seeds

Maybe the only thing worse than being paid off to have an opinion, is guessing and adopting others’ opinions out of fear of being “wrong” about your own.

In an era of personal brands and monetizable reputations, every single one of our posts is a performance. If you exist online, there is no such thing as authenticity. This only becomes more true, ... See more

One of my (many) contrarian beliefs is that we do not have strong enough preferences. We often blame social media or the speed of information as the reason why we’re easily distracted, but the real reason behind our inability to focus has less to do with the sheer quantity of media and more to do with our laziness when it comes to distinguishing wh... See more

The crowd is the flâneur’s indispensable counterpart: the crowd turns people into observable objects . In Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Man in the Crowd’ the protagonist pursues an intriguing figure through the streets of London for a whole night without ever being able to see his face: in big cities, one can stroll through busy streets without recognisin... See more

1.4. The largest cultural segment in any society is the “mainstream,” although it may represent a plurality rather than a majority.

1.4.1 The “average” person in any society belongs to this taste world as it requires no specialized knowledge, nor has very high barriers to participation. Tastes can be acquired through ambient absorption — e.g. heari... See more

One of the benefits of producing consistent creative work is that it comes with a narrative network effect: The more people who know and love the story of an object, the stronger the tie to that object becomes. For a brand like MSCHF, success might not always come from money—sometimes, it comes from products that reinforce how they want to articula... See more

Consider the difference between Trader Joe’s (a beloved grocery store with a wide variety of goods, all of which you can trust) and whatever new CPG goods are popular on TikTok. Hype is a flash in the pan. Narrative network effects are durable, long-lasting, and broadly applicable.

The more people who buy a product, the further the product’s message spreads, the more money the company makes, the more they can invest in their projects. It's a virtuous cycle of creation and consumption. By making scale—the number of people who use or see the creation—an explicit part of the art’s statement, they naturally marry the business’s g... See more

If you serve as a mechanical slave to mass media and online algorithms, you’ll end up with intellectual diabetes. To find quality information, you have to rebel against the incentives of mass media and the algorithms that threaten its business model.Make no mistake. For the conscious news consumer, there has never been a better time to be alive. Th... See more

. Is it good to have a schtick? Am I just a little story dispenser, dispassionately using the same bits ad nauseam?