• Two week ago, I announced I’m giving $10,000 to the best essay of 2025. The competition starts today! Below you’ll find the prompt and some details to help you get started. I’m putting some final touches on the software & submission tool, so expect that to come out by the end of this week. In the meantime, you can start brainstorming and drafting your ideas.

• The Essay Architecture textbook is live on Substack! This has been two years in the making. Paid subscribers now have 40 posts that cover every element and pattern of the system in detail. Free subscribers have access to A Pattern Language (an introductory essay) and the dimension pages, which give an overview and all the definitions.

• Check out my episode on Infinite Loops with Jim O’Shaughnessy for a conversation on Essay Architecture, this competition, writing, technology, and education. Big thanks to Jim, for the O’Shaughnessy Fellowship made this all possible (you should apply in 2026).

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The prompt:

What’s it like to live in 2025? Write an essay about a specific moment you experienced in 2025—an event, trend, media, technology, or relationship—that exemplifies both our current zeitgeist and our timeless nature.

I figured since you’ll be spending hours writing your own essay(s), I’d spend some time articulating the prompt, why I picked it, how to approach it, what we’re judging on, and a summary of the rules. There are also 50+ examples in the footnotes that might help you generate ideas. If anything isn’t clear, please leave a comment! (I’ll add a “clarifications” section at the bottom.)

Why is this the prompt?

For an essay contest to be “open,” the prompt needs to be flexible enough for any writer to enter. Something obvious we all share is this specific moment in time. 2025 can unify a big range of very different essays. Our goal here is to publish 10+ finalists into an anthology; not only will it be a collection of solid essays, but also an artifact to make sense of the spirit of our times. Sense-making is hard in 2025: the open Internet is chaotic and polarized, and institutions have fixed ideologies. The hope is to curate a collection of independent thinkers who use personal experience to make sense of our society.

How should you approach the prompt?

Approach “2025” in an angle that is most exciting for you (a prompt is really just a launch point that you should quickly abandon once you find inspiration). You do not need to tap into pop culture icons, or polarizing political ideas, or what you think everyone else collectively thinks this year is all about. Go deeper than hype and headlines. What feels significant to you this year, and what might that reveal about our culture? It’s okay if it’s extremely subtle and unexpected. Don’t feel the need to make it explicit (“I think the most defining moment of 2025 is X because…”). The prompt should be invisible. You need not even mention “2025” once. I also don’t recommend trying to summarize the entire year, month-by-month. Pick one moment and go deep.

I’ll share two general ways to approach the prompt (and really, essays in general). An essay is a personal reflection that links individual experience to socially relevant ideas. You might begin with the particulars of your own life, or, the broader patterns of culture, but eventually you have to bridge the two. An essayist fuses many genres—the pen of a poet, the imagination of novelist, the persuasion of a marketer, the research of a journalist, etc.—but most fundamentally, it fuses the soul of a memoirist with the insight of a philosopher. It’s about using your own life as a portal to understand bigger ideas.

1. Start with experience: What are some notable things that happened to you this year? These could range from obviously important life events to peculiar moments you can’t stop thinking about. What can you write about that almost no one else can? By starting here, you’re guaranteed to write something singular; the task then is to figure out how your experience is emblematic of a larger phenomena. Is it totally okay if your topic is not self-evidently symbolic of 2025. By getting into the specifics, you might reveal an unnamed current that we’re all entangled in. (Examples in footnote.1)

2. Start with culture: What are some phenomena in the larger culture that you have a unique relationship to? Whether you cover a massively mainstream moment,2 or a little-known event in an Internet subculture,3 it’s all about finding an idiosyncratic angle. It’s less about picking “the best” or most representative moment; it’s about finding one where your singular experience gives us the best lens to understand it. Whether you’re writing about politics,4 media,5 technology,6 language,7 or another domain, make it yours.

What are we judging on?

There are three ways your essays will be evaluated: (1) the Essay Architecture framework will judge how well-rounded your composition is, scoring your submission 1-5 across 27 objective patterns; (2) the best-crafted essays will be read by a panel of human readers who look at 8 subjective criteria (listed below), because the quality of a work is more than the quality of its craftsmanship; and (3) a guest judge will serve as a wildcard, ranking essays based on their own taste.

Objective criteria:

To get a basic understanding of the Essay Architecture framework, you can check out my latest posts on Idea, Form, and Voice. In each you’ll find a short essay on the dimension, along with a one-line question that defines each element and pattern. It’s around 2,700 words total (which is far more descriptive than most essay prizes).

Subjective criteria:

Now, here are some subjective qualities of a great essay. (I’m sure these will evolve with time.) A great essay is not just well-composed, it’s singular, emblematic, timeless, catalytic, essayistic, emotional, experimental, strange, etc. These are less definable through patterns on the page; they’re felt by the reader, and colored by their experiences.

1. Does the essay seem to come from a singular life circumstance?

2. Does an insight reveal something surprising about 2025?

3. Has it connected a timely moment to timeless themes?

4. Is the core insight likely to provoke change in thought or action?

5. Did it capture the essayistic spirit: a mind working through friction?

6. Does it pack powerful emotions?

7. Does it push the boundaries of prose and experiment with craft?

8. Does it make the familiar strange?

General rules:

(Detailed and boring terms coming soon)

• Open eligibility. Open to anyone 18 years or older (ages 13-17 require parental consent); open to most locations (unfortunately certain countries with US embargoes might have complications); pseudonyms welcome.

• $10k grand prize and 10+ finalists get published. There is a single cash prize, but the finalists will be featured in an anthology with a royalty split.

• Upload for $2-9 to get feedback and scores, then submit for free. Unlike traditional contests that charge a ~$24 submission fee and don’t offer feedback, the Essay Architecture software gives you a detailed analysis of anything you upload.

• Unlimited submissions. You can upload as many drafts as you want to improve it through feedback, but I recommend submitting one version per idea. But feel free to submit as many different ideas as you’d like for consideration.

• Written or published in 2025. Along with new, unpublished essays, you can submit anything you’ve written or published in 2025. Feel free to submit any of your existing Substack essays that relate to the prompt (you can edit them or submit as is).

• Flexible word count: Open to both short and long essays. The max word count is 10,000 words, but focus on quality, not length. It’s better you submit a 1,000 word essay that is dense with meaning than a 5,000 word essay that is ambitious in scope but poorly crafted. If you exceed 2,500 words, make sure the form/structure is tight.

• Blind judging: Your submission will be given a random ID number so that readers won’t be able to easily identify you. But since these essays will have personal elements, there’s a chance they might. If they think they do, they will guess who the writer is, and if they’re right, their evaluation will be down-weighted or omitted (you will not be penalized; the scores of blind judges will just have more weight than non-blind judges).

• English language: All essays are scored and judged in English. If you are writing in another language, please translate before you submit.

• AI policy: Some competitions ban all forms of AI usage. Given that Essay Architecture is an AI-powered editor, I’m more open to it. That said, the spirit of this whole project is to preserve the act of essay writing (meaning, in my opinion, you should use AI to augment your thinking, not to automate your sentences). But however you use AI, it’s welcome, as long as you disclose it. For each submission, there’s a little one-view survey that asks you to share how influential AI was in various parts of your process. Usage will not be penalized! This information will help me see aggregate stats and shape a more specific AI policy in the future.

• Data privacy: Essay Architecture uses OpenAI’s API. Data you submit through this API is not used to train their models (unlike the conversations within their product, ChatGPT). Additionally, I do not sell data or use uploads to train my own generative models. A good rule of thumb is to not upload any sensitive data you wouldn’t want on your personal website (after all, this is a tool for essays that you will be sharing in public).

• Submissions close Sunday, November 23rd, 2025: Submit early to avoid any last-minute technical issues! In case everybody procrastinates and there’s a final-hour surge that melts the server, I will provide a backup submission portal through Google Forms.

Examples

The Internet needs a quality algorithm. Without one, it will only get harder to discover and celebrate great writing. It used to be the role of literary institutions to sift through silos of submissions, to find the signal in the noise, to elevate great work from unsuspecting people to inspire the larger culture.

Consider the 21-year-old college student who won the Prix de Paris essay contest in 1956: she won $1,000, a job at Vogue, and went on to become Joan Didion. Or consider the unknown, 38-year-old sheet music copyist who beat establishment intellectuals at the Academie de Dijon essay contest in 1750 and went on to become Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Now consider how similar things happened to James Baldwin, David Foster Wallace, Brandon Sanderson, and whole generations of writers, known and unknown.

But when a culture loses its ability to properly fish for talent, you get something like today’s Internet: infinite hooks, but everything is seaweed. Writing hits your glowing screens at numbing speeds and scales based on its popularity and extremity. Engagement algorithms are hackable. Consider the state of the Substack leaderboards: #2 was recently hung for plagiarism, and multiple accounts flutter into the top 10 with AI slop and cogsucking armies of commentbots. Trite little Notes that read like greeting cards are getting more attention than entire editions of The Iowa Review. Meanwhile, the platform has an underbelly of growling, undiscovered talent. This is merely a minor annoyance, for feedmakers care less about merit than total user milliseconds.1

The journals, anthologies, magazines, and MFAs—the purported guardians of writing education, economics, and quality—haven’t adapted well to the 21st century (this could be its own essay, but for now I’ll make a generalization and say that old giants were gutted and turned into media companies2). Whether it’s The New Yorker or Best American Essays, they seem to be more driven by prestige than virtue. There’s little incentive to modernize, either; essay competitions are run the same way in 2025 as they were run in 1750. Some still use mail. They charge you a $24.50 entry fee, disappear with your work for 3 months, only to send back a template rejection letter without any feedback.

As I build the software for Essay Architecture—which generates feedback by running thousands of 1-5 evaluations—I realize I’m building more than an educational tool. There’s a social component to this: it’s an engine for essay discovery, the beginnings of a quality algorithm.

So I’m putting up $10,000 to test a thesis: can I create an internet-native technology-forward essay prize that is more accessible, more transparent, and more synergetic, resulting in an anthology that is commercially viable and culturally catalytic?

In two weeks I’ll share all the details, but I’ve used this essay to explore and articulate (first to myself, and now to you), how the Essay Architecture Prize is different from traditional essay contests. I analyzed 65 of them. I entered 2 of them myself3 to feel the dynamics (in 2024 I lost the Astral Codex Ten book review contest, but won the inaugural Cosmos Essay Prize). There are dozens of design decisions4 to consider, and with the right mission, the right technology, and a big-enough prize, I think it’s possible to create a new discovery engine that rewards the right things, otherwise timeless essays will continue to hide in the slopstorm, dwelling unread in the gutters of Substack.

I, MORE ACCESSIBLE: At $10,000, this is the world’s largest “open” essay prize. It doesn’t use the essay as a tool to promote an agenda; its agenda is to promote the essay.

I noticed that all the competitions with significant prizes have restrictions around location, age, or topic. The CBC Nonfiction Prize ($6,000) is only for Canadians (it is funded by their government). The John Locke Institute Essay Competition ($10,000) is only for college applicants. The Willie Morris Awards ($12,000) is for “under-recognized writers” writing about the US South. The Ayn Rand Institute Essay Contest ($25,0000) is only for high school students willing to write a book report on one of her three books. The Berggruen Prize ($50,000) is only for someone capable of exploring the frontiers of unsolved problems in philosophy and consciousness. The Nine Dots Prize ($100,000) asks you to submit a 3,000-word essay, but the winner has to agree to spend a year expanding it into a book for Cambridge University Press.

I think you get it. The point is, these contests use the essay as a tool to advance some institutional agenda. There is nothing inherently wrong with that; if you’re going to give away free money, it might as well be strategic. However, this means that the big prizes are usually off-limits to the average writer.

Now, there’s a whole other breed of competitions which I call “open” essay prizes. They celebrate a specific medium of literature (essays, fiction, poetry) and try to find emerging voices. They give little restrictions—sometimes just a word count—and the prompt5 is open-ended enough for anyone to enter. The problem is, the largest open essay prize is not very big. The William Hazlitt Prize (~$23,000), hosted by Notting Hill Editions, quietly disappeared five years ago, and so now the largest one is $5,000.

At $10,000, I’ll be hosting, “the world’s largest open essay prize.” It’s neat to say that. As a sum, it’s a lot for me to casually give away, and for the recipient, it’s big enough to work hard towards. But still, it’s not necessarily life-changing money, and it’s definitely not society-changing money.

Think about how the X-Prize (and others) give away $1,000,000s per year for scientific innovations; why is literature/education/philosophy valued 100x less? As writing gets threatened by AI in the decades ahead, it will become urgent to incentivize and champion the essay, our best folk medium. Unlike fiction, memoir, or poetry, it’s the one literary form that, theoretically, could be taken up by everyone. Everyone (everyone) has space in their life to write one essay per year. If AGI/ASI automates all our cognitive labor, then essay writing could be the recreational hobby that sharpens our thinking, the gym for the mind.

So let’s imagine a utopian future where an open essay prize offers society-changing money: $10 million. People are freaking out, borderline obsessed, kind of like in Ready Player One. Joyce Carol Oates submits, but loses to an unexpected teenager who lives in a trailer park. If the 28% prize:entry ratio6 holds, that would be an awful lot of reading and judging to do. 2,800,000 entries at 2,500 words comes out to 7 billion words, and if the judges read slowly and carefully at 30 WPM, it would require 3.8 million reading hours, or 486,000 days of full-time reading, which could be pulled off in a year with a team of 1,300 readers, reading full-time, 8 hours a day, without weekends or vacation. Even if you paid everyone minimum wage, it would cost something like $62 million to pay your judges.

The point is, a society-wide open essay prize can’t scale with human judges. Paradoxically, if you want to build an institution to preserve human writing, it might only be possible with AI evaluation.

II, MORE TRANSPARENT: The judging standards are transparent, detailed, and built into software that you get for ~$3-9/draft. This lets you get instant, unlimited feedback, making it possible for anyone to iterate towards a winning essay.

I looked through the top 10 open essay prizes from 2024 to see how they communicated their quality standard, and couldn’t believe the lack of specificity. They ask for “writing with a command of craft.” They say “writers are encouraged to explore the form,” and “the Selection Committee judges applications on the quality of the writing samples.” Sometimes it gets poetic, asking for “daring formal and aesthetic innovations that upset and reorder literary conventions, historical narratives and readers’ imaginations.” If they’re not vague, they’re often completely missing. The Iowa Reviews Awards ($1,500), associated with the renowned Iowa MFA program, has nothing to say about what they want. They’ll know it when they see it.

Of the contests that I analyzed, the average submission fee was $24.21, and most don’t offer feedback (though I found two that did, for $90-120 per entry). So basically, you pay money to submit into a black box.

With Essay Architecture, all essays are scored on 27 patterns, each with a public definition,7 and there is a 20,000-word wiki that explains what each pattern is, why it matters, how to implement it, and it gives examples and rubrics. If that’s not enough, you also get access to a tool that scores your essay and gives you instant8 feedback on how to improve it. At $3-9/per draft,9 it’s 10-40x less than market, and once you’ve uploaded, submission is free.

What makes this radical is that you have access to the same tool that I’ll use to shape the longlist. This means, if you’re motivated, you can get into an iterative loop and get as close to a platonically perfect essay as you can. Even if you lose (and of course, almost all entrants do in fact lose), you leave with hopefully the best essay you’ve ever written, and new insights on the revision process.

I know what you’re thinking: isn’t this hackable? If everyone has the judging tool, won’t everyone get a 5/5? Won’t trolls discover AI hacks and get perfect scores by uploading gibberish?

Well, the main insight is that AI generation is significantly harder than AI analysis. I fed Claude my textbook (which has all the answers) and asked it to turn some notes into a perfect essay; it only got a 3.6. For reference, a 3.0 is good, a 4.0 is great, and a 5.0 is world-class. From my beta testing, writers found they could increase their scores by 0.5-1.0 with editing. At a certain point though, your form hits a limit, and you can only advance by significantly restructuring your essay. After five rewrites, I got the essay you’re reading from a 2.61 up to a low-4.10 And even if you do find a way to technically hack the software to score a perfect 5 with a slop submission, it would be pointless because the winners are ultimately determined by human readers.

The judging process has three pillars of equal weight: (1) Essay Architecture scores on objective composition patterns (also, I’ll be manually scoring the longlist to make sure it’s accurate); (2) a panel of readers will be scoring for non-compositional, subjective values (do they feel the essay is culturally potent, timeless, singular?); and (3) I’ll invite a guest judge to serve as a wildcard, stack ranking the short-list based on their own taste. The top essays from this competition will be well-crafted, well-liked, and recommended by a trusted judge. The whole triad is covered: logos, pathos, and ethos. All three branches are present: judicial, legislative, and executive. This is as American as it gets. Can a process like this make a substantial difference in the quality and success of an essay anthology?

III: MORE SYNERGISTIC: This is built for independent online writers. You’re allowed to publish essays that are already on your Substack, and if you’re a finalist, you’ll be featured in and earn royalties from a Metalabel anthology.

I’ve noticed that essay competitions aren’t too popular among online writers, and I think it’s because of friction around publishing rights. These institutions typically want “first North American serial rights.” This means, while you still keep the copyright, they want to be the first outlet to publish your work. You’ll see things like “Entries must not have been previously published, either in print or online, or been accepted for publication elsewhere.” Some will consider simultaneous submissions, but only if you “notify them immediately” if the work has been accepted, generously giving you “24 hours to decide if you’d like to withdraw.” This is the language of a gatekeeper.

The Essay Architecture Prize is built for independent writers who already self-publish, which means you’re welcome to submit anything: unpublished essays, or ones that already exist on your Substack. If you are a finalist, you’ll be asked to grant me “non-exclusive publishing rights,” which gives me permission to publish your work in an anthology of the winners. Unlike traditional anthologies though, I want writers to have equity in the book.

Here is a theoretical breakdown of how an essayist gets paid on their path to getting featured in a prestigious anthology. The writer is (sometimes) compensated by the journal they get published in: maybe it’s $0.20/word from The New Yorker, but probably under $500 for a Tier 2 journal, and often $0 for a smaller literary outlet. Anthologies often select essays from journals and prize winners. 70% run on prestige and offer nothing other than free copies of the book, 20% offer a flat fee (maybe $200), and 10% offer royalties. I would guess that a large anthology like Best American Essays doesn’t offer royalties. If we generously assume it sells 50,000 copies per edition at $20, and then factor in costs for distribution and printing and such, then Harper Collins might profit something like $250,000. At 22 contributors, that’s like $11,000 in value generated per essayist, but they earn something closer to $400.

This doesn’t feel like synergy, this feels like trading your work and time for a “featured in X” badge. What if writers owned 100% of the anthology?

Imagine if 10 finalists were assembled into a digital zine on Metalabel, a platform that automatically splits sales between the owners of a collection. If it sold 2,500 copies at $10, that would be $2,500 per owner (which makes the royalties function as a meaningful prize for being a finalist). Now let’s run the crazy simulation. In a fantasy where this becomes a commercial breakthrough—because unlike BAE, its obsession with quality leads to a collection that is well-rounded, trance-inducing, and recommendable—selling 500k copies of a $19.99 softcover, that’s something like $2.5 million in revenue, which, split 20ish ways, comes out to $125,000 per finalist.

Of course, I’m excited just to sell the first 100 copies, but the fantasy proves a different point: a business that pays writers well is, generally, a bad business. The idea of giving 100% of royalties to the original essayists makes absolutely no sense to Harper Collins, or to anyone aware of the complexities of book-selling. But what makes this fundamentally different from a publishing company is that the whole thing is anchored in software. It’s a different business model, one that happens to produce high-quality essay books. The hope is for the software to be successful enough so that I can make decisions from the place of what helps writers? and what helps essay culture? Synergy means the more I help the community (via tools, prizes, distribution), the more it helps me (bigger prizes + better books = word of mouth + more software revenue), which then fuels better tools, bigger prizes, farther reach, and on and on and on.

EssayArchitecture.com

The Essay Architecture Prize

So this inaugural Essay Architecture Prize is an experiment to see if any of this is actually feasible. Are there enough entrants, submissions, and subscriptions to sustain software development and host a bigger prize next year? How accurate is the scoring? How does Substack respond to the concept and process? Where is the bottleneck in infrastructure? (Does the whole thing crash and burn the day before the November deadline?) Is the grassroots anthology we produce better than Best American Essays and how many copies can we sell if everyone promotes it? Did I enjoy running this and would I want to run it every year?

Out of all the businesses I could make from this tool, I’m most excited about the one where software and literature work together in a flywheel. Mr. Beast started by giving away $10,000 to his audience, and now he routinely does 7-figure giveaways. But, unlike Mr. Beast, this won’t use jaw-dropping prizes and fabricated situations to hack your attention; I see it like a Trojan Horse, an unreasonable sum of money that tricks a generation into manifesting the golden age of the Essay, where good ideas get amplified and inspire a wave of reading, writing, editing, thinking, and self-publishing.

Let me know if you have questions/ideas and I’ll make sure to address them in next post.

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Footnotes:

As a young architect reading The Fountainhead in architecture school, I picked up a dangerous virtue: you can just scrap everything and start over. (Spoilers ahead.)

Howard Roark1—the protagonist, an architect—is the patron saint of creative destruction:2 after a building committee compromised his plans, he felt a moral obligation to demolish his own building. He used dynamite in the middle of the night. They arrested him. In court he defended himself with a 150-page speech on creative integrity. I saw this as permission to set an unreasonable quality standard for myself. Since then, I’ve been open, perhaps too open, to scrapping a perfectly-fine design to chase its always-elusive potential (this essay is v7.2, and a trusted editor begged me to ship v4.3).

In architecture school, I became known for a design-until-the-last-minute philosophy. The open problems of my design haunted me more than the fear of not finishing in time. I’d make major overhauls, days before crit, while most other students were in production mode for weeks. Through all-nighters and clever production techniques, I somehow pulled it off. The compulsion to take projects further and further let me grasp the process and patterns of architecture in a way I would’ve never known if I stopped when I was supposed to. It gave me a confidence that would eventually screw me. In my final year, the assignment was far bigger in scope, and I showed up to crit with no final drawings, sleep-deprived, rambling through 45 linear feet of chaotic design sketches. I got in trouble, but at least I passed; a friend with the same philosophy failed the semester and couldn’t graduate (Roark failed out of architecture school too).

All this to say, I know both the pain and potential of creative destruction, and in April I had to decide whether I should ship Essay Architecture or burn it down.

This decision was hard because I’d been working for 10 months towards specific forms: a 50k-word wiki on writing theory, a 2,700-point control set of classic essays, custom-built evaluation software, sleek visual interfaces, and some active users—but I didn’t have the one thing that mattered most: high-quality feedback. It was, despite my best efforts, slop-prone. But as I reflected on the dilemma, I had an insight: through building and failing, I gained a hunch on what it might take to make an AI-powered editor that doesn’t suck … all I had to do was completely start over.

It was a gamble. Either I invent something that’s massively useful for writers, or it doesn’t work and I have nothing to show for a year of effort.

The beauty of a blank slate is that you have way more context and the freedom to ask a more specific question. What if essay scores don’t matter? What if the only goal was to shape an AI to give specific, contextual, useful feedback? What would it take to build a world-class editor, always available, for like $9/draft? (One that refuses to write for you, BTW). So I rebuilt it, and while the feedback was noticeably better, something more interesting happened. Only when I stopped obsessing over score precision did I accidentally build something that is 47x more precise than Claude Sonnet 4, the best public chatbot for feedback.

This post is an update on year one of Essay Architecture (how it went, what you’ll soon have, and what’s next), but more so it’s a reflection on the nuances of creative destruction. Whether you are making software, a company, a building, a book, a song, an essay, or whatever, it’s worth knowing what you gain from burning down your architecture.

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Design through destruction

At the core of creative destruction is a simple idea: be thesis-driven, not form-driven. This means you’re not tied to any one particular form; you burn through them to find one that embodies your thesis. The challenge is, you can’t really see your thesis in high-resolution until you cast it into matter. You have to start somewhere. But in order to start anywhere, you have to make assumptions, and many of those will be wrong, and you won’t know which ones are wrong for weeks or months, if ever. Some assumptions are small and fixable. Some assumptions are big and irreversible and set your project’s fate.

An “original sin” is a foundational, day-one mistake that all further decisions are built upon. I had two.

The original sin of my textbook was the ambition to make each chapter as gnarly as possible. I assumed the book should be physical, held in hand, the culmination of everything I ever thought about writing. I started off by shipping 5,000-word prose essays, each with a dozen custom illustrations. They took 50 hours each. Whatever it takes to make Elements of Style for the 21st century, that’s what I’d do. But if I need to do that for every pattern, element, and dimension, then it demands like 38 hours of full-time work per week, on just the book.

Once I really got into building software and grasping the complexity, I realized I had something like 8 full-time jobs of technical work cut out for me.3

The dilemma became clear. I couldn’t focus on the book and the tool: if I approached both forms, I’d have neither. And so I had to burn the book, and melt it down into more and more compressed forms, until it was no longer a book, but a wiki that lived directly in the software.

The original sin with the software was that I accidentally built “hot or not but for essays.”4 I was obsessed with scoring, not just because I am a numbers guy,5 but because quantifying quality was the only way to ensure that an LLM was not bullshitting you. I scored a hundred essays 1-5 on 27 criteria, and then built a whole suite of admin tools so that I could run hundreds of evaluations with a single click—to test variations of patterns, essays, and models—so I could recursively improve my prompts for higher accuracy, precision, and reliability.6

Through rigorous testing I was able to get patterns to match my control set by 80-90%, but I didn’t realize I was getting captured by my own metrics. Yes, it could think and score like me, but I overlooked how these numbers converted back to written feedback. It was sometimes useful, always vague, and often, completely useless:

“To improve, the author could enhance the richness of the narrative by incorporating a wider range of cultural touchstones and specific examples, which would not only ground the philosophical insights but also create a more relatable framework for readers.”

Yikes. So I shifted my attention to making the feedback better, and it did get slightly better, but I hit what seemed like an unpassable limit…

Since my engine was built on determining the overall score for a pattern, it didn’t have a paragraph-by-paragraph coherence of your essay. This is what a good human editor intuitively has: they understand your essay at different scales—the word, the sentence, the paragraph, the section, the whole—and can navigate between them. When I inspected how my evaluator was thinking across iterations, I noticed it would pick a random paragraph each time, and use it as the basis of big-picture feedback.

