Alex Dobrenko

Writer George Saunders calls this “achieving the iconic space,” and it’s what he’s after when he meets his creative writing students. “They arrive already wonderful. What we try to do over the next three years is help them achieve what I call their “iconic space” — the place from which they will write the stories only they could write, using what... See more

The better your vocabulary, the more things you can name, the richer your base of raw materials to hang new ideas and experiences on.

The resulting product, despite its good intentions, is a search engine that surfaces websites that were written to be optimized for a search engine. You are not the audience; the algorithm is.

I know I know. That sounds dumb and unrealistic. I thought the same thing. The truth is people DID tell me this. There were the Instagurus, the Michael Singer and Eckhart Tolle books, the friend who left the grind years ago and never looked back. Intellectually, I could see that it was possible. In practice, I couldn’t get close enough to touch it.

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The “For You” pages of the world are right, I am interested in that content, but I’m not seeing it from my friends, or that one author I like, or that random blog I found when I was learning about an obscure hobby.

Are.na was born out of this desire to create a platform that helped you find people through information, and vice versa. That’s essentially the thing that Are.na does, plus enabling you to learn more about yourself through the information you collect.