Thomas

All original ideas are combinations of other people’s ideas. So the more you curate other people’s ideas, the more you develop your own rare and valuable ideas

I was talking to a friend the other day about life hacks and he said: what if life hacks, in the end, make you a hack? No one wants to be a hack. A hack job is a job poorly done. No matter how much we glorify hacks as workarounds to success, nothing gets you there except actual work. The grind, the hustle, the hours on end putting your head down... See more

You could say paradigms are harder to change than anything else about a system, and therefore this item should be lowest on the list, not second-to-highest. But there’s nothing physical or expensive or even slow in the process of paradigm change. In a single individual it can happen in a millisecond. All it takes is a click in the mind, a falling... See more

Many activists on both the Left and Right now hope to bring about their ideal world the same way a spoiled brat acquires a toy they’ve been denied: by being as loud and hysterical as possible. This is neotoddlerism: the view that utopia can be achieved by acting like a three-year old.

Social media intensify this kind of communication without community. You cannot forge a public sphere out of influencers and followers. Digital communities have the form of commodities; ultimately, they are commodities.