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before I get to tonight's bookwork i wanna think out loud a bit about a question people have asked me and i'm usually kind of evasive and handwavy about, re: "so what are the next steps (re: The Dominos)". the thing is that I don't want to "contaminate" the process with my model
i'll just talk thru the actual dominos ig. so the first domino is love and curiosity, directed inwards and outwards. this is very important bc if you approach the process with neediness β a need to prove yourself, assert yourself, anxiety, fear, etc β it'll leak out and sabotage
this is a lot of what the book i'm currently working on is about; being kind to yourself, gently curious with yourself, the most heroic thing you can do is to refuse to hate yourself, and instead earn your own self-respect by living in accordance with your values
the next domino is "friendly ambitious nerds", and that's what my first book was about: it's basically an articulation of the way I live my life, communitarian, public-commons-minded, encouraging, inviting, etc. after I published the book i started keeping an eye out in history
and I found to my delight β its not surprising, but still β that there have been friendly ambitious nerds throughout history who devoted large amounts of their life to cultivating scenes around them. Erasmus is my go-to example. Coleridge was another. Max Planck. Gertrude Stein
I define a minimum viable scene as 1. at least two people... 2. who are producing public-facing work... 3. that's directed at each other... 4. creating powerful vectors in the process would also add that these people encourage and unblock each other... buncha other deets
see even before we get to the next domino (meta-scenes, ie the modern equivalent of cities), there's a TON OF WORK TO DO!! one way I frame this is "mint 1000 erasmuses". encourage 100 people to do 100 things β podcasts, vlogs, blogposts. scene-mindedly https://t.co/v8SdXhRUQq
TIL about Erasmus β (probably well known to Europeans, there's a student exchange named after him) β one of the most prolific men of letters in the 1500s, corresponding with literally hundreds of people. he was born out of wedlock, both of his parents died in the plague... https://t.co/msUcui2O6H
so yea honestly I don't really care too much about the bigger dominos until I have say 500 mutuals who are producing prolific amounts of work with smart, thoughtful, curious audiences internationally. we will be asking different questions at that stage
the big mistake (I.M.H.O!!!) that public intellectuals have been making for the 10 years or so is that they are still operating with old media models of thinking. most of them, as far as I can tell, seem to prefer an audience of 1 million fans over 500 truly great co-creators
I get that I'm probably overlooking a bunch of nuance, that's part of what I call the Times Square problem, it's the glitziest, loudest voices that get most attention. The Internet is not just Times Square, there's all sorts of interesting shit going on but we have to look for it
I see all kinds of really silly (to me) failure modes. for example, what was that, "Pursuit Of Truth University"? absolutely unhinged. it was never gonna work. if you want real scholarship it's going to come from the fringes. I see so many people waste so much effort every year
the unit economics are all wrong. before you start some grand initiative you have to ask yourself how you're going to sustain it when you run out of money. and the way to do that IMO is to be scrappy as hell and to tie it to your personal bein https://t.co/tnB88b86kC
this is why I will most likely never launch an organization, unless for some reason people are throwing so much money at me that I need to find some way to spend it meaningfully. I believe the world needs a better public commons and the way to do that is with volunteers
handover protocols are important so you don't fucken waste years and years of people's efforts and then end up with nothing to show for it when goes to shit and your personal ego burns out https://t.co/tqJQTL5ecm
This is why - Iβm totally serious - itβs important to have proper documentation and handover protocols. Iβve seen local music and political and journalism scenes repeatedly stuck in the same small sad loops because nobody has the foresight Play the 100 year game https://t.co/Z4m7wvXYpH
IMO you have to be willing to earn people's attention slowly over 10+ years so that the people who choose to work with you deeply know your values and are serious and so on. I'm not in a mad rush here. In fact I gently reject anybody who's too excited bc- https://t.co/AdR4f8kARG
I've been here a long time! I was a child raised by libraries & the internet. I intend to tend to it & contribute to it as best as I can until I die, & leave my own efforts in good hands. for the love of it. helping the next kid is all the reward I need https://t.co/J3xzAQT4ER
nobody has any idea what 50 years of compounded friendly-ambitious-nerd switchboarding + modern media tools can look like. it's never been done. montaigne and emerson were better FANs than I'll ever be, but they didn't have twitter. I see it as my duty to uphold their tradition
Here is Marshall McLuhan dreaming to Ezra Pound of bringing 10 Erasmuses, 10 Emersons, 10 Montaignes together. Unfortunately for them, they did not have Twitter. Fortunately for us, we do. We will honor our predecessors by fulfilling their dreams. https://t.co/NZ63UdPZHY
this whole thread btw is sort of deliberately oblique and slightly inaccessible because I don't want to make overly legible, grandiose proclamations, because then you appeal primarily to impatient grandiose types. I've really thought this stuff through! https://t.co/tvh6a0HatF
dream big but take baby steps. my day-to-day is I answer DMs from anxious ambitious kids who might not be able to do anything for me, but might be interested in helping out in their own way on their own terms 10, 20 years from now. long game
and really the best way anybody can help is not even to think about me at all, but to focus on tending first to themselves, &then the people in their lives. help unblock each other, encourage each other to do whatever it is that lights up your eyes, makes you excited to be alive
@visakanv I keep thinking of you when I make videos addressed to (or riffing on) friends. it's such a potent way to vid vlogbrothers vibes https://t.co/8sHwu29n6i
a video by @m_ashcroft gave me an idea for another video he could make, & I decided to just make it myself! it's a tiny exploration of the nature of intentionality. where do intentions come from? how does that relate to being on autopilot? https://t.co/mKHO0S7jme