Hello Again, Friend

By John Popko / Fall 2025

Hello, friend.

By the time you read this, maybe the noise has settled into a new kind of weather. Maybe the feed is just what the sky does now. Iʼm writing from the moment before it fully hardens, when you can still hear individual voices inside the static, and I want to tell you what the static is made of.

This morning, an email arrived with a little gold seal: an invitation to write for a “next-generationˮ site. No pitching, they said; the machine already knows what readers want. I wouldnʼt be paid to find the truth; I would be paid to match demand. The dashboard would grade me. The sponsors—gambling companies and adult entertainment, mostly—would take care of the rest. The soul in me said this was disgusting and represented everything I hated. The husband and renter in me saw a decent paycheck that would help pay the bills with minimal effort. I stared at the screen and felt that guilty tingle you get when a shortcut reveals itself: the soft thrill of skipping the hard parts.

Weʼve taught ourselves to treat that sensation as normal. We call it “modern media,ˮ the way people once said “modern plumbingˮ—a convenience, a sign of progress. But it doesnʼt feel like plumbing. It feels like moving furniture around to make room for a machine that eats furniture. Journalism used to be an argument with reality; now itʼs an argument with a ranking system. The question is no longer “Is it true?ˮ but “Will it travel?ˮ And once you ask the second question enough times, the first one starts to sound naive.

I say this as someone who has learned to write for robots. To make ends meet, I take some freelance shifts, and the currency isnʼt clarity or empathy; itʼs throughput. You learn to draft for the skeleton keyphrases first and the reader second. You apologize to the facts in the third paragraph. You leave the headline alone because it “performs.ˮ You call that compromise “format,ˮ as if the shape of the page were a law of nature instead of a set of sales goals. Every concession is tiny and deniable. The sum is unmistakable: the audience stops being a public and starts being a resource. And if you publish something that might anger that audience or someone popular? You get pulled.

None of this arrives as a conspiracy. It arrives as a series of “best practicesˮ transmitted through seminars and platform decks and the haunted wisdom of older writers who survived the last round of layoffs. A sales rep runs training on “writing to demand.ˮ A product manager asks if weʼve considered the “affiliates opportunity.ˮ An editor friend confides that the only dependable money is from sportsbooks and adult advertising. Itʼs not that the public clamors for any of this; itʼs that dashboards do. And dashboards sign paychecks.

The country teaches the lesson more bluntly. Years ago, a giant platform sold the entire industry on the idea that video was our destiny. Publishers reorganized, reporters were laid off, and feeds were rebuilt around autoplay. Then the math broke. In 2019 Facebook agreed to pay $40 million to settle claims that it had inflated video metrics—a small number compared to the disruption it had already triggered—and admitted no wrongdoing. The pivot left empty chairs that never filled again. The graph apologized with a check and moved on.

Meanwhile, a legacy magazine—one that had once taught people how to love sentences about baseball in winter—ran articles under fake names that looked suspiciously like AI puppets. When a reporter asked questions, the stories disappeared, the way stage props do after the trick. The people whose names were on the masthead felt sick. The readers felt tricked. But clicks are bad at telling the difference between curiosity and nausea.

Follow the money a little farther and you find a thicket of “newsˮ sites generated by machines and funded (often unknowingly) by programmatic ads from major brands. It turns out that if you can mass-produce plausible sentences and staple automated ads to them, you can siphon attention. The market doesnʼt care that the writing has no author; it cares that the page has an ad slot. NewsGuard has been tracking that pipeline for years, including how big advertisers end up bankrolling AI-generated misinformation because the system is designed to know everything about audiences and almost nothing about context.

Gambling sits at the end of this river like a trash-filled ocean. The fit is perfect: the attention economy wants you excited but never satisfied, and gambling is the art of perpetual almost. Even ESPN—once a museum of slow, joyous sportswriting—put its name on a sportsbook in 2023. The partnership has since been unwound; the network is moving to a new exclusive deal with DraftKings. The media doesnʼt merely cover betting; it experiments with being betting. Whatever to keep investors happy.