This was unfixable.

Once you grasp the nature and magnitude of an original sin, the only way forward is destruction. There is no degree of polish or patchwork that can fix a flawed foundation. At first, it’s demoralizing. But it isn’t wasteful to shed. Your abandoned forms are vehicles to refine your assumptions and discover your constraints. If you believe in the spirit of iteration, then design is 50% destruction.

So I started over with a new assumption: AI feedback sucks because of “context ambiguity.”7 It gives random results because it’s never sure what to focus on. What if I isolate the scope? What if I run every criteria against every paragraph, so that the goal is extremely clear?

So I built out a new method, and as far as I know it doesn’t have a name, so I’m calling it “atomic evaluations.” It runs 1,000-10,000 evaluations for every upload, and bridges the macro and micro scales. The downside is that it’s slower (~15 minutes) and more expensive (sometimes $3/draft in API credits). The upside is that it’s like “DeepResearch but for essay composition.” It takes time, but the feedback feels contextual, specific, and more like something I’d get from a human editor:

“Can you explore the origins and cultural weight of the "kill your darlings" writing adage?” (Paragraph 4) [then, if you click to expand, you get more details] … “You mention this common phrase, which sets a useful tone, but it feels like a missed chance to connect it to rich literary or historical roots. Could you explore who first coined this adage, how it shaped literary writing traditions, or how its meaning evolved in writing pedagogy? What stories or controversies surround its use? Elaborating in this way will ground the metaphor in tangible history, making it resonate more deeply with readers. And how might knowing the phrase's origin deepen your thesis about iteration and destruction in writing? This is where layering in archival or scholarly insight can really shift your essay from naming conventions toward meaningful scholarship.”

It also turns out that granular analysis doesn’t just lead to better feedback, it leads to extremely stable scores. I asked three instances of Claude Sonnet 4 to score the same essay 1-5, and it returned 3.25, 2.75, and 3.45. I ran the same experiment through Essay Architecture and it got 2.93, 2.92, 2.93 (in this example, the range of variability is 47x tighter). Over multiple examples, my overall precision score still holds at 99% (compared to Claude’s 83%). The accuracy still needs work, but high precision means we can get LLMs to think in predictable and reproducible ways. It means we’re not technically limited; we’re only limited by our ability to turn writing theory into code.

When you abandon your old forms and tighten your thesis, something magical happens. Not only are the new forms more mature, but in some unexplainable way, the old forms remerge without you trying. I hesitate to use a phoenix metaphor, but when you let something die, something better grows from its ashes. Only after abandoning score precision did I—in pursuit of a better goal—invent a system that accidentally led to hyper-precision.

To my surprise, the same thing happened with my textbook (which I declared dead in January).

The book phase-shifted into the wiki, but the wiki had its own troubles: it was an intimidating maze of text, too distant from the incoming feedback. And, so again, the form started melting: from full pages, to hidden paragraphs you reveal, and finally down to a single question per pattern. This compression was driven by the medium (prose works very differently in a web-app than in a book8). I realized I had to build my curriculum like those Russian Matryoshka dolls; each pattern now exists at multiple resolutions: small (a 10-word question so you instantly get it), medium (an 80-word blurb of your choice), and large (a 500-word modular page). Since Essay Architecture is both wide and deep, I need to present patterns at their smallest resolution and let writers opt in for complexity when they’re ready for it.

Only after I built out a digital fractal curriculum did I realize, oh wait, this could totally be assembled into a book. In a single day, I aggregated everything into a gDoc and used my essay, A Pattern Language, as the introduction. It landed at 20k words and I’m almost done editing. It’s smaller, and quite different from the original vision of illustrated prose essays, but it’s very distilled, and perhaps the best way for someone to wrap their head around the entire framework in 1-2 hours.

Essay Architecture goes live!

On September 15th, you’ll be able to read the book and use the tool. I need to thank everyone who has been following this project for their patience! My paid subscribers (to date) will get the ebook for free, along with some credits to try the tool. If you filled out my survey to join the beta, expect to receive an email next week for early access.

As I imagine the months and years ahead for this project, I wonder how I can embody creative destruction to its fullest. Even though I logically know and value this virtue, it is very easy for me to fantasize about form. For example, on September 15th, I also plan to launch an essay competition (announcement coming soon!); the natural instinct is to envision all its features, the user experience, the operations required, etc. Instead, I’ll be starting from a question, “what can I learn from running an essay competition?” There are many unknowns, and thus many assumptions—what might be my original sin?

To clarify, you definitely shouldn’t burn down everything you start. There is wisdom in knowing what’s worth letting be, and what’s worth obsessing over. In some cases, expression only warrants a single take. There’s also a case for engineering to be non-iterative: eventually you want stable, scalable infrastructure. But the act of creating in unknown realms should be conceived as an experiment: you build not to finish, but to learn and rebuild.

I sense that most creators shy away from experiments because creative destruction is … destructive. We cling. If you write, you likely know the phrase, “kill your darlings.” It reminds you to delete that one sentence you fell in love with because it no longer serves the essay. This phrase traces back to a 1914 lecture from Arthur Quiller-Couch, where he said “murder your darlings.” This deliberately-violent phrase incepted the idea that, to move forward, you have to delete sentences; we don’t yet have a phrase to delete all of your sentences. We also don’t have the incentives. Algorithms create a high-speed culture that rewards quantity over quality, and also, the pursuit of quality is not just inefficient, but often lonely and painful; it challenges all of your internal mental limits. I imagine that when you’re writing, there’s a voice in your head hoping, “maybe this is the one, maybe I can ship this draft.” I know this because I have this voice too. God, don’t make me write v8.1.9 But this comes from impatience, and from confusion over the whole point of a draft, which is never to finish, but to put you in the right place to ask the right question: “now that I know what I know, what could I make if I start over?”

When was the last time you started over on a project, and how did it go? How do you approach something when you know it’s sacrificial? What are you holding onto that you should let go? When is it worth not burning down your architecture? Questions about Essay Architecture?

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Footnotes:

All the thinking here stems from a particular book (Food of the Gods) by a particular thinker (Terence McKenna), and so this whole essay was conceived as a Response. There are many ways to fulfill a pattern. A Response could be as simple as including a single paragraph that connects your original Thesis to an existing work. On the other hand, an essay can systematically break down a book, respond to each point, and use it as a gateway into a completely new idea. That’s what this is.

So from here you have two options: 1) you can read this 5k word essay on a strange theory that still haunts me, or 2) if you’re a paid subscriber, you can read about the Response pattern in more detail. The vision for the paid tier is to share deep dives of my framework, essay reviews (Here is New York), literary criticism (Best American Essays?), and commentary on writing software. (On deck is a post called “45 predictions on writing in 2045,” and also essays on the Form and Voice dimension.)

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This essay is too long for some email providers, so you might want to read this in a browser or on the Substack app. Link here.

The Stoned Ape Theory is too weird for real scientists to take seriously, too convenient for psychedelic activists to doubt, and too catchy for anyone to forget.

Almost everyone I ask about it knows the gist: human consciousness emerged from monkeys eating mushrooms (or some variation of that). It’s basically preposterous. Similar to how the Victorian minds of the 19th century just couldn’t bear the thought of ape ancestors, it’s equally weird to think our minds bloomed from fungus. The Origin of Species (1859) faced decades of resistance; now it’s obvious. New paradigms of evolution are hard to swallow.

Unlike Darwin’s theory though, the Stoned Ape Theory is based on unhinged speculation, spreading mostly through its catchiness. It’s in the opening animation of official Joe Rogan YouTube clips. It’s made popular by entertainers (watch: Bill Hicks in 1993). It’s the subject of Comedy Central shorts. It’s animated in Netflix documentaries. Now, this evolutionary hunch occupies a small sliver in many of our heads, whether we believe it not.

Despite how popular the theory is, most don’t know where it comes from. A memetic virus rarely points back to its source. In this case, it originated in Food of the Gods, a 1992 book by Terence McKenna—who happens to be one of my favorite thinkers.

I’ve listened to 100+ hours of McKenna lectures in the last decade, but didn’t read a full book of his until last year. He’s something like the Grateful Dead in philosopher form (a psychonautic, encyclopedic bard); just as the band’s live shows are better than their albums, McKenna would riff for hours, weaving through radical theories, trip reports, and audience questions, all in a mytho-poetic-comedic style that triggered an audience roar every 60-90 seconds.

Food of the Gods is his most popular book by tenfold, and so I chose to read it first because I wanted clarity on his most known idea: the Stoned Ape Theory. How could a psychedelic trip get into the genome?

The concept always intrigued me but the details never made sense, and so I hoped his 332 pages of careful research and writing could unpack it for me. I browsed Goodreads reviews before diving in, and was disappointed to learn that no such rigor existed:

"Possibly the worst researched book I've ever read, it is nonetheless a fascinating meditation on a variety of radical ideas."

“Whether the musings of a fungus-obsessed false prophet or [an]... invite into the realm that granted sentience to our great ape ancestors, Food of the Gods is a must read, and a must discuss.”

"Rambling, ridiculous, and incoherent.”

After finishing it myself I can confirm that Food of the Gods is a disappointing read, even to a seasoned McKenna fan. It’s more like psychedelic propaganda than anthropological research. It’s also a structural mess that seems to miss the point: only 13% of the book covers the Stoned Ape Theory (I was expecting something like Sapiens on shrooms, but evolution was only the focus in 3 of the 17 chapters).

All that said, within the book is a kernel of an idea that’s not worth abandoning just yet.

It seems likely and significant that pre-lingual humans were exposed to psychedelics during a critical evolutionary moment two million years ago, but McKenna has no serious explanation for how this moved us “out of the stream of animal evolution and into the fast-rising tide of language and culture.” (p. xvii)

While his evolutionary mechanism is flimsy, I’m still haunted by his premise: in the shit of the beasts we hunted grew psilocybin mushrooms, something that looks like an innocent food source, but actually triggers a linguistic explosion.

In the last 33 years, the Stoned Ape Theory has been rightly critiqued, but wrongly dismissed. It’s a bold and weird idea, filled with lots of holes, but it hovers around a perennial mystery: our origins. Now that I’ve finished the book, my sense is that McKenna surfaced some important ideas without convincingly connecting them. The goal of this review of Food of the Gods is to: 1) present his setup, 2) critique his evolutionary mechanism, 3) consider an alternate mechanism for how psychedelics led to the emergence of human consciousness.

PART 1:

The Food of the Gods Grows in Cowshit

Terence McKenna’s hypothesis is a response to one of the biggest mysteries in human evolution: how did the brain size of the Homo genus double in only 2 million years?

For context, he states that “evolution in high animals … operate[s] in time spans of … tens of millions of years” (p.20). From 4-7 million years ago, the brain only grew around 7%. Then, from 2-4 million years ago, it jumped to 32%. Since Homo habilis emerged, our average brain size has grown 124%. Why the “sudden and mysterious expansion?” (p.22)

McKenna cites Lumsden and Wilson (authors of Genes, Mind, and Culture from 1981), who call this “perhaps the fastest advance recorded for any complex organ in the whole history of life” (p.24). Even the first chapter of Sapiens—the pop anthropology book by Yuval Noah Harrari—addresses this mystery: “What then drove forward the evolution of the massive human brain during those 2 million years? Frankly, we don’t know.” (Sapiens, p.9)

While we don't know exactly what sparked this growth, most theories point back to an extreme moment of climate change.

Between 2-8 million years ago, there were several periods of glaciation across the Northern Hemisphere. Expansive sheets of ice caused the air to cool and dry, reducing rainfall in the South. Rain forests receded and hominids were pushed out of their habitat and into the grasslands and savannahs that were emerging across Africa. This is called the “Savannah Hypothesis,” and McKenna alludes to it as he frames his theory.

Every theory on how the human brain evolved is some kind of adaptation to the grassland. We relied more and more on bipedalism to navigate an open plain, which freed our hands to carry food, build tools, throw spears, and upgrade our thumbs. These tools—paired with social coordination—let small packs hunt bigger and bigger mammals, which required the invention of fire to eat meat, which led to more calorie-dense and nutrient-rich food.

According to McKenna, there’s another big factor in the grasslands that no one accounted for:

“Grasslands have far fewer plant species than forests. Because of this scarcity, it is highly likely that [an omnivorous] hominid would test any grassland plant encountered for its food potential” (p.35) [...] When our remote ancestors moved out of the trees and onto the grasslands, they increasingly encountered hooved beasts [along with] the manure of these same wild cattle and the mushrooms that grow in it.” (p. 37)

McKenna points to a blindspot in evolutionary theory: among all the other forces on the African plains were little mushrooms that accidentally led to synesthesia, self-reflection, abstract thinking, symbolic communication, and divergent problem solving. Yes, our brains also probably grew from bipedal tool-enabled meat hunting, but the road to survival was lined with mutagens.

According to Terence, “ human emergence … is a you-are-what-you-eat story,” (p.16) and it isn’t just meat. After a species moves into a new environment, its diet is in question and they’re desperate to experiment. “The strategy of the early hominid omnivores was to eat everything that seemed foodlike and to vomit whatever was unpalatable” (p.17).

Psilocybin cubensis is a species of mushroom that grows in the dung of not just cattle or bovines, but all herbivores. A new 2024 study dates Psilocybe back to 60-65 million years ago (around the time when the dinosaur-ending asteroid hit). They are pre-hominid. The wind spreads spores over fields, dropping them in hot, damp, nutrient-filled cow dung—the perfect microclimate for fungus growth.

It’s entirely possible that Homo habilis had psychedelic experiences, but how readily available were mushrooms in Africa 2 millions years ago? If mushrooms were the catalyst of the brain boom, then they must have been everywhere, right? Unfortunately we have no way to measure this, and McKenna doesn’t estimate volume, but we can at least anchor our speculations in the gross volume of cowshit.

Hypothetical: 10 million African herbivores, dumping 10 dung per day, leaves us with 100 million patties per day (incredible). Maybe 1 in 3 patties grow mushrooms, but not all of those mushrooms are psychoactive. If 1 in 10,000 patties are magic, then that’s something like 10k shrooms per day, or 3.65 million per year. According to a study by Navarette (2016), there were 18,500 members of Homo habilis at this time—meaning, 197 maximum trips per person per year. Of course, most of these were probably left to rot, but given the abundance, it’s not unrealistic to imagine 5-10% of Apes got stoned in a given year. (According to this psychiatry study, 7.1% of adults tried a psychedelic in 2022. Some things never change.)

Anyway, McKenna was the first to propose a human/cattle/mushroom symbiosis as an answer to the mysterious surge in brain size. Since the 1960s, others have speculated on the role of psychedelics in human evolution—apparently, Francis Crick, discoverer of the double-helix DNA spiral, was the first (!?)—but McKenna was an ethnobotanist who could refine the details and pitch the premise.

According to Terence, we used mushrooms to “bootstrap to higher and higher cultural levels” (p.39), and it’s not a coincidence that our earliest Neolithic religions (10,000 BC) worshipped cows. He shows us Sahara Desert cave art that features “shamans with large numbers of grazing cattle … dancing with fists full of mushrooms” (p.70). Then we see Catal Huyuk, “a huge [9th millennia BC] settlement, spreading over 32 acres … accommodating over 7,000 people”; the excavation revealed “amazing shrines with cattle bas-reliefs and heads of now extinct aurochs” (p.82). This proto-culture eventually shifted into the soma-fueled Vedic religions of India, where some of the Gods were actually cows.

McKenna, in his typical interdisciplinary fashion, pulls threads from anthropology, mycology, and comparative religion to make a compelling case: during an important moment for the Homo genus, we were in the presence of consciousness expanders. The food of the Gods was in the humblest of places. Great premise. The problem is, the proposed evolutionary mechanism is mostly bullshit.

PART 2:

Binoculars, Orgies, and Language

So let’s assume that proto-humans had access to some quantity of psychedelics for the last 2 million years. Wouldn’t these hominids get high, come down, and be biologically identical? Even if mushrooms promote neurogenesis, the effects aren’t inheritable. In fact, the whole idea that LSD “may alter the chromosomes” was a media-fueled cultural hysteria in 1967 that had to be debunked. If mushroom experiences don’t pass down to your offspring, then how could they have guided evolution?

McKenna has a 3-point theory on how the hominids who ate mushrooms outbred the others; this framework shows McKenna’s strength as a meme-maker. His section header is titled: “THREE BIG STEPS FOR THE HUMAN RACE.” It’s a triad—a 3-step explanation—forged in a way to be memorable, repeatable, and spreadable. This is exactly what happened.

To summarize:

• In low doses, it sharpens your vision into “chemical binoculars” to make you a better hunter.

• In medium doses, it makes you horny and more likely to reproduce.

• In high doses, it leads to mystical experiences, problem solving, and language.

The framework is an anthropological cartoon, where the tribes who ate mushrooms were better hunters, better bonkers, and better thinkers, giving them a chemical advantage.

“In such a situation, the outbreeding (or decline) of non-psilocybin-using groups would be a natural consequence.” (p.25-26)

McKenna softens his theory by framing it as a “constructed fantasy,” but then analytically explains how the three forces are “interconnected and mutually reinforcing” (p.25). The framework is a solid meme—it’s simple enough to remember and riff to your friends; but when you investigate each point, it falls apart.

Low doses:

Microdosing as “chemical binoculars” for hunting

The first part of McKenna’s theory comes from a research study done by Roland Fischer in the late 1960s:

“[He] gave small amounts of psilocybin to graduate students and then measured their ability to detect the moment when previously parallel lines became skewed. He found that performance ability on this particular task was actually improved after small doses of psilocybin” (p.24).

Fischer’s study is proof to McKenna that a drug can give you a better model of the world. In terms of evolution, he notes how this chemical mutagen gave hunters an adaptive advantage, and it became “deeply scripted into the behavior and… genome of some individuals” (p. 25):

“... small amounts of psilocybin, consumed with no awareness of its psychoactivity while in the general act of browsing for food … impart a noticeable increase in visual acuity, especially edge detection. As visual acuity is at a premium among hunter-gatherers, the discovery of the equivalent ‘chemical binoculars’ could not fail to have had an impact…” (p.25)

“Chemical binoculars” is a remarkable coined phrase, but he’s vague in how a microdose can lead to a fork in the species, and worse, he’s way off on his source.

The Roland Fisher study used psilocybin in medium-high doses (160 µg/kg), not low doses (12 µg/kg). It also wasn’t about “edge detection,” but “visual acuity,” and the idea that a faster refresh-rate automatically leads to better hunting is an assumption that ignores the strong body load that occurs on mid/high doses. In fact, Fischer’s paper even says that psilocybin “may not be conducive to the survival of the organism” (the exact opposite conclusion that McKenna draws from the same study). Quite the skew.

Medium doses:

Arousal, orgies, and growing tribes

So not only are the microdosing hunters gathering more food, but at medium doses they’re having more kids.

“Because psilocybin is a stimulant of the central nervous system, when taken in slightly larger doses, it tends to trigger restlessness and sexual arousal. Thus, at this second level of usage, by increasing instances of copulation, the mushrooms directly favored human reproduction” (p.26).

And it’s not just an increased amount of sex as we know it, but medium/high doses change the nature of relationships, sex, and parenting:

“The boundary-dissolving qualities of shamanic ecstasy predispose hallucinogen-using tribal groups to community bonding and to group sexual activities, which promote gene mixing, higher birth rates, and a communal sense of responsibility for the group offspring.”

Does more reproduction automatically benefit the tribe and enhance the continuation of their gene pool?

If mushrooms led to orgies and population spikes, that could be a liability for a hunter-gatherer tribe. It’s more likely that a stable population size in Ancient Africa would have been ideal for survival. On page 19, he notes that if a species integrates sweet potatoes of the genus Dioscorea (the raw material we use for birth control pills) they would find themselves in a diet-induced reproductive chaos. The opposite could be equally true: a mutagen that leads to uncontrolled tribe growth would put a strain on already limited resources.

High doses:

God and language

And now, finally, at the highest, heroic doses of mushrooms, McKenna explains two types of effects: mystical experiences and the advent of language:

“Certainly at the third and highest level of usage, religious concerns would be at the forefront of the tribe’s consciousness, simply because of the power and strangeness of the experience itself. This third level, then, is the level of the full-blown shamanic ecstasy.” (p.26)

While much of the book unpacks the implications of mushrooms spawning religion, there are fewer mentions about how mushrooms could have been a catalyst for language, sparking an adaptive advantage. Here’s the clearest one:

“Psilocybin’s main synergistic effect seems ultimately to be in the domain of language. It excites vocalization; it empowers articulation; it transmutes language into something that is visibly beheld. It could have had an impact on the sudden emergence of consciousness and language use in early humans. We literally may have eaten our way to higher consciousness. In this context it is important to note that the most powerful mutagens in the natural environment occur in molds and fungi. Mushrooms and cereal grains infected by molds may have had a major influence on animal species, including primates, evolving in the grasslands.” (p. 42)

Out of his three points, the idea of mushrooms catalyzing language is the most convincing, but still, McKenna’s case isn’t very rigorous. This is the degree of his supporting material (with no footnotes or citations):

“Researchers familiar with the territory agree that psilocybin has a profoundly catalytic effect on the linguistic impulse” (p. 53).

Natural selection?

Right after he explains his 3-point theory, he shifts to address objections from Darwinists. He acknowledges that his theory sounds “smack of Lamarckism.” Jean-Baptiste Lamarck was the first person to develop a full theory of evolution (1802). He held the reigning theory until Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859), and is known for being wrong on his theory of “soft inheritance” (that changes to your body or mind within your life can be passed down to your offspring).

“While the mushrooms may have given us better eyesight, sex, and language when eaten, how did these enhancements get into the human genome and become innately human?” (p.27)

McKenna’s whole theory hinges on a good answer to this question, and unfortunately he fumbles it. In a dense 200-word explanation, he implies that language, vocabulary, and memory offered such a radical survival advantage that it created an eat-mushrooms-or-die situation. He’s saying that speech-like behavior “spread through populations along with the genes that reinforce them” (p. 28).

This is a weak attempt to make his theory seem Darwinian. The basics of natural selection say that, over generations, certain gene-environment combinations give members of a subspecies a survival and reproductive advantage; those without the right traits die out, and so the population fills with those who have it.

In order for the psychedelic experience to have altered the path of evolution from Homo habilis to Homo sapiens, via natural selection, three things must have been true:

1. Due to location, only a subset of the population got access to the mushrooms.

2. Among those who ate them, only some percent of users had (unspecified) "language genes" that enabled them to better conceptualize and vocalize their intentions.

3. The ability to wield language had such a significant survival advantage, that anyone who couldn't talk got outbred.

This is shaky, not just because there’s no detail on how genetic variance causes some to burst into language and not others, but mostly because it makes little sense how a few extra words would put another tribe out of existence. Sure, I’d imagine a Homo erectus tribe of 1,000+ words with advanced grammar could out-smart and out-hunt a nearby Homo habilis tribe with only 50 words. But the accumulation of language likely happened extremely slowly; based on the rate of vocabulary growth, we’re talking 1-5 words per millennia. Humans weren’t just competing against each other, but lions. Lions don’t play in the realm of words. So even if mushrooms enabled a genetically-blessed subspecies of Homo habilis to invent a few new phrases, McKenna isn’t making a good case for how this threatens the existence of non-psychedelic tribes.

Basically, all three points of McKenna’s framework—vision, sex, and language—are cartoon mechanisms for evolution. It’s totally possible that 2 millions years ago, hominids were surrounded by fields of mushrooms and had profound psychedelic experiences, but there’s still no real explanation for how it catalyzed humanity and fostered the explosion in our brain size, structure, and function. Based on what’s presented in Food of the Gods, it’s not clear how mushrooms are a factor in evolution at all, let alone the main factor.

PART 3:

Psychedelic Propaganda

Food of the Gods makes more sense when you understand the climate it was written in: a psychedelic blackout. In 1971 they were made illegal, and until 1995, the most qualified researchers in the world couldn’t touch them (after serious breakthroughs in the ‘50s and ‘60s). Now, it's obvious we’re in a “renaissance” with forward progress. But from ‘71-’95, there was no knowing if the situation would ever change. This led to an intellectual counter-movement, where whole books were written as a plea for legalization (their argument generally goes: “Look! Psychedelics have historical precedent in cultures, X, Y, and Z, and so therefore we have no right to keep these sacred plants illegal.”

Look at 1992 (the year Food of the Gods was published): publications on psychedelics were at an all-time low (since their rediscovery in the 20th century), and 0 clinical trials were conducted with LSD or psilocybin. It was bleak.

Almost as soon as McKenna introduces the Stoned Ape theory, he moves on. The meme was planted, and rigor doesn’t matter. From page 57 on, we’re in the territory of his psychedelic manifesto which I can summarize in 3 points:

• Chapter 5: Agriculture is the fall from Eden into history, ruled by a “dominator culture” of “pathological monotheism” (p.64). He makes a Learian plea for an Archaic Revival: “a clarion call to recover our birthright … It is a call to realize that life lived in the absence of the psychedelic experience upon which primordial shamanism is based is life trivialized, life denied, life enslaved to the ego and its fear of dissolution in the mysterious matrix of feeling that is all around us. It is in the Archaic Revival that our transcendence of the historical dilemma actually lies.” (p.252)

• Chapter 6-14: Our substance addictions stems from an “existential incompleteness” from losing touch with the mushroom. He covers the history of drugs, from prehistory through the 20th century. He gives a literally exhaustive survey of mushrooms, ergot, cannabis, hashish, sugar, coffee, tea, chocolate, tobacco, LSD, cocaine, heroin, DMT, and television.

• Chapter 15: The last page of the book is a 10-point drug policy, showing the real intention of this whole effort: activism. He covers taxes, the IMF, cartel laws, research, and education.

Here are two more quotes from Goodreads on how the messianic mushroomism gets tiresome:

“You can like mushrooms without believing they are the cause of all human innovation, religion, and culture."

“The contortion of historical evidence to make the mushroom the [center] of human evolution, societal development and ultimately suggesting we should all go back to its regular consumption eventually became ridiculous.”

You might not be surprised to learn that Terence McKenna confessed to having little concern for academic accuracy. Here’s a quote from one of his lectures:

“Since I feel pretty much around friends and fringies here, it doesn’t trouble me to confess … Food of the Gods, I conceived of as an intellectual Trojan horse. Written as though it were a scientific study, citations to impossible-to-find books and so forth … simply to ‘assuage’ academic anthropologists. The idea is – to leave this thing on their doorstep; rather like an abandoned baby, or Trojan horse.”

