The Imperceptible Mechanisms of Deep Community

When you're chopping up your thoughts, feelings, ideas, and observations into different templates and styles to please a bunch of different gods, you're not penetrating deeper into the one truth of our one world.

Independent creators today, consciously or unconsciously, subscribe to a kind of algorithmic polytheism. If you publish words on Twitter, you're doing proof-of-work sacrifices to honor one unknowable god; if you publish videos to Youtube, you're doing different proof-of-work sacrifices to honor a different unknowable god. And so on.

Creating on the internet is undoubtedly better than creating for institutional career advancement, but it's still just a truckstop on the way to where I see culture going.

By enabling members to access the alpha of their own interior, and providing social-psychological support for sustaining their work over time, deep community tends to generate something worthy of public attention. As soon as generating public attention becomes the focus or goal, the mechanism of deep community tends to break, like sand in its gears... See more

If you go too far off the beaten path of algorithmic consistency, you risk never being heard. You may never get enough cultural momentum to exist in any meaningful way. That is a real problem. But if you're too good at algorithmic optimization, you risk building a large audience without saying anything particularly original or important. Not to men... See more