How to Internet

You're doing it wrong.

Every new medium transforms how we find each other.

The printing press made it possible to speak to thousands. Radio let you reach millions in real time. Television added pictures and put a glowing box in every living room. Each leap felt like progress. More reach. More people. More connection.

The internet promised the ultimate reach. Everyone could broadcast. Everyone could connect. The gatekeepers would fall and we’d speak directly to the world.

It delivered. That was the problem.

Reach is not connection. Broadcasting to everyone is not the same as finding your people. The internet gave us the biggest audience in human history. We performed for it. It left us empty.

For years, this was how I experienced the internet. Not as a performer. I watched from the sidelines. But I absorbed the logic. Reach was the point. Audience was the goal. Someday, I told myself, I’d build one.

I had it backwards.

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On July 20, 1969, six hundred million people watched Apollo 11 touch down on the moon. They sat with their families in front of the same glowing box, watching the same grainy footage. In the days that followed, they gathered at office water coolers to talk about the miracle.

That was the gift of broadcast. Forced synchronicity. Everyone received the same signal at the same time, and that created something real—shared experience across millions of strangers who would never meet.

Nearly twenty years later, a television was rolled into my third-grade classroom. Thousands of classrooms across the country did the same thing that morning. We watched Christa McAuliffe prepare to become the first teacher in space. Seventy-four seconds into the journey, the Challenger exploded. Seven astronauts died on live television in front of millions of children.

It was my earliest memory of national tragedy. For days afterward, that was all anyone discussed. Strangers and friends, everywhere I went. We processed it together because we had witnessed it together.

Broadcast had constraints. Miss an episode of In Living Color and you missed the cafeteria conversation the next day. But have recordings of the Stretch and Bobbito show—a hip-hop program that aired at 1am on a college station with a sixty-mile range, requiring you to stay awake for three hours flipping cassette tapes—and you had something. The DJs introduced Wu-Tang, Biggie, Jay-Z, and Nas before any of them had record deals. Having those tapes meant something.

The constraint created value. Scarcity made things matter. Showing up at the same time made us feel like we belonged to something larger than ourselves.

The internet removed the constraint. We celebrated. Then we realized what we’d lost.

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In 2012, Felix Baumgartner stepped out of a capsule at the edge of space and fell 24 miles to Earth. He broke the sound barrier with his body. Eight million people watched live—the largest YouTube audience in history. But that meant six hundred million didn’t. Most caught it later, alone, as a clip in a feed. The shared moment had become a private one.

That same year, Psy released “Gangnam Style.” It became the first YouTube video to hit one billion views. But few people watched it. They shared it. Parodied it. Filmed themselves doing the horse dance in offices, at weddings, in Times Square. World leaders attempted the choreography on camera.

The song wasn’t a hit because people consumed it. It was a hit because people performed their relationship.

This is the Reach Game. The content matters less than the reactions it generates. YouTube overflows with videos of people reacting to old songs for the first time. A TV show isn’t popular unless it spawns a dozen recap podcasts. The thing becomes raw material for the discourse about the thing.

This cuts both ways. Memes make me laugh. Commentary sharpens my thinking. I’ve discovered music and books I never would have found alone.

But I’ve watched strangers spend weeks destroying each other over whether a dress was blue or gold. The same machinery spreads joy and poison. It doesn’t care which.

For years, this was all I saw. The fragmentation. The outrage. The endless performance. I wasn’t performing myself. I was watching, scrolling, imagining a future where I’d join in. Mostly I lurked. It still left me empty.

I didn’t know there was another way.

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Last year, I joined a cohort-based writing course. The curriculum was solid. The real value was what formed around it.

I connected with a handful of people. I was lucky enough to land in one of the few cohorts that kept meeting after the course ended. Weekly sessions. Drafts exchanged. Honest feedback delivered.

Week after week, I gather with five people I’ve never met in person, scattered across three continents. I wait to read Kyle’s synthesis from his Book Pairings newsletter. I learn about creative friendships from Kate—her piece tracing Herbert Matter’s hidden influence on Jackson Pollock. Manish brings relentless optimism and investing wisdom. Harry and I have spent hours dissecting crypto, tech, and the differences between Britain and America. One of his posts sparked what you’re reading.

Emily joined most recently. Her first piece floored me. She connected a personal tragedy to larger forces with precision I envied. The tagline on her newsletter captured why I started writing: “stories about tech changing the world, instead of eating it.”

I wish I could steal it.

None of us planned this. We didn’t set out to build something. We kept showing up, week after week, and became the reason each other kept writing.

I doubt I’d call myself a writer if those meetings had stopped. This piece exists because of the tough love they gave me last session. They told me to stop tinkering and ship.

So here it is.

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I’ve been trying to understand why this worked when so much else fails.

Part of it is scale. Six people, not six million. No audience means no performance. You stop reacting and start talking.

Part of it is synchronicity. We meet at the same time each week. The constraint broadcast forced on us—we rebuilt it by choice. Showing up together turns out to matter.

Part of it is shared struggle. We’re all trying to do the same hard thing. That creates investment the sidelines can’t match.

But the more I think about it, the more I believe the answer is simpler. We were all looking for the same thing. Somehow, we found each other. That’s when I realized I’d been thinking about the internet all wrong.

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Before printing presses, before written language, before anything we’d call technology, there was an older way to find your people.

A fire on a hilltop. Smoke rising against the sky.

It wasn’t broadcasting. It couldn’t reach everyone. That was the point. It reached the people who were looking for it. The ones who knew what the signal meant. The ones searching for that exact light.

No one built the internet to work this way. We built it for reach. We built it for scale. We built it to broadcast to everyone.

But buried inside the machinery, there’s an older model waiting to be found. The internet can be a smoke signal—if you use it that way. A signal that crosses every border, every ocean, every barrier that ever separated the people meant to find each other. Not by reaching everyone. By reaching the right ones.

I don’t know if this scales. I don’t know if it works for everyone. I have no system. No framework. No five steps to build your tribe.

I know that I spent years on the sidelines, absorbing the logic of reach, and it left me empty. Then I stumbled into a corner of the internet where six people gathered around something small and real. It changed everything.

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When I started writing online, I carried all that old logic with me. I thought it was about building a following. Accumulating subscribers. The dreams I’d had as a lurker, finally realized. I imagined big names noticing me. Likes rolling in.

I had it backwards.

Your content isn’t a product. It’s a smoke signal. It’s not supposed to reach everyone. It’s supposed to reach the people looking for exactly what you’re making—even if they don’t know it yet, even if you haven’t met them, even if they’re scattered across three continents and you’ll never see their faces.

Most people won’t see it. That’s not failure. That’s the point.

The right ones will.

How To Internet © 2021 by Josh Zen is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0