This pissed off a lot of McKenna fans, and causes accusations ranging from him being a complete fraud to a mal-intended CIA agent. When asked about his book in this interview, he sees it as a catalyst in a larger culture war. He wanted the unjustly illegalized drugs to be situated in a human origins scenario. In the same way that Darwin’s theory reset the 19th century Victorian mind, he hoped that equating psychedelics with evolution would trigger a new openness to them. He wanted to make the switch from:

“ ‘Drugs are alien, invasive and distorting to human nature’ to:

‘Drugs are natural, ancient and responsible for human nature.’ ”

For what it’s worth, I don't think McKenna is a complete charlatan. I think he had an interesting hunch and acted on it, but in the act of crystallizing it into a book, he was less interested in careful analysis and more interested in using his position as a psychedelic guru to shift the culture. His target audience was “drug-friendly 18-25 year olds” who would spread the ideas into the mainstream.

“You've heard me talk about meme wars, and how, if we could have a level playing field, these ideas would do very well.”

PART 4:

The Babbling Idiot and the Tribe

Despite all the problems laid out above (bad research, bad arguments, questionable intentions), I still think he’s onto something: maybe psychedelics never got into the genome, but at a critical moment in our evolution, our pre-lingual ancestors moved into a new grassy environment, one filled with mushrooms that are now proven to activate the language-forming centers of our brain.

Since 2014, a new wave of university-backed studies have confirmed a lot McKenna’s intuitions: psilocybin aids in abstract thinking and symbolic communication; it reduces top-down control and fosters spontaneous language; it increases semantic association, expanding the repertoire of usable words, and even facilitates the creation of new ones. Damn. We can’t know exactly how mushrooms affect Homo habilis vs. Homo sapiens, but there’s reason to believe something happened.

For one paragraph, I’d like you to entertain my own anthropological cartoon. It exists within McKenna’s premise, but without the glorification of the mushroom or the user. I call it: The Babbling Idiot & The Tribe.

Imagine a hungry apex hunter stalking a Megalotragus, and in the process he comes across a dung patty that’s filled with a few mushrooms (appetizers). Unknowingly, he consumes a heroic dose of Psilocybin cubensis. An hour later, hunting is out of the question. There is slight nausea, a weirdness, and eventually, the spontaneous creation of mouth noises. As he comes back into contact with the tribe, he’s not just tripping, he’s grunting and riffing in ways they can’t understand. It’s frightening. From a state of synesthesia, the Babbling Idiot is attempting to make abstract connections between his intentions and his palette of possible sounds. You can imagine hundreds of proto-words coming through over the hours, none of them crystallizing into meaning. But in rare cases, perhaps aided by gestures, the tribe can grok what he means. Most of the words are forgotten, but some are coined in such a way that they’re useful and memorable. The babbling idiot was a temporary conduit for the logos, and came down with little to no memory of the ordeal. Sobered up, he hears a new word moving around the tribe, and asks, “what do you mean?”

This story inverts all of psychedelic romanticism that was baked into McKenna’s theory:

• Mushroom use didn’t need to be frequent; this might have been a rare event.

• The whole tribe didn’t need to take them; it could’ve been a single person.

• It wasn’t brave or intentional; it could’ve been accidental.

• They didn’t turn into a superhuman hunter, lover, or linguist; they became a babbling idiot.

• They didn’t come down more evolved; they barely remembered it.

• The hero isn’t the psychonaut; the hero is the sober tribe who paid attention through the chaos to catch and remember the words that mattered.

To bring this back to evolution, magic mushrooms may have simply been a catalyst for linguistic mutation. Over a tribe’s life, the lead hunters would accidentally get stoned a few times, and it would lead to outpourings of gibberish. In some cases it would threaten the survival of the tribe, in most cases it would have been kind of annoying, and in rare cases it would lead to the creation of a re-usable word.

McKenna was—literally—a remarkable babbler, and would even demonstrate it to his live audiences. He referred to it as “glossolalia,” the spontaneous urge to form speech on high-doses of psilocybin, despite it being void of meaning. It sounds eerie, almost like he’s speaking in tongues. This happened to him often enough that he started recording his outbursts on tape recorders. Now he can simulate it at will while completely sober. You can check out this 15-second version, or a longer version titled, “Recordings Which People Find Extremely Alarming.”

It’s not that psychedelics got into the genome, it’s that over many millennia they mutagenically expanded our repertoire of language.

The evolutionary mechanism here isn’t the mushroom, it’s language itself. Psychedelics can restructure your brain, but not your kid’s brain, and that’s okay, because the artifacts from a single trip are strong enough to infect everyone around you—even if they’re sober. Think of the words, music, art, culture, and technology that came out of the 1960s from a small subculture of trippers. Through mimesis, language ripples through cultures and generations like a shockwave. It’s time we consider that the word itself might have been the original burst from the mushroom.

Consider the power new words might have had on a Homo habilis with a vocabulary of less than 50 words. They had the linguistic range of a 2-year old, and used basic utterances and gestures for food, danger, and water. A million years later, Homo erectus, with brains almost double the size, had fire, technology, but also a modern vocal tract, with a vocabulary over 1,000 words, putting them at the fluency of a 3-4 year old. By the time Homo Sapiens were forging words in Egyptian cuneiform, their vocabularies were over 10,000 words.

The doubling of our brain size matches a logarithmic growth in our vocabulary, and so it brings us into a chicken-or-the-egg situation. Which guided which?

The natural assumption is that a growing brain breeds the hardware for language, but what if the opposite is also true? Over millennia, could increased vocabulary put pressure on the brain to grow? Could the two have existed in a feedback loop? Were ancient brains significantly smaller because of the absence of language? How does this relate to the critical window of language learning in children? If you were to time travel back 2 million years, kidnap a homind infant, bring them to 2025, and raise them like a typical child, how many words could they learn and how big might their brain grow? Might the mysterious doubling of our brains come down to a lineage of babbling idiots on mushrooms who slowly brought words to the tribe?

Answering these questions is beyond my expertise, and beyond the scope of a book review on Food of the Gods. But these musings have led me to the book I’ll read next: The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain (1998), written by a different Terrence—Terrence Deacon (Amazon, Goodreads).

While Food of the Gods is dense, and the Stoned Ape Theory is flawed, McKenna’s meme is an outlier in that there’s actually more depth the further you look into it. After reading Terence, I’m more energized than ever to return to his lectures and engage with his exotic ideas. If McKenna is himself a babbling idiot at the frontiers of language, then we are the tribe tasked to listen carefully, forgivingly, and generatively—because the guy on mushrooms might be onto something.

Thanks for the feedback: , , , , , , , , , .

Thoughts? What’s convincing? What’s unanswered?

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Welcome to Essay Architecture. If you’re new to this Substack, you might want to start with A Pattern Language or Year of the Wiki or Best American Essays? because today’s post has nothing to do with essays. Today’s post is the first act of a new commitment: to share a monthly essay that goes off-script. This one’s about NPC streamers on TikTok (the pinnacle of being on-script). I see them as the most extreme expression of Creator Economy incentives, and a reminder to value your agency. It’s a trip. Since it’s long, I recommend reading it in a browser so it doesn’t get cut off in your email client (and if you read on desktop, you get the bonus of hovering footnotes). Enjoy.

Would you slap yourself in the face 250 times a day if it paid for your wedding? Would you pretend to electrocute yourself on camera for an hour a day if it paid more than your full-time job? Would you lock yourself in your room for a year if it brought you a million followers? No? What about 10 million? These “hypothetical exchange scenarios” used to be safely contained in the imagination of high school cafeterias. Now, thanks to TikTok, there’s a marketplace to reward life-changing money to the shameless few who can stick to a gimmick.

Pinkydoll was the first human to get famous for letting thousands of spectators simultaneously control her body. She went viral because Elon retweeted a clip of her livestream (twice). All of Twitter saw confusing clips of an influencer that appeared to be short-circuiting, but most of us didn’t get the underlying mechanic: the crowd pays for emojis that trigger pre-decided moves. So for 1.4 cents, you can flash an emoji rose on her screen, and then she’ll sniff that invisible rose and say, “thank you for the rose!” The streamers who do this are known as NPCs, non-player characters. Like a background character in a video game, they have no agency. They’re only programmed to do a handful of tricks, over and over.

If you’ve never seen someone get possessed by their audience for money, this video might be helpful context.

Supposedly, Pinkydoll is the queen of the genre. Apparently, she made $10k per stream at her peak.1 Inevitably, she spawned thousands of imitators. I never imagined this could be a legitimate way to make money online until I learned there were $3.48 billion of in-app transactions in 2023. On any given day there’s millions of dollars for NPCs to fight over. Napkin math suggests the TikTok Live tipping market could be twice the size of the Substack subscription market.2

I decided to install TikTok and investigate this oddity. I mounted my phone, went to the Live section, swiped until I found an NPC streamer, and then live-wrote whatever I saw in extreme detail.3 Often it was an intimate affair: just me, a room of 45 strangers, and someone attempting to milk us for tips in exceedingly strange ways. Since these algorithms interpret every second you look at something as permission to show you more of it, and since I’d spend minutes word-sketching each streamer, it led me into an NPC K-Hole that I’ll never forget.

I saw pornstars, paraplegics, pretend slaves, actual homeless, cancer patients, war refugees, and waves of teenagers all competing for roses in a weird new economy, each privately praying for an algorithm to change their life. More than half acted like robots, too. I couldn’t make sense of it all in real-time, I was just a stenographer at the technocircus. Despite my analytical lens to all of this, I still got hypnotized from exposure—I found myself whistling jingles, repeating catchphrases (out loud, to myself), and thinking “I could do this…”—and so I deleted TikTok after a week.

19 months later, I feel compelled to publish this. It’s not just because TikTok is in limbo,4 or because this trend re-emerged,5 but because it so clearly shows the machinery of the Creator Economy. It’s a warning. As platforms tighten the feedback loops between consumers and creators, the incentives get stronger and stranger.6 I’m not saying we’re all about to pivot to zombie streaming; but the NPC is a symptom and symbol of our times. When we over-optimize for metrics and monetization, we turn into mechanical cartoons of ourselves.

I want this essay to read like a cross between a sociological media study and a 30-minute TikTok binge that makes you feel nauseous (sorry). My goal is to convince you that, in an age where platforms tempt you to gamble your agency for engagement, you should go off script.

Dancing for tips in the uncanny valley:

How does one make money on that dancing app? Substack has subscriptions. YouTube shares ad revenue. TikTok lets you tip creators during live streams, but instead of paying them in USD, you pick between a hundred emojis that range in value from 1.4 cents to $500. TikTok gamified tipping. A single feature—“video gifts”—changed the role of a creator from an artist-in-control to a shtick-designer

Here’s an orienting example: Imagine opening the Live feed to find a very short but very jacked Russian bodybuilder in front of a table of weights in escalating sizes. For 1 rose—the cheapest gift—he’ll curl the tiny weight. But for 1 corgi (worth $4.18), he'll curl the biggest weight. The rules are written on cardboard behind him. Someone is now gifting roses as fast as they can tap, and now you’re watching this little man with huge biceps furiously pump out 139 curls in a row with a comically small weight, switching arms as necessary. For an insignificant amount of money, you mess with strangers and make them dance. At least he gets fit.

NPCs are part of a genre you might call MMCCM: massively multiplayer crowd-controlled media. Its closest precedent is Twitch Plays Pokemon (2014), where ~1.2 million people simultaneously sent commands to a single Gameboy emulator (unbelievably, they beat the game). TikTok brought this video game dynamic to social media. They replaced the main character—a pixellated, mindless Ash Ketchum—with real humans, with real hopes. They created a marketplace to match hordes of paying clickers with people willing to be controlled.

MMCCM is the most extreme and literal form of audience capture.7 You don’t just become creatively trapped by the expectations of your followers, you lend them your body. You trade micro-gestures for micro-payments. This gives the voyeuristic audience an unsettling degree of control. Unlike American Idol, where the fate of the Idol is determined through a 24-hour voting window, the Idol becomes a mechanical puppet, operated in real-time by a faceless Other that is hypnotizing itself.

Since the creator is incentivized to act like a robot, they try to look like a robot too. It feels ethically weird to control a human-looking stranger like a slave, but robots want you to control them. Machines have no agency, free-will, or preference in outcome, and so a machine aesthetic is an implicit invitation. They consent. Streamers alter their looks, movements, and voice—pushing themselves into that eerie space where things look almost but not quite human: the uncanny valley. I saw clowns, angels, furries, and mechanical drag queens. I heard abnormal voice impressions of babies, demons, and cartoon characters. I even saw an audience control a robot ventriloquist who controlled a small robot hand puppet. When all these effects come together, you almost can’t tell if the streamer is human or AI-generated. They tap into our fascination with the unfamiliar and our paranoia of technology. As we pause in shock, they go viral. The timing of this is equally uncanny: humans are getting rich by pretending to act like robots at a time when robots are getting quite good at pretending to be human.

You know those street-performers8 who look like robots and stand still for hours, only changing poses after you tip them? We have upshifted that into a new Internet phenomenon. NPC streamers are the robo-buskers on the sidewalks of the Internet, except they don’t have to paint themselves silver (though some do) nor have extraordinary motor control of their limbs (only 3 in ~500 did). Instead, they act like a background character from Grand Theft Auto. They slowly bob in place with their arms forward, awaiting your instructions, easing the tension with the Wii theme song on loop.

(To experience the rest of this essay in full effect, I recommend playing this in the background.)

Outliers in appearance:

When I first came across Pinkydoll on TikTok Live there were 44,000 people watching, eclipsing the attendance of most Mets or Yankees games. She’d iterate through dozens of memorized catchphrases with precision and stamina. In addition to “thank you for the roses!” she’s most known for saying, “Mmm!” [slurp] “Ice Cream So Good! Yes, yes, yes.” A barrage of ice cream cones would flood the screen, and she’d get stuck in a slurp-loop.9 Whenever she exposed her tongue, you’d see her face turn staticky, revealing that some deep-fake makeup filter must be on. Unlike baseball stadiums, I assume 1-5% of the crowd was actively masturbating.

Many of the top NPC streamers are pornstars. In addition to making money from video gifts, their streams are top-of-funnel marketing for their OnlyFans (where creators earn ~$5b per year). Of course there’s no nudity allowed on TikTok,10 but it’s not against the content policy to moan “yes” and fake an orgasm. This subgenre of NPC streaming is like interactive techno-burlesque: a performative fusion of choreography, costume, and satire, all with sexual undertones. My guess is that the same people who pay for 1:1 Internet camming are also paying for NPC streaming. The difference: hyper-optimized fetish matchmaking happens in digital daylight. A few weirdos get to control a public sexbot, and the scrollerbys don’t even know it’s softcore sex work; they just stop and rubberneck like it’s a puzzling car accident, and so the crowd grows.

Amidst the bright colors and hypnotizing loops, comments rush down the screen faster than you can read: “bleach my eyes,” speculations on the decline of the west, a conspiracy theory on Pinkydoll being an MKUltra project, talks of a sex tape, hundreds of people sharing their cell phone numbers, shilling for her crypto scam, $CREAM, and advertisements for her new cohort-based course, “How to Be Popular.”

It’s not just the attractive NPCs who hold attention and go viral, it’s anyone who looks … different. Take the Surya-Manurung family from Indonesia, where 4 of 5 siblings carry a rare genetic disease causing their face to change shape and swell over time. They have converted their looks into influence (3.2 million TikTok followers) more successfully than model/influencer Emily Ratajowski (2.7 million). I found them singing high-pitched karaoke covers for roses and hearts to 5,200 people. “AMERICA, WE LOVE YOU!” “CALIFORNIA, WE LOVE YOU!” When you look into the purchasing power parity (PPP) of the Indonesian Rupiah, you realize they’re making a month’s salary in a single stream. The comment section was cautious and polite, and took great offense to anyone calling them “lizard people.”

The difference between this and “Deformito-Mania” of the 19th century is that you can now go direct-to-consumer without a middleman. TikTok has a disabled community that is building awareness and monetizing their self-expression. A lot of what I’ve seen is inspirational,11 but I also can’t help but wonder if TikTok is exploiting them. Consider the finances of P.T. Barnum’s circus: a few made extreme wealth, like General Tom Thumb—a 3’-4” dwarf who became internationally famous for his Napoleon impression—while most acts only made 1% of the revenue they generated.

Would TikTok intentionally skew their algorithms to get people hooked on the unfamiliar, and then take a huge cut? I found many Reddit comments of this nature:

“My feed shows people with severe burns to the point where they have no face whatsoever, or are born with horrible congenital defects where they look like they're in a third world location and severely suffering … [it’s] honestly super fucking upsetting to me. I've never once liked or watched any of this content, and I continuously report that I'm not interested…, yet it still comes up on my [For You Page].”

On TikTok Live I frequently saw a DJ with no jaw, people with rectangle heads, people with backwards heads, paraplegics, a man with a micro-penis willing to answer all of your questions, and a girl with no arms who shows us how to apply makeup with your feet. Some do their own thing, some follow the NPC format, and some just ask for likes or medicine.

It’s known that physical outliers12 draw crowds, and so TikTok’s suite of dysmorphic camera filters helps creators go viral. I saw a guy claim to have “Waseman syndrome,” causing his eyes to be offset (one eye was closer to his forehead, and the other down by his lips). Given the range of severe conditions I’d seen, he had me fooled. But I sensed something was off when he said, “If we boost this to 100,000 likes, I’ll remove my deformity filter so you can see what my face really looks like.”

Recreational Torture Markets:

I often saw a guy sleeping on a platform suspended over a pool of water, and one time I considered it: should I pull the trigger? I was one of 12 people watching. For less than a dollar, I could participate in this digital dunk tank. I wasn’t sure if my emoji was connected to the dunk machine through the TikTok API, or if an off-screen friend pulled a lever. In any case, I hesitated. Is it wrong to dunk this stranger even though he’s inviting me to? Was he actually sleeping, or faking? Could this money help him? Or does he have a handler who takes a cut? As I did the moral calculus, someone else made him plunge. He fell into the water, and on turned the strobe lights and Korean party music. He did a dance and yelled into the camera: “I LOVE YOU!”

Obviously, violence is banned on TikTok Live, but some NPCs invite you to inflict mild forms of torture. Nothing illegal. Nothing extreme (no cutting off fingers). Just the low-pain laugh-inducing psychological torture. Even though there’s consent and it's packaged as a game, something feels weird when it's online. As a kid I had no issue with a dunk tank at a carnival, but it just feels wrong through a smartphone: (1) since you’re not physically there, the consequences don’t register, (2) you’re part of a mob and they can’t see your face, (3) there’s an endless feed of ways to inflict displeasure on strangers for leisure, and (4) you have to pay for it with roses.

So who pays for this? I’d guess it’s someone with a casual attitude over juvenile mockery. Perhaps it’s TikTok’s core demographic: high schoolers.

As a teenager I’d routinely contribute $1 or $3 to watch somebody do something stupid. Most kids wouldn’t budge for under $5, so we’d pool together our leftover lunch money until the reward was big enough for someone to cave. It was the thrill of the hour. There was an escalating suspense as the mob-leader raised funding. Who would it be today? Over time, you learned your friend’s price and preference for pain. For example, I’d never drink a “golden cobra”—a concoction of all the leftover drinks + condiments, usually mustard—even if it went up to $25. But for less than $10, I’d get hit in the face with an industrial rubber band.

At a single lunch table, there’s only so much experimentation and price discovery that can happen; but when you connect 10 million high schoolers through a gamified market of recreational torture, there are no limits. It’s a gig economy for humiliation. It’s Jackass as a platform.

Most gimmicks took the form of traditional high school stunts. BradySlaps slapped himself for every rose. One kid had different emojis mapped to different condiment chugs. Another kid would rapidly hit +1 on a calculator on his quest to a million, tempting you to pay him $20 to reset him at 0.13 But it’s the stranger stunts that paid well. Electrocution Girl would react to lightning bolt emojis by pretending to have mini-seizures, and so she spasmed around her room to the sound of Blink 182 hits. She later revealed she made $68/hour doing this. The weirder the stunt, the more likely you are to make McKinsey rates.

TikTok does what they can to prevent harm,14 but they can’t seem to catch trouble in real-time. It took them at least 39 days to ban Bucket Hat Burke, whose plan was to lock himself in his room until he reached 1 million followers. He got tens of thousands.

Fated to Pretend:

When everything is anchored in pretending, you lose your grip on what’s real.

One night I saw a young black kid playing out the trope of being a slave on a plantation: he was in overalls and a straw hat, with a cotton field in the background, rehashing racist stereotypes around fried chicken and shoot-ups, all with a goofy frozen smile (again, bobbing in place to the Wii theme song). Like a professional wrestler, a good NPC knows how to provoke a crowd. The comment section started bidding on him like it was a live auction ($10. $12. $25!). Of course it’s an act, which means someone can be disturbingly racist and you don’t know if they’re part of the bit or not.

A few minutes in, I saw a comment flash by, saying he’d get banned from TikTok if he didn’t end the stream. I wondered if human trafficking is a content category that companies can’t tolerate, even if it’s satire. $120, now. Given the torrent of comments, did he miss the warning? I panicked for him: he had 2,425 followers, and I felt the pain of losing years of work over a stupid stunt. $300. For the first time, I participated. I jumped in to try to save him. To break through the message flood, I left short, repetitive comments like, “Did you see the message from TikTok?!” and “You’re about to get banned!” Eventually, someone replied to me: “Dude, those perma-ban warnings are fake.” Apparently, NPC streamers try to psyche out each other with fake warnings so they don’t climb the TikTok leaderboard faster than them. Fooled again.

Even though there’s no actual pain being inflicted, some NPCs will pretend to be in extreme pain to (1) heighten the drama, and (2) tap into sadism. Once I saw a teenager hysterically crying as he held a bicycle pump connected to a 6’ balloon above his head; it was filled with white powder and grew with every rose. He pleaded with you to stop. There’s a recurring “Disturb My Job” gimmick, where a guy works at a computer and filters his face to be in a permanent scrunch of pain; every like triggers a maniacal clown laugh, and certain gifts require him to put on a horse head and dance to Gangnam Style. Others appear normal until they have a pretend psychotic meltdown over a specific gift: “NO PANDAS! NO ROSES!”

In between the various rose competitions, you’ll sometimes swipe straight into a cinder block shelter in Syria, with a shot of a father with 6 kids, all reading Islamic prayers, with a message saying, “Help. No Food. War,” and a PayPal link. This is not a stunt. They have very real concerns and likely have no idea how video gifts work on TikTok Live.

The juxtaposition of tragedy and satire, pranks and pain, all united under the same emoji economy, creates weird misunderstandings. One time I flicked into a hospital room. She had Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, a blood cancer of the lymph nodes. 100 people watching. She had light eyebrows, freckles, and a shaved head—maybe 12 years old. “If you’re new here, make sure you hit that button to follow along my journey.” She told us she was about to get chemo at 6pm. 135 people now. 13,000 likes. She said she loved supportive comments, and then started asking her audience for a “universe,” the highest-priced video gift on TikTok Live, worth $500. You could see the ceiling tiles and fluorescent lights above her, but someone asked in the comments: “are you really in a hospital?”

The constant trickery creates a context where everything is a game, even when it’s not. I saw a few homeless people sleeping on a sidewalk covered in blankets. For 399 coins, you can wake them up with a stupid song and make them do the Chicken Dance. I was there when someone did it. The song played, but unlike the kid who was fake-sleeping in the dunk tank, they were actually passed out. Their unresponsiveness gave them more autonomy than any of the NPCs, but the crowd was pissed: “WTF, this is fake.”

For every devastating thing I saw, there was at least one moment that was equally uplifting. I donated a few thousand likes to five Kenyans dancing through a cloud of dust and emojis as they climbed to a million likes, earning the title of the #4 TikTok account in the world that week. Their faces were joyous, either because they loved dancing, or because they were making life-changing money, or both. But even the feel-good winners have a darker function in the rose economy. They are the jackpots on the casino floor. They inspire anyone watching with a new sense of hope (“That is possible. I could do that”). And so more people get roped in to the hope of hacking a market glitch to escape the machinery of their circumstance.

The pitfalls of agency gambling:

As Pinkydolly went viral, she told Business Insider, “I don’t care about the haters—what’s important is my son is going to have a beautiful life.” She’s a single mom. Before she was Pinkydoll, she was Fedha Fernande Nkoy Sinon: a Canadian small business owner who just went out of business. At her peak, she made a year’s income in ~2 weeks. Pinkydoll effectively won the TikTok lottery,15 but like all people who suddenly get rich or famous, something backfires. Months later her OnlyFans videos leaked online and she followed up with a post crying that her son would one day find them. The algorithmic williwaw16 slowed down, and she’s since been looking for new lottery tickets. Today you can find her experimenting with a fusion genre called “glizzy mukbang”—in addition to eating enormous quantities of food on camera in a single sitting, all the food is shaped like a penis: bananas, burritos, or 20 pounds of hot dogs.

Underneath these bizarre antics are fairly regular people—they come online to realize the great promise of the Internet: financial independence through self-publishing. Many NPCs even bake their money problems into their bit. NPC Kyle would yell “Lowe’s doesn’t pay enough!” while holding BBQ tongs in each hand, clicking them to match his words. NPC Dora the Explorer, while doing a perfect impression, would get meta: “You guys are paying for my credit card bill!” She’d tilt her head, smile, and hold it for 15 seconds before speaking again. “You guys are paying for my credit card bill!”

Some NPC streamers “job-stack” and run a TikTok Live session during their shift.17 The most illuminating example I saw was of an on-site construction worker. #NPC-at-work. He was wearing an orange vest and holding one of those two-sided STOP/SLOW signs to help orient oncoming cars around roadwork. Bobbing in place to the Barbie theme song, he’d react to emojis with “gang gangggg” and “NO GLIZZIES! I’M ALLERGIC!” He filled the silence with meows and banter: “Lookin’ like a fool in public? Yes, yes, yesss. Send roses!” 2.1k live, 25k likes. He’d often break character to focus on his job (to prevent cars from crashing), but then he’d immediately slip back into his trance.

