Ian Vanagas

Shared creativity is a powerful force.

Travis Kalanick started Uber as a hack to split a few private cars with his friends. Thefacebook.com was just a student directory written in PHP. Even Elon Musk started SpaceX with the goal of merely increasing NASA’s budget by pulling a PR stunt.

The personal computing revolution succeeded and we are all miserable. The dream of personal computing as augmentation for the intellect, and the joyful, radical counterculture that arose around the first PC’s has given way to our increasingly dismal present.

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.

Thinking about inputs and outputs to the system in a method-agnostic way lets you take a step back from the algorithmic jargon and consider whether other fields have developed methods that might work here using different terminology.

When she was laid off from her role at a fintech startup in the pandemic panic of early 2020, Paris doubled down on driving traffic to her DePop store to make money. She saw TikTok as an untapped fount of opportunity, and made creating videos for it her full-time job. She posted dozens of times a day, drawing viewers in with her... See more

We are on a trend “inward”, where capital, our proxy for GDP, is better served deployed into things that generate more capital, instead of things that generate production.