact, wouldn’t it have been even worse the further you go back in time because contrary information was primarily distributed by singular people? People weren’t exposed to thousands of contradictory facts that went against their beliefs; they just ignored what Tommy had to say because they knew better. They had their one set of facts they believed and judged whether what another person said was truth mostly by character and how it aligned with their beliefs, and rarely because it was truth. This is still true today. Change only came as the number of people they encountered who were saying the same thing increased; again, not because they were right, but because they were saying the same thing. Young Margret had no way of calculating the trajectories of planets or evaluating the science of gravity; she just had to trust others explanations of how things we can plainly see are the result mystical magical forces. The only thing that has changed is the number of people we are exposed to who are saying the same things, right or wrong, but what hasn’t changed is the number of people who were believed things and repeated them…right and wrong.
I think it's okay if not taken to extreme. There's a difference between writing a book review and writing a tweet. It's hard to say much in a tweet, but I'm in favor of people writing book reviews.
Also, posting a tweet linking to your book review seems fine? It's a good way to draw people into reading something longer when they take a real interest.
A few people who read the book review might go on to read the book. Most won't, and that seems okay, as long as they're reading.
I completely disagree with this article. It's romanticizing the past and ignoring obvious benefits of summarizing.
In fact, I'd argue that the entire world is built on abstraction and summarization. It has been ever since humans started to specialize.
What good does it do a baker to understand the entire supply chain of wheat berries? To know the fertilization procedures? To know the kreb cycle? Certainly all of these specific details go into the process of making bread yet none of them are useful for a baker. It's why we could bake bread long before we knew exactly what made plants grow. It's why we've been able to do selective breeding long before we understood exactly what DNA was.
The power of specialization and "compression" is that rather that you the learner can choose what to spend your days learning. That has even caused a rise in symbiotic specializations. For example, a biologist can find a new bone and compare it's structure to the structure of other bones in similar species building out the family tree. A geologist can work with the biologist if they say "I want to look for bones roughly from roughly 600,000CE, where should I be looking?". They have a compressed understanding of what the geologist is capable of just like the geologies has a compressed understanding of what the biologist is doing.
What this article fails to understand is there is simply too much information for any one individual person to know. Compression is a natural outcome of that. The modern world works because we compress our understanding on topics that don't interest us while expanding and decompressing the topics that do.
And, if you want someone to decompress your specific article. To dive in and truly engage with it. Then it's your job to write a good summary that hooks people. You need to give people a reason to want to decompress. If that seems burdensome, maybe it's because you yourself have not taken the time to decompress knowledge of how to write good summaries. That is, you put low value on a summary.
"If I Had More Time, I Would Have Written a Shorter Letter"
It's a little weird that, on the one hand, nobody much wants to read anything long, and on the other, hours long podcasts, Netflix documentaries, and one-person YouTube videos on esoteric subjects are all quite popular. There's no lack of demand for longform content, but it's mostly not writing.
> Once a week, someone breathlessly tells me, "Oh my god, I read this article that said..." But what they mean is they watched a 30-second TikTok or skimmed a headline while scrolling through their feed. They think they've "read" something when they've consumed the intellectual equivalent of cotton candy: all sugar, no substance, dissolving the moment it hits their tongue.
Okay, but here's the thing: the article itself probably was already, as it were, pre-digested. A popular science article is already somewhat meant to be read as entertainment. Sure, reading the article is better than skimming the headline, but maybe less than you'd think. It's meant for a popular audience, it's written by a journalist who probably isn't an expert in the subject, and it's subject to the same commercial demands as anything else. A lot of popular science is like this, and it's not bad per se, but it's still a kind of product, even when it's in a Very Serious Newspaper. I read this stuff and enjoy it; it isn't non-informative. But it's also designed to be pretty easy to digest.
I bet if you grab a random teenager off the street and give them a multi-page document with instructions and ask them to find a specific bit, they'll just quit because they think they have to read it sequentially from start to end.
Skimming the text quickly to find out where the relevant bits are just doesn't exist as a possibility for them
They'd rather listen to a rambling 45 minute Youtube video on how to do something and rewind it constantly and zoom in to see wtf is going on.
85 comments
[ 1.5 ms ] story [ 82.4 ms ] threadI just…don’t have the time. And a lot of lengthy mediocre experiences could really use a summary.
I’m not sure I’m even agreeing with the concept of compression culture being a real thing when we are seeing things like streaming shows with incredibly long runtimes taking over cultural popularity over movies. Something like Stranger Things should really be a movie or movie series rather than a show with 34 hour-long episodes.
I would pay extra money for a compressed cut of some of these media properties.
I do think that people's lack of ability to process nuance and our platforms' inability to convey it are real problems though. Not sure what the large scale solution is, but on a personal level I stay skeptical of conclusions that seem "too black/white" - the reality is likely to be somewhere in the middle.
The opposite is also true though. I'd argue it's even truer: we treat verbosity as depth, or at least as substance.
I see people of all ages saying stuff like "I don't have the patience to watch a full movie uninterrupted". I think its the same thing.
