Sterling Proffer

12. Curate your own marketplace: The more new content gets created, the more curation matters. As the music industry transitions to web3, curators who add context and meaning to music, and guide us through what’s good and what’s not, will become increasingly important.

I have occasionally been asked why I’m obsessed with brands. The answer is that brands are things made out of belief. They are amorphous *meanings* that structure our relationships; they are already the same sort of thing that a religion or a culture is. With the cultural production service economy, and now with cryptocurrencies, all of the... See more

The civic fathers who presided over the industrial cities of the late nineteenth and early and middle twentieth centuries—the Rockefellers and Carnegies who built the museums and libraries and concert halls—supported culture as an end in itself: a public good, a social value, a point of local and national pride. Today’s planners and plutocrats... See more

All modern machine-learning models are based on “neural networks”—programming which mimics the ways in which brain cells interact with each other. Their parameters describe the weights of the connections between these virtual neurons, weights the models develop through trial and error as they are “trained” to respond to specific inputs with the... See more

Building Habit—Not Page Views—Matters Most For Keeping Subscribers, Data Analysis Finds

As I struggled with these thoughts early on, I wanted to explore what it would mean for brands and subcultures to merge more fully, to offer a much deeper and richer meaning. This set me on a quest to learn about cults. I read about organizations which were abusive and manipulative, but which still managed to create meaningful practices that... See more