There’s nothing wrong with trading some agency in the moment to unlock more agency in the future. This is called a job. The difference is NPCs gamble all their agency, through a machine aesthetic that is literally dehumanizing. They give up full motor-control for the small chance of making 100x their hourly rate. The reality is that 95% of these streamers don’t make anything, 4% make $10s of dollars, 0.9% make $100s of dollars, and 0.1% make Pinkydoll money. It is an extreme power law distribution, just like the Creator Economy. Both scenes suggest that the most successful will be the least agentic.

As I spent that week on TikTok writing about streamers getting physically captured by their audience, I was getting psychologically captured by my own. I had just gone (semi) viral on Twitter: 100k likes for a thread on Kurt Vonnegut. I was bent on recreating that success by writing more threads, optimizing through metrics, and responding to all the data that was rapidly spilling into my notifications. I really would’ve rather been writing essays, but I just left my full-time job and had no income, and so it felt responsible to gamble with my agency. I thought that if I spent 80% of my writing on niche threads, then I could write myself out of the matrix, and then one day, I could write about whatever I wanted. There are clear aesthetic differences between a literary threadboi and a glizzy mukbang star, but the mechanics are the same: I was an NPC. It worked. My monthly growth rate increased by 12x, but it came with the cost of polluting my attention, my intentions, and my creative practice, and so I gave up growth-hacking after 2 months.

If you imagine yourself creating for the rest of your life, then maybe the best move is to be agentic, starting today. Maybe it goes unnoticed at the scale of weeks and months, but it brings you compounding advantages: (1) The freedom to do whatever you want means you’re less likely to burn out,18 and more likely to stick around for a decade. (2) By focusing on the work (instead of growth) you’ll eventually make stuff that’s good enough to spread on its own.

Agency is a nice ideal to aspire to, but it requires the courage to be perpetually misunderstood. Agency means you shed through topics, tempos, tones, mediums, and identities faster than the Internet’s refresh rate. The cost of personal evolution is that your audience’s model of you is constantly lagging. You become hard to explain. Every act of creative freedom risks disappointing the people who pledged to support you. Some leave. But many stay to follow your zigzag19 path. As Internet niches get conquered by bots and content entrepreneurs, I think unpredictability will be refreshing.

To claim agency is to show up to the attention casino and resist many forces, both your natural desire to be liked, and also the gravity of the roulette table. You have to live among algorithms without caving to them. As Emerson said, “[self reliance] is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.” Of course, TikTok will never admit that it harbors dark patterns and corrupting forces. Now that you know how complicated TikTok Live is, I want you to see how the company markets this feature:

“TikTok LIVE is where the party's at – it's all about real-time fun, self-expression, and letting your creativity shine. Going LIVE on TikTok means unlocking a world of possibilities and connecting with awesome people. It's the place for all creators because it's the place for you to totally be yourself!”

I know that NPCs make up a small percent of TikTok streamers, but to infer that a gamified tipping market is a place to be totally yourself is another sign to me that we’re living through The Great Gaslighting. For almost two decades, social media companies have romanticized their mission to better the world, while they’re secretly shaking the beehive, robbing the agency of a generation, and making extraordinary money from it all.

There is something sinister about making the rose the penny of their economy. Since it’s the cheapest gift, it’s the one everyone sees. It’s become the emblem of a weird system where a mob floods your stream with roses as they judge, thirst, or laugh at you. The symbol of appreciation has been inverted. The flower of beauty, twisted (in Latin, torture means “to twist”). The whole thing feels like circus-as-software, a carnival erupting in every pocket, luring us all to watch or join the freak show, promising gold, without the ringmaster sharing an important term that almost no one knows: TikTok takes 77% of every rose.20

Thanks for everyone who gave feedback on earlier forms of this draft:, , , , , , , , , . And also thanks to everyone who shared thoughts on Notes to help shape my conclusion: , , , , .

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Footnotes:

Let’s imagine I want to write an essay with a farfetched thesis: your dreams can predict the future, accurately. Of course, it’s a stretch. But if I went for it, what would I need to convince a reader of this superstition? Science. Historical examples. Personal stories. I’d need to consider the skeptic and imagine their objections in advance. Whether my thesis is ordinary or outrageous, what I need is Material.

Material is the substance of your essay, the assemblage of found things that get woven into a linear reading experience.

If a Thesis is the sun at the center of an essay, then Material is the swirl of ideas that orbit it. While a thesis is stubbornly singular, your Material is expansive. Wildly different things can coexist in the same space, but under one very important and non-negotiable rule: they should all relate to your thesis. Otherwise, you don’t have a system of ideas, you have paragraphs of space junk.

As a writer I collect rare materials, and so I always need to be careful not to hoard cheap shit from yard sales. I need solid collection constraints; “dreams” is far too broad. I don’t want to include everything from my dream journal, the science of lucid dreaming, or anything from the movie Inception. My thesis is on “precognitive” dreams, dreams that end up happening in your waking life. From this more specific lens, I can dive into Minority Report, the (bogus) predictions of Nostradamus, and the time my great grandmother saw the winning horse numbers for the next day’s race, three times in a row, and gambled and won (true or not, this a legend in my family).

Your thesis is the filter that helps you collect absurdly specific facts and stories, but what if your thesis is fuzzy? “Precognitive dreams,” is an apex example of fuzzy thinking. It’s not even a thesis, it’s a topic: 

Am I saying that the soul can time travel? Am I saying that our future is predetermined? Or, am I saying that a broken clock is right twice a day? Can coincidence drive the layperson insane? Maybe the brain is inconceivably good at pattern recognition? I don’t know my angle yet, and I won’t begin to know until I write a draft.

According to Paul Graham in “The Age of the Essay,” the idea that writers need to start from a fixed, unchanging center is an “intellectual hangover” from the Middle Ages, when most schools were law schools. Material isn’t just ammunition to defend a preconceived thesis. Material is a vehicle to advance your thinking. Through putting your experiences, thoughts, and research into paragraphs of your own, you see the holes in your ideas, and that opens questions, and those questions point towards new silos of Material to consider. As if by dream logic, you jump from one association to the next, gathering nodes that hopefully crystallized into a refined thesis.

The problem is you inevitably amass so many options that nothing makes sense anymore. Let’s imagine my early drafts lead me to read “Synchronicity” by Carl Jung, which is loaded with precognitive dream examples, and now I’m considering 3 new, competing options for a thesis. How does it all fit together? Where is the center? Material has the capacity both to enlighten and burden you. This is totally normal. In the exploration process, the writer spirals into complexity and knows not where to restart. Take it from John McPhee, who opens his essay “Structure” with him on his back on a picnic table, looking up at the sky, panicking over his mess of Material as his deadline looms:

“The subject was the Pine Barrens of southern New Jersey. I had spent about eight months driving down from Princeton day after day, or taking a sleeping bag and a small tent. I had done all the research I was going to do—had interviewed woodlanders, fire watchers, forest rangers, botanists, cranberry growers, blueberry pickers, keepers of a general store. I had read all the books I was going to read, and scientific papers, and a doctoral dissertation. I had assembled enough material to fill a silo, and now I had no idea what to do with it.”

— John McPhee in “Structure”

What you don’t want to do is keep everything you find. A mosaic of material drowns your reader in confusion. They don’t know how things are connected, or why the writer jumps from one scene to the next in a dream-like procession.

What you want to do is cut. Abandon most of the Material you find, and select just a few pieces that work together to show a pattern. Keep pruning, relentlessly, until a little collection of rare Materials convey a big idea with ease.

Today, we’ll get into:

• How to sift through silos of Material to find a solid Thesis.

• Why personal experience and cultural references are equally important.

• What you need to build arguments (points and counterpoints).

Sifting through silos_

Rarely do I start an essay knowing the perfect 3 examples to weave into it. Rather, I need to immerse myself in an unreasonable amount of detail, and look for patterns in the noise. There are plenty of archetypes for the scrupulous searcher. An essayist is a kid who finds faces in clouds, an amateur altcoin trader who gazes into graphs, or a beach goer with a metal detector. Only by sifting through the sands of information can we find any shells worth stringing into a necklace. 

We have vast reservoirs of things to tap into: memories, unread books in our libraries, dream journals, whatever. From these different places, we pluck things. We pluck them out of their original silos and put them all next to each other. 

Could there be a shared thread between 1) my great grandmother’s trippy dreams, 2) Dune 2, and 3) J.B. Rhine’s parapsychology experiments at Duke in the 1930s? Each of these sources are composed of intricate sub-parts. On the surface, a collection of Material might seem random; but when you look carefully, you can find a pattern that connects them.

One of the main sins of scoping Material is a refusal to abandon the form you found it in. We often see stories through a fixed frame, often a beginning, middle, and end that have to flow in a specific order. It’s like when someone says, “Oh my god, I need to tell you about this dream,” and then chronologically runs through an absurd 10-step sequence, instead of just sharing the one detail that actually matters. So many times, a three-paragraph rant works better as a single sentence.

Through being incisional, we cut into our Material to see its indivisible and rearrangeable parts. We have to sacrifice the precious originals, melting them down to scraps, goo, and dust, so we can rebuild our own original work from the scraps. I wrote about this in The Alchemy of the Rewrite, but here’s a diagram that breaks pattern recognition down into a cartoon sequence.

• SEGMENT: What are the subunits of this Material that stand on their own?

• LABEL: How can I name each part so that I see this Material as a constellation of memorable concepts?

• MATCH: If I focus on one subunit at a time, which other subunits are most related to it? 

• EVALUATE: What are the distinct themes running through my Material?

• EXTRACT: Can I recombine a few parts to create a strong pattern, and cut the rest?

This is a semi-technical skill that is probably hard at first and becomes intuitive over time. What’s more important than any step-by-step process is the meta-skill. Writers need the patience to sift through noise on their search, and the agility to abandon old models in light of new information. Consider how Ken Burns assembled 10,000 hours of archival footage to review for his 18 hour documentary, Baseball. That’s a ratio of over 500:1. But creative waste isn’t a bug, it’s a feature.

Radical exposure, paired with a discerning eye, puts you in a position to weave together unlikely parts into a unique, integrated whole.

I’m not saying you should stop writing and go on a research binge. I’m asking you to spend as much time reading your draft as you do writing it. If you riff something out in 45 minutes, spend another 45 to analyze the Material on the page.

The fusion of memoir and research_

There’s a huge array of what can be considered Material, but I think it helps to classify everything into two opposing buckets. In the realm of personal Experience, we have anecdotes, stories, scenes, memories, dreams, journals, perceptions, family history, AIM logs, etc. In the realm of cultural References,” we have name drops, facts, summaries, commentaries, graphs, charts, quotes, excerpts, links, etc. 

Obviously, feelings and facts can co-exist in the same essay, but there’s a 450-year debate on how one type of Material is holy and the other is forbidden. This has fractured the essay into competing mediums.  “Articles” use factoids to make mechanical arguments, while “opinion pieces” weave feelings in an organic stream. In articles, the author has no presence. In personal essays, the author’s presence is all there is. One optimizes for objective truth, the other for subjective honesty, and both camps are scared of being wrong.

If the author isn’t on the page, the reader misses out on the human element. Why do they care about this topic? Inversely, if all we see is the author’s life, the reader can’t connect stories to the larger culture.

Of course, academic papers should lean towards research, and memoirs should lean towards experience, but the essay is such a powerful medium because it allows for the fusion of genres. When you integrate the two, you weave a web of supporting Material that is both relatable and credible.

Personal experience makes an essay idiosyncratic. The word “personal” is up for debate. When I say it, it means more than thoughts, feelings, or voice. To me, personal implies biographical details. It implies author-turned-character. What string of events led to a unique point of view? Perspective is downstream of experience.

If I were to ever write an essay about precognitive dreams, I’d have to include my weird family history around the matter:

• My great great grandmother was rumored to be the psychic midwife of her town. 

• My great grandmother believed that God helped her gamble on horse races.

• My grandmother interprets every dream symbol and coffee grind.

• My mother is a fan of American pop-medium, John Edward.

• My father, an MIT structural engineer, rolls his eyes at dream-talk.

There’s a unique backstory and tension here, and this isn’t even getting into my own experiences yet (which I’ll do soon). The point is, my life is a reservoir of Material that nobody else has access to. This is my moat. By tapping into this, I write the essay that only I can write. No one can put their name on that essay and get away with it. A large language model can read trillions of words, but it won’t ever learn the rumors of my ancestors. 

Cultural references make an essay verifiable. While experiences are singular and sometimes dubious, references are nodes in the public domain that anyone can point to. Does the thing have a Wikipedia page? Here is a fact-salad about the topic at hand: 

• Precognitive dreams are a theme through the history of literature, from Homer, all through the Bible, to Shakespeare and Stephen King. 

• One night, the wife of a Roman ruler had a dream that her husband would be killed, and she warned him. The next day, Julius Caesar was assassinated in the Senate. 

• 63% of Americans report having at least one precog dream in their life. 

• In 1927, J.W. Dunne (an ex-aeronautical engineer in the British military) proposed a theory that dreams enable people to experience time non-linearly. 

• Freud and Jung fought over this.

I’m not arguing that any of these facts prove or disprove a thesis. Including this kind of Material shows that I’m not trapped in my own bubble of experience. It shows I’m aware of how events from my own life have parallels in the public domain. 

It’s never been easier to connect the dots. I learned about all 6 bullets above through ChatGPT; I’m sharing this to remind you that there are no serious barriers to grounding your experiences in culture. Before the Internet, academics had to fly to get their sources. Now I can upload a draft, and it gives me a list of references to read into.

If my essay only consisted of a fact salad, it would be generic and non-distinct. But the fusion of feeling and fact creates a special fabric, one where history colors experience and experience colors history. 

I’m not saying all essays need memoir-resolution stories and MLA-cited research. Naturally, essays lean in one direction or the other. Experience-heavy essays can include a few powerful facts, and Reference-heavy essays can get personal by sharing a few relevant anecdotes.

An awareness of these two spheres is a good start, but it’s not enough. You eventually want to make sure your Material is actually convincing. You don’t want to build a maze of facts and feelings that do nothing to advance your thinking or clarify your thesis.

Consider the skeptic_

If I were to write an essay on precognitive dreams, I’d probably start with the snake story. 

One day, ten years ago, in the suburbs of Long Island, I walked out of my parents garage to find a 5’-9” yellow snake in the driveway. This was not a dream. The snake and the outdoor family cat were circling each other, each hissing, as if they were about to rumble. I grabbed the cat, ran inside, and from the window I watched the beast slowly slither away. I’ve seen small garden snakes in the yard, but this? Was this an illegal pet that escaped? It was a situation out of a dream. What made the weird event even weirder is that the night before I dreamt it. I dreamt of a big yellow snake dueling a chipmunk in red boxing gloves (the chipmunk symbolizing my cat, of course).

Yes, this actually happened, and it boggles me. While I could jump to the definitive conclusion that I come from a lineage of psychics and now commune with the snake realm, it would be foolish to not consider the Law of Large Numbers. The average person has 100,000 dreams in their life, and so 1 of them is destined to be profoundly coincidental.

A bad argument is one that ignores the skeptics and builds a mountain of evidence for a single side of an issue. If I insisted, “my experience is true, and this happened all through history too, therefore prophecies are real,” that would be shallow logic. If all the Material points to a single and spectacular conclusion, something’s off. If you’re not willing to earnestly consider the opposite of your thesis, you’re bullshitting yourself. If you know counterpoints exist and you decide to omit them, you’re either lazy or lying.

A good argument would embody the view of the skeptic and take the counter-position seriously. It would go through each claim (sub-argument) of a thesis, and amass evidence for and against it (points and counterpoints). It doesn’t just stop there. By writing through the tension, you think critically, and come to more interesting conclusions and questions.

Imagine the flow of this essay: it would start with the Great Snake Mystery (a personal Experience). It would then mention that Cleopatra also had a precog snake dream, followed by a machine-gun spatter of quick, historical, prophecy References. So far all these points are evidence for my thesis. Then comes the Law of Large Numbers; it’s a counterpoint, a reference that deflates everything. Bummer, what next? I write to explore the tension, and there’s three general paths I could take, each of which unlocks new silos of Material:

1. I could challenge: I’d find new Material to disprove the skeptics. Technically, I did have another precog dream come true: just two years ago, I foregleamed a fight between my wife’s Doberman and a large raccoon. This could lead to a refined thesis: I can see the future, but only futures that involve domestic animal violence (likely, not an angle I’d take). Next…

2. I could compromise: Maybe there’s a middle ground. Maybe dreams don’t let us escape space-time, but perhaps our subconscious is just a good pattern engine. The brain registers a lot of material below our threshold of attention, and so at night it naturally plots out possible futures (ie: job promotions). We tend to remember the few that actually happen. But how do you account for an exotic 1-of-1 snake encounter? Maybe the snake was sleeping in the bushes from the night before, and pheromones came through an open window to trigger the dream. I looked it up, and while snakes can smell up to 300 feet, the human range is closer to 3 feet. It’s more likely that the snake was dreaming about me. Next…

3. I could concede: I could admit that I’m not a psychic, and make fun of myself for ever believing I was. This could prompt a whole riff on why humans have the impulse to retroactively assign meaning to vague signals. Is this impulse good or bad? That’s a different question, a hard question, a great question, a question that only comes up through going deeper on your Material.

An important point of this example is that you don’t always need to prove your thesis right. Sometimes, proving yourself wrong is more interesting. Through considering the skeptic, you unlock other silos of Material; it creates a richer experience for the reader, and it deepens the logic of your idea.

To put this simply, there are 4 types of material that an essay wants to assemble: personal Experiences, cultural References, things that prove you right, and things that prove you wrong. Without experience, it’s an article. Without references, it’s a journal. Without counterpoints, it’s propaganda.  Through the intersection of these tensions, your essay becomes a proxy for a ruminating mind.

The next 3 posts for Essay Architecture will dive deeper into these patterns:

• Experience (putting yourself on the page);

• References (linking into the constellations of culture);

• Logic (building sound arguments).

These upcoming pattern posts are for paid subscribers of Essay Architecture, but everyone will still get a free preview. If you’re an independent essayist looking to upgrade your craft, it only costs $100/year.

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Let’s riff:

• +1s: Which points around Material resonated with you and why? Do any other examples come to mind that you’d like to share?

• Challenge: What do you disagree with and why? Let’s make this tighter.

• Dreams: What’s your weirdest dream that seemed to predict the future?

• Introduce: If you’re a new subscriber here, feel free to say hey in the comments and tell us about your writing goals and challenges (or, you can reply to this email).

• Share: If you found this essay helpful, consider sharing it so more people can find my project.

Writers are lodged in a crisis of who: Do I write for myself? Do I write for the masses? Am I trying to capture my life in prose or change the world with earworms? Who is this for?

William Zinser says, “don’t try to guess what… the country is in [the] mood to read.” So an entrepreneur might tell you to use data analytics to know what they’re in the mood to read. Vonnegut says to zoom in: “Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.” Which person though? Your best friend? A theoretical but specific stranger? (34-year olds in Northeastern cities who like etymology.) John McPhee says to start your session with “Dear mother…”

In The Craft of Writing Effectively, a U. Chicago professor, Larry McEnerney, gives some practical advice that might bum out the romantics: if you’re writing professionally, it’s not about explaining your ideas to your readers, it’s about changing their ideas.” There are a few ways to interpret this quote, but the word that now jumps out to me is “change.”

What is the common thread between personal growth stories, call to action persuasions, academic arguments, and political manifestors? Change.

Something was this, but now it’s that.

Or maybe it should be that.

So maybe it doesn’t matter if you’re writing about something trivial (your upcoming vacation to Maryland in August) or something existential (the icebergs are melting); what matters is how you model transformation. Whether you show or tell, invite or command, a well-shaped catalyst will get readers questioning how they need to change their outlook or actions.

A catalyst is the specific agent of change. When we render the world before and after the catalyst, an essay is imbued with relevance and urgency.

This is the last pattern of the series on Thesis, and it closes the first section of Essay Architecture. Here’s a recap:

• Microcosm : make your thesis tangible through a scene or symbol;

• Response: put your thesis in context and show us how it’s different;

• Catalyst: reach through the page to change the reader.

Essays are thought to be a short, casual format, but when the catalyst is potent, it can function like a psychedelic. The other day I sat down to read EB White’s, “Here is New York,” and in under half an hour he permanently changed my lens to the place I was born.

Here’s what’s in today’s essay (for paid subscribers):

1. The process of discovering a catalyst.

2. How to strengthen a catalyst by modeling the before and after.

3. Some brief ethics on brainwashing.

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If you don’t subscribe for my paid tier, I hope you still found value in the intro above. The next overview post (on Material) will be free. If you don’t want my posts on the craft of writing (free & paid), but still want my other posts (essays, updates, logs, etc.), you can update your account settings. Otherwise, hope you subscribe and enjoy the rest of this post.

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Every building has a site; it could be a dense metropolis, an AutoCAD strip mall, a sprawling suburb, or a somewhere in the sticks. The ultimate sin of architecture is when a designer ignores their context. My wife is an architect, and when we drive around Tudor-filled Queens and spot one of those McMansions trying to be an Italian villa—with plastic terracotta roofs and excessive Juliette balconies—she literally screams. It’s not just bad taste. The architect is so absorbed in their own design that they become blind to their surroundings. They forget to look up. Or worse, they choose not to.

Every idea has a neighborhood too, no matter how personal or original it is.

As an essay writer, your job extends beyond writing great sentences (voice) and putting them in the right order (form); you are also a cartographer of ideas: you sketch maps of your culture and put your story in context.

Your thesis becomes stronger when you frame it as a response to existing, related ideas. There are basically no rules on what you can respond to … it could be a manifesto by Sartre, Seth Godin’s glasses, the “duck architecture” in the show How I Met Your Mother, or Ron Weasley (ie: fiction counts; does it have name recognition among two or more people?).

Today’s post on Response is part of the Essay Architecture series; it’s one of three answers to the question: “what makes a great thesis?”

Recap: A THESIS is the singular anchor of your entire essay. It is a unique perspective, anchored in experience and culture, that organizes your stories, anecdotes, theories, and facts. There are 3 patterns in a great thesis:

• MICROCOSM (paid post) is when a small frame reveals a larger truth. The frame can be anything: a volcano, a person, your friend’s engagement party, Super Bowl LVIII, a Mr. Rogers quote, Gollum, a lobster, a slug… When a tangible thing is framed to represent your thesis, your thesis becomes microcosmic.

• RESPONSE: on building context around your thesis (today’s post).

• CATALYST: on changing someone’s mind (coming next week).

Since most of you reading this aren’t paid subscribers (yet) I wanted to share the main visual of today’s post. It’s inspired by Richard Serra’s 1967 “Verb List.” Serra was a modern, abstract sculptor, known for massive sheets of twisted metal.

You might not expect an organic sculptor to have a process that’s so anchored in language, but Serra’s list of 108 verbs is taught in art and architecture schools. It’s a dictionary of very specific ways you can alter an object: to droop, to knot, to smear … to dapple.

Our essays gain cultural richness when we frame them as responses, but we need a vocabulary that goes beyond “agree” and “disagree.” The image below shows different ways your thesis can respond (to extend, to contextualize, to codify, etc.). Later in this post, I’ll show how these 15 verbs can all branch from the same essay (in today’s case, “Why I am Christian again,” by James Taylor Foreman).

For $8.33/month, you’ll get essays like this all year that deconstruct the secret architecture of great essays. If you haven’t read it yet, check out the free chapter on Thesis.

Here’s a comment by from last chapter on Microcosm:

“This piece *immediately* unlocked something in a piece I was working on.”

Here’s a comment from who just signed up for the Writer’s Studio:

“Michael has fundamentally changed the way I think about writing holistically, from first draft to final published essay. I come from a product design background, and his work helped me translate my design process to the process of writing great essays.”

Because I don’t promote the Writer’s Studio enough, I should make a quick note here: In addition to my chapters, the Founding Tier on my Substack ($300/year), gets a Calendly link to book live feedback sessions whenever and as often as they need them. It’s often 1:1 with me, and sometimes includes a small group. More details on that in this post (and feel free to DM me too).

If you don’t subscribe for either paid tier, I hope you still find value in the intro & diagram above. If you don’t wan’t my posts on the writing craft (free & paid), but still want my other posts (essays, updates, logs, etc.), you can update your account settings. Otherwise, hope you subscribe and enjoy the rest of this post.

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How many times do you rewrite a draft from scratch before you publish it?

Once? Nill? 10 plus?

This is my 5th attempt, and it’s especially risky because my deadline is in 5 hours. Becky and I are cross-posting at the same time (8 AM ET Wednesday in Hong Kong), and my last 4 versions just don’t cut it. V1 was an abandoned book intro. V2 was 10,000 words of bore. V3 warped into an X thread that got 3 likes. V4 integrated an old “how to reverse outline” manual and turned Frankenstein. If V5 isn't shareable, Becky might hate me forever and so I really need to deliver.

This roving behavior is pretty typical for me. In architecture school I was known for making big changes to my design with 72 hours left until crit (nutso stuff). With essays, I’ll occasionally get OCD and rewrite something 17 times; but usually, it happens at least twice/thrice.

It’s not that my first drafts suck; they’re generally pretty good. It’s just that by the time I finish, I have a new clarity on its potential, and I’m blessed/cursed with the patience to do it again and again and again.

Despite being gungho for the rewrite, I’m selective about when I do it. Not every idea can or should be put through a ruthless pressure cooker. I do this for <1% of my ideas. In a given month, I’ll publish something like 250 logs that are filled with typos, maybe 5 one-page, one-take typewriter essays, and no more than one essay that’s gone through re-write limbo. I’m a big believer in fast, intuitive writing. But the ideas that really matter (maybe 2-10 per year?) are worth rewriting until they’re near perfect, and it’s worth knowing how to do that.

Rewriting is both technical and emotional. The process is analytical, but you also need a certain mindset and temperament to not wig out. 

Fortunately, there’s a good metaphor we can use to welcome this process: alchemy. 

It even comes with its own word: “assay.”

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Essay vs. Assay (Montaigne might be wrong)_

We call our posts “essays” because of a French mayor named Michel de Montaigne; in the 1580s, he would retreat into a tower to write a series of vignettes called Essais. The word translates to “to try,” “to test,” but also, “to attempt,” “to undertake,” and even, “to thrust out.” All of these interpretations are process-oriented. They focus on the romantic and gushy qualities of spilling your guts into a first draft. Show up, channel the universe, spasm onto the page, and call it art. No wrong answers.

