Ian Vanagas

As a writer, looking for evidence of readership and engagement on Twitter makes you into the drunk looking for your lost keys under the street light.

Paris is not in pursuit of perfection. "Most of my shit's bad," she laughs, "I'm not trying to act like I'm some savant, like this is some fucking Picasso shit." She points to her friend, prolific YouTuber and filmmaker Casey Neistat. "He's like 'I won't put anything out there they don't think is amazing and I don't give a fuck how people receive... See more

DOOM embraced the idea of shared creativity. Rather than requiring the user to start from a blank slate, DOOM provided the structure and tools which allowed people to re-combine and add things to an existing system. This lowered the barrier to entry, not only in terms of the required technical skill (since it was not necessary to learn to write... See more

We are in the age of hyper-competition. Being a big spender is a seductive way to make you feel like you belong.

High-modernist (think Bauhaus and Le Corbusier) aesthetics necessarily lead to simplification, since a reality that serves many purposes presents itself as illegible to a vision informed by a singular purpose. Any elements that are non-functional with respect to the singular purpose tend to confuse, and are therefore eliminated during the attempt... See more

The perceived mediocrity of her content, and its subsequent success despite that, was dubbed the "Victoria Paris Effect" by the Embedded Substack. She's had advantages others don't: her college education, pandemic timing, and the fact that "so  many  massive creators are thin and white," she says. "That is never something that's not always working... See more

In the end, every single person like Nick who votes to deploy their capital into something which doesn’t produce anything beyond capital, is a vote to sit on the sidelines while every single other person works to keep the lights on, or ideally reverse the cycle.