Depth over Noise #1

I'm going to try something new: a newsletter featuring a curated collection of articles, quotes and more that I find interesting, insightful and worth sharing.

I enjoy reading and discovering things. There are quotes in other articles delivering a message better than I could. I want to share that. Instead of dumping them to social media – and adding more noise – I would rather embed them into context. This gives me room to explore the depth of the message, providing more thoughts, views, data, analytics or whatever is suitable for it.

For now, I plan to publish at irregular intervals, when I have something to share. Let's get started.

The real skill is to know when to dive deep and when to skip the details #

Within the context of agentic coding, this article states that these tools are slot machines. You put in the task you want to achieve, and then you wait for the output and see whether it does what you wanted or not. When it works, great, you head to the next task. If it doesn't, you may put in more money and try again, hoping for a better outcome. If you're not making progress, you'll take the time to analyse, understand and do it yourself.

Besides the message of the post, I love this learning, I couldn't express myself better:

Early on in my career, someone much wiser than me described two modes of operating: the Conjurer and the Scribe. The Conjurer is a wizard, creating realities out of thin air, working in broad strokes and never going deep. The Scribe reads every line of the text, and every line it refers to, understanding everything to its deepest and fullest extent before acting. Some of us tend more towards one way of operating or the other. Both are critical.

But the real skill, the real thing that makes you effective, is knowing when to use one mode or the other, and being able to switch between them as needed. When does understanding matter? When should we skip it and move onto the next thing? In a field with endless and important detail at every level, we have to both “let it go and move on” and “slow down” constantly.

Back to the future: From text back to the spoken word #

A section within a German newsletter about the situation of journalism got my attention. It starts with a classic, well-written quote regarding the internet and masses of content these days:

What does it mean to live in a world of virtually infinite and ever-growing content? We see the result every day: a relentless race for attention, whether in social media, journalism, or on the web. A huge long tail of content whose lack of visibility is tantamount to non-existence.

Going further, when considering newspapers and social media, my thoughts were always focused on the different media types, including text, images, and video. But that it represents a different orientation is something I haven't thought about before:

While orality was oriented toward relationships, literacy is oriented toward objects. Accordingly, as Walter Ong points out, the distinction between orality and literacy does not represent an evolutionary progression from “primitive” to “civilised.” Instead, it brought with it both gains and losses. Oral cultures embodied liveliness, creativity in presentation, a sense of community, and dynamism. Conversely, literacy means critical thinking, individualisation and autonomy, complex knowledge structures, and the globalisation of cultural forms of expression.

Now, heading to journalism itself. The author expects a declining relevance of text and complexity and growing importance of brevity, moving images, and emotionalisation and concludes:

Privately funded journalism finds itself in a dilemma due to economic constraints: if the audience develops into part of an oral culture, podcasts or videos may not do it justice. Instead, it will probably only be possible to do so if one fully commits to becoming an identity medium—in other words, a medium that limits its reporting to confirming particular worldviews, validating tribal affiliations, cultivating enemy stereotypes, and fueling conflicts. In the US, such a media landscape is already largely a reality; in Germany, we are beginning to see the first outlines.

Digging through the links of this newsletter, I ended up discovering how entertainment is evolving:

1. Pre-Internet 'People Magazine' Era – before social media, magazines with mass publication.
2. Content from 'your friends' kills People Magazine – private online bubbles between real friends.
3. Professional 'Friends' (also known as influencers) kill Real Friends – Professional friends spend all their time being pretty and amusing. They out-compete your actual friends on the entertainment they provide.
4. Algorithmic Everyone kills Influencers. – Algorithmically sourced content to your personal needs from 'everyone'; anyone can be viral today and irrelevant tomorrow.
5. Next is pure-Al content, which beats 'Algorithmic Everyone' – bet about fully personalised generated content created by AI.

Reports of the German inner circle of power #

During my summer vacation, I picked up all three audiobooks from Robin Alexander. He is a German journalist capturing political events and has deep roots in the inner circles of power. It is interesting to hear how individuals acted within the political debate of past events. I found it especially exciting, having lived through these times myself and noticed this from the outside.

For me, phrases like report of the inner circle of power carry a kind of cinematic weight. They don’t just tell you what the book is about—they make you feel it. It’s a promise. The place where decisions are made, where power breathes and pulses behind closed doors, has just been opened up to take a look at. That phrasing elevates the whole thing. And these books hold their promise.

Anyhow, the books have great listening experiences. They were so exciting, I couldn't put them down:

Die Getriebenen (en: The Driven), published March 2017, (🇩🇪|€) Hugendubel, Thalia

The opening of the border to refugees in autumn 2015 divided the country – some praise Angela Merkel's moral stance, others condemn the surrender of sovereignty. However, what appears to be deliberate action is, in reality, a policy of muddling through, tactical manoeuvring, and vacillation, fueled by lofty ideals and opportunism. Robin Alexander shows that the political actors are driven, torn between self-imposed constraints and the rapid succession of events.

Machtverfall (en: Decline in Power), published June 2021, (🇩🇪|€) Hugendubel, Thalia, RTL+

At the end of her term in office, Angela Merkel faces what is probably her greatest challenge yet. But the chancellor, who has often risen to the occasion in emergencies, is reaching the limits of her authority in this crisis. According to Robin Alexander, the pandemic is just another spectacular chapter in an even greater drama: the end of an entire era. The book tells the story behind the scenes: of the tough, long battle within the inner circles of power in the republic and of the showdown over Merkel's succession, which almost tore her party apart.

Letzte Chance (en: Last Chance), published June 2025, (🇩🇪|€) Hugendubel, Thalia, RTL+

As the new chancellor, Friedrich Merz faces enormous challenges. Enemies of democracy, both internal and external, are preparing to storm the liberal order. The electoral success of populist parties threatens to blow apart the political centre. With Trump's re-election and Russia's advance, Germany's role in the world will change radically. Robin Alexander takes a look behind the scenes at one of the most decisive phases in German politics, in which a fragmented party landscape and a polarised public make stable majorities almost impossible.

About this newsletter #

I believe that written content – or any type of content – has an expiration date. Just as groceries have an expiry date listed on the packaging, every piece of content has one too. However, on content, there might only be the creation date shown. The content churn is highly dynamic and unclear. No one can look into the future.

When I put in the effort to write an article, I try to stick with content that has been around for a while. Readers should find in my blog archive articles that will remain relevant, whether you read them today or in a couple of years. This is why I choose content that I believe will stay up-to-date for as long as possible. It should convey a clear message that I can sum up in a sentence or two.

But these guidelines limit the content I can write about. I have a hard time writing about current events, news, or topics because the expiration date tends to be short.

What I like about newsletters, on the other hand, is that they are a snapshot of a point in time. They give me the room to explore all the things I missed for my articles. If some content prevails, great; it remains. If not, proceed to the next issue.

That's the reason why I try this experiment with “newsletters”. For now, it is just another post on my blog, with a familiar name across the series.