In the Montaignian sense of the word, “to essay” is to not be concerned with composing a legible linear arc; it’s the pure act of thinking and feeling into prose. To clarify, this spirit is extremely important, BUT(!), it’s only half of what’s required to be understood.

It’s weird to me that the writings of the father of the essay read like the musings of a rambler. Of course, he is historically relevant: he brought the personal dimension into short-form prose, he covered a polymathic range of topics (gallbladder stones, God, cannibals, taxes, thumbs), he was one of the first to use the printing press to make his ideas accessible to the public, and he influenced great thinkers like Shakespeare, Descartes, and Nietzsche… but Montaigne is known for tangents and digressions (and it doesn’t help that it clocks in at a 14th-grade reading level). He wanted to capture the unhinged explorations of a meandering mind. Maybe he succeeded at that, but it doesn’t lead to timeless essays.

I hope to put in the work so I can one day appreciate Montaigne, but still, I think he represents a distorted view of the writer-reader relationship. An essay is an act of communion. It’s more than riffing on the page; it’s about crafting your thoughts in a way so a reader can inherit your perspective. I sense that Montaigne is a symbol for clinging to first draft structures, either for laziness, for fear, or for the thrill of being “organic.” The order you first conceive your thoughts is rarely the order that will make the most sense to readers. I like to think the first draft is for me to discover my idea, and the second draft is to best convey that idea to a stranger.

I was shocked (and thrilled) to learn that the etymology of the word essay implies that you don’t have to edit it! 

“Essay” comes from the Latin word “exagium” … and there’s another word that springs from this root: “assay.” I’d never heard of this one. I looked up both brother words in the COCA (the Corpus of Contemporary American English: a well-balanced library of a billion words that’s used to check how common a word is). Essay had 19,894 instances, and assay has 1,976 (surprisingly high, but still 10x less used).

Assay was coined a hundred years before Montaigne, by an alchemist named Paracelsus (the father of pharmacology). The meaning of assay is closer to exagium, and translates to “to weigh,” “to measure,” and “to determine the content or quality of something.” In a chemical sense, these alchemists were melting materials to understand their properties.

So while “essay” is about the original act of putting your thoughts on the page, “assay” speaks to the opposite function: to analyze what was made. After all, isn’t editing an act of melting?

The alchemists get a lot of flack: they’re caricatured as hucksters who tried to turn lead into valuable metals to shill to kings. But their method–the alchemical process–is not just the precursor to the scientific method, it’s the perfect metaphor for the creative process.

Alchemy is often simplified as “idea mixing,” fusing 2 or 3 uncommon influences; but actually, alchemy is the process of shifting between two opposite states (heating and cooling).

An alchemist starts by taking an existing metal and melting it to see what’s inside. Add heat. Dissolve the thing. Analyze the goo. Remove impurities. Refine proportions. Add new chemicals … Then they freeze it, binding everything into a new crystallized form. Once it’s solid, melt it again … The constant diverging and converging turns raw materials into refined ones.

Consider the parallel to writing: editing (or, restructuring) is the process of heating. You melt the seams that tie your prose together and analyze the ideas behind a draft. Like an alchemist, you rearrange the goo, add parts, delete parts, shape a new outline, and then rewrite it. Putting liquid ideas back into solid prose is a cooling process: you’re crystallizing thought.

So “essay” and “assay” represent the two halves of the writing process. One is about exploration, the other about examination. One is intuitive and mystical, the other is rigorous and scientific. We should honor each half, and de-latch from Montaigne’s notion that an essay is an unedited mind on the page. Like an alchemist, we should reforge our ideas over and over.

Ultimately, the path to quality comes from taking a draft, and having the courage and capacity to melt it. Academically, this process is known as “reverse outlining.” We usually think that outlining comes before the draft, but doing this after is how to start refinement. You dissolve your prose under the heat of analysis, so that once-frozen sentences are now malleable bullet points that can be reshaped into a new iteration.

The next section is a step-by-step guide on how to rewrite a draft.

How to melt your prose_

1. Make a backup. The idea of melting your prose sounds as irreversible as dipping physical paper in a vat of acid. Don’t melt your work without having a backup. Remember, Google Docs has a version history. You can copy text. You can copy files. You can print out your draft and store it in a safe. Don’t cling, don’t be timid, and have faith that your next iteration will be stronger. Do whatever it takes so you feel comfortable melting your precious sentences.

2. Find the seeds (solve et coagula). Before you melt your draft, you want to inspect it. The goal here is to identify all the indivisible units of meaning. Ideally, every paragraph is a distinct idea, but this is rarely the case in a first draft. Sometimes there are 3 ideas in one chunk, sometimes one idea is extended across 3 chunks, and sometimes it’s just a big wall of text. Sub-titles can be misleading too. The goal here is to untangle the knots: delete your headers, and re-cluster your sentences so each paragraph is a distinct unit of thought. The alchemists called this “solve et coagula,” which is Latin for “dissolve and coagulate.” It’s okay if some paragraphs are small fragments and others are huge. You can’t re-structure until you know the atomic elements you're working with. These pure and isolated components were called “seeds,” and they can be kept, cut, recombined, or transformed.

3. Name your parts (specificare). It’s hard to grok your structure when all your ideas are expanded as long strings of words. Unlike those aliens from Arrival, we can’t process full essays at once. In order to “think in structure,” we need to melt thousands of words into a small list of phrases that our mind can hold at the same time. To do this, give each paragraph a title. This might seem hardcore, but it’s great practice in compressing ideas and coining phrases. The alchemists called this “specificare” which is Latin for “to name distinctly.” This new list of bullets is your “reverse outline.” Like an alchemist, you are inspecting, analyzing, and identifying each element of your draft. You can go through this process in a new document, at the top of your page, with post-it notes, in Miro, or wherever makes sense for you. Remember, the goal here isn’t to fix or re-arrange; you want to see the existing arc of thinking.

4. Grasp the essence (quinta essentia). Scan your list of parts; is there a single bullet that seems more important, provocative, or unifying than the others? Is there some invisible theme that connects some of the bullets? After melting, the alchemists would search for the most concentrated essence of a substance, called the “quintessence,” or, “the fifth element.” It was beyond earth, air, fire, and water, and was thought to be the purest form of matter. By finding this essence (the thesis) it can transform ordinary things into higher forms (in the ideal sense: gold). Sit with your reverse outline for a bit and look for patterns. Try looking at your elements in every possible way until something pops. Write your new, refined thesis at the top of the page.

5. Rearrange the goo (conjunction). Now that we have a hunch for a refined thesis, we’re going to look back at our reverse outline. Which bullet points are worth keeping? What can we cut? Shuffle the parts that make sense into a new order, and feel free to add new bullets. The goal here is to craft a sequence that supports your new thesis. What is the most gripping starting point? What’s the closer? How do I bridge the two? This outline can be as lo-fi or as detailed as you want. It can be 5 simple points, or it can include multiple levels of indentations. Your new outline can go either at the top of your document or in a new one.

6. Write from scratch (fixation). This final act is an act of cooling: you’re turning your liquid outline back into solid prose. Point by point, I’ll convert my outline into paragraphs. I’ll often have older drafts to the side for reference, and sometimes I’ll copy chunks into my new outline. I still try to manually rewrite everything, because phrasing often comes out better on a second take. I’ll use more specific language and cut bloated words. Once the new paragraph is done, I’ll delete the reference one. Keep moving down. When I get to the end, I’ll sometimes re-read older drafts to see if there are any turns of phrases I missed.

The death and rebirth of all of your darlings_

While it helps to have a technical step-by-step, it’s worth noting the psychic toil that comes with rewriting. You don’t simply “melt a draft,” you also melt yourself. In the process of writing something, you become entangled with it. It’s not an objective idea, but it’s an expression of you, a proxy of your identity. Acknowledging that it’s flawed is an acknowledgement of your own flaws. The fact that we cling is entirely natural.

Stephen King coined the phrase, “kill your darlings,” to remind us that we have to part ways with beautiful sentences. 

But when it comes to rewriting, it’s not the sentences that have to die, but the ego. It’s no wonder writers often avoid editing, it literally feels like death.

An alchemist might say that letting go and embracing death is the only road to refinement. In addition to their work with materials, they developed a religious doctrine around death-and-rebirth that paralleled their science. Carl Jung was fascinated by this: creative growth (refinement) and spiritual growth (“individuation”) were linked. The alchemists had multiple symbols for transformation: the phoenix rising from its own ashes, the green lion devouring the sun, and the ouroboros (the snake eating its own tail).

So while it’s tempting to talk about craft-specific tricks to detach from a draft (time, feedback, weed, etc.), maybe it’s worth thinking about the larger meta-skill of letting go. Maybe the thing holding us back from quality writing isn’t our technical ability, but our impatience and our fear of dissolving something we used to love. Once we can embrace a creative death, we can embrace it in other areas of our life: in old identities, in blocked careers, in toxic relationships, wherever. And once we see it everywhere, it’s not so unthinkable to rewrite an essay.

Knowing this doesn’t make it automatically easy. I still catch myself clinging to some first drafts. If you don’t cling, maybe you never liked the idea enough in the first place. But it helps to remember the alchemists. There are so many pressures that make a rewrite feel impossible, but if you dare to melt your prose and trust that something better will emerge, you can transform ordinary insights into linguistic gold.

Special thanks to for her multiple rounds of feedback on this! A common question on rewrites is, “how do you know when to stop?” The answer: deadlines. I think the best middle ground between infinite iteration and one-draft publishing is to rewrite as many times as you can within a fixed cadence. Becky is a pro at this. She publishes every week, hasn’t missed a deadline in over a year, and still gets in 3+ versions per essay. Check out her writing process in How to Substack Like a Journalist.

Beck At It

How to Substack like a journalist

The deadline: Wednesdays at 8AM The finish line is set in advance. During my finance journalism days, I had a publishing schedule to follow. If my editor had slotted my article about Shariah-compliant investment banks in Southeast Asia for the coming Thursday, I had to have something publish-worthy by then. If not, there simply won’t be a story from my b…

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2 years ago · 3 likes · 1 comment · Becky Isjwara

Let’s riff:

• What’s your approach to rewriting?

• Any thoughts on the alchemists?

• What am I missing on Montaigne?

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Considering checking out my paid tiers for more on writing. Details here.

If you think Leap Year logic is random and confusing, the calendar before 46 BC was absurd. At the end of February, there was a 50% chance that a high priest (dubbed the “pontifex maximus”)  would declare “Intercalaris,” a bonus month. It was somewhere between 22-28 days, had a 50% chance of occurring, and you only had a few months notice. The stated reason was to sync their lunar calendar with the sun, but it was really a tool for manipulation. The priest would stretch time as needed to mess with elections, term lengths, and the timing of holidays. Time was tampered. Rigged.

The Julian Calendar was an attempt to bring stability to time (sounds noble, but Julian Caesar was an eponymist: a special kind of asshole who coins terms after their own name for immortality). With the help of an astronomer named Sosigenes, they introduced a 12-month, 365 day calendar. They knew that a true solar year was 365.25 days, so every 4 years they’d add one more day to sync up with the sun. It was called a Leap Year. 

It was predictable. It was safe from abuse. Unfortunately, the math was wrong. A solar year is actually 365.242 years: a rounding error. They were off by 11 minutes a year. It wasn’t even noticeable at first, but several empires later they realized their fuck-up. By the 16th century, astronomers realized the solstices were 10 days off from when they were supposed to happen. Let’s call this “solar drift.”

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So in 1582, Pope Greg and his sidekick Luigi did some napkin math and came up with the Gregorian Calendar (another eponymist name-grab where the astrologer gets no credit). They needed fewer Leap Years to be more aligned with the sun, so they introduced 3 “Leap Year Omissions” within a 400-year “Leap Cycle.” For example, the years 1700, 1800, and 1900 did not have Leap Years, even though they were supposed to in the Julian Calendar (2000 wasn’t skipped, and I feel cheated out of experiencing a Leap Year Omission Day in my lifetime).

It was a solid plan to get us back in sync with the sun, but we had to do the unimaginable: skip 10 days. In Spain, Portugal, and Italy, people went to bed on October 4th, 1582 and woke up on October 15th. The masses, who didn’t really get why such a change was necessary, were disturbed and disoriented. Birthdays went uncelebrated. The religious ones who assumed Judgment Day was coming on a fixed date within their lifetime assumed the government cut 10 days off their life. There were protests and attempts to resist. To add to the confusion, not every country agreed to this. It took between 2 months and 300+ years for everyone to sign onto the Gregorian Calendar. This was the greatest episode of time dysphoria in civilized history.

Now that we all finally agree that the end of February warrants a complex logic, it’s worth pointing out that the math is still wrong. A solar year is actually 365.24219 days. Another rounding error. Every year, our calendar drifts 26 seconds away from the sun. Thanks to Gregory, we’re drifting 25x slower than before, but we’re still drifting.  

Every 3,300 years we’ll experience a full day of solar drift. 

In 600,000 years, we’ll experience a “solstice reversal,” where the Earth and the calendar are so uncalibrated, that the summer months will have winter weather and the winter months will have summer weather. This seems impossibly far away, but a leak is a leak. The Gregorian Calendar is set up to go through over 8,000 solstice reversals before the sun explodes.

The Gregorian calendar didn’t fix the problem, it just slowed it down. It’s a quintessential example of tweaking a bad design instead of finding a real solution. Instead of saying, “maybe Leap Year is fucking stupid?” we doubled-down, adding Leap Cycles and Leap Year Omission Days.

The hard question is: how can we sync an annual calendar to the sun without fiddling with days? Pre-Julian, we added months, and Post-Julian, we added days; maybe we need to keep thinking smaller…

We’re dealing with a surplus of .24219 years beyond our tidy 365-day calendar. Let’s break that down. That’s 5.81256 extra hours per year, or 348.7536 extra minutes per year, or 23,085.216 extra seconds per year. That seems like a lot of seconds. But how many seconds are in a full-year? 31,536,000, damn, that’s a lot of seconds. So what happens if those ~23k orphan seconds get baked into the 31 million seconds we already have? Each second would be .0007320273973 seconds longer.

If we made every second 0.73 milliseconds longer, we wouldn’t need to use a Leap Year to catch up to the sun.

In the spirit and tradition of the eponymists, I’m going to coin this new unit of time as, “The Dean Second.” A vote for The Dean Second is a vote for calendar sanity. No more arbitrary days! It dissolves the Leap Year, the bastard of time, and redistributes it into the smallest unit we have, the second. Note: 0.73 milliseconds is imperceptible. It is less than 1/1000th of a second. The most perceptive gamers in the world can’t even notice visual changes under 10 milliseconds. The best part of the Dean Second is that no one will even notice it. There will be no time dysphoria, no existential conundrums, and no serious birthday disruptions (people born on February 29th are already used to celebrating on the 28th). 

At this point, you might be thinking: “You can’t just change the second!? It’s defined by an atomic clock!” 

When you understand how the atomic second was defined, you realize how bogus it is. By the 1950s, the scientific community needed a stable way to measure “one second,” and realized that Earth’s orbit and rotation was too unpredictable to base satellite systems on. Their search led them to Cesium-133, nature’s most stable element. Its electrons emit radiation at such a predictable interval, that it was pitched as a naturally ocurring pendulum. They consistently measured 9,192,631,770 billion Cesium vibration cycles within one traditional “solar” second, and so that became the “atomic second.”

So yes, an atomic clock has impressive PICOsecond-grade precision (to the billionths), but, they're basing their Cesium measurements on a bad unit: the solar second. This is (another) quintessential example of precision without accuracy.

The solar second isn’t just an old unit (FFS, it is Sumerian: pre-civilizational), it is blind to the whole historical dilemma of calendars, leap years, and solar drift. You get a solar second by breaking a “solar day” (one spin) into 86,400 units (24 x 60 x 60). 24 was picked because it’s double 12 (a superstitious and supernatural number), and 60 is a “composable” number from the sexagesimal system (it can divide easily into many parts: 30, 20, 15, 10, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1). This is a nifty invention for a mud-hut civilization, but it ignores the .24219 year surplus on a solar year. 

If society agrees that Leap Years are unbearable and that a Dean Second makes more sense, then we could redefine an atomic second to be derived from a Dean Second instead of a solar second. In case you’re an atomic scientist reading this, a Dean Second contains 9,199,361,028 Cesium cycles per second (only 6.7 million extra cycles).

As you might expect, the clock people don’t give a shit about the priorities of the calendar people. Unlike me, they don’t see the existence of Leap Year as a serious (and dangerous) design flaw that needs to be remedied immediately. This is (yet another) quintessential example of inter-department coordination problems. Thanks to Pope Greg, the calendar people are basically off the hook for 10,000 years–they have no incentive to fight for their cause–and the clock people have their own motives. They freaked out over a 1.5 millisecond discrepancy in Earth’s orbit in 2016, and yet, a 26 second solar drift (17,000x worse) is just out of scope. Either they don’t know about solar drift, or they don’t care because they believe no one will even use calendars in 3,300 years after the species becomes transhumanist light beings that live inside a Cesium-powered server.

In any case, it’s no surprise that our extremely precise atomic clocks are out of phase with a true solar year, so what do we do? We invent Leap Seconds. Instead of solving this problem holistically, we decided to create a committee called the International Earth Rotation and Reference System Service (IERRS) to add or delete Leap Seconds as they see fit. Since 1972, these guys have fucked with time on 27 separate occasions. They announce these decisions in advance to other timekeepers on June 30th, but they don’t have Twitter and haven’t updated their website since 2013.

The IERRS is not just a symbol of “paradigm blindness” (the willingness to triple-down in wrong domains instead of considering new solutions), it’s also a logistical pain. There’s a formal movement by the GCPM (General Conference of Weights and Measure) who are the “supreme authority” over the IBPM (International Bureau of Weights and Measurements, since 1875) to formally Abolish the Leap Second by 2035. This is a real movement in the scientific community. Their stated goal is to “shift from Solar time to Cesium time,” but even if that works, we are still drifting 26 seconds per year. Atomic time doesn’t fix the Julian/Gregorian Drift Problem: no matter how deep you round, you’ll never actually match the calendar to the sun.

This is an opportunity to sneak in a slight amendment. If we’re going to abolish Leap Seconds by 2035, we might as well abolish Leap Year too by introducing the Dean Second.

It works. It’s catchy. It’s non-disruptive. You don’t have to skip 10 days. You won’t even notice The Dean Second, and yet, you magically get 63 extra “original” seconds per day. We can abolish Leap Year, reverse two thousand years of band-aid solutions, and eliminate the cognitive dissonance to the 5 million kids who are born once every 4 years.

I’m not yet sure if this is just a timely joke post or the beginning of a project. I’ve only been a calendar-clock integration specialist for 3 days. I’m willing to admit this whole scheme is batshit and blind to a very obvious wrench. Is it even possible to update the world’s 400 atomic clocks at the same time, or will that actually lead to a Y2K-grade disaster? 

Either way, it was fun to pitch a new fundamental unit of reality through a Substack post. Every re-stack of this post is not just a vote to Abolish Leap Year, or a vote for the Dean Second, but a vote for integrated design thinking. Plus, if you re-stack this and I go viral and get permanently famous as “Leap Year guy,” then that puts me in an ironic position of trapping myself in a niche that’s only relevant once every 4 years.

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Welcome to Essay Architecture. It’s time for another visual bender (10 new diagrams today), where we deconstruct the patterns behind great ideas. A recap from last post:

A THESIS is a unique perspective, anchored in experience and culture, that organizes supporting material, to change someone’s mind. It is singular: the center of the mandala, from which every sentence dances around. 

There are 3 patterns in a good thesis: Microcosm, Response, and Catalyst. In the spirit of thoroughness, today’s post—north of 2k words—is on how to make an idea microcosmic.

These pattern posts have a free-preview, but the bulk of it is for paid subscribers. I’m very pleased with my decision to put this series behind a paywall. Top-of-funnel writing advice—by nature of seeking to help as many people as possible—is designed to be simple, viral, and stripped of nuance. But since these posts are for practicing writers who want to refine their lens on essay-craft, I feel the permission to nerd out in a way that’s natural to me. My MO is something like “the truth of complexity, but made elegant and digestible through doodles.” Even though I started this essay with a solid sense of what I wanted to say, the act of making it plunged me into a new depth of thinking. So thanks for the support everyone. It’s exciting to make things at the edge of my ability that (theoretically) help you make things at the edge of your ability (#synergy).

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The Pick One Volcano Principle_

Even if I were obsessed with volcanoes, an essay called “Vulcanology” would be far too broad. I’d either have to ambitiously research every volcano on Earth, or, sweep over everything with generalizations. It would suffer from “Ultimate Guide syndrome.” I need to narrow the frame.

Even “Active Volcanoes in Mexico,” while much better, is still too wide of a scope. Sure, I’ve eliminated 96% of all volcanoes from the crosshair of my focus, but there are still 48 left. Do I have to survey all of them? This would exhaust myself and my readers. Zoom in. Pick one volcano.

This example comes from Umberto Eco’s (1977) “How to Write a Thesis,” where he suggests “The History of Popocatepetl” as a better scope. By limiting the focus to one, indivisible thing, a writer can grapple with the details. This one’s an active volcano with multiple types of eruptions, and since the Spanish conquistadors settled there in 1518,  the surrounding towns had to build intricate systems for monitoring, notifying, and evacuating.

There’s a wonderful paradox here. By zooming in as far as you can on one interesting volcano, the high-res details can reveal nuanced truths about all volcanoes.

A writer is like a photographer in that they have to set the frame. A good essay is like a beautiful picture taken from within a rich three-dimensional landscape of the mind. Don’t write panoramas. If the frame is zoomed out, the details are fuzzy and the mind doesn’t know where to focus. Zooming in reduces the scope and enriches the detail.

It’s not just about zooming in though; the frame you pick matters. While the volcano Mount Siple may have a tight scope, you may find it hard to draw meaningful insights from a dormant volcano on an uninhabited island in Antarctica. Of course, it depends on your goal. The point is, specificity alone isn’t enough; you want to find a narrow frame that is an unsuspecting portal into a whole universe of thought.

• Lilian: “You gave words for a problem I didn't know how to verbalize.”

• : “...it’s the best how-to I’ve read on getting to that gravitational core.”

• : “...the amount of useful, thoughtful information in just this chapter alone was enough for me to… rethink everything I do with my writing…”

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It begins. Welcome to the first chapter of Essay Architecture. In The secret architecture of great essays, I announced a 27-part framework (nothing crazy) and this essay on Thesis is an introduction to the first 3 patterns: microcosm, response, and catalyst.

Consider these “element overviews'' to be 200-level theory posts that are free to the public. Following each one will be three 300-level “pattern” posts that dive deep into details, examples, and prompts; these are for paid subscribers ($10/month).

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A dirty word_

When you hear the word “thesis,” what possibly comes to mind is a 426-page typewritten dissertation that takes 3 years of library hunkering before it gets ransacked by a committee of heads in suits. The word screams PhD. It sounds like a concept reserved for the academic elite. I’ve been reading the 1977 book How to Write a Thesis by Umberto Eco, and it’s as old-school as you would expect (much of it describes how to research in the pre-Internet world); it’s also filled with gold.

The essence of a thesis is important to writers of all styles. Even a 500 word single-sitting Substack rant about your love or hate for Superbowl ads will benefit from having a thesis. 

A THESIS is a unique perspective, anchored in experience and culture, that organizes supporting material, to change someone’s mind. It is singular: the center of the mandala, from which every sentence dances around. 

Since ancient times, it’s been known that effective communication is rooted in a central kernel. In Rhetoric and Poetics, Aristotle wrote about the importance of using a focal point to unite diverse components. This shows up in every discipline under different names: artists have a concept, fiction writers have a theme, lawyers have a central argument, scientists have a hypothesis, poets have a motif, songwriters have a chorus, anthropologists have a theory, designers have a scheme, architects have a parti, etc. In order for a work to be digestible, persuasive, and memorable, the parts have to link into one big idea.

Regardless of the kind of writer you consider yourself, there’s much to learn from academic writing. I believe an essay is the most flexible written medium, and it calls for a fusion of genres: the soul of a memoirist, the pen of a poet, and the rigor of an academic. By learning to shape a thesis, your essays will become more than gripping stories with beautiful sentences, they will help you and your reader make sense of the world.

Don’t be intimidated. A thesis isn’t massive, complex, or tedious… it’s the opposite: an indivisible, tiny–dare I say, atomic–idea. (entering the James Clear distortion field.)

Today, we’ll talk about what a thesis is and how to arrive at a good one, but we’ll start with the confusion that emerges when it’s missing.

The hydra problem_

A thesis prevents the hydra-like expansion of ideas. The hydra is a multi-headed swamp monster from Greek mythology, and if you cut off one of its heads, two grow back in its place. Through effort, you actually worsen the problem. Writers face hydras all the time. Lost in the joy of coming up with and connecting ideas, the undisciplined writer accidentally summons a monster.

Before I published online, every idea I started would spiral out of control. The problem? I didn’t have a clear thesis. I’d begin with a vague intention–“Let me write about the Metaverse today”–and weeks later, I’d have over 10,000 words with no end in sight. The more I wrote, the more the scope grew. Every new paragraph would provoke new explorations I couldn’t resist. Before I knew how to shape a thesis, my drafts would get bloated with tangents, digressions, and backstory. It was an information-rich clusterfuck. Without a central anchor, I’d get devoured by my own hydra, every time.

The search for the center_

Of course, as writers we have to explore. Both Paul Graham and Salvador Dali agree–the pragmatist and the surrealist never agree–that you can’t know your thesis before you begin.1 But the manner in which we explore is critical. We don’t want to expand endlessly outwards and keep everything we find. Instead, we want to explore with the goal of discovering the best possible center–our thesis. Once we find it, the trick is to cut everything that doesn’t belong in its orbit, and then re-explore from that new vantage point.

A thesis is a unifying perspective. It lets different ideas coexist by having them all point back to the same central core. An essay should only ever have one thesis; this might seem obvious, but it’s hard in practice. Half-a-dozen competing thesis ideas might slip into a first draft, and in that honeymoon phase, the writer loves them all equally. Without a unifying center, the reader wades through serious friction.

