My Last Post on Robert Scoble

To anyone with a normal professional, family and social life, the fact that Robert Scoble has a problem has been obvious for a long time.

In perhaps my harshest criticism of the man to date, I responded to a post in which he noted that he often asks himself whether he should respond to another email or change his son’s diapers, writing:

Scoble has to ask himself whether he should let his child fester in shit or respond to another email?

I could probably write an extensive rant about this but it’s not worth it because it doesn’t take an incredibly perceptive person to figure out that any individual who has to ask himself whether caring for his child should come before his email has more than a productivity problem – he has a serious prioritization problem and an addiction.

The saddest thing about Scoble’s post is not that he would actually post something so utterly despicable without apparently realizing how horrible it makes him look as a parent. It’s that of the more that 100 commenters who participated in the “conversation,” only Dianna Huff of the MarCom Writer Blog called him on this question and only one pointed out that Scoble’s perspective is indicative more of “obsession” than anything else.

I can’t help but wonder what type of futures children raised by technology addicts face. Are they really any better than the futures of children whose parents are addicted to something else?

Michael Arrington may not be the sharpest tool in the shed (he sometimes makes Kelly Pickler look quick) but he finally realized that something is not right with his friend Robert Scoble. In a post entitled “I’m Sorry Robert, But It’s Time For A Friendfeed Intervention” he writes:

I’m a big champion of services like Twitter and the newer Friendfeed (can you believe Friendfeed is less than a year old?). But there’s a difference between liking a service and having an addiction. Robert Scoble crossed that line, and I believe he’s asking for help.

I asked Robert how much time he actually spends on those services. He monitors them all day, he said, hitting refresh over and over on both (he doesn’t use desktop clients to manage the services, and he says he doesn’t like real-time streaming feature on Friendfeed). In addition to watching all day, he says he spends at least seven hours a day, seven days a week, actually reading and responding directly on those services.

That’s 2,555 hours over the last year.

Which is more than a full time job (2,000 hours/year).

It is more than 106 full 24 hour days interacting with those services in aggregate.

It is an addiction.

Of course, Arrington doesn’t really care about Scoble (”Well, I’ll put his family life aside, that’s his business”) but he is concerned about Scoble’s blog:

…his blog has clearly suffered. He now posts only a few times a week, sometimes sporadically writing multiple posts in a day but often skipping 3-4 days in between. A year ago, Robert wrote multiple posts, every day. I used to read his blog daily, now I visit once a week.

What has he gained? On Twitter Robert has nearly 45,000 followers and has written over 16,000 messages. On Friendfeed Robert has nearly 23,000 subscribers.

So lots of people follow Robert on those services, but they aren’t visiting his site and the content he writes is on someone else’s server. Plus all that content is just really forgettable, compared to a good thought piece that people refer back to over time. There is no direct way to monetize any of that content, which is something that a full time blogger with a family really needs to think about.

In calling for an intervention, Arrington cries, “I want Scobleizer back.” Awww, how sweet.

But it’s not about you, Mr. Arrington. The purpose of an intervention is to help a person you care about regain a healthy life for their own good, not for yours. In true Web 2.0 style, Arrington’s call for a Scoble intervention is really about his disappointment that Scoble isn’t writing as many blog posts as he used to.

This, and Scoble’s response, demonstrates just how fucked up these people are.

In answering the question, “what did I give up by spending time on Twitter and friendfeed?” Scoble comes up with the following:

1. A few of my friends think I am not as good a thought leader anymore because they don’t get as many long posts as I used to do.
2. If you check Compete.com you’ll see my overall traffic went down about 14% this year while FriendFeed’s traffic went up 4,056%.
3. I don’t get any money from friendfeed, while on my blog I do sell ads now.
4. I’m not breaking as many stories anymore so I’m showing up on TechMeme less and less.
5. Arrington himself told me he is reading me less on my blog, although lots of the “A list” crowd have been showing up on friendfeed now that it has hit a certain audience size and is starting to show up on their referral logs.

Not as good a thought leader? A decline in traffic? Not selling ads? Failing to break stories? Showing up less frequently on TechMeme? The loss of an A-list reader?

When confronted with the possibility that his 7+ hour a day addiction is costing him something, I think it’s telling that Scoble is only able to come up with such worthless “losses.”

This addiction has clearly supported a narcissistic personality that has Scoble convinced that being “available to a wider range of people” is critical to his humanity. That he’s so insightful that making sure his words “get indexed by the two most popular ‘real-time web’ search engines” is important to his country. That the fate of Seth Godin, who “only blogs and…rarely gets discussed on Twitter or friendfeed”, is a tragedy that he could never live with. That his “list of 23,000 people on friendfeed and 44,692 on Twitter that I can show [translation: sell to] potential sponsors” is a priceless treasure. That his visibility is crucial to “[collecting] more subscribers” like one might collect baseball cards.

A simple question is in order: who the fuck does Robert Scoble think he is? Jesus Christ? Henry Kissinger? Maradona?

Earth to Scoble: you’re like the rest of us (read: a regular human being). You’re not a prominent politician. You aren’t an executive at a powerful corporation. You’re not a famous athlete. You aren’t a Hollywood celebrity. You’re not a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist.

You may be a “personality” in the small, small world of tech startups but you’re not contributing anything meaningful to the world on FriendFeed. Blogging about blogging is not making the world a better place. In fact, the 7+ hours a day you waste on FriendFeed and Twitter reduces by more than 2,500 hours a year your capacity to actually impact the world in some small but meaningful way.

