Relating with social media

How does one start a new business or sell a product in a world without advertising?

How do you scale something fast enough through just word of mouth to get out of the red?

If I open a new bakery, is it predatory to send a pamphlet to the nearby houses? Should I just sit quietly and hope that enough people notice?

used to work with a client who followed many of these coaches. Her feed was FULL of fantasy marketing and after a while, whether you like it not, that gets to a person.

Not least because of the echo chamber effect of social media. Once you follow one of these grifters individuals, your Explore page is full of them.

And when I say it gets to a person,... See more

A lot of social media these days makes me feel like I’m doing it wrong; I’m not going to the right places or wearing the right thing or doing the right workout (or any workout tbh). Sure, it’s kinda an obvious takeaway about a common feeling, but what was less obvious to me is how this week’s contributor Alex Dobrenko characterizes this experience:... See more

Global mega-platforms under capitalism are structurally incapable of handling the business of civilization: of governance, of providing genuinely public infrastructure, of making knife-edge decisions about the balance of liberties and securities. It’s not what they do or what they want to do, and in many cases it’s in opposition to their actual... See more

if you want to be a person that regurgitates meaningless babble to create an illusion of competence, Linkedin is just the right place for you.

The most successful social media accounts today are rich. They’re thick with engaging content. They innovate on the constraints of the medium. They are wildly inspiring to me.

I never get the feeling that they’re saving their best stuff for their website or email subscribers. They make remarkable content and put it on social media for people to... See more

Because self-promotion sucks. It is actually very boring and not that fun to produce TikTok videos or to learn email marketing for this purpose. Hardly anyone wants to “build a platform;” we want to just have one. This is what people sign up for now when they go for the American dream — working for yourself and making money doing what you love. The... See more

There’s no urgency to idleness. Why not be idle tomorrow, once you’ve finished everything you have to do today? You will never get a midnight text reminding you to do nothing. You will never get a calendar invite to do nothing.