Culture

It’s not that most people can’t make heavy things. It’s that they don’t notice they aren’t. Lightness has its virtues—it pulls us in, subtly, innocently, whispering, ' Just do things .' The machine rewards movement, so we keep going, collecting badges. One day, we look up and realize we’ve been running in place.

And then you feel it: a quiet,... See more

At any given time, you’re either pre–heavy thing or post–heavy thing . You’ve either made something weighty already, or you haven’t. Pre–heavy thing people are still searching, experimenting, iterating. Post–heavy thing people have crossed the threshold. They’ve made something of substance—something that commands respect, inspires others, and... See more

Light things shape culture, but rarely shape us.

Creation isn’t just about output. It’s a process of becoming. The best work shapes the maker as much as the audience. A founder builds a startup to prove they can. A writer wrestles an idea into clarity. You don’t just create heavy things. You become someone who can.

The output matters, but the intention, the struggle, the care is what makes it count — what gives it weight.

We create more than ever, but it weighs nothing.

When literally everything becomes television, what disappears is not something so broad as intelligence (although that seems to be going, too) but something harder to put into words, and even harder to prove the value of. It’s something like inwardness. The capacity for solitude, for sustained attention, for meaning that penetrates inward rather... See more

But the opportunity for Attention Assets goes far beyond pricing equities. We believe that predicting attention is an economically valuable activity. Attention is a leading indicator to consumer preferences and spending. Businesses allocate R&D, hiring, and marketing dollars depending on where attention goes. It is a matter of figuring out new... See more

The goal of an equities research analyst is to determine the price of a stock. There are established methods to calculate the DCF component but what about the memetic component? As more assets trade off of their memetic value, it will become necessary to develop methods to model memetic value. Sophisticated investors already use things like... See more

The most obvious tradeoff of our proposed oracle is that the inputs are difficult to obtain. If you want to construct a LeBron James attention oracle, you must first create many different liquid prediction markets for topics related to LeBron. In addition, those markets must stay liquid over time and be replaced with liquid markets as existing ones... See more