Andrew McCluskey

“Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign.

But stories can also be used to empower, and to humanize.”

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

The antidote is boring: take less capital, get to profit sooner, and stay small enough to survive platform volatility. Earn resiliance through reputation.

Slow growth feels unglamorous until you wake up richer, calmer, and in control—while everyone else is still chasing the next trick.

I don’t know why we talk about walled gardens.

That seems to imply something beautiful, something worth defending.

It conjures images of beautifully maintained flowerbeds protected from the outside world. But that’s not what Facebook built, what Instagram built, what Twitter built.

They built paved, unshaded, barren hellscapes, trapped us in them,... See more

and share them with our members to promote local culture across generations, ideologies and personal feeds.

Here’s a stunning stat: more than 39,000 accounts on TikTok now have at least 1M followers. This creates “niche fame” where within a specific following, a creator may be a rockstar, but more broadly, that same creator may be completely unknown.