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The hacker class experiences extremes of a winner-take-all outcome of its efforts. On the one hand, fantastic careers and the spoils of some simulatio
Variety of work is the next point, and a most important one. To compel a man to do day after day the same task, without any hope of escape or ch
Now we have seen that the semi-theological dogma that all labour, under any circumstances, is a blessing to the labourer, is hypocritical and fa
It’s rare for a member to convert from a lower tier to a higher tier. In most cases, it’s not worth it to have a way for people to pay you $2, $10, $5
To me, a membership is something you pay for to get access to a benefit you’re after. That benefit can be a community of your peers, but it doesn’t ha
We earn trust by stating our business model upfront – instead of ads, we monetize by charging directly. Directly charging creates high expectations fr
I came of age in the Napster days, when only fools spent money on anything digital. Early on, we decided that we’d rather pay for the internet with at
One mistake I often used to make at Justin.tv was offering a potpourri of business models (virtual goods, product placement, chat ads, contests, etc..
The problem in media isn’t the business model. The problem is that most of the content sucks.
Create ownership in everything. Revenue shares in projects. Equity in micro-companies. Stakes in outcomes. The Old Game keeps you permanently renting
When individual entry is impossible, collective entry becomes optimal. When traditional financing fails, alternative structures win. The groups doing
Rob and I had to face the truth: Matter is a great product—3x App of the Day, with many thousands of passionate users—but it isn’t the next Duolingo.
When the institutions are optimized to fund the legible thing and the individuals are optimized to build the legible thing, the identity of the founde
LY Corporation has been digging through the data for Pokémon Sleep, and the overall results show that users have been resting easy and well since the
Two weeks of 20-minute yoga nidra sessions led to a higher percentage of delta-waves in deep sleep and better memory, decision-making, and abstraction
The study found that mindfulness helped the nurses experience fewer negative emotions and less rumination — repetitive negative thinking.
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What am I supposed to do? Keep standards high and fail them all? That’s not an option for untenured faculty who would like to keep their jobs. I’m a t
The more upset I became, the more I felt that my sensitivity towards the paintings was the same sensitivity I held when I was the subject of the photo
To spot weird signals, you need to go down rabbit holes. Follow your intuition. And remember, pursuing rabbit holes is not always an act of procrastin
Gen AI  for music has captured ~$300M in funding so far this year across several high-profile deals, the majority of which either focus on rights man
Consumer behavior is never done or satisfied. One of the great things about brands is that magical products or platforms or experiences can delight cu
Consumer founders today are solving for abundance. Too much food, pollution, stimulation, and connections leads to obesity, climate change, mental hea
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A great story about simplicity from Akio Morita, the instigator of the Walkman project at Sony: Engineers had the technology to add the recording func
Long-tail users of user-centered design are not given the degree of control necessary to adapt the design object or tool to their unique needs, and de
The engineer who truly understands the problem often finds that the elegant solution is simpler than anyone expected. The engineer who starts with a
The subscription model means content providers are paid regularly no matter the quality and quantity of the product. Makes sense – being paid on a reg
What tradition or practice from another culture or era do you think we should widely adopt?I wish patronage were widely adopted as an explicit social
Media and Machines.
When pursuing a 1-of-1 vision, you aren’t going to be the most popular or celebrated person. You’re going to be an oddity that the most in-the-know pe
It’s possible for other projects to be sexier, more lucrative, and more attention getting, however their purposes are less unique than yours.
I appreciated Nvidia’s founder talking the other week about what it means to work in a zero billion dollar industry. It means really believing in some
🧱Alternative funding model (inspired by cooperative breweries) Get 1,000 people to chip in $1,000. Make them members/ co-owners. Put each person's
If you make a cooperative, you have to know that you can’t design them; you can only grow them, like plants. If you grow one and you do it with other
The most successful web3 social apps are going to look completely different than web2 social (rather than building "decentralized Twitter/FB/X") They
The Future of NFTs: A Visual Exploration into the REAL use cases
All social networking apps fall on a spectrum from love to fame.
