("JP")

Social media is similar to sharecropping :

• We’re "renting" space on a platform we don’t own


• We’re paying for that space by becoming “the product” whose attention is sold to the highest ads bidder


• Our attention is also being usurped by the makers of the platform and what they’ve programmed their algorithm to show us, and


• Our data is being

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The negative consequences of forcing the forests to become legible to their planners didn’t become obvious until after second rotation of trees to be planted, about a century later. This is important to note: the first-order effects, what happens right away, are often beneficial; it’s the second and third-order effects of forcing legibility onto an... See more

Google and Facebook play the roles of central bankers for our attention economy. They represented a generation of “free-to-play” games that unlocked infinite consumer surplus and participation, and with increasing power as the brokers of the value exchange, they now require “paying to win”.

The best founders have figured out that owning their narrative gives them meaningful leverage. Founders and companies can increasingly communicate their narrative in a direct and compounding way to investors.

Looking closely is valuable at every scale. From looking closely at a sentence, a photograph, a building, a government. It scales and it cascades — one cognizant detail begets another and then another. Suddenly you’ve traveled very far from that first little: Huh.

I’d say that that huh is the foundational block of curiosity. To get good at the huh... See more