with it

What do you gain from being “with it” or “in the know”?

I remember telling my older relatives and friends about ghost kitchens^1 when they started popping up, who would react with damp surprise. Now, most people know about ghost kitchens. What did I gain from knowing about them first? Maybe it slightly improved my decisions about where to eat: it made me less likely to buy overpriced food from low-quality or cash-grabbing providers. But nothing significant. What I gained was being “with it”: a quality that has status associated with it.

Sometimes being “with it” is valuable. Following broad AI trends is useful because it lets you plan better for the future (especially as a programmer, like me). But even here, it’s important to decouple the good feeling from the useful knowledge. It’s not good for me because I’m in the know; it’s good for me because I have useful information that benefits me.

Once you see this difference, it’s hard not to notice it everywhere. If you like information, there’s an insidious kind of knowledge that’s one step above “insight porn” (in that you remember it, and it helps you mentally organize the world) but one step below “actionable” (it doesn’t help you make predictions). I mentioned ghost kitchens: other examples are how airlines make money from credit card partnerships, or how dating apps are optimized to keep you single, or how grocery stores put the most common items in the back of the store so you walk past everything else to get to it. I didn’t know this last one before researching for this essay, and it still gave me that jolt of worldly superiority and the pleasure of knowledge gained. Except, it won’t change how I interact with the world one bit.

Being “with it” in terms of Trump’s latest SNAFU or the latest twitter discourse is obviously even less valuable. It’s less useful and it’s more memetic and enraging. But the other version of “withitness” is more keeping up with more obscure news and trends: tracking development on the latest AI models, knowing about the latest housing policy changes. Some of my favorite blogs (like DWATV) traffic in subjects like this, sometimes accidentally, sometimes not. Podcasts are prone to the same. But beyond all other forms of media, “withitness” is the domain of the youtube video essay: the 0.5-3hr deep dive into an inane topic, knowledge of which topic grants you mild amounts of social cache, and knowledge of which feels inexplicably satisfying to obtain (possibly because it is knowledge that leaves no opportunity for action).

Anyway, you get the idea. I think it’s valuable to recognize the trap of with-it-ness, to see plainly that it is not a good on its own, to seek only information which enriches your life and the activities you fill it with, and to judge the worth of knowledge most by how it affects how you act in the world. Also, don’t forget to have fun.