Benji
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Benji
How to Be a Good Citizen in Troubled Times
How to Be a Good Citizen in Troubled Times
No matter what you’re writing—story, novel, poem, essay—the first thing you’re going to need is an idea. As I said earlier, don’t make this the intimidating part. Ideas are everywhere. Lift up a big rock and look under it, stare into a window of a house you drive past and dream about what’s going on inside. Read the newspaper, ask your father about
... See moreAnn Patchett • This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage
The image that stayed with me from Welwood’s work is being a big tent at a festival. The life inside it is the life inside us always at play, but we’re also the container that protects that life from the elements with wide open sides that enable an ongoing interplay with the world. We’re tied to the earth, but constantly expanding in all... See more
• The Great Differentiation is the race to be different. It is the salvation from slop.
• For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. This is Newton’s Third Law of Motion. It is also an emergent Law of the Market.
• Sameness has never been cheaper.
• Websites look the same. Writing reads the same. Hype videos hype the same.
• Copying is free and frictionless. And because it is cheap, it is low status. What might have been 2019’s most beautiful landing page is 2025’s slop.
• When sameness is cheap, differentiation is valuable. But how do you remain differentiated when copying is free and frictionless? Make copying expensive.
• Male peacocks are famous for their feathers. “If a male peacock has a giant array of feathers and still manages to drag it around everywhere and survive,” Nathan Baschez wrote in his April 2022 essay, [DALL•E 2 and The Origin of Vibe Shifts](https://every.to/divinations/dall-e-2-and-the-origin-of-vibe-shifts), “it’s a pretty good bet that they are physically fit and have good genes.”
• This, Baschez says, borrowing from evolutionary psychology, is a costly signal, costly “because it costs something tangible to send them, which is proof of fitness (in the broadest sense of the word “fit”: well adapted to survive in the environment).”
• But what Robinhood and the other examples we’ll look at show is that with the cost of almost any digital signaling plummeting to zero, those companies who wish to send costly signals have moved offline.
