Island of Misfit Startups: Part I (LensReader)
Island of Misfit Startups: Part I (LensReader)
This startup is brought to you courtesy of my essay Cargo Cult Civilization.
In the physical world, transmitting information or matter always requires energy. This principle is rooted in the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which dictates that any process involving the transmission of a signal or the transport of mass must overcome entropy and resistance, necessitating an energy expenditure.
In information theory (specifically Landauer’s principle), even the erasure of information (often a necessary step in processing or transmission) has a minimum energy cost associated with it.
Sending costs something for the sender.
You pay to mail a letter. The recipient pays nothing.
Advertising flipped the script. Delivery is free! (Subsidized by attention extraction.) The recipient pays in cognitive load, in time, in the slow atrophying of their capacity to focus. The sender pays bupkis.
In fact, the spammer gets paid, either a) by driving you to some experience in which you are going to buy something; b) by increasing the sender’s capacity to send; c) in providing the sender with valuable data (usually about you); d) rewarding the sender with audience, and the platform pays the sender.
This is thermodynamically bonkers. It’s like a postal system where sending is free and opening your mailbox costs a dollar. The result is predictable: infinite mail. Your mailbox overflows, so you stop opening it. The system collapses under the badly-chosen poles of optimization. It’s 2026, and your feeds are full of “AI slop”. Phew, this was so fucking predictable.
The failure mode is not cultural, moral, or technological. It is economic. We inverted who pays the energy cost of transmission, and entropy (Moloch) did what entropy always does.
Here’s the startup that Cargo Cult Civilization inspires.
LensReader
There are two hacks needed:
1. Make the sender pay. Per item. Per recipient. This is the Signal Tax.
2. Refuse to give the sender engagement signal. Engagement Blackout.
Not “pay to reach more people” (that’s just advertising at scale; CPMs). Pay to deliver at all. A fixed cost per recommendation, per reader, regardless of outcome.
We’ll call these senders “curation agents”, jah? (Because it’s 2026, and fucking everything is an agent now, right? Get with the program.)
The user pays for curation - one or more trusted editors. Curators pay LensReader a tax per message.
User pays Curation Agent → Curator pays Signal Tax → User resubscribes → Curator keeps margin
Now run the P&L. The spammer sending 1,000 items/month to each subscriber goes bankrupt. The curator sending 20 carefully chosen items/month gets paid. The economics select for signal.
Anyhow, the signal tax is not enough by itself.
LensReader’s contract with agents is “You pay to send, but all I give you is a delivery receipt.” Critically: NO information about open, engagement, clickthrough, etc. Nada.
This is required. The signal tax alone doesn’t prevent agents from optimizing toward engagement bait. You’d still get rage-click headlines, just fewer of them. The engagement blackout breaks the feedback loop entirely.
The agent knows they delivered. They don’t know if you opened it, or if you clicked. They don’t know if you read for ten seconds or ten minutes. They’re flying blind.
This means they can’t A/B test headlines. They can’t optimize for dwell time. They can’t learn that YOU specifically respond to outrage. They can only optimize for one thing: whether you keep paying them.
And the only way you keep paying them is if they keep sending you things you actually wanted.
Costs scale with volume and revenue scales with trust, the margin structure brutally favors low-frequency, high-signal agents. By removing outcome telemetry, optimization turns back into judgment. Thus the incentive to the curation agents is: curate well, and customers pay to subscribe to your curation.
What’s an Agent? Anything that filters the firehose:
- A human editor picking 5 links a day
- A script: “All articles mentioning ‘Rust’ with >50 HN upvotes”
- An AI: “Find 3 articles that disagree with each other on interest rates”
The platform doesn’t care. It charges the same tax per delivery. The agent’s job is to be worth more to subscribers than the tax costs to deliver.
The user experience isn’t a feed, it’s probably more like an inbox. (“Message for you, Sir.”)
Content arrives in bundles. “The Daily Tech Brief.” “Weekly Science Deep Dive.” When you finish, the interface says: “You are caught up.”
There is no infinite scroll. There is completion. It can’t exploit the dopamine short-circuit. It won’t lobotomize your ability to think for yourself.
Sure, the UX will still allow saves and upvotes, comments, blah blah blah. But none of that is exposed to agents.
In LensReader, discovery must be referral-based (good old fashioned word of mouth). If the platform refuses to provide engagement data, it also likely refuses to provide an algorithmic “Recommended Agents” list (which would just recreate the popularity contest). This forces discovery back into the human layer (blogs, emails, conversation), which reinforces the “slow web” ethos.
The Cargo Cult Connection
In Cargo Cult Civilization, I diagnosed the disease: the feed paved your brain’s minimum-energy path. It made reaction free and cognition expensive. The thermodynamics favors slop, and you forgot how to think, connect to others, etc.
LensReader is one possible antibody. It right-side-ups the thermodynamics. It makes slop expensive. It doesn’t fix your brain. It fixes the economics that broke it.
Why I’m Not Building This
I have other obsessions. Someone else should build this.
This is Part I of “The Island of Misfit Startups”, which are business architectures that solve problems I’ve diagnosed but won’t build myself. Coming Soon: “Training for Tuesday”, on why competence comes from confusion, not confidence.