Cal Newport: Why Social Media Is Big Tobacco Not Big Oil and the Steam Whistle Theory of Attention
Update: 2025-11-25
Description
Cal Newport, computer science professor and author of Digital Minimalism, argues that the better analogy for social media is not big oil that must be broken up because it's vital to society but big tobacco that must be culturally rejected because it's unhealthy and dispensable—people don't care if you tell them to leave Facebook for six months but petroleum deprivation changes lives. Newport reveals Facebook's PR pivot after 2016 when defectors like Sean Parker exposed addiction engineering: Cambridge Analytica let Facebook redirect media attention to fixable privacy and content moderation issues instead of unfixable business-model problems like bleeding users' attention through steam whistle tweets. Drawing from Mark Harmon quitting Twitter and Neil Stephenson's famous essay Why I Am a Bad Correspondent, Newport explains the novelist's dilemma: each tweet is a steam whistle that bleeds energy needed to fuel the boiler for producing lasting work. He dismantles the myth that creators need social media to grow, arguing that people talking about your work on their channels matters infinitely more than you promoting yourself on yours.
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