{"id":19045,"date":"2025-10-15T09:25:25","date_gmt":"2025-10-15T13:25:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/joindeleteme.com\/?p=19045"},"modified":"2025-10-15T10:02:54","modified_gmt":"2025-10-15T14:02:54","slug":"the-earned-internet-seth-godin-leads-the-way-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/joindeleteme.com\/blog\/the-earned-internet-seth-godin-leads-the-way-again\/","title":{"rendered":"The Earned Internet? Seth Godin Leads the Way (Again)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>This week\u2019s episode of <a href=\"https:\/\/joindeleteme.com\/podcast\/\">\u201cWhat the Hack?\u201d<\/a> featuring Seth Godin forced a fundamental re-evaluation of what I thought I knew about our digital lives, specifically the digital noise of spam and intrusive ads. You can listen to the episode wherever you get your podcasts, and I urge you to do it. Godin is so good.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The early Internet promised connection. There was a vision of a vast, open digital commons where information flowed freely, unburdened by gatekeepers. The design of this digital world was utopian. But not everyone saw it that way. A hacked version of that promise started taking shape, not a dystopia exactly, but not awesome either. It turned the connected commons into a common marketplace driven by a new direct-marketing engine: the spam economy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Permission Not Submission\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/Nws9njDLVEw?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>Maybe there are no \u201cbad players,&#8221; per se. But there was a shift from connecting people to connecting people to transactions. Every click, every moment of presence, became data for sale.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Enter Seth Godin, who tried to make it otherwise. Godin is the patron saint of attention well deserved, inventor of permission marketing, bestselling author, and the Jerry Garcia of good advice who thinks everything is marketing. Good, bad and indifferent\u2013he also believes much of what reaches our inboxes falls under the rubric of a broken promise. And the reason it\u2019s there in the first place is because the people sending it should have to pay postage. That\u2019s how direct marketing worked before the Internet, and Godin argues that\u2019s the way it should have continued to work.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Charging Postage for Email?\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/iAdlc30sxGE?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>But at its core, Godin\u2019s anti-spam playbook isn\u2019t a marginal business tactic; it\u2019s a demand for the market to honor its contract with consumers: Listen to me, and I\u2019ll say something worth hearing.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\">The Digital Attention Tax<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p>Nothing is free online. We pay a digital attention tax\u2014a toll levied every time we encounter an irrelevant ad or an unsolicited piece of marketing slop. (Worth noting: Massachusetts Rep. Jake Auchincloss has floated the idea of an actual attention tax to <a href=\"https:\/\/medium.com\/@DaveHallmon\/taxing-our-attention-ffa864e32b02\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">fund local journalism and literacy programs<\/a>. That\u2019s not this.)&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The attention tax Godin talked about is not just about wasted time; it\u2019s the cognitive overhead. The spam economy is how platforms monetize our presence because the bar for entry, while not zero, doesn\u2019t include the considerable expense of postage. But whether we\u2019re talking about actual spam email or the participatory spam of doom scrolling or (egad) pop-up ads and retargeting, our attention is not <em>earned<\/em>; it is stolen. The &#8220;slop loop&#8221; is the mechanism of this theft, a system built on intrusion, surveillance, and targeting, not opting-in or consent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Would They Miss You If You Were Gone?\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/LMFrHbHhs9M?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>And because the internet took the dystopian route to utopia, this tax is now the unavoidable price of entry into the digital space, making everything we do online fundamentally transactional. Our data has become a liability. The constant bombardment lowers the ethical bar for everyone, creating a race to the bottom in which marketers believe that they must be increasingly loud and intrusive just to survive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Godin\u2019s elegant solution blew my mind, that we don\u2019t need to block the noise, but rather demand value in exchange for enduring it. Instead of stealing attention (or buying it), Godin urges us to earn it with a product or story so original and so compelling, that we\u2019ll gladly pay the tax of our undivided attention.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\">The High Cost of Mediocrity<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p>To Godin\u2019s eye, the corruption and the resulting attention tax force a radical truth: mediocrity is not affordable.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The \u201cdigital slop loop\u201d mentioned in the episode notes is the death spiral of non-original, easy-to-replicate marketing that results in more user enervation than sales. The way to win in a world where the available pool of attention is finite but the volume of noise is infinite, is to play a different game.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Godin argues that to thrive these days, a business must accept a demanding, even punishing assignment: to be original.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Originality is the necessary, high cost of entry. It is the practical difficulty of consistently delivering a product or service so distinct that it cannot be automated, easily copied, or bought cheaply. You earn attention with exceptional quality. Anything less will be ignored in our noisy marketplace.&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This week\u2019s episode of \u201cWhat the Hack?\u201d featuring Seth Godin forced a fundamental re-evaluation of what I thought I knew about our digital lives, specifically the digital noise of spam and intrusive ads. You can listen to the episode wherever you get your podcasts, and I urge you to do it. Godin is so good.\u00a0 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":37,"featured_media":19042,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19045","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-learn-more-data-brokers"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/joindeleteme.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19045","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/joindeleteme.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/joindeleteme.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/joindeleteme.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/37"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/joindeleteme.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19045"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/joindeleteme.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19045\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/joindeleteme.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19042"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/joindeleteme.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19045"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/joindeleteme.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19045"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/joindeleteme.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19045"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}