PS. didn't have time to read the huge article, can you summarise?
it's the journey, not the destination
There are blog post that is simply not worth my effort.
Unfortunately the first one is rare and the second one is literally everywhere. There is also the difference when one has accumulated enough knowledge on a subject, most of the article are a refresh of those knowledge rater than bringing anything new. The major problems lies with people who dont have those knowledge and fundamentals but jumped to summary and conclusion.
I grew up, overseas, where the TV sucked, and I became a voracious reader. I didn't read James Joyce or Chaucer. I read J. R. R. Tolkien, Alistair McClean, and C. S. Lewis. I have always said that it's important to read, even if what we read is "junk," because it makes it easier to consume the tougher stuff.
I've read a lot of tech literature, as well. I don't read it anywhere nearly as quickly as the fiction, but I have been able to read it well.
She's not really wrong, but I don't know if the "you" in the title is particularly conducive to getting folks to take the lesson to heart.
I have found that making it an "I" and "We" thing, helps to carry the message more effectively. Of course, no good deed goes unpunished, so people tend to say that I'm "making it all about me," so there's that.
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.
. But the confidence was high and the picture incomplete. And the worst part of it all, the behaviour was
> Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don't know we don't know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tends to be the difficult ones.
Even before social media and AI summaries, when we only had land lines and libraries, my passion has been lowering the amount of unknown unknowns and increase the amount of known unknowns.
My grandfather shared the same passion and owned a series of books that had stuff about _everything_ on a surface level. The one of them on the shelf next to me is from 1952 and is called "The Book of Skills". And has stuff like how to water your plants, detailed instructions on bookbinding, how to build a boat and fix (1950s) electric components.
Basically I don't pretend to know everything about everything, but I do enjoy knowing something about a bunch of things.
If I know a solution for a problem _exists_ so if I (or someone else) need it, I know it has been solved - even though I don't have a clue how - but I know too look for a ready-made solution. Then I can go look it up and stand on the shoulders of giants so to speak.
Nowadays I use LLM summaries for similar things, I don't claim to know everything but I absorb enough surface level information so I can go look for more if I need the full data later on. Basically building an index instead of a full-ass library.
Also, posting a tweet linking to your book review seems fine? It's a good way to draw people into reading something longer when they take a real interest.
A few people who read the book review might go on to read the book. Most won't, and that seems okay, as long as they're reading.
‘No long sermons’: how influencer Catholic priests are spreading the word of God online
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jul/22/its-like-going...In fact, I'd argue that the entire world is built on abstraction and summarization. It has been ever since humans started to specialize.
What good does it do a baker to understand the entire supply chain of wheat berries? To know the fertilization procedures? To know the kreb cycle? Certainly all of these specific details go into the process of making bread yet none of them are useful for a baker. It's why we could bake bread long before we knew exactly what made plants grow. It's why we've been able to do selective breeding long before we understood exactly what DNA was.
The power of specialization and "compression" is that rather that you the learner can choose what to spend your days learning. That has even caused a rise in symbiotic specializations. For example, a biologist can find a new bone and compare it's structure to the structure of other bones in similar species building out the family tree. A geologist can work with the biologist if they say "I want to look for bones roughly from roughly 600,000CE, where should I be looking?". They have a compressed understanding of what the geologist is capable of just like the geologies has a compressed understanding of what the biologist is doing.
What this article fails to understand is there is simply too much information for any one individual person to know. Compression is a natural outcome of that. The modern world works because we compress our understanding on topics that don't interest us while expanding and decompressing the topics that do.
And, if you want someone to decompress your specific article. To dive in and truly engage with it. Then it's your job to write a good summary that hooks people. You need to give people a reason to want to decompress. If that seems burdensome, maybe it's because you yourself have not taken the time to decompress knowledge of how to write good summaries. That is, you put low value on a summary.
"If I Had More Time, I Would Have Written a Shorter Letter"
> Once a week, someone breathlessly tells me, "Oh my god, I read this article that said..." But what they mean is they watched a 30-second TikTok or skimmed a headline while scrolling through their feed. They think they've "read" something when they've consumed the intellectual equivalent of cotton candy: all sugar, no substance, dissolving the moment it hits their tongue.
Okay, but here's the thing: the article itself probably was already, as it were, pre-digested. A popular science article is already somewhat meant to be read as entertainment. Sure, reading the article is better than skimming the headline, but maybe less than you'd think. It's meant for a popular audience, it's written by a journalist who probably isn't an expert in the subject, and it's subject to the same commercial demands as anything else. A lot of popular science is like this, and it's not bad per se, but it's still a kind of product, even when it's in a Very Serious Newspaper. I read this stuff and enjoy it; it isn't non-informative. But it's also designed to be pretty easy to digest.
I bet if you grab a random teenager off the street and give them a multi-page document with instructions and ask them to find a specific bit, they'll just quit because they think they have to read it sequentially from start to end.
Skimming the text quickly to find out where the relevant bits are just doesn't exist as a possibility for them
They'd rather listen to a rambling 45 minute Youtube video on how to do something and rewind it constantly and zoom in to see wtf is going on.