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The great thing, then, in all education, is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy. It is to fund and capitalize our acquisitions, a
That is, be systematically ascetic or heroic in little unnecessary points, do every day or two something for no other reason than that you would rathe
5/ You try to figure things out rather than feel through them How do you drop a hot frying pan? You feel it, and you will let go. All your bad hab
Unplugging Is Not the Solution You Want
Society is increasingly cutting the nourishing ties that attach us, and calling it innovation. I worry about how encouraged we are to do things effici
I couldn’t help but come to the conviction, right there on the bus, that one of the most important questions modern man must ask himself is how much t
The freedom of information the internet brings helps us expose idiot intellectuals quickly and more accurately than ever before. But the internet also
“As a medium, the internet is defined by a built-in performance incentive. In real life, you can walk around living life and be visible to other peopl
I am tired of seeing speed as a selling point. I’ve wanted to talk about this for a long time. I think one of the main reasons many of us feel anxio
From Lily Chambers: I genuinely do not care if AI tools make me more productive. I am tired of seeing, "increased productivity" as a selling point. I
Spirituality is experiencing who you are beyond small mental definitions, rituals, relationships. For this reason it renders traditional religion impo
“The function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature of the one who prays.” — Søren Kierkegaard
DAOs are not corporations: where decentralization in autonomous organizations matters
Governments sporadically got things spectacularly wrong. In 1865, the rail and horse-drawn carriage lobbies in the U.K. drummed up enough outrage to p
This is why successful companies still pursuing breakthroughs are always led by live players, often the founders. Only Mark Zuckerberg could have cha
Gen Z and the End of Predictable Progress - by kyla scanlon
What we’re seeing isn’t just a media trend. It’s a shift in the architecture of power. Attention → Speculation → Allocation. This is the new supply ch
Many people were outraged by what they regarded as his non-parliamentary use of medieval laws to raise money. The most notorious was ship money. This
One thing that might surprise you about dominance is how companies get it. You might think it comes from rapacious win-at-all costs business practices
There’s this cool idea in software that you “ship your org chart” called Conway’s law: “Organizations, who design systems, are constrained to produce
What really broke down in Google’s original vision is the incentive system they were building towards. There is a very specific subset of information
PEOPLE IN SYSTEMS DO NOT DO WHAT THE SYSTEM SAYS THEY ARE DOING. University professors chase grants, not student enlightenment. VCs nurture personal b
If you don’t have time to clean up, you don’t have time to cook Professionals understand that the project is the whole project, not simply the fun
Hindsight is 2020I don’t mean “hindsight is 20/20.” I’m talking about the year 2020.See, early in 2023, I wrote an article about starting and growing
A solid foundation requires a robust team structure. Hiring individuals who not only have the requisite skills but also align with the company’s cultu
It’s about the same trap in professional life: doing the thing for years, getting more experienced, and staying stuck at the same level. You can work
I don't know if I'm ever going to get rich doing this but I am going to keep making things that I want to exist, in a way that seems fun and to a leve
What we see as an agency in our work with creatorsWe work with a lot of creators around the world for different brands, markets and niches and the one
So who survives?First, creators who publish citable work. Newsletter writers who go deep on one thing. Analysts who publish original data. Technical w
The existence of AI models means that openness is a bigger liability for user-generated content companies. The existence of a successful company in so
The natural end state of marketplaces and social media is the eventual shift from user generated supply to professionalized supply/content. They can f
The usual cycle with social media sites is that they start out being very flexible and open, and are happy to have users even if those users are shari
On the one hand, Octavia Butler has this to say: “The only lasting truth is Change.” On the other hand, Bill Bernbach would counter as such: “A com
pretty clear that collecting cultural ephemera is a new consumer behavior that’s going to become a core part of life on the internet
Something I’ve noticed, however, is that exclusively using TikTok doesn’t mean I’m only exposed to TikTok-specific trends and culture. In fact, many o
Introducing a Rocks, Sand, and Water Framework for AttentionWe always talk about consumers’ attention as being finite, but how is it divided?I imagine
Collecting and archiving are ways to reclaim and own our attention—they are acts of meaning-making. These practices are rituals: habits and skills tha
Parnell shows that authors of color and queer authors are much more likely to have their work flagged as “adult content,” largely due to problems with
The whole thing about the Kardashians — the resistance they’ve kind of induced in people — is that it doesn’t feel consensual. You absorb information
And I realised that if you ever hear someone explaining things in terms of a long list of caveats, the odds are good that you’re looking at tacit know
Tacit knowledge is knowledge that cannot be captured through words alone.Think about riding a bicycle. Riding a bicycle is impossible to teach through
A democratic cultural politics would be developmentalist — oriented to learning, growth and discovery — rather than presentist. All kinds of resources
Some assume that a fundamental property of the internet is that it is globally connected, but countries, such as Iran and China, who have built their
Gen Z and the End of Predictable Progress - by kyla scanlon
The game has shifted, and the winning strategy with it. It’s no longer about understanding specialized details; it’s about grasping the high-level glo
What we do with our freedomThe examples of the excruciating etiquette of the aristocratic courts, the marriage market Rhimes dramatised, the civil ass
Remember in the before times how on hard days you could grab your work bestie and go have lunch blocks away from whatever was bothering you?
Like many people I thought Covid, with its stopped clock and blunt force, would bring a major reckoning. A reckoning with small things, like what we w
anyone who prioritizes the wellbeing of the “future of humanity” in the abstract over the dignity and care of individuals in the present cannot claim
Consider one more possibility: that the people who seem to slow us down and hold us back are actually preventing things from happening too fast. Imagi
Our metrics of progress have continuously abstracted: from the tangible bushels of wheat in agricultural economies (with natural physical limits), to
