#1: Directing Attention + first ever article

12 Challenges is now Directing Attention

tl;dr: here’s the first ever Attention article: Attention is in █████ mode

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It’s official — 12 Challenges has rebranded to Directing Attention, which will tell the inside story as I build Attention into a media juggernaut, one which I hope to grow to the heights of Gawker or Vice.

For a longer explanation of why 12 Challenges has pivoted, go here. The short version is: I think the world needs a new publication that makes tech fun and makes fun of tech. That’s Attention’s mission.

This Substack is not that publication — Attention will live on its own site (more about that later). But this Substack is the best place to follow Attention: you’ll get the latest Attention articles directly into your inbox, as well as hang out with me behind-the-scenes as I try to make this thing work. Speaking of which:

The plan

What’s your plan with Attention, I hear precisely no one ask. Well, let me tell you!

Attention will feature three types of content:

🎯: Playful tech analysis and activism — make tech fun!

🤡: Satire ridiculing the tech world and its bigwigs — make fun of tech!

👾: Interactive mini-sites (‘creative coding’) — make fun tech!

A question I’ve been asking myself, as the sole writer and editor of Attention, is: how should I spend my extremely limited time to build an audience? To put it another way, where to start?

So I turned to my list of 225-and-counting Attention ideas, which I keep on Notion. I ranked every idea by how good it is (how much I think people will like it), and time (how long it would take to make).

What I found is that I have tons of nice 👾-type ideas (interactive mini-sites), but most of them could take ten days or even more to make. Feels like a risky investment. The 🎯-type ideas (playful tech analysis and activism) are very thoughtful and I’m excited for them, but they’re less likely to set the world on fire since the marketplace for tech analysis and activism is highly competitive, even if I think I have an edge through ‘playfulness’.

That leaves one clear path ahead, at least for the initial stages of Attention until I find more collaborators: 🤡. Writing tech satire takes less time than the other two categories, and I think I can make a bunch of pieces that people will really enjoy.

The first article

So, to the first ever piece of Attention content. I’ve been thinking that it would be fun to write a series of press releases as Attention itself, painting Attention as a startup dutifully going through the hype cycle and all the other self-congratulatory phases of a startup’s life.

The first press release, I figured, should be about stealth mode, which is a concept deployed by early-stage startup founders to tell themselves they are definitely CIA agents, not just insecure overachievers whose ideas and egos are too fragile to survive contact with reality. So here it is:

Attention is in █████ mode

The website

Open that link and you’ll see Attention’s website for the first time. There’s not much there — I’m coding it pixel by pixel. Why am I doing this, instead of using Ghost, Substack, Wordpress, or any other of thousands of tools to publish online?

The answer: full creative control. I want to publish articles that can look like absolutely anything (crucially, including 👾-type — interactive mini-sites). I’m using a format called MDX to do this — it’s like markdown, but it also allows embedding of React components. I was inspired to do this by the superb React developer Josh Comeau, whose blog I’ve enjoyed reading for a few years now (check out his beautiful About page).

Using MDX means I’ll be able to make an article look like a WhatsApp conversation, or an RPG, or add interactive charts, or animate the page on scrolling down, or use different fonts to parody anything I like. I’ll be able to surprise and delight readers using the full power of the building blocks of the web, HTML and JavaScript.

The status

I feel good. I’m finally publishing again after being blocked, I’ve launched the very first piece, I’ve developed a basic site. Small steps, but I’m happy that after months of dreaming things are moving!

Thanks so much for following along, and I’ll be back soon with more Attention content.