This is the part where Iʼm supposed to say that things used to be nobler. They werenʼt. Newspapers have always mixed public service and spectacle; radio invented the sensational format before YouTube learned to monetize it. Whatʼs new is the intimacy and the scale. The feed knows you in ways that used to be reserved for families and lovers. It knows which hour your loneliness wakes up. It bundles that knowledge into a product called “relevanceˮ and sells it wholesale. We built a system that looks at human attention the way mining looks at beautiful mountains: a thing to be stripped until the contour is gone.

Living inside that system trains you to be a certain kind of person. You become impatient with nuance because nuance doesnʼt index. You become suspicious of calm because calm doesnʼt “convert.ˮ You start grading your own life for performance: did that feeling trend? Should that grief have a carousel? When every emotion is formatted for distribution, every emotion starts to feel counterfeit. The worst part isnʼt that we read bad articles; itʼs that we begin to treat ourselves like content.

I want to tell you Iʼve been heroic about this, but mostly Iʼve been efficient. Iʼve written headlines that oversold a sentence. Iʼve accepted a pace that makes quality a luxury. Iʼve watched the sponsorship sheet fill up with betting promotions and thought, grimly, at least I have a job, unlike so many of my colleagues. Itʼs easy to shout about systems and harder to unlearn the little appetites they plant in you: the refresh itch, the hunger for numbers, the tiny pride when a cynical line gets shared.

If thereʼs a way out, I donʼt think it begins with lecturing each other to read longform like itʼs kale. It begins with building friction back into the places where friction saves us. There are low-glamour tools that still work: headlines that must match the body, fact checks you canʼt skip, kill switches for anonymous quotes, audits for metrics that can demolish entire newsrooms. If a platform number can cause layoffs in a hundred cities, that number should be auditable. The settlement checks weʼve seen—modest, tidy—shouldnʼt be the cost of doing business. They should be the cost of breaking the public.

Mostly, though, the repair I can testify to is smaller and more immediate. Itʼs what happened after that invitation sat in my inbox like a coin trick. I drafted a polite email asking for more info. I asked about rates. I pictured the clock that would start the moment I accepted, the quota that would turn the day into a chute. Then I thought about the vigil we turned into a slideshow; I thought about the reporters who reorganized their lives because a platformʼs math said video would save us; I thought about a magazine that hid behind manufactured names and a network that decided to be a casino for a while. I deleted the draft. I took a walk. The world outside the feed was disorganized, unoptimized, and beautiful in the way things are when nobody is trying to sell them.

You might say thatʼs a sentimental ending. It is. But itʼs also a test. The feed teaches us to feel exhaustion where attention should be and cynicism where concern belongs. Sentiment—earned, not faked—is one way to remember we arenʼt inventory. When I say “Hello again, friend,ˮ I want to mean it literally: a person addressing another person, not a “dear readerˮ pose designed to increase dwell time, to fill the seat cushions of Musk and Zuckerbergʼs jets. If the air in your time is thicker than mine, if the noise has become the weather, then maybe the most radical act is to keep treating attention as something human beings lend to each other intentionally.

So hereʼs the small promise I can keep from this side of your future: I wonʼt write to please the feed. I wonʼt dress a headline in a lie just because the lie travels faster. I wonʼt pretend that churning sludge is “meeting people where they are.ˮ Iʼll misspelll smoe wrds so you can at least know I was here. I would rather write less and more authentically than write constantly and vanish. If enough of us commit to that boring, stubborn ethic, we might start to build a world that doesnʼt mistake us for ore.

Until then, forgive us our compromises and our dashboards. We wanted to know more and feel less alone, and we built a system that does the opposite. If you can still hear a single voice in the static where you are, hold onto it. Let it slow you down. Let it make you late. Let it be enough.

Hello again, friend. If you still own your attention, keep it. If youʼve lost it, take it back.