The book 1.0

Announcing The Techno-Humanist Manifesto

The real breakthroughs that enabled the revival of the 1,000 True Fans model are better understood as cultural. The rise in both online news paywalls and subscription video-streaming services trained users to be more comfortable paying à la carte for content. When you already shell out regular subscription fees for newyorker.com, Netflix, Peacock, ... See more

Cal Newport • The Rise of the Internet’s Creative Middle Class

The co-opting of “community” into a sales strategy is insidious, not only because it reduces likeminded groups of people to consumer demographics, but because, in an era when we’re all encouraged to cultivate our own “personal brands,” it also reduces each of us to a salesperson , seeking out likeminded people in order to sell them things , whether... See more

You are not a commercial for yourself

Our sense of it being effective to stick together, to do things like loan each other sugar, proactively participate in building neighborhood safety and infrastructure, or babysit each other’s children is dissolving, because in fact it is no longer effective or efficient to do many of these things.

Everyone’s Existential Crisis

I think everything you write has a purpose, and if you understand the purpose and the audience, you shouldn’t veer too far from what its intention is. I would like to be good at writing ad copy, writing press releases and writing articles in all their correct ways, but then also be able to experiment and expand the form.

Natasha Stagg’s New Book Perfectly Distils Life in Pandemic-Era New York

but continued a love affair with language and meaning as texture and material.

James Bridle • Why I Write

A few years ago, a user by the name of IlluminatiPirate published Dead Internet Theory: Most of the Internet is Fake on the online forum Agora Road’s Macintosh Cafe.1 The theory proposes that the majority of the content with which we engage online is algorithmically generated by bots, all in an effort to control what we believe. I feel obligated to... See more

Gaby Goldberg • Making the Internet Alive Again

My secret, cynical theory is that we are so completely numbed and overwhelmed by information these days that we simply don’t think in these more abstract terms anymore (and I think it’s that numbness that I want to capture in this piece somehow). Or maybe we still do, but it all gets lost in idle musings on Twitter or in group chats or messages to

Working notes for Summer of Protocols

I’d describe my time from 2015-2020 (when the book will be published) in three distinct phases:

Phase I: 2015-2016: Discovery, exploration, initial research, hypothesis generation (funded by the Ford Foundation)

Phase II: 2016-2018: Experience, experimenting, hypothesis testing (working at GitHub)

Phase III: 2018-2020: Refining, summarizing, consolida