The mind craves unity_

The mind has limited working memory and needs a framework to assimilate new information into. In 1988, John Sweller ran an educational psychology study and coined the phrase, “Cognitive Load Theory.” Two groups were given a ton of information about the Pacific Southwest. The text was identical, but one group had their data augmented with a main idea and headers, while the other group was dropped into a flurry of facts. As you might expect, the first group was able to recall points and have discussions about them; the other group was totally disoriented. An essay is a linear stream of information, and without a thesis to anchor the details, it devolves into noise.

I’m not saying you need to water your idea down to some minimalist caricature. Of course, an essay can and should house multiple things: a range of anecdotes, tasteful digressions (known as “whale facts”2), and odd associations (like fusing Gumby with Sarte’s existentialism3). But for these oddities to gel, they all need to point back to the same place. A thesis helps you organize complexity.

Never have multiple theses; instead, stretch the density of what you can include in a single thesis.

Thesis as nucleus_

To put it practically: a thesis helps you make decisions on what to keep and what to cut. It is a razor, a constraint, a rule, a reducing valve to reality. Out of the vast range of everything that could possibly exist in your essay, your thesis determines what’s allowed to occupy your limited page estate.

You know what else does this? The nucleus of a cell (let’s talk folk science).

Imagine that your essay is a cell and the thesis is its nucleus: the central boss that determines what’s allowed inside. The nucleus sends detailed instructions to the permeable outer membrane. If it lets in everything, the cell will grow uncontrollably and die; if it lets in nothing, it won’t get the proteins it needs (an over-simplification… I am not a molecular biologist).

Before you have clarity on your thesis, it’s hard to set the rules of entry. You might articulate an anecdote in 250 words, when a single sentence will do the trick. When your intellectual security guards don’t have clear instructions, they let everything slide through: the digressions, rambles, tangents, etc. Good ideas never come alone; they always try to smuggle in their friends. 

For example, in an essay about “anti-fragility” (when something gets stronger from shock), you can include a wide range of points in your essay, like the resilience of human bones, and how startups learn best from failure. But, if you get into the scientific nuances of calcium derivatives, or the full-history of Y Combinator, you’re adding bloat that does nothing to strengthen your thesis.

Ideas exist in constellations, but if we bring every association onto the page, the essay becomes unbalanced and the thesis is unclear. We need to be discerning, precise, and incisional. Similar to the nucleus, the thesis only lets in the specific sub-points that augment our essay.

The power of purging_

At the top of my draft, I keep a single-sentence thesis statement that I update as I write. It always evolves. As new ideas enter the page, new connections form, and I’ll have a maybe-I’m-actually-writing-about-this! moment. It’s exciting, but slightly terrifying.

By shifting your center, you have to purge material that once seemed great. It’s not fun to kick guests out of the party (but you can invite them to another essay). There is all sorts of psychological resistance to purging: the sunk-cost fallacy, the idea-ego connection, the fear of destruction. Can we pull it off?

Even though it’s tough, purging has serious power. The connection between your revised thesis and the relevant material is only clear once the bloat is carved out. Instead of seeing it as “losing” material, or “wasting” time, see it as a necessary part of discovering your thesis.

Cling to nothing but the quest for a better thesis.

Only through purging can our drafts take evolutionary leaps. A slight pivot in your thesis can result in a totally different essay; a thesis is consequential. Check out these two thesis-statements; one is where I started, the other is where I ended:

Considering they both include AI and the Beatles, they don’t seem that different, but the wording of your thesis really matters. I started out trying to convince my reader that a tsunami of killer Beatles songs was coming, and I quickly learned that people found that terrifying. They were dwelling on the negative effects. It took me 5 drafts to figure out precisely why I was excited about this weird premise: musical abundance and fan participation leads to diehard subcultures, and so AI is about to do to all bands what acid did to the Grateful Dead.

The refined thesis gave me clarity on what to cut and what to add. I removed all of the AI techno-babble and most of the speculations on how people might make music in the future. I re-centered the piece around my experiences and yearnings as a hardcore Beatles fan, and showed how this future of fan fiction will resolve some open-ends from my past. The final essay was completely different, way more personal, and seemed to convince the skeptics. I would’ve never arrived at Lucy in the Sky of Large Language Models, if I didn’t purge most of what was in my first draft.

The 3 patterns of a great thesis_

Writing an essay is something like an alchemical quest: we seek to turn ordinary insights into linguistic gold. The path to do this is to continuously refine our thesis–by melting it and recrystallizing it over and over (or at least once)–until it hits something that feels like max potency.

As I’m drafting, I’ll ask myself these 3 questions to clarify my thesis:

• Is there a unique frame that illustrates a larger lesson? (a microcosm)

• How does my thesis interact with existing ideas that are similar? (a response)

• What is this idea implying the reader should do? (a catalyst)

Through the rest of February, each of these 3 patterns will be explored in an essay of their own. There is a lot of freedom in these constraints, and knowing them well will ensure your work is well-scoped, in touch with the public discourse, and relevant to the reader.

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Let’s riff:

• +1s: Which points resonated with you and why? Do any examples come to mind that you’d like to share? I see this as an evolving document, and like an architect, I want to incorporate and synthesize examples from different fields.

• Challenge: What do you disagree with and why? This is v1, and only through getting into the details can we discover all the nuances.

• Share: If you found this essay helpful, I’d appreciate you sharing it so more people can find my project.

Footnotes:

BONSECOURS MARKET_ On the port of Old Montreal, inside an 1849 Canadian parliament building turned flea-market, I came across an odd little statue: a sitting man made of white clay. He’s holding his head in his hands, looking back at himself. In place of a head is a large open book. Unlike the mass-produced trinkets and cartons of maple syrup, this was a 1 of 1 made by an unnamed local sculptor (says the lady at the counter). $120.

I wasn’t sure if this was a surreal nightmare or an important reminder. Is this little man a prisoner of his own words? Maybe he’s written so much that his identity is made of paper, alienating himself to the point that he lives life as a third-person floating head… (belonging in the 1994 cartoon, Aaahh!! Real Monsters)… Or, is he a master of rendering his self-awareness into language? A good statue has no answers.

I didn’t buy it, maybe because my brother judged me once for spending $100 on an obsidian sphere at an Astoria street festival, or maybe because I didn’t want to deal with the logistics of smuggling this small man onto a plane. What if his head fell off? Would I have to explain myself to customs? Would they check my Substack? The image stuck with me for my whole trip in Montreal.

It haunted me because I soon realized the statue is a symbol for my most important habit: logloglog.

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Today is my two year “logging” anniversary; this post is an ode. I capture my notes to self throughout the day—the events, the reflections, the mild-epiphanies—turn them into prose, and publish them unannounced to michaeldean.site/logs the next morning, outside of any feed. It’s good practice, low-pressure, word-wielding fun.

After 3,772 logs, I laughed at how unremarkable the Genesis Log was: “@December 9, 2021 8:34 PM (EDT): decided not to watch jungle cruise with danielle. it got a 62% on rotten tomatoes, and i don't trust the rock.” The bar is that low, which is precisely the point. Outside the pressure of gDocs, my very formal looking EB Garamond font, and 27 patterns to shape the perfect essay, my logs are a breeding ground for drafts to accidentally emerge.

I could preach all the practical benefits of writing every day, but the value is more psychic than anything.

Field notes from the everyday_

Logging is different from other forms of journaling. It’s not a pre-meditated brain dump along reflection prompts (morning pages). It’s not about using egg-shaped timers to jolt you into awareness every 900 seconds (interstitial journaling). This is about writing as a way of seeing. It’s perception made exterior.

Logs are field notes from the everyday.

“Field notes” are common for architects, archaeologists, ship captains, and software developers. They capture the details of a day’s events. What happened? What’s in the changelog? It requires the awareness to notice, the discipline to capture, and the foresight to shape notes so a future self can decipher them. 

It’s about freezing your consciousness for future elaboration. In order for the whole system to work, you need to remember to pay attention.

It’s not about writing, but being.

Most of the day I’m in auto-pilot. My thoughts are the fluid in which I swim. I’m immersed in the river of thoughts, rings, feeds, talks, projects, and flim flam. But every log of mine is a moment that crossed some threshold of novelty. It’s like I rotate outside of my head to face myself, examining the thought I’m thinking or sight I’m seeing. I am statue man, 5x a day.

Some moments are so arresting I can’t help but think, “I should remember that!” But once I became a logger, I started experiencing extreme lucidity in mundane moments. The impetus to turn everything into language changes the way you see. I’m no longer just in a coffee shop on auto-pilot, I become the eyes of the coffee shop, finely attuned to the details, making note of either the Christmas music selection, the poor ergonomics of chairs, the highlights of today’s talk with Alice, the itchiness of my beard, or the 12 other unsuspecting strangers who have no idea they’re being chiseled into words. 

Stop reading for a minute. How would you turn right now into a great paragraph? If you were to rotate out of your head and look back at your mind above your chair, what would you see and how would you name it?

“Semi-public micro-blogging as introspection” is one of the most resilient writing habits you can build. There is endless material in your inner and outer world, and all you have to do is write one great sentence. You are surrounded by things waiting to be field notes.

Even during the craziest seasons of my life–when my essay routines collapse–I log (I’ve logged 92% of days, and never less than 6,000 words in a month). It’s resilient to schemes, brands, goals, ego, and perfectionism— it’s just too easy. If you’re stuck in a publishing rut, logging is an easy way to break a funk. 

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A book of consciousness_

Maybe the statue resonated with me because logging is a small habit that ballooned into a big artifact. I’ve logged on average less than five times a day, but over two years I’ve generated 324,491 words—a 1,180 page book of my big stupid head—longer than the first three Harry Potter books combined, coming in at 24 hours and 2 minutes of reading.

I’m surprised I kept up with this (I’m bad with streaks), but now I can’t imagine stopping. My best guess on why this feels so right is because it lives outside of a social media feed. The complete lack of engagement is what’s liberating. Each log has no validation, no feedback loop, no record of receipt. It’s an antidote to American Idol thinking. I don’t feel the stage effect. My decision to share isn’t guided by an expectation of what an audience wants. The inherent silence forces me to be intrinsically-motivated. Do I like this thought I’m having? Is it worth pausing my life for 30 seconds to remember this in the future?

If I kept my logs to myself, my habit would probably disappear. Their semi-public nature keeps me accountable. Since anyone could manually wonder, “what’s Michael thinking?” there’s an onus to be slightly coherent and to not disappear for a month. It’s almost like a one-way mirror: you can peek into my mental room whenever you want, for 15 seconds or 2 hours, but since I can’t see you I don’t feel any self-consciousness.

What emerges is a random mosaic of thought— unpolished, unfiltered, unoptimized. It’s conceptual anarchy. Yesterday I logged about hand railings, VR, karaoke, Christmas in Bryant park, death, NPCs, foot locker advertisements, a reminder to get a Remarkable tablet, a prompt idea, flower species, a daydream, and how my landlord downstairs woke me up with her hysterical laughter at 2:45 am. It’s messy, off-brand, and true to my experience. It’s what you’d get if you plotted my thoughts into a book.

Writers need a release valve_

This all might seem like an obsessive exercise in self-documentation. I’ll admit it kind of is. I log, therefore I am. There is an existential and very human comfort in having a detailed record of my life. While a searchable memory is … useful and weird … the act of off-loading thoughts might be the most helpful part of it.

Logging is a release valve; it quiets the chatter. I feel better on days I logloglog. Much of the pain writers feel might come from a wealth of ideas without a fast enough execution cycle.

Before I started logging, epiphanies were like elephants. “Damn, I can’t wait to sit down and write the 5,000 word version of this.” Obviously it rarely happened, and then more epiphanies came, and they all lingered for weeks and months, growing stale, taunting me, eventually rotting, leaving me with nothing to show, yelling (internally), “help, help, my head is made of language!”

Logging helped me realize the power in the 50-word version of an idea. There is a calmness in the moment after expression. Knowing the idea is captured, I can move on. The process honors even the most half-baked ideas and gives them real estate on my website. Some ideas end up maturing into fully fleshed essays. Most don’t. 

My log:essay ratio is 45:1, and that’s the way it’s supposed to be. I can’t save all the baby turtles, but I’d rather them linger on my site than clog my head and cloud my vision.

Three hours before my flight home from Montreal, I rushed back to Bonsecours Market to spend the remaining Canadian dollars I had on the statue of the little man with a book-head. Packing it with bubble-wrap in a shoebox, I carried it on my lap; now it’s in my Zoom background.

Here are the logs from 2023:

| January | February | March | April | May | June |

| July | August | September | October | November | December |

Let’s riff:

• What should I name the statue?

• Is your head made of language too and do you need a release valve?

• Where is your bottleneck with field notes? (awareness, capture, sharing)

• Have you ever watched Jungle Cruise and would you recommend it?

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Check out my About page for context, and my Index for all published work.

Announcement:

I was honored to be asked to contribute to Can You Imagine? A Library of Possibilities for Reimagining the Web. Along with a group of online writers I admire, I have a short essay in there about social media metrics, and how we should measure “posters” over “users.” If you want a physical, 95-page zine–that includes critiques on social media, a relevant history, a reading syllabus, and visions of the future–check this out. After a year of chaos, it’s only natural that counter-cultures, reform movements, startups, and writers come together to shape an Internet we actually want to spend time on. Thanks to and Anna Dorothea Ker for putting this together.

Get the Zine

How can life go on if machines create 75 billion versions of Wild Honey Pie, the worst Beatles song in recorded history?1

When people imagine the future of AI music, their fear takes the form of a “totally autonomous agent,” posing as a “creator,” generating “not one song, a hundred songs, or a thousand songs,” but “billions of songs” using analytics to “test their way into what may work” (quote from the CEO of Spotify). The volume is dizzying, the method alienating. Sounds like the death of music culture to me… but maybe this is the wrong model.

Instead, imagine how the hardcore fans will use it. The 1% of the 1%–the obsessive, near-freakish scholar-monks who read into the secret meanings behind every word–will soon have the ability to imitate their heroes. 

AI will elevate fan fiction to the point where it’s indistinguishable from the source. Weird…

Up until now, fan fiction has been an illegitimate half-breed, a sub-genre of pale imitations for nerds. It’s amateurish because it takes tremendous time, capital, networks, and expertise to make a timeless work of art. Given the limited resources, the average teenager might just write out their George Harrison sex fantasies and upload them to Wattpad. But the next generation of Beatles fans? They’ll have Lennon-McCartney co-write hits based on their journals, with everything mixed by an immortal George Martin (their sound engineer, “the fifth Beatle.”)

If you enabled 15,000 hardcore fans to join the Beatles, what kind of cultural ripple could that make?

This is the angle I’d like to explore the future of AI music through. It isn’t doomerism, and I hope it doesn't come across as coked-up techno-optimism either– it’s a specific thought experiment through the microcosm of the Beatles.

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The Limits of Fan Fiction_

I’ll start with a confession: I am a Beatles nerd, perhaps to a degree that you didn’t know was possible. I’ve had the Beatles discography on repeat for the last 15 years. Getting high and actively listening to the details and messages2 in their music was perhaps the defining rite of passage of my college years. As popular as they obviously are, I’d wager I’m in the upper 1% of the 1% of their fanhood. They’re a big part of my identity. Bigger than New York, or Greek Orthodoxy, or maybe even writing itself. I can identify most songs from a one-second isolated drum track, listen to their outtakes, reverse engineer their songwriting, and know the obscure histories behind each song…

(…Lucy in the Sky of Diamonds was inspired by a hallucinatory chapter in a Lewis Carol book, and titled based on a scribble from Lennon’s 4-year old son. The fact that it’s code for “LSD” is a coincidence. Lennon ended up hating the song, in fact he thought Sgt. Peppers as whole was a sham of a concept album…)

There’s no name for a Beatles fan that is unreasonably enthusiastic. The cult members of the Grateful Dead are called “deadheads,” so I guess you could call me a Beatle-head.

Similar to how porn addicts get progressively into harder and weirder stuff, so do Beatle-heads. After you memorize their albums, there’s nowhere left to go but fan fiction.

• I watched “The Rutles: All You Need is Cash,” a mockumentary about the Fab Four (Dirk, Nasty, Stig, and Barry), created by one of the members of Monty Python.

• I listened to “Everyday Chemistry,” a bootleg album that spliced together the hits from their solo careers, marketing itself as a stolen cassette tape from a parallel universe where the Beatles never broke up.

• It gets weirder: the thickest book I own is “The Memoirs of Billy Shears,” a 672 page confessional memoir from the man who claims to have replaced Paul McCartney after he died in a car crash in 1966 (and yes, he is an Illuminati freemason to the 9th degree).3

Once you consume all the fan fiction worth consuming, there’s nothing else to do but create your own. In 2019, I convinced my band to create “The Sergeant Pepper's Spook Opera.” We’d trick our friends into thinking we’d perform the classic Sgt. Peppers album, in full on Halloween, note for note, but instead we’d troll them within a bastardized Frank Zappa version that promotes an exaggerated “Paul is Dead” conspiracy theory (he didn’t actually die in a car crash, he was assassinated by MI-6 so that handlers could hijack the band and use it to destabilize western culture through psychedelic propaganda… not that we believed this, it was Halloween). Yes, we were going to assassinate our lead singer on stage during the 2nd song and replace him with a 6’-2” stranger that no one recognized. Yes, we talked about distributing 5,000 word pamphlets to fill you in on the truth. Yes, we made a powerpoint.

Here’s the original song, and below is our insane-o-world Halloween version (please use headphones and crank at max volume to compensate for the lack of mixing and mastering… lyrics below)

“50 years ago today, Sgt. Peppers told the band what to play,
Give them acid, give them hooks, give them psychedelic books (what a flay!)
Give them what they want to hear, let them boogie, let them dance their lives away,
He’s a spookman, with a spook plan, he’s going to turn you on.

Some people call me Willam,
Some people call me Paul,
Some people call me Billy Shears, but they don’t know at all,
I am Sheperd,
I am a billionaire,
I met the queen, (she was a military man).
When my music hits the air they’ll have to listen:

To Sgt. Pepper’s Military Mind Control Band, we hope you will enjoy the show.
We’re Sgt. Pepper’s Military Mind Control Band, sit back and have your mind controlled!”

In case you couldn’t guess, the Spook Opera never panned out. Our vision got thwarted by real-world constraints. It was hard to record, even harder to rehearse it live, and impossible to coordinate between all the Paul McCartney impersonators. In the end, the venue canceled on us anyway.

I share all these details to show you how a Beatle-head will go to absurd lengths to add to the lore. We spent multiple weeks on this half-baked project and all we got was another amateurish fan fiction artifact that is many leagues short of even the worst Beatles song (in case you didn’t click the link before, Wild Honey Pie). Such is fan fiction.

You might imagine the shock I felt when I found hundreds of AI-generated “new” Beatles songs on YouTube. It didn’t sound like fan fiction at all. It sounded like them. My wife–a more casual Beatles fan– was able to tell if it was John, Paul, or George singing (there must be an algorithmic bias against Ringo).

Of course, I listened to all of them in one weekend. These days are like the days of the early Internet (1993), when you could surf every website over one weekend. Soon the AI Beatles catalog will grow at a rate faster than you can listen to it.

The Semantic Apocalypse?_

First, I found convincing variations of the known songs; a full-band Blackbird, a Ticket to Ride by the late Beatles, Something if written by Paul, and Yesterday if written by John. There were also weird mashups, like Lucy in the Sky of Diamonds from the 90s, Hey Jude but bluegrass, You Won’t See Me but reggae, and Radiohead’s Creep (in case you want to hear McCartney say, “you’re so fucking special.”)

And to top it off, I found whole “new” albums of “new” Beatles songs. I’ve probably listened to The Yellow Album more times than Yellow Submarine.

The songs aren’t exactly polished. Far from radio-ready. I’d describe them as demos4 from an alternate universe where the Beatles are on way too much mushrooms, speaking gibberish through a lo-fi FM radio.

As a Beatle-head on a short-supply of fan fiction, this is precisely what I want.

These demos were all generated through Jukebox, a neural network that OpenAI launched two and a half years before ChatGPT. It’s described as a “large language model for music.” It’s trained on the Beatles catalog and a whole corpus of popular music. You can upload audio files, write lyrics, tweak settings, and generate 60 second stems.5

Jukebox never caught on, probably because AI music is currently the opposite of AI writing. ChatGPT seems convincing at first, but if you read closely you realize it might be bullshitting you. Jukebox is too experimental for a casual listener, but if you listen closely, there are scattered musical fragments of a near-religious quality.6 Some bass lines are impossibly good. Some harmonies are chilling. Some mixing effects have alien beauty…

Imagine the sonic imagination of the Beatles unchained from the timbre of analog instruments. Imagine a guitar riff turning into a dog bark, and then into a plate smashing, and then back into a guitar, all within 3 seconds. The rhythms and melodies are traditionally good, but they’re shape-shifters. Some moments give me the chills.

I’ve chopped my favorite songs into an MP3 and have listened to it over 50 times. These demos are stuck in my head. I whistle them. 

My first instinct was to show everyone I knew. I felt like I was living through that movie Yesterday, where the main character hits their head and wakes up in a new dimension with exclusive knowledge of an entire Beatles catalog. When I showed my other Beatle-head friends, they shared the same “holy fuck!” reaction I had. When I showed my non-Beatle-head friends, they were first confused, then giddy, but ultimately disgusted. A million “new” songs by 2030? My dad (born in 1960) said, “I’m glad I’m on my way out,” as if we’ve just opened up the door to Skynet.

best articulated this skepticism in “The semantic apocalypse (how meaning is draining away in the age of AI).” He called it four years ago:

In April of 2019 the OpenAI project released a preview of MuseNet, a deep neural network that generates musical compositions. Its mimetic abilities means the project can start with just a few given notes and extrapolate out an entire song, and do so in styles ranging from Chopin to Lady Gaga. The results are staggeringly realistic. A neural network can now, or within the next few years, be trained in the style of Philip Larkin, or The Beatles, and produce new works in the style of those artists, works that are nigh indistinguishable from the originals. It’s now just a matter of time until our world becomes a Jurassic Park filled with newly-issued work by long-dead creators.

To summarize the arguments I’ve heard against AI music:

1. AI turns any artist into a pattern language. It reduces “art” to a commodity that’s infinitely reproduced on a server, with no consciousness, no soul, and no intent – the defining thing that makes it art.

2. “Prompting” is cheap and skilless, enabling an algorithm pimp to generate hits7 on-demand.

3. While the songs might sound convincing, they’re illusions – just like when you see faces in the clouds (an effect known as pareidolia).

4. Infinite supply brings cheapness and irrelevance.

5. And even when the quality improves with the technology, the whole wave of fake songs will lack historical context. What good are the Beatles outside of the 1960’s Beatlemania? It’s a pointless novelty, a complete failure of the purpose of music, a reckless regurgitation.

6. Infinite music crowds out and destroy the spirits of the remaining musical artists who are already hanging on by a thread.

But if you see this through the lens of fan fiction, here are the counter-points:

1. The voice of the band is getting sublimated into an instrument, so now millions of people can create Beatles music through their own intentions. We won’t witness the death of intention, but the psychedelic explosion of it.

2. There will be a spectrum of seriousness and talent. I’ve seen someone render Lil Jon’s Get Low through the early Beatles aesthetic for a cheap laugh. I’ve also seen my friend Kevin upload original chord progressions to have the ghost of John Lennon hum melody ideas back to him.

3. The early phases of songwriting often involve listening back to hour-long noise-filled jams to find the small moments worth keeping. At the very least, AI sparks inspiration for fans to develop.

4. The culture of the Grateful Dead blossomed precisely because of an extreme abundance of music.

5. When the cost of creating music goes to zero, we’ll see a mosaic of random subcultures all rendering their ideas through the vernacular of the Beatles.

6. When artists empower their fans, it benefits everyone.

The “Infinite Beatles” aren’t inherently good or bad. It is inherently a revolution in participation. It brings interactivity, stakes, and the camaraderie and chaos you get when a population tries to converge on a shared vision of the Beatles (hint: an impossible task).

Realistically, this technology will not lead Beatlemania 2.0. We will not twist and shout into the void. But small tribes of isolated Beatle-heads will come together and participate like never before. No permission required, everyone’s invited: the trolls, the teenagers and their parents, the poets with clumsy hands, the musicians with day jobs, the career songwriters, the extremists, the marketers, and the lunatics with unhinged imaginations.

For those who care, it’s an antidote to the Spotify effect: instead of having music fade into the background of your life, you have an invitation to join the band.

Grateful-Deadification_

We’re about to witness a psychedelic meltdown of pop music. 

In 1965 a bluegrass band in San Francisco got turned onto acid and it defined not just their career, but the future of music that’s about to unfold.

The Grateful Dead showed up to venues without a setlist or plan.

“I love the interview with Branford Marsalis, reflecting on the first time he sat in with the Dead on 3.29.90. Before he went onstage with them for the second set, he asked Jerry, "What will we be playing?" and Jerry replied, "Oh, I have no idea, we'll figure it out when we get out there." Branford said he walked out in front of 15,000 screaming fans and thought, "Wow, the audience has no idea what's about to happen, and the musicians onstage have no idea what's about to happen. This is really exciting."

What ended up happening was a 90-minute seamless set of music, where one song segued into another, without a break, covering a lot of musical and emotional territory.

Branford said it reminded him of why he even wanted to play music in the first place. Total risk, total payoff.” — YouTube comment

They’d start the show, start tripping, and things would take unpredictable directions. Their songs would mutate into each other, melt into primordial goo, take on new structures, and somehow come back together. It was a different experience each night. Sometimes a song would be 3 minutes, sometimes 45, and any song has hundreds of distinct live versions.

Now it all makes sense. As I binged the AI Beatles on YouTube, there’s regularly a “sounds like the Dead,” comment.

AI is about to do to all bands what acid did to the Grateful Dead.

In the 1990s, Terence McKenna said:

“Computers are like drugs, you just can’t swallow them yet.”

Technology is putting music through a process of “oozification,” a phrase coined by . He says that technology causes stable forms to dissolve into miniature fragments that can be recombined in infinitely new ways. This challenges the things we once held sacred. The song, the catalog, and the band itself, each defined by its boundaries, its rules, and its scarcity, are all about to get oozy. This sounds scary and unfamiliar, but it’s already happened. The Grateful Dead were the “band of ooze.”

