“I will withdraw myself, my ego and my personal life, from the equation as much as possible. And instead devote my whole life to prayer, service, and work.”

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What arrived as a message meant to settle something was soon followed by photos of his family dinner, travel updates, “Just made it to SF!”, and selfies. Their chat, her attention were a feed: posted to engage, no answer required.

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Like any other morning, his first morning in San Francisco started with the routine scrolling through X. A shower and, if time allowed, a 20-minute meditation followed. As a startup founder on the quest to solve the ‘world’s attention crisis,’ it seemed practical to begin by exhausting his own.

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Lying on his belly, he opened the app and scrolled through it. He paused now and then to type a pointed reply without periods, carrying his thinking through other Threads. Like a TV, it’s a broadcast medium—you share what’s on your mind and let whoever is on the other side of the screen deal with it. Unlike a TV, participation is assumed.

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When Twitter, X in its pre-life, came to be, publishing and opinion-making were a prerogative. It belonged to the channels with reach and earned authority. With Twitter, one could shape and post their own opinions. Everyone could broadcast.

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You might think that to enable expression, one would optimize the writing experience. But not really. It was the reading experience that was honed to perfection. It’s easier to serve a curated list of messages for reading than to distribute an ever-growing, mutating dialogue for further writing.

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From an architecture point of view, writing is a costly operation: one message needs to be distributed across thousands of timelines, analyzed, and cached. A single post is a new piece of data triggering a multitude of side effects and scenarios.

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A reading operation, on the other hand, is just a timeline compiled from precomputed and cached data. It works with what is already available by collecting and delivering you a bento box of content—all prepared and assembled for consumption.

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His timeline was a curation of content matching his preferences, selected according to the probability of being liked, replied to, and reposted—statements of high agency and achievements by tech founders, thoughts on the state of computing, and occasional teaching from the Catholic Church. Something to engage his soul. What we are engaging for is another question: to speak or to converse?

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In the real world, a reaction to what is said is an element of a conversation. It’s a two-way communication. In the digital world, it’s a one-way signal. The first makes sense in relation to each other. The second—each by itself, then grouped together. A chain of replies on X is called “Threads,” not “Convos.” By design and by behavior.

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If one optimizes the reading experience, whatever we write cultivates the purpose of being heard. Posting becomes declaring: from one person to many, no expectations.

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In a sense, we’re all broadcasters, transmitting our thoughts, wishing to have more conversations about A, B, and C, where response is unnecessary. Each individual message, complete on its own, carries enough value. Contribution serves to direct attention to it.

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For two years he had been trying to build a startup. Looking at the posts by other founders and industry thought leaders, he was part of the conversation, but not a participant. Higher purpose, grand visions, and morale posture—he read them as one reads instructions, liking and replying in solidarity and support. The work of fulfilling them was left to the real world beyond his view.

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His email pinged with a request for another bureaucratic paper for his startup. “This is ridiculous!” He posted his dissatisfaction about being a part of that administrative mess, attached a classical painting of Christ carrying his cross, and closed the app. Intuitive action is a sign of good UX.

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“I don’t know how to understand your last message. Can we talk about it?”—her message came up. He turned on “Do not disturb” and locked the screen in the service of his purpose.

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