Brandon Marcus

Meaningmaking includes all judgment calls, aesthetic preferences, and moral decisions that require determining what’s worth pursuing or believing. Here’s the critical insight: only humans can do meaningmaking work, while machines (including AI systems) cannot do meaningmaking work at all (yet).

Smaller, purpose-driven communities are the future. The desire for smaller, more intimate communities is undeniable. People are abandoning massive platforms in favor of tight-knit groups where trust and shared values flourish and content is at the core. The future of community building is in going back to the basics. Brands and platforms that can... See more

We need to confront honestly the issue of scale. Bigness has a charm and a drama that are seductive, especially to politicians and financiers; but bigness promotes greed, indifference, and damage, and often bigness is not necessary.

– Wendell Berry

The power law is the language the world is written in. If you’re building anything - a brand, a movement, a community - or all three at once - your job is to learn how to read it. To see where influence is actually concentrating, especially in places that don’t look like power yet.

We need to rebuild or reinvent the ways and places in which we meet; we need to recognise them as the space of democracy, of joy, of connection, of love, of trust. Technology has stolen us from each other and in many ways from ourselves, and then tried to sell us substitutes.

All this is partly a language problem. Silicon Valley’s corporations are constantly recruiting us to embrace their goals and their language. Corporate capitalists teach us to be more like them, to value efficiency and profitability and forget about values that might matter more in the end. We lack the language that would let us prize the arduous,... See more

Having convinced a lot of us that we don’t want to go out and have unmediated contact with other people, Silicon Valley is now telling us we do not want to do our own thinking, creating or communicating with other humans.