So chill out, because AI is going to turn all bands into jam bands. This might be the ultimate comic relief of our technology paranoia. The machines are just trying to noodle.

The Grateful Dead are also a model to show us the kind of cultures that emerges around oozy music. An extreme abundance of songs doesn’t lead to meaninglessness; it fosters hardcore fans. AI music will bring us Beatle-heads, Swifty-heads, Drake-heads, and Talking-Heads-heads. What makes a “deadhead” different from a casual fan is their degree of participation.

Many deadheads took it upon themselves to use tape recorders to capture each night. The band setup special sections for the bootleggers, relying on their fans to capture, curate, and distribute their uncontainable explosion of new music. One of their most prominent collectors Richard Allan “Dick” Latvala. He ended up becoming the bands’ official archivist, and the band worked with him to release 36 live albums, known as “Dick’s Picks.”

Another fan, John Oswald, clipped together 100 fragments from live recordings of Dark Star spanning from 1968 to 1993, to create a “Grayfolded.”

Deadheads were collectors, curators, and remixers. Many of the live versions were better and substantially different from the album version. A deadhead might say something like, “Man, Jerry’s solo in the 8/5/74 version was <extraterrestrial>.” 

Over three decades, the Grateful Dead played 2,350 shows, which comes out to over 7,000 hours of music, or 293 days straight. By comparison, The Beatles whole catalog is only ~10 hours long, with live versions being more or less the same as their albums. The original Beatles were not oozy, but the AI Beatles will be.

The crazy thing here is that AI will make the Grateful Dead’s catalog appear very, very small.

Enter: the Dadabots. On April 6, 2021, they initiated the big bang of funk. NO SOUL has been improvising funk for 940 days straight. A synthetic jam band on an Infinite Radio station has already jammed 3x longer than the entire career of the Grateful Dead.

You can imagine someone will, without permission, create an Infinite Radio for each of the 213 songs in the Beatles catalog (this someone might be me). If each song ran in parallel, and if they were shaped to create distinct 3-minute songs, then this one person would generate 37 million new Beatles songs per year. 

This is reckless abundance. It’s more music than anyone can ever listen to. I can barely keep up with my Discover Weekly playlist on Spotify. In a world of Infinite John Lennon, with billions of songs coming out per year, how will anyone find anything worth listening to?

Fan Fiction Markets_

Even if the supply of Beatles tunes balloons to unimaginable scales, demand is fixed. If some troll creates a black hole of Wild Honey Pie, you don’t have to know about it.

Matchmaking through markets will let people find what they want. For example, if you’re convinced that I could be your curator of emerging Beatles songs, you could just subscribe for “Dean’s Picks” and trust me (Substack spinoff coming soon). Maybe I’ll listen to 100s of new AI Beatles songs each week and send you a weekly EP of the best 6. I might be a breeder and a lyricist too. You’ll get a blend of spook rock, conspiracy themes, bluegrass, hypnagogia, cyberpunk, and baroque-folk. That’s my slant on the AI Beatles.

If you don’t want my slant, you can check out an open market. This already exists on Wattpad, where young people upvote and downvote 1,000s of Beatles stories. Each story has multiple tags, some of which include: “romance,” “angst,” “vampires,” “gay,” “gay with Bob Dylan,” “adoption,” “time travel,” “Rubber Soul,” “daddykink,” “smuttyfanfic,” and “diapers.”

There’s even a story called “Wild Honey Pie,” which is surprisingly non-erotic.

AI will bring an explosion of segmentation to Beatles masters that are passable as real songs. Our mono-music-culture was at it’s peak in 1964 when 38% of Americans tuned in to watch the Fab Four on the Ed Sullivan Show. Since then, it’s been a genre explosion. Today, only 5% of Spotify listeners listen to the Beatles.

Generative AI will turn every artist into a fractal explosion. You’ll witness all of the segments of culture within any given artist. There will be as many competing versions of the Beatles as there are niches in culture: you’ll have the breakup Beatles, the birthday song for your kids Beatles, the bukkake Beatles, the Beefheart Beatles, the benzedrine Beatles, the Yacht Club Beatles, the death metal Beatles, the Grimace for President Beatles, the anti-abortion Beatles, the Fake Plastic Paul Beatles, the Lil Wayne Beatles, and most troublesome, the Nazi Beatles. 

Pre-ooze, the Beatles were a group of 4 guys. They had total control of their catalog. They broke up because they couldn’t agree. Moving forward, disagreement will be the primary feature of every catalog. We’re about to see an infinite regression of the White Album (an album with such a disassociated collection of songs, that they chose to leave the cover blank.)

If artists want any control over this phenomenon, it’s up to them to create their own market, control demand, and empower their own fans. We’ve already seen this in the pre-AI era. Radiohead released stems of their song Nude in 2008, challenging their fans to create remixes, hosting the best versions on their website. Taylor Swift hosted cover competitions over the radio and invited the winners backstage.

New artists can involve their fans by releasing AI tools along with their albums; this is exactly what Grimes did. She released a platform called “elf tech” where fans could make songs using her voice and aesthetic. She’s even made a Spotify channel called “Grimes AI” to promote fan creations, organized it through a blockchain, and shares royalties with them. The Grimes main account has 6 million monthly listeners, and the Grimes AI account is in the six figures! As of May 2023, there were 3,632 daily average users creating 250 songs per hour.

1 in 40 Grimes listeners will listen to AI variations.

1 in 2,000 Grimes listeners will join the band.

Grime-heads are growing her catalog 10x faster than anyone can listen to it.

Music is meant to be extended.

Join the Band

The history of music and the trends of the Internet show us that insane volume won’t destroy music culture, it’ll empower it. Beatle-heads will extend the lore, extend the catalog, and create new subcultures. It’s not good or bad, it’s a jarring shift from a finite game into an infinite game.

The Beatles have 30 million monthly listeners on Spotify. Maybe 98% of them won’t see the AI Beatles as legitimate, but that 2% could be a million-person market. They’ll treat the collective as seriously as an up and coming indie artist. If 1 in 2,000 fans contribute to their catalog (like Grimes), that means there could be 15,000 Beatles creators. I’ll probably be one of them.

Before the pandemic, I saw myself more as a songwriter than an essay writer. That shifted in the last three years. Similar to how this essay took 20+ hours to produce, so did a song. I made the hard decision to give up songwriting so I could focus all my energy on writing online.

But if I had Lennon-McCartney in my pocket, and George Martin waiting for me on a server for $9, and I could conceive, write, and release songs in 45 minutes, all through a process that involved me playing the instruments in my closet, maybe I could be prolific, unleash my imagination, and honor my passion for music, even though it’s just a hobby.

One day I’ll finish the Sgt. Peppers Spook Opera.

Let’s riff:

• Favorite Beatles Song? (or, how many times did you listen to Wild Honey Pie?)

• Would you be a troll, a curator, a breeder, a lyricist, or a song shaper?

• What unresolved questions do you have?

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Consider checking out the work of the people who helped me make this:

and — Their skepticism around AI music helped me shed through 7 drafts. They asked the right questions, brought the past to the surface, and helped me find a convincing angle. Yehudis just dropped an essay called Strangers with Benefits that will get you reflecting on all those brief but profound encounters in your life. Also, decided to make his logging practice public (the log mafia is brewing…).

helped weave the personal angle throughout. helped me double down on the jam band angle. (and ) helped me shed an older intro. affirmed my new intro, and gave me the advice I needed to write the conclusion. brought the jokes for a title brainstorm (other options included “Strawberry Fields Forever, Forever,” “Sgt. Peppers Infinite Recursion Club Band,” and “Twist and Shout into the Void.” Also, helpful brainstorms with on the infinite and on the nature of AI tools.

I also want to thank some friends who helped develop these ideas in talks and early drafts that go back to May of 2022:

Footnotes:

By 2026, I want to have written 1 million words, assembled a 10,000 year reading list, and turned all my theories of craft into code. I’m a nerd of the craft turned AI prepper.

Most takes around AI writing are either skeptical, cheap, or hyperbolic. We have “the pattern parrot without a soul” cynics, the silver bullet boys (“Look, I push the button and the thing comes out!”), and the doomers who prophesize that every Substacker will disappear into a biblical flood of robot hucksters.

Overall, I’m an optimist.

The future may be profoundly weird (as it always is), but I don’t think we’ll devolve into illiterate machine-slaves. I think humans will write essays that are unimaginably good and soulful by today’s standards. Montaigne might be proud.

You might not have such great hopes for AI and that’s fair. Right now we’re stuck with a v1 chatbot that gives you generic heaps of text. If you prompt it to “write me a 2,000 word op-ed about the psychology of power through the lens of Gollum’s hypothetical masturbation habits,” it will babble cliches for 10 seconds before it shuts itself down from its own content policy.1

But what if AI was unchained and specific to you? What if it had access to all your essays, your journals, your family history, the libraries of the books you’ve read and wish to read, and the tomes of your favorite authors? What if it knew your personal preferences around structure and voice and humor? What if it was your editor?

You might soon have access to a 24/7 super editor (otherwise known as Chris Wong) that can be hyper-customized to your stories, your style, and your intentions. It won’t be a silver bullet. It won’t replace the work of sculpting thought. It’s not cheating. It will help you work smart. After a first draft, it might ask you a chain of questions to help evolve your essay into its highest possible form. It’s a role reversal. 

Writers will still write, and AI will ask you the prompts.

As we approach this unpredictable frontier, it’s worth doubling down on the timeless principles of writing: ones that are as relevant today as they will be in the future. If AI just sucks forever, then good for you! You’ll become a better writer. But if AI does become an alien wordsmith, then these 3 tips will spawn an Editor G*d that knows you better than you do.

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• Journal: An Editor G*d can guide you better if it knows your depths. Once you realize this, it’s a race to render your consciousness into text. Don’t stay on brand; make the chaotic range of your thoughts legible to the machine. You’ll want to upload your predictions for the year 2052, your interactions with a diner waiter, and the stories of that time your grandfather (drunkenly?) slaughtered a pig named Mookie at the church barbecue with a 22 caliber. In September I uploaded 27,000 words to my logs. I’m on pace to hit 1 million words of logs by November 2025. As said by the Executive Editor of WIRED in 1993, “unedited data is a pearl beyond price.”

• Research: Your Editor G*d will have unlimited reading stamina. This isn’t to say you should stop reading yourself. Reading is fun. But wouldn’t it be neat if you had a personal research assistant that could connect your dingleberry of thought to the vast history of thoughts that came before you?2 This eliminates the need to hoard highlights and book-chug 100 books a year.3 Instead, it’s a game of cartography. What exists out there? Who were Joan Didion’s contemporaries? Which Greek and Roman authors wrote about human psychology? Which books were in the personal library of Terence McKenna? You won’t be able to read all of this in a single lifetime, but your Editor G*d can do it faster than you can cleanse your bowels. So start figuring out what’s worth knowing and how to make it machine-readable.
  

• Reverse engineer your patterns of prose: There’s nothing lamer to me than an Editor G*d stuck with the default settings (you don’t want 5-paragraph-essay templates with PG-tone). You want your Editor G*d to know how you like to craft a thesis, a title, a hook, an outline, paragraph, a sentence, and a vivid image that punctures the imagination; it should know your idiosyncratic rules on when to use or not use a semicolon. This requires you to become self-aware of your writing process. Any time you write a draft, you're making hundreds of micro-decisions without realizing. Why do you do the things you do? Have you thought about reverse engineering your process and writing down a list of the 100 things you believe to be true about writing? The better you can define “what makes a good essay?” the better your Editor G*d can steer you.

Even if the Editor G*ds never come, at least you’ll get personal, get better educated, and get clarity on how your writing process works. And if they do come, not only will the quality take on a mythical dimension, but it could make writing a lot more fun.

Ultimately, I think it’ll make the process more feminine: where 90% of the prose you write is intuitive, unstructured, and from the heart. The masculine half of the craft is still equally important, but you might only have to “tune your code” for 2 hours a month. As you riff, the Editor G*d will continue to prompt you until you unpack everything you need to say, and then it could rearrange and lightly edit your own prose into a seriously coherent arc that is 90% ready to go.

Just imagine this. You riff 2,000 words into the page without a paragraph break. Submit. “Editor G*d thinking…” 1 second later. “Hey Michael, I see your riff covers a lot of themes around time dilation, the afterlife, and the Egyptian Book of the Dead… can you tell me a little bit more about the time you said your last words to your grandmother Irene on her deathbed? She was unconscious but she shed a tear. What do you think she was experiencing?”

Robot-prompted or not, the realm of reflection will always be reserved for the human. And most importantly, it will still be hard— thank God! Art made without struggle isn’t worth the canvas it’s inked on. An AI editor might automate a lot of the brain-frying “science of an essay” pain, leaving writers to face themselves, their memories, their ideas, and their demons. If every person had access to a sick editor, writing would be more accessible, leading more minds to the growth and identity shifts that come from plunging into self-expression.

AI could usher both miraculous and terrible futures, and it’s not stopping, so it’s worth preparing yourself for the best case.

Let's riff:

• Does this ease any existential anxiety around the future of writing?

• Would you trust an AI-powered editor?

• Yay or nay to DeanBot?

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Thanks to my feedback givers: , , , , , , , Brenda, and Diana.

Check out my About page for context, and my Index for all published work.

Footnotes:

Social media is so absorbed by the last 24-hours that we often forget there is a history of writing online.

Imagine being one of the first 1,000 people to launch a personal website in 1994. Put yourself in the shoes of a college freshman who suddenly has 24/7 Internet access piped into your dorm room. Most of the other sites are static: “hello world!” experiments, boring resumes, academic research…

So few people are online that you’re basically pseudonymous, and since you’re tech-savvy, creatively restless, and incredibly horny, you sublimate your entire psyche into an insane HTML maze, including your complete browsing history, porn links, a real-time memoir, an autobiography, a family tree, a psychological analysis of each of your friends, and basically every thought you’ve ever had.

No filter. You unleash the pinnacle of self-expression through the new medium of hyperlinks.

It’s a mix of link curation and storytelling. No one’s seen anything like it, and so naturally your homepage becomes the portal to the early Internet. You have so much traffic you crash the servers at your college. By 1995, your website hits 27,000 daily views, 4x the traffic of Yahoo!,1 and 1% of all Internet traffic (for context, that’s the same relative size of Mr. Beast, who now gets 360 million views a day).

Can you imagine your most vulnerable thoughts being so public?

This is the story of Justin Hall, the first online writer, and the first Internet-native celebrity. He revealed the potential of a new medium. He bared his soul in hypertext. He inspired thousands of people to write online. And in the end, the world crucified him for it.

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30 years later, Justin is a father of two with a mostly private life, and the Internet is a radically different place. Billions are online. We’re all connected through feeds and social graphs, meaning any thought we share can be scrutinized by everyone we know; we censor ourselves. Most people don’t feel safe being real online anymore, including Justin.

I’ve been on a quest to make sense of Justin’s past by surfing through his HTML maze on links.net, which has over 4,794 pages. I’ve read every journal entry of his from 1996. I see him as the forgotten hero of online writers. Since I found his site in 2021, he inspired me to upload unpolished personal logs to my website everyday.

If you write online, you need to know the story of Justin Hall. It’s filled with inspirations and warnings about unfiltered self-expression. It might even encourage you to push the boundaries of what you're willing to share.

In celebration of Justin’s site, this biography includes 128 hyperlinks that drop you into different points of his maze. I recommend reading all the way through before you go tab diving (I’ve gotten lost for hours). Today, we’ll explore 4 questions as we unpack his story:

• What was the original vision of the Internet? 

• What does digital self-expression look like in its most extreme form? 

• What are the benefits and dangers of oversharing? 

• How can we take creative risks in 2023 when the world is watching?

1. Healing through hyperlinks

When we thought blue underlined text could save the world.

We take hyperlinks for granted. But an early breed of confessional writers thought they would usher us into a digital utopia. Blue text linked the stories that anyone could now freely upload. They let strangers surf the inner lives of other strangers, triggering the timeless epiphany of “we are all one.” The first person to really embody this vision was Justin Hall. His compulsion to express every detail of his life online likely came from 3 things: the suicide of his father, his childhood obsession with computers, and the barriers to get online in the 1980s.

1984. At 8 years old, one year after his family got an Apple-II Plus in their home, Justin’s father, Wesley Hall, took his own life. Much of his writing wrestles with this event, and he has the obituary, eulogy, and suicide note on his website.

For a decade, Justin spent 2-3 days a week at a psychologist's office, making it normal for him to reflect and write about heavy emotions. As he aged, he became an investigator of his dad’s life. He looked through old letters to make sense of the past (like this note he wrote to his neighbors, criticizing them for the way they treated their dog). Perhaps these letters showed Justin the power of writing: a form of self-expression that could preserve one’s life and personality, through time and beyond death.

"Looking through old mail reminds me I want to be as great as my father[—] reading through his formal and informal correspondence, on legal blue carbon sheets … office relics of a dead man[:] either responding to city official ineptitude or encouraging … friends[, “] there's something so wonderful about that record[.”] I hope someone goes through my mail someday [and] tries to understand who I was.” Source.

The Internet would eventually fuse his desire for expression with his aptitude for computers,2 but there was a problem: the “world wide web” was off limits to Justin. In the early days, you needed credentials from the government, a research institution, or a university.3 He still managed to sneak online. Some older friends lent him their access codes and he found his way into the underground USENET forums,4 where they had discussion groups around taboo things like trauma, anarchy, beastiality, and psilocybin. In 1991, he published an article about the Internet in his high school’s newspaper,5 awestruck by the lack of restrictions, but frustrated that the average young person couldn’t get online without “borrowing, hacking, or waiting.”

Justin started college at Swarthmore in 1993, which came with a digital river of dial-up Internet in his dorm room. That December he discovered “Mosaic” through an article in the New York Times written by John Markoff.6 The world’s first Internet browser arrived. It featured a simple interface, multimedia, the ability to upload HTML, and it worked on any operating system. But most importantly, it introduced Justin to the hyperlink, the invention that would shape his life:

“Before Mosaic, finding information on computer databases scattered around the world required knowing—and accurately typing—arcane addresses and commands like "telnet://192.100.81.100/." Mosaic lets computer users simply click a mouse on words.. to summon text, sound and images from many of the hundreds of databases on the Internet.”

As soon as he got back to campus (January 1994), Justin built his first homepage, featuring prankster spelling7 (“High Stylin’ on the Wurld Wyde Webb”), tech specs, a photo of actor Carry Grant taking acid, a voice note of Marc Andreessen riffing on “global hypermedia,” and 52 links to websites he found interesting.

Some call him “the founding father of blogging.” While he didn’t make the very first website, he was the first to push the hyperlink to its limits. Justin raved to his friends about Mosaic, but had nowhere to point them; there was no search, and no list of trending sites coming out. So he took it upon himself to spend 8-10 hours a day surfing and indexing the entire early Internet as it emerged.8 It was small enough that you could catch up on the weekends. He got the domain name links.net,9 coined it as, “Justin’s Links from the Underground,”10 and became the master curator of the web.

By the summer of ‘94, Justin’s labyrinth was getting popular. He dropped out of school and moved to San Francisco after landing a job as an Editorial Assistant at HotWired.11 Justin was a 19-year old at the center of the digital revolution. The city was the throbbing heart of the self-publishing scene, with the highest density of online writers in the world.12 He moved into Cyborganic, a hacker commune of web experts located in the Mission District. Imagine a counter-cultural scene where everyone worked for HotWired by day, but at night they stayed up and smoked weed, pursuing their own personal Internet projects through AppleTalk ethernet hookups in each bedroom, all linked to a Unix server in the kitchen.

This group sensed that the Internet was a powder keg about to break into mainstream culture, and so the house was simmering with visions of the future. They envisioned a self-publishing revolution. Since anyone could express themselves online, they thought everyone would. In the best case scenario, the Internet would become an empathy engine. If everyone rendered their deepest thoughts into a hyperlink maze, it would break barriers and let strangers connect, fulfilling Tim Leary’s prophecy of “finding the others.” 

The original vision of the Internet was utopian. While San Francisco of the 1960s was filled with LSD futurism, the ‘90s put their hope in technology. They replaced mind-expanding drugs with reach-expanding computer networks. A peer-to-peer revolution was brewing, and the Cyborganic house hoped to steer it. They wanted to spread the idea that your website is a symbol of your consciousness before the medium fell prey to consumer capitalism.

After one semester off, Justin went back to Swarthmore in the spring of ‘95. He returned with a missionary attitude, to push the limits of online self-expression, and to turn on the world to the healing power of hyperlinks.

2. The pinnacle of online self-expression

What could your website look like if you had zero inhibition?

Online writing today is often presented to young people as a form of entrepreneurship: focus on a single topic (no range), for a mass-market audience (no depth), and be careful with off-brand details (no glimpse into the logs of your life).  Justin embodied the opposite ethos: write about a polymathic range of topics, at a depth that most people would never consider making public, and include detailed logs of your day-by-day experiences.

Justin returned to college as a sophomore with perhaps the biggest online audience in the world.13 While most of the tech visionaries of the 1990s were looking for venture opportunities, Justin was still only 20 years old. He was more interested in self-discovery, unfiltered expression, and cultural change. What emerged was fascinating. As I dive through his rabbit holes, I get the sense that someone’s consciousness was frozen into text. It’s a public digital memorial of a person at a specific time in their life.

Though Justin never broke down his own site along these three dimensions (range, depth, logs), they seem to me to be the pillars of Justin’s publishing philosophy. When an online writer does all three, they evolve from a flat caricature into a 3-dimensional portrait.

RANGE:

Justin wrote an essay called “scholarly schizophrenia,” a term to describe the delirious range of content on his website. The opening sentence is “I have problems with categories.” In today’s landscape, writers are incentivized to lean into a single topic and a single identity (you’re more likely to be remembered among the mass of Internet lurkers if you double-down on a brand).

But when it comes to self-expression, Justin gives the opposite advice in a post called webergy: 

”Write about yourself,
your hobbies, your passions, your politics, your community,
whatever turns you on.”

Surf through links.net and you’ll notice the conceptual anarchy. You might find a guide to the band Jane’s Addiction, a long unedited paper on St. Francis from high school, his DJ set lists, notes on shamanism, his 1995 articles in the Phoenix newspaper, a short biography on Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, his ideas on dancefloor politics, a proposal for his college’s computer infrastructure, his dream journal, media theories on hypertext, a story about his appendix bursting at SIGGRAPH ‘95, or sex poems from his ex-girlfriend along with her monopoly strategy.

Similar to the nicheless of today, Justin struggled to define himself. He is an expanding constellation of ideas that can’t be compressed into a label. Instead of trying to find clarity within himself, he embraced the complexity:

“Schuldenfrei [, my philosophy professor,] accused me of being a hippy on the wires. I'm not just a hippy, I'm a punk. I'm a geek. I like jazz, and Jane's Addiction. I write poetry, sew, talk astrology, and spend eight hours a day on a computer. and I wear a suit and tie to teach.”

Instead of reducing his essence down to a meme, he took the “Choose Your Adventure,” approach. He made maps to organize his complexity and orient his readers. His Mindex from 96 is a cartography of himself, and his link portal (called “the Weird, the Wild, and the Wonderful on the WWW”)  is a cartography of his browsing history. Some maps are sorted by media type, and others are organized by format (essays, short stories, poems, and coursework).

The downside of range is overwhelm. A new visitor won’t immediately get what you’re about, and they have to constantly make decisions on where to navigate.14 But the upside is extreme resonance. By rendering every part of yourself into HTML, and connecting everything through maps and hyperlinks, you let the reader venture towards the parts of your mind that intersects with theirs. 

DEPTH:

The HTML writers of the mid-90s were known as “the online diarists,” and sometimes, “the escribitionists.” It’s a fusion of the word exhibitionist and scribe, so basically, “a nudist of the written word.”  Justin wasn’t shy to expose himself in either the literary or physical sense. His website is an example of what your digital footprint might look like if you had no inhibition.

At one end of his vulnerability, he’s endearing. He invites you, a total stranger, into the intricacies of his family history. Justin has a hypertext autobiography he refers to as, “the textbook of my life.” The details that are typically saved for inner circles are just one click away: his early years in Chicago, the memories in his childhood home, a grade-by-grade recap of his K-12 schooling at Francis Parker, his gratitude for his mom, and his grandpa’s thoughts on death.

At the other end of vulnerability is the taboo: the things the average person would be embarrassed to publicize. You’ll find sexual encounters in his journals, write-ups on his STDs, a “nekkid” photo shoot (NSFW), a story on getting wrongfully arrested at a protest, scattered reports from 38 LSD trips, and the curiosity to see if drinking piss could heighten psilocybin trips. His willingness to experiment is equally as impressive as his willingness to share it.

At the core of this “hold nothing back” philosophy was the belief that people connect over repressed isolation. Justin got tons of emails from readers dealing with similar scars, like suicide in the family or alcoholism. Through reading the confessions of others, you learn you’re not the only one. The early web was underground enough that you could spill all your beans and strangers would reach out to say, “me too!”.  From his post, links like life, he says:

“I'll talk to anyone who'll listen.
Joy and pain is pretty universal;
maybe you'll find catharsis or a sense of yourself within.”

Between 1995-1998, people around the world began the process of uploading their unfiltered life and history onto the Internet.15 In 2000, something called the “Online Diary History Project '' contacted and archived a few of the most prominent confessional writers. 15% of them cite Justin Hall as their inspiration. Here’s a quote from writer Carolyn Burke on the importance of sharing your depths:

"An online diary, a place that exposed private mental spaces to everyone's scrutiny, seemed like a social obligation to me. I felt at the time that I could give back to society something important: a snapshot of what a person is like on the inside. This is something that we don't get access to in face to face, social society. Our intimacies are hidden, and speaking of them in public is taboo. I questioned the privacy taboo. I disagreed with it. I exposed my private and intimate world to public awareness."

LOGS:

Starting on January 10, 1996, Justin uploaded a daily journal entry to the front page of his site.16

He seldom left his dorm without a camera, and never without a notepad. All day he would write his experiences by hand, and then upload them onto his website that night, sometimes as late as 4 am. On his 1996 homepage, you’d read about classes, parties, drugs, conversations, Batlhazar’s suicide rumors, VC meetings, threesomes. It was a feed of campus gossip, filtered from a single point of view. 

