Sixian

There are two types of indie consultants. There are those that have created a very clear specialization, you can look at their website and see something like “I help B2B SaaS companies with their content strategy” or “I help brands build audience via email”...Then there are those who are… weirder, less legible, harder to define. Folks who’s website... See more

Transparency Creates A Steep Power Law James: And so we’re back to the power-law problem. Which is that some people are very charismatic and other people just aren’t. Some people are really fast, and smart, and interesting to listen to and some people aren’t... And these attention systems we have today — and this identity of the individual with the... See more

To have deep knowledge about something is to have a rich inner world built around that subject’s orbit. How, then, does knowledge come to exist in the world beyond an individual’s private mind?

It’s by keeping our work legible that we keep the door open to the next generation of our co-workers. What works for them also works for us, because whether you are just out of school or have twenty years of experience, you’ll eventually end up in the same spot: your first year of making websites.

It’s curious to want to call an advert ‘objectifying’, because of course it is: its function is to promote an object. Yet this nonetheless feels like the right word, not only in reference to the object of the ad’s intentions, but the kind of gaze that is filming it. The camera, the eye, is fixated on the phone’s ‘thing-ness’: not what it can do,... See more

When people typically talk about the attention economy, they’re referring to creators amassing the attention of an audience, and then, after they have the attention, they’re able to monetize that attention in all sorts of different ways...I think what’s really interesting about NFTs and some of the new creator economy products that are coming into... See more

So in this post I’m going to reject the commonly accepted wisdom and look at why specializing is hard, why it fails and what an alternative path looks like. The answer lies in developing strong opinions and a distinctive vibe.

The old guard is now left to study the activities and new realities of online tribes. These groups are constantly churning out unsanctioned narratives that attract large followings, and that’s how things have sorted out. As in the media revolution sparked by Gutenberg, the powers that be are not too pleased about losing their monopoly over the... See more

A radical manifesto for the transformation of post-pandemic politicsThe question of ownership is the critical fault line of our times, and during the pandemic this issue has only become more divisive. Since March 2020 we have witnessed the extraordinary growth of asset manager capitalism and the explosive concentration of wealth within the hands of... See more