The book 1.0

chasing the feeling of acceptance, telos and community without that feeling corresponding to any materially beneficial group telos. The phenomenology of social reward and the material benefits of social cohesion are becoming increasingly decoupled.

The belief that the Earth is flat is not in and of itself problematic for most people, since most people will never need to circumnavigate the globe. However, the effects on adherents’ social relationships are problematic. The belief both signals and generates frame shear, the lack of mutual intelligibility, with all except those who share it—meani... See more

Flatness, like scalability, is efficient. The same culture flows through the same pipes to the same net-average consumer. But since when did efficiency become the sole metric by which we judge art? Filterworld represents the idea that the messiness of culture can be optimized and that only what is optimized for shareability is worthwhile. I disagre... See more

Internet people like to talk about “the stack,” or the layered architecture of protocols, software and hardware, operated by different service providers that collectively delivers the daily miracle of connection. It’s a complicated, dynamic system with a basic value baked into the core design: Key functions are kept separate to ensure resilience, g... See more

The sense is that in the fairly recent past there were social narratives that were both fulfilling and rewarding to participate in, but that for our generation and seemingly subsequent generations to come, it is becoming harder and harder to find and buy into a compelling shared telos. This is the sense of meaninglessness that prompts some people i... See more

At each point between phases, I didn’t know where my next source of funding was going to come from. What I can say is that if you’re writing thoughtfully, in public, about a topic of niche interest to a certain set of people, and getting those people to engage with your work, it’s very likely that someone will come along and offer to pay you to kee... See more

way of reaching understandings of what is going on , i.e. the foundations of world models and cultures in general.

t’s key to research the need for an idea, not only focus on the solution, but what it actually solves. Get intimate with that problem and its many dimensions, understand how it shows up in people’s lives.

The canonical example of the 2010s was probably the trend-forecasting agency K-HOLE, which was formed by four art-school friends who, while grifting fashion-industry jobs in New York, became ‘interested in the total collapse that comes with being the thing itself’. As it turned out, they were exceptionally good at ‘the thing itself’ – publishing pu... See more