But let’s forget about “changing the world” and “making the world a better place.” It’s usually self-aggrandizing assholes who wake up every day fixated on these bullshit notions. The people who do change the world (for the better) change the world without intending to. It’s the egotists with their god complexes who try to reshape the world as they believe it should be who usually end up making it worse for everyone around them.

So let’s acknowledge who Scoble really is first and foremost: a husband and a father.

And given that, I would ask the following question: is the 2,500 hours he’s not spending in quality time with his wife and children due to his online activities really any less saddening than 2,500 hours wasted by an absentee husband and father who is a drug addict or workaholic?

Now, I know some who read this might argue that I’m going out of bounds here and say, “How the hell do you know that Scoble isn’t spending enough time with his wife and kids?”

Simple: the allocation of time is no different than the allocation of capital. If you have $10 million and misallocate “only” $4 million of that, it’s still a gross misallocation of capital that could create more wealth, be donated to charity, be put to some productive use. When allocating every resource (time, capital, labor, etc.), one should always allocate the resource so as to achieve the optimal return given the desired objectives.

I’ve never been married and have no kids (that I know of) but even I know that the every father’s most important objective is to provide for his family. That means putting food on the table and being there emotionally for his wife and children.

There are 8,760 hours in a year. If you sleep 8 hours a night, that means you have 5,840 waking hours in which you can fulfill that simple yet often challenging objective. Scoble admits he’s spending over 2,500 of those hours online. In other words, Scoble, by his own count, is spending over 40% of his waking hours “reading and responding directly” to messages on services like FriendFeed.

That’s potentially 2,500+ hours of quality, distraction-free time that could have been invested in, say, Scoble’s relationships with his wife and children. Being an emotionally and physically involved husband. Being a dedicated, attentive father. Engaging in some sort of commercial activity that would help ensure even greater financial security for his family.

It’s hard to do any of those things when you’re clicking refresh all day long and trying to split your attention between those who you love and some random “subscriber” on Twitter who is jerking you off.

I’m admittedly a complete idiot when it comes to certain things but I’ve never met a woman who is secretly satisfied by a man who more interested in his G1 phone than he is in finding her G-spot. I’ve never met a child who is truly happy that he or she has to compete with daddy’s myopic “hobbies” for attention. And I’ve never met a family that complained it’s too “comfortable” financially.

Even if we assume that Scoble treats his family well, instead of using all the free time he apparently has to build a better life with and for his family, Scoble wastes it on self-congratulatory “conversations” about “conversations.”

Ask yourself: wouldn’t spending an extra hour a day with his wife be a better investment of Scoble’s time? Wouldn’t spending an extra hour a day with his young son, Milan, during some of the most important formative years of his childhood, be a better investment of Scoble’s time? I say it’d be a damn good start.

But these are questions Scoble apparently has no capacity to ask himself. His entire world is dominated by his online activities and they represent the primary consideration when contemplating anything.

Despite being publicly told by his friend (Arrington) on one of the most popular technology blogs that he has an addiction, Scoble’s pontificating on the matter produces little more than narcissistic attention whoring. In a comment he left on Arrington’s post, he writes:

Heh, Mike, we’re talking about you over on friendfeed. The intervention isn’t working.
http://friendfeed.com/e/1df653…..riendfeed/

What more can I say. If Scoble doesn’t prove that Internet addiction is real, I don’t know what will. A person who spends 2,500+ hours a year on FriendFeed, Twitter, et. al. is no better than the junkie who throws his life away for another hit of China White. Scoble’s FriendFeed account is the Internet equivalent of a heroin addict’s mutilated arms.

Of course, don’t expect any of Scoble’s “subscribers” to express much concern about Scoble’s problem. When Scoble wrote that he has to debate whether he should change his son’s diapers or respond to another email, all but one of the commenters on his blog bothered to point out just how sick that is.

But that’s not surprising. As was made evident from the unfortunate (and perhaps preventable) suicide of Abraham K. Biggs, which was streamed live on Justin.tv as viewers watched and did nothing, Web 2.0 isn’t about being social and it’s not about “conversations.” It’s about indulging in narcissistic exhibitions with other narcissists and talking to hear your own voice. The people you’re engaging in these shallow, 140 character conversations with don’t really exist. They’re artificial constructs and they’re completely disposable.

So who cares if one of those “people” clearly has a problem? What does it matter? As long as they’re posting blogs and engaging in a “conversation” that entertains, why should anyone give a shit? Online, a person in need is little more than a cheap circus act.

Which is why none of Robert Scoble’s “subscribers” or “followers” or whatever they call themselves will do the man a favor and tune out.

I’m reminded of a experience that many people share: having a friend or family member with an addiction. In the early stages, tolerating the addiction (and even pretending that it isn’t a problem) seems to work just fine. But inevitably there comes a point at which the elephant in the room can’t be ignored and you know what needs to be done: you need to leave the room so that your friend or loved one can deal with that elephant. Some do, some don’t. Life goes on.

In the case of all the people who either marvel or laugh at Robert Scoble’s online activity levels, leaving the room means “unfollowing” the man.

I’m no saint. I’ve been harsh on Scoble and admittedly, I didn’t quite recognize how serious his Internet addiction is (2,500+ hours/year serious). Perhaps it’s because I always saw a slight hint of exaggeration and self-depreciation in some of the things Scoble has written about his online activities. Or perhaps it’s because I simply didn’t want to recognize how serious his Internet addiction is. In any case, I’m guilty of treating him like a cheap circus act.

This will be my last post on Robert Scoble. I’ve seen the effects of addiction on people I care about and wouldn’t wish it on anyone with a family – even those individuals who I don’t like. I hope he gets the help he needs.