strategy - Other Life

Urbit and the Telos of the Creator Economy

~hatryx-lastud Urbit is a new kind of networked operating system that turns your computer into a “ship” that can network and exchange data and computation with any other person or group on the network (like the current internet), but without requiring any trusted third parties like Facebook or Google to

strategy

Samo Burja and the New Private Intellectual

I just published a new episode of the podcast. Here I collect some of its best insights, in text for your convenience. From Other Life Episode #129, Samo Burja on Intellectual Legitimacy and His Business Model as a Private Researcher, you'll learn about: The dangers of a rebel mentalityGreat Founder

strategy

The time to withdraw

I've built a decent audience across several social media platforms, but I can't shake the feeling that something fundamental is going rotten. For people doing longer-term and more sophisticated work, such as writing serious non-fiction, participating in the "creator economy" is something like settling an unmapped foreign jungle: the irresistible

strategy

Eric Weinstein's Error

Eric Weinstein has released his highly self-aggrandized anticipated research paper on geometric unity. I read the paper. I gave it a solid hour or two. I did read the whole thing. The paper is not really a research paper, it's a collection of briefly formalized mathematical intuitions combined with some

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The Meaning of Clubhouse vs. Taylor Lorenz

This is not just another Twitter beef, but a bellwether for the changing structure of intellectual influence. Clubhouse is a “drop-in audio” chat app especially popular in tech circles. People come in and out of ephemeral chat rooms; the rooms split users into speakers and listeners, with users moving between

Productivity

Should you start a Substack?

TLDR: For most of you, no, starting a Substack is not the best way to build a financially sustainable long-term writing project. You should definitely build an email list, but you should do it with a free newsletter you run alongside a website/blog that you own. Especially for people

strategy

It's rational to move somewhere beautiful to write

Having unique and true ideas is, pound for pound, the most valuable human resource in the world. If you are blessed with periodically arriving flashes of insight, in the long-run it is economically worthwhile to organize everything around recording and publishing those insights. The greatest inhibitor of unique ideas is

News and Updates

How I made $3,300 on a short niche philosophy book

The Based Deleuze project is now officially complete, so it’s time to do some final accounting. Here I will review the financials, the labor/time costs, and the main lessons learned. Based Deleuze was conceived and executed as a hard test. In research design, a hard test is a

Productivity

Lessons from Nietzsche’s Awful Publishing Results

“…the marketbell—The Daily Press—is only run for their own clique and not for the proud and solitary One.” Nietzsche’s publisher Schmeitzner on the complete failure of Thus Spake Zarathustra Independent intellectuals today should study closely one of the most profound and impactful thinkers in all of modern

strategy

There are no humans on the internet

The best way to build community and make friends on the internet is to treat all internet interlocutors as if they are real humans in a real-life, local village. If you do this, over time many people will like you and want to form an alliance with you. Because most

Productivity

The Optimal Podcasting Process for Indie Thinkers: Automate and Proliferate

Here is the podcasting process I’ve developed over nearly 2 years of iteration. It’s not perfect, and it’s not for everyone, but for many indie thinkers I think this is the best system. Certainly better than any other piece of “how to run a podcast” content I’

Productivity

Reasons not to start an online magazine

TLDR: The magazine model is not the best choice for indie intellectuals trying to start something. Two reasons: (1) Accelerating digital culture requires you to move fast and group projects move slower than solo projects, and (2) accelerating media segmentation rewards increasingly unique, hyper-niche content, so smaller, in-house production teams

strategy

Fully automated personal brands

Right now, it’s still seen as bad taste to overly automate your personal social media — and for good reason. But taste changes, and it always follows the money. As machine learning gets better, we will soon cross the threshold where some minority fraction of the dumbest people will be

Productivity

An Effort Allocator for Content Creators

Get the spreadsheet If you're trying to build a long-term intellectual life on the internet, one of the biggest problems you'll face is figuring out how to allocate your effort. There is no template for doing this successfully — yet — and it's a doozy of an optimization problem. If you don't

Productivity

If you're a content creator, you're a tiny startup (you just don’t know it yet)

All of the following terms from Silicon Valley startup culture have direct analogues in the content-creation game. In the examples below, I’ll discuss a blogger or video producer who earns income via Patreon, but the principles generalize much more widely. Product-Market Fit Product-market fit is when it becomes clear

Productivity

You can’t be smarter than you are

This might sound obvious, but it’s not: You are only as smart as you are. People get stuck because they aspire to be smarter than they are. People refuse to produce until they are as smart as they want to be, but the only way to become as smart

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Calling all indie thinkers (literally)

Over the past week, I’ve conducted more than ten private Skype interviews with a diverse group of internet intellectuals, “content creators” of the higher-brow variety, cancellation-vulnerable professionals, and lesser-known upstarts aspiring to be one of these… The reason I organized these Skype calls is that I spent the past

Productivity

The worst that can happen is nothing

If you’re genuinely seeking the truth and you put something crappy into the world, nothing happens. There is no punishment for crappy content. It’s one of the simplest and most profound facts of conducting creative intellectual work on the internet. If you make something good or important, there’

Productivity

Abjection

If you would like to become a philosopher or any type of serious intellectual you must acquaint yourself with the concept of abjection. To be a philosopher one must be abject, and the reason a lot of people don't understand anything about this concept is because most contemporary philosophers want

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Advancing to Level 2

I’ve now been on Patreon for one year. It's been good, but I think I need to level up. Would you like to help? If so, I have a new flashy object with your name on it. Read on. Review and Projections First, a little review of my Level

Productivity

Not making progress or losing motivation?

As I wrote a few weeks ago, I was recently hired on a monthly retainer to do some intellectual consulting. Basically, a very smart person just needed to some help getting a project off the ground — what they needed was a combination of substantive feedback, informal support, tactical guidance, and

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Progress report for first book project

I launched a pre-order form for Based Deleuze a little more than a month ago (June 20, 2019). I committed to publishing a short book of about 20k words by September 20 at the latest. I currently have 15.9k words, so the writing itself has been proceeding smoothly. That’

Productivity

Can you do a PhD if you have ADHD?

I received this question recently from a reader. Here is how I replied. I also made this video if you’d prefer to hear my thoughts that way. This post and the video are not exactly the same. First of all, I'm only slightly “on the spectrum,” if that’s

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An automated system for delivering high volumes of exclusive content to patrons

This took a lot of tinkering, but I think I've finally figured out the best currently available way to manage and deliver a wide variety of exclusive items to patrons. Optimizing and automating the links between research, production, and dissemination will probably be one of the main edges that internet

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How I'm Successfully Digitizing Another Professorial Function: Consulting

[Update: Much of this turned out to be prescient, in fact so prescient that a lot below has been transcended by the creation of IndieThinkers.org. So I'm not really helping many people personally and directly anymore, but rather building scalable systems for doing so.] As loyal readers will know,