On the DAZE page (described by Justin as a “chronological miracle of navel gazing”), you can browse through the calendar of his life. You can click into years, and then months, to arrive at a particular day that he froze into text.17

I don’t think it’s accurate to call these “journals.” It’s not like he’s reflecting on a recurring set of questions to arrive at some heightened self-insight. He’s also not following a 3-page stream-of-consciousness.18 The word “diary” also feels less correct than the word “log;” it’s less like a deliberate introspection, and more like a blitz recalling of what happened to him every 30 minutes that day, typed out at full speed in chaotic open verse, leaving portals into his maze whenever relevant.

The excerpt below from January 26, 1996 is just one of 67 fragments on that day's entry. It’s semi-dense and takes work to decipher. But as you read through a chain of days, you build a fuzzy, almost impressionistic sense of what his day-to-day life is like:

“lingering in my room,
sharing personal web publishing potential
with a talented poetess; mary
who speaks as from a chink in the wall; quiet; honest
her response catches me off my guard; in my heart
"are you going to have kids?"

Less than a year after starting this practice, Justin refers to his own logs as “chronological puke,” calling it “amusing, probably indulgent, and definitely useless.”19 But decades later, I see Justin’s fractured prose as a cryptic wormhole into his consciousness. It’s half time travel, half brain transplant. I can occupy someone else’s head; what a rare privilege! Rarely do we get a raw glimpse into the “intrinsic perspective” of a real person (it usually comes from a fictional character). The Intrinsic Perspective is a Substack by , and he defines consciousness as:

“... what it’s like to be you. It is the set of experiences, emotions, sensations, and thoughts that occupy your day, at the center of which is always you, the experiencer...”

When you log frequently, you turn your consciousness into media. It lets you capture the little moments, the ones not notable enough to turn into an essay, but notable enough to replay in your head at the end of a day. By capturing your thoughts, they don’t fade to memory. By publishing them, you invite others into your reality.

Some of Justin’s peers were uneasy about his logging. They’d check his site every day to see if he wrote about them; everyone on campus was a character in his public drama.20 When people challenged his ethics, he’d tell them to write online about him. Justin wanted everyone to take responsibility for their own perspective through logging.

3. Oversharing

What are the consequences of holding nothing back?

Justin’s nature and pace of publishing brought surreal things into his life. The Internet is a serendipity engine; based on what you upload, it will match you with people, events, and opportunities of a similar kind. It’s an oddly specific matchmaker.

In the best case, it mysteriously unlocks the world for you. In the worst case, it’s a hell that explodes in unexpected ways. Justin got both.

1996, UNLOCKING THE WORLD:

Justin’s online reputation unlocked a range of things:

• He landed internships and jobs at progressive technology companies like HotWired (‘94), Electric Minds (‘96), and Gamers.com (‘98).

• It let him build a network adjacent to the “cultural elite,” the people on the front edge of shaping Internet discourse. He met John Perry Barlow in the same year he published “The Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” (‘96). He had dinner with my favorite thinker, Terence McKennna (and got into a physical altercation with my favorite writer, Kurt Vonnegut).

• Since he ran a high-traffic website, he had no problem getting speaking opportunities in mainstream outlets. He spoke on MSNBC, got featured in The Philadelphia inquirer, and delivered a talk called “Publishing Empowerment” to the RAND Corporation, a think-tank that pioneered some of the early inventions that made computing possible.

By the time Justin was a junior in college he was a cyber-celebrity.21 But separate from all the material opportunities, the coolest thing Justin unlocked was a cultural one: his audience enabled him to travel the country for free in the summer of 1996 to spread the word on self-publishing.

Justin taught HTML basics online and web ethics on campus, but he wanted to expand his reach. He felt a sense of responsibility to turn consumers into creators and to make sure the underprivileged learn to get online. He had the idea to tour the country through Greyhound buses and exchange websites for free lodging. If you let this Internet icon crash on your couch, he’d speak to your community, orient you to the digital underground, and build you a website so you have a megaphone to the world.

May 20, 1996. Justin set out and bussed through Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, Texas, Kansas, Missouri, Colorado, Utah, and Arizona, landing back in San Francisco on July 3rd. He  built websites for middle class Americans, and 10-year olds, and punks, and typewriter collectors, and the mentally ill.22 17 stops, 45 days, 100+ websites, barely sleeping 3 hours a night,23 he’d tape up his “why the web?” manifesto at colleges and coffee shops. He’s known as the “Johnny Appleseed of HTML.”24 The whole thing was filmed by Doug Block for a documentary called Home Page. Doug saw Justin’s voyage as “On the Road of the Internet Age,” based on Jack Kerouac’s novel from 1957.25 It was a great American road trip through the South, written by a young man on a spiritual mission, logging a portrait of his country as it was signing online. 

It was a cultural odyssey, at a singular point in history, made possible through fearless self-expression. All that said, it didn’t bring commercial opportunities. Compare that to his contemporaries … In 1995, “Jerry and David’s Guide to the Web” got rebranded to Yahoo! (a backronym for “Yet Another Hierarchically Organized Oracle.”) Even though the co-founders were two months behind Justin in indexing the web, they were 6-8 years older, out of college, and hungry to start a business. In 1996, as Justin was preparing for his road trip, Yahoo! raised $33 million dollars from Sequoia. Meanwhile Justin was behind on his server fees, opposed to banner ads, and opted to raise $714 in donations from his audience.

Justin had the outlook of an artistic cyber-prophet, and ultimately thought that culture could beat capital. But in the end, the forces of Silicon Valley would scale and turn Justin’s own website against him.

SEARCH RUINED EVERYTHING:

As Justin continued to share his whole life, the web was evolving. The way to find information was shifting from browsing to searching.26

Maybe you remember the first time you typed your own name into a search engine to see the results (known as “ego surfing”). Imagine if the first link was a peculiar website called links.net, featuring Justin writing his full recollections of your time together, and a detailed analysis of your personality.

 At first, Justin found humor in these conflicts. “I’m a writer, what do you expect?” He referenced Truman Capote’s “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” where the author profiles and exposes New York socialites, alienating him from his friends. 

But as online circles grew, it became less safe to be weird. Unfiltered self-expression backfired.

The first real issue came up in 1996 with his ex-employer, the Boston Consulting Group. Justin worked an internship there in the summer before his freshman year. They didn’t have their own website, so when prospective clients searched them, the first thing they found was Justin’s expressive blog post about their all-expenses paid retreat in Wisconsin (from the perspective of an 18-year-old).  He highlighted a night of drunken karaoke, where a senior exec gave a slideshow on mushrooms, and he slept with the 23-year old girl from accounting. Everyone’s full name was featured.

Justin ignored their calls, so they repeatedly harassed his mom and showed up at her house, until he agreed to omit some of the details.

Little by little, his friends would say, “dude, take my name off your website, I’m going to lose my job.” His family became more guarded at dinner, knowing anything they say might end up on his front page. The ethics of a “hypertext autobiography” began to break down. Justin realized that maybe it’s not his role to tell other people’s stories. His logs got more and more impersonal, until he eventually lost momentum with them.

Justin’s time in college (1993-1998) aligns with a massive transformation in the Internet. When Justin entered college, there were about a thousand people online, the web browser had just been invented, and it was a terrain of self-expression. When he graduated, over 100 million were online, venture-backed companies were competing for mass adoption, and Google search was released.

Out of school, Justin got offered a dream job: a weekly TV segment to teach viewers how to build websites. But after two episodes (9/22/98 and 9/29/98), the station got complaints from their conservative viewers. They found his site and complained: “Who is this homosexual freak pornographer?! If you keep him on air, we’re going to boycott your channel.” The network told him to take down some pages or resign. Justin walked.

The breaking point came when his own audience began dissecting, analyzing, and rooting against his relationships. Justin was falling in love, but his readers started citing episodes from past failed relationships in his comments. They formed theories around Justin’s personality; they weren’t wrong. His new girlfriend was freaked out, and he had to decide between his website and a real person.

At this point, self-publishing wasn’t serving him anymore; it pissed off his friends and family, it lost him jobs, and it threatened his future. He got hit with the dark consequences of oversharing, and decided to sign off in 2005. Self-expression turned to self-censorship. He’s made some brief appearances since, but the ethos of radical range, depth, and logging hasn’t returned since the ‘90s.

[<p>] In hindsight, the [&ldquo;] “webheads [<em>] lost control [</em>] of the very medium they created” [&rdquo;]. In the early days, [<strong>] you could only share online if you knew how to write HTML [</strong>] and handle your own hosting. Platforms changed this. [</p>]

OpenJournal, LiveDiary, Movable Type, Blogger, and Xanga all came out in the late 1990s, making it easier to share, bringing more people online, and creating social pressure. People felt less comfortable being open. It began a period of standardization, and “the personal website” was replaced with templates and reverse chronological feeds. 

Since then, we’ve been lodged in “the Impersonal Internet.” The global village scaled into a global metropolis. Now, anyone can publish, but almost no one does. A Neilson study in 2006 reported “participation inequality” across all online communities, where 99% lurk and only 1% of people actually post. It’s precisely the dystopia that Justin Hall and the Cyborganic crew in 1994 were trying to avoid.

4. Legacy beats self-censorship

Why and how to overshare in a world where everyone’s watching

Here’s a paragraph from Justin’s autobiography about the present:

“By 2022 I find myself the father of a second child, and learning more about fatherhood than I knew awaited me. I visit the public library to fetch books for my kids at least three times a week. I volunteer at their schools. So aside from my work building software to help adults find cannabis, I'm pretty focused on parenting at the moment. I feel grateful to have the opportunity to focus on it. I find it challenging and therapeutic.”

Justin seems to be in a new and fruitful chapter of life, and hyper-publishing doesn’t play a big role in it (he tweeted twice in 2023). What’s the lesson here? Maybe you feel the world is just so different now than it was in 1994, that the era of radical transparency is over. Maybe you think links.net is a fascinating relic of the vintage Internet, but the method isn’t a philosophy to live by today.

But I see links.net as a model for the kind of website I want to build. The fact that Justin’s consciousness from almost 30 years ago is frozen into the Internet is perhaps the most interesting part of this whole story. Decades later, here I am, reliving his past in detail. His adventure is perhaps fresher in my mind than his, considering I’m the one “going through his mail to understand who he was.”

In a strange way, his decades-old story is helping me steer mine today. He’s helped me push the limits of my own publishing, while making me aware of the consequences. Since I found his site, I’ve uploaded over 275,000 words of daily logs to my site and hope to keep up the habit for the rest of my life. There’s a range of reasons for why you should write online, but Justin reminds me that writing for the future is the most wholesome and sustainable purpose.

This quote from JD Salingers summarizes why you should make your inner life legible to the world:27

“Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You’ll learn from them—if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you.”

You might impact people long beyond your time; it could be your own kids, the kids of your kids, or a total stranger like me. This brings the story full circle. Justin spent much of his life making sense of his dad’s life, and maybe his whole extreme blogging experiment was a way to leave a trail for his descendents. In a 1998 Swedish documentary, he riffed on the potential of inter-generational writing:

“Imagine if all your relatives had web pages, all their relatives, even their dead relatives, telling stories from before you were born.”

I’ve never met one of my grandfathers, but I learned that he wanted to be a writer. I recently found 3 chapters of an unfinished World War 2 novel. It was neat to read his prose and meet the characters of his imagination, but it didn’t give me a snapshot into his life. Through his bookshelf in my grandmother’s basement, I can approximate his range of interests, but I don’t know his inner depths. I have no logs of his days. My only impressions of him are from second-hand stories, and so the truth of his consciousness is a mystery to me.

Imagine if he wrote more? I could have a full grasp of his life, and I could understand his struggles in the context of mine.

So while there might be consequences to oversharing, it’s worth trying to make it work. It can unlock the world today, while also leaving something for the far future, whether the audience is millions of people or your 5 grandchildren (who might be your biggest fans). But having a long timeframe doesn’t mean we should share recklessly and ignore the present:

How can you explore without confusing your audience? How do you unpack intimate depths without compromising your loved ones? How do you share your logs when the whole world is watching?

How do you overshare without getting burned? Here are 3 ideas.

• THE PRIVACY SPECTRUM: On a stage, you’re more likely to perform. At a campfire, you’re more likely to be real. This is natural, and applies to self-publishing too. Check out Low Stakes, Strong Takes by . You don’t have to pick between vulnerability and accessibilty. You can have a range of writing that straddles the privacy spectrum. Most writers would benefit from having a middle ground, a public URL on their site where they can go off-brand, that’s only clicked into by the people who care to explore your mind (more here on the benefits of public logging).

  

  Consider how there are different “levels of accessibility;” you can make it so your most vulnerable work is only found by the readers on your team:

  • L1: Content designed to hack the Twitter algorithm and go viral (50x your audience)

  • L2: Newsletters delivered to the inbox of all of your subscribers (50% of your audience reads)

  • L3: A page on your site that’s there for true fans to explore (5% of your audience reads)

  • L4: Gated or paid content for committed fans who want to support you and dive deeper (2% of your audience)

  • L5: Unlisted URLs to share with specific friends (a handful of people)

• PSEUDONYMS: When Justin started, so few people were online that almost everyone had the benefits of pseudonymity. But today, everyone in your life can search for you and read your thoughts. Chances are, you’re self-censoring without realizing. Where might you share a paragraph of how your day went? Do you feel the liberty to write about sex, drugs, and failure? If not, chances are you're carrying baggage under your name. I tried writing under my legal name for 6 months and my essays were stale and safe. As soon as I dropped my long Greek last name and elevated my middle name, writing became untethered and transformational. Michael Dean is a “half-pseudonym;” it feels like an honest identity, with an added layer of SEO defense (when you search Michael Dean, a shirtless MTV reality star pops up). The privacy made it easier to take creative risks online, and I’m gradually sharing my site with people in my life. If you’re considering a pen name, check out The Pseudonymous Cape by .

• PLATFORMS – The feed-based model of social media is designed to boost advertising revenue, not to enable people to connect and express themselves. We need new platforms with a core mission of enabling range, depth, and logs– not just reach. Substack embodies the ethos of independent publishing, and might be the only platform I can think of that enables L1-L5 sharing. It’s also worth checking out Plexus (), a startup using AI to connect people. Instead of being greeted with an addictive feed, you start by sharing a thought, and then it constructs a feed of posts that are most related to it.  You have the confidence to overshare, knowing that no one on the network will see a post of yours unless they reveal something of a similar nature. It eliminates the stage effect.

Hopefully, Justin’s story, paired with some practical ideas on how to “overshare” in 2023, have gotten you to question what you share, how to do it, and why it’s worth it.

There are multitudes within you. Your taboo secret depths are also present in millions of others. And the day-to-day mundanities of your life might feel sacred to someone else, either now or in the unimaginable future.

So go off-brand, at least on your personal website. Do whatever it takes to overshare, whether it’s about controlling visibility, adopting a pen name, or finding a better home to host your thoughts.

Unlock the world through self-publishing. Find that group of 10 people who become conspirators on your journey, and add nuggets to your time capsule as you go (let me know if you figure out century-long domain hosting).

Extend your time horizon to 10, 30, or 100 years into the future. Imagine someone outliving you and reading your blog, whether they’re a descendent or a stranger, thinking “wow, what a life,” adjusting their own accordingly. When you write with legacy in mind, there’s no reason not to push the boundaries of how you express yourself.

Special thanks to Justin Hall for the courage to go first.

Let’s riff:

• What are your impressions of links.net?

• What do you want to bring into your writing practice? (range, depth, logs)

• How might you overshare without getting burned?

Leave a comment

Feedback thanks:

• helped me with several rounds of detailed edits on this piece. He just published Promethean Barbie, a story showing how both Robert Oppenheimer and Ruth Handler connect to the myth of Prometheus; someone tries to do something good and gets misinterpreted and tortured for eternity. This archetype is so common among artists that find fame, and it kind of happened to Justin Hall too. He was all about increasing empathy through writing online, but with scale the Internet turned on him. Garrett shares thoughts on why you should create and invent, despite the risk of being misunderstood. Garrett is a great thinker, writer, and editor, and you should check out the site he’s building with Notion.
  

• gave feedback that helped me organize this essay around 4 questions, and brought out the angle of “so what does this mean for today?” She just published Learn The Rain Dance, an essay about learning to live with fear, instead of avoiding it or pretending you can overcome it. It’s so related to this essay; continuously pushing the boundaries of what you share in public comes with a regular dose of fear. It never goes away, even with experience, even under a pseudonym. This is a good thing; fear is a compass. I admire the depth in her writing, so check out her Substack for literary portraits of the human condition.

Make sure to check out Justin’s documentary Overshare to hear his story from his perspective (filmed in 2014, 41 minutes), and here are a few other links to dive into:

• Home Page (1999): A 1 hour 41 minute documentary, filmed in ‘96..

• 10 Years of Links.net (2004): 10-year reflection..

• XOXO Festival (2014): 20 minute talk..

• Internet History Podcast (2017), 1 hour 45 minutes..

• Walter Isaacson’s Youtube (2021): 15 minute video..

Footnotes:

If you were conscious, American, and owned a television in 2003, you know this show. I remember sitting on my parent’s green, beat up couch, gazing into a 29” SONY, mesmerized at Season 2. Clay Aiken. Rubben Studdard. Normal people with normal lives became household names overnight. No one in the country had seen reality TV quite like this. We watched. We voted through a landline. Everyone had a role to play. It was the dawn of “social media,” but through television, before Silicon Valley put it on the Internet.

This is more than a hollow game show from a lost era. It influenced our culture in a profound way. The first wave of social platforms (MySpace2, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter) emerged at a time when American Idol had our culture mesmerized. When Facebook hit its viral moment in 2006 with the introduction of the News Feed, American Idol was the #1 show in the country and had 3x the “user base.” Now, every major platform we have, without exception, is structured like a talent show: the owners create a digital stage (a vacuum for fame) where a mass of lurkers vote to determine the fate of disposable idols.

Instead of using the profound invention of the Internet to connect, stay in touch, and express ourselves, we’ve designed ourselves a tyrannical stage. 

Some dare to jump on it and sing cover songs, but most don’t. You know why? Poll results tell us that stage fright is the #1 fear in America3. It’s called “glossophobia.” We’d rather dangle from the edge of a building, suspend ourselves in a pool of snakes, drown, have ACL surgery, or get packed into an unimaginably small space, than to stand in front of a mass of people and tell them what we think.

We’ve built our worst nightmare and we can’t snap out of it4. 

How did this happen? Let’s look into the rise of the stage and the downstream effects on our culture. Is it possible to build social media without “the stage effect,” or are we forever destined to perform?

The Right to Be Famous

So few people had computers in 1993, that the first online writers were characterized by an extreme lack of self-consciousness. It wasn’t about status. Nerdy, pseudonymous pioneers were basically journaling in public through HTML mazes and weblogs5. The Internet was void of a main stage. It was only hallways. In the early 2000s, when I was barely a teenager, I jumped from AIM to MySpace, and the fact that I was willing to post a shirtless cringeworthy photo of myself (edited in Abercrombie-sepia), was proof that I saw myself existing in a private, barely-visible corner of the Internet.

Within a few years the ethos radically shifted. Instead of building tools for everyday people to connect over media, we built tools to make everyday people instantly famous. This happened on television before the Internet; through American Idol.

This show didn’t just feature a regular stage, but a stage you watched from home along with the whole country. It wasn’t just a regular talent show; you were the judge. And it wasn’t just for the talented; even, you could try out. This new format of media imprinted on the American psyche in two key ways:

• THE RIGHT TO BE AN IDOL – American Idol popularized the idea that a normal person could reach nationwide fame overnight. The celebrities of the 90s were manufactured icons from labels, hand-selected and delivered from above, but this show went out of its way to highlight the humble origins of the contestants6. It’s a meritocracy now. Everyone has a chance to be suddenly famous. Can you kind of sing? This could happen to you, too. There was an open invitation, and so 600,000 dreamers stampeded into auditorium tryouts across the country7.
  

• THE CIVIC DUTY OF VOTING – Before American Idol, television had been a one-way broadcast8. Now the audience controlled the show.  Call in. Text in. Millions sent data back to the show to determine its outcome. The subject matter was trivial (who sang the best Aerosmith cover song), but the mechanism was a revolution: for the first time, a mob of people could come together and determine the fate of their culture. They voted on which everyday person would join the pantheon of pop idols.

The name “American” Idol is very revealing. Underneath this talent show was a new premise that was unexpected: democratic fame. You have both the right to be famous and the civic duty to vote on the fame of others. The stage became accessible and interactive.

This show was a milestone in Americanism. In 2012, the Season 11 finale alone hit a record of 132 million votes, eclipsing the turnout in the United States presidential election by 3 million. Obama’s election was historic, but technically, Americans cared slightly more about Phillip Phillips.

The key innovation of American Idol is dangling fame on an open stage. By enabling 1% of users to radically succeed (the talent), you get the 99% hooked on the game, and that is the customer base. Whether the spectators secretly hope for fame themselves one day, want to experience the ascent of fame vicariously, or, convulse at the whole concept, it’s hard to look away. The show created an opportunity for advertising at a scale and degree never before seen.

Coca Cola was the official sponsor, Ford sold cars, and Cingular made millions on an exclusive SMS voting contract, but the main export of this show was a new joy of voyeurism. We marveled at the rise and fall of everyday people. We cringed at delusional singers, hoping Simon (the British alpha judge) would unleash his nasty snark. We watched artists reduce their complex selves into personal brands that could be digested by the public. I was young and impressionable. I learned to lurk and judge from behind the safety of a screen.

From 2003-2006, as we saw the rise in popularity of American Idol, social media companies evolved their feature set in a way that eerily resembles the mechanics of a talent show.

• The feed was born, aggregating everyone’s “wall” posts onto the front page of the site. Overnight, it evolved from a semi-public bulletin board to a radically public always-on show9. Cozy status updates turned into a mandatory megaphone. Now every thought you had was broadcasted to every person you’ve ever known. It was a stage; the stakes were raised.
  

• Our lingo changed from “friend requests” to “followers.” It’s no longer about a 2-way bond, it’s about becoming the idol of your own reality. The change in terms represents that someone could accrue a following way larger than the people they actually know. You can become a celebrity, admired and worshiped by the loose contacts of your loose contacts. Followers became the currency of fame.
  

• The like brought metrics into play, changing the game from connecting into ranking. The “thumbs up” is innocent on the surface, but it birthed an era of quantifiable status. It made our thoughts “fungible,” meaning, we can value the worthiness of posts relative to each other. The “like” is effortless; a low-friction form of participation. If you don’t want to get on the stage, that’s fine, just vote.
  

September 5th, 2006. I remember when Facebook introduced “the News Feed.” I scrolled, mesmerized, contemplating the implications. It’s as if I was airdropped into my own custom reality show. It triggered a radical degree of self-consciousness. Now everyone sees when I post?10

There was significant backlash, but we never looked back. These 3 elements (the feed, the follower, the like) are the foundation of every platform now, and they fuse together to create the modern spectacle that we appear to be stuck in. There’s an obvious reason this happened: both the Television and Internet companies, at around the same time, learned the absurd power of owning the stage. In 2009, American Idol hit $937 million in advertising alone, becoming the first “social media”' platform to pass a billion in annual revenue. Facebook Ads launched one year after The News Feed, and by 2010, they passed a billion too.

The ethos of American Idol warped the early promise of social media. Even though the feature set evolved to put each of us in our own reality show, its outward mission statement didn’t change. Facebook wants to “make the world more open and connected.” LinkedIn wants to “connect the world's professionals.” Twitter is the “town square” for free speech. This is all feel-good utopian bullshit. It was a bait and switch. If they were to make an honest pitch it would be, “even, you can become a star, and if not, at least you can vote.”

The Lurker Generation

What percent of users on social media actually post?

Whenever I ask people this, they guess it’s around 30-50%. There’s a massive bias here: the illusion that everyone’s in on the game. It’s way closer to 1% (or under). In 2006, Nielsen posted a report on “participation inequality” on social media sites11, and used the figure of 90-9-1. 90% lurk and leave no trace, 9% will like or share, while just 1% creates new content. The stage creates a radical split between Idols and Lurkers. 

Maybe you think our era of social media can be defined as “loud and chaotic, with everyone screaming at once,” but it’s really an era of mass self-censorship. 

We’ve built a context where anyone can share, but in reality, almost no one does. So even if viral sensations absorb all the attention in the room, a generation is defined by the sensibilities of the masses, which means it would be accurate to call us the “Lurker Generation.”

If you’ve been on the new platform Threads, you’ll notice it’s suspiciously void of normal people. On July 5th, Meta released their “Twitter Killer” and it gained a historic 100 million sign-ups in the first few days. It’s marketed as “a sane vision of the Internet” and a place where “communities come together,” but it’s really a stage for Idols. My wife and I scrolled through her feed to find an endless stream of influencers and brands. All big accounts. She follows a few hundred people we know in real life (college friends, co-workers, family), but they never appeared, either because they felt intimidated to jump on this new stage, or, because their ideas weren’t as algorithmically relevant as the musings of Bill Gates.

This is “the stage effect” in action. A few perform, but most avoid it.

The idea of extreme visibility is unappealing to most people. Being a celebrity is uncomfortable (even if you’re a micro-micro-celebrity). Stages are inherently scary. In the analog world, we have intimate and specific contexts, and tailor what we say to a group of 2-10 people. Rarely do you make a casual declaration to hundreds of people at once. Whenever I make statements to large crowds, like a wedding speech, I’m a sweaty trembling mess for at least 30 minutes before. Addressing “a mass” used to be reserved for pop stars, news anchors, and world leaders. Now, it’s the default setting to stay in touch.

Those who do step up to become Idols can tap into unimaginable opportunities. Post 20-30 times a day, build a name, build an audience, build a business, and you can close the gap between your current life and your wildest vision. You can meet your best friends online. You can tweet your way onto a yacht. This is the premise of “The Great Online Game.”12

But whether you’re the Lurker or the Idol, there’s a dark, hypnotic effect when you align yourself with the stage. I’ve seen both sides. As the Lurker, I’ve been caught in multi-day doom-scrolls. As the Idol, I’ve been glued to my notification tab, refreshing every 5 minutes as a thread goes viral, asking, “is this the one to hit a million views?” You’re either addicted to the fame of others, or you’re addicted to your own fame.

The unfortunate truth is that Idols and Lurkers are the lifeblood of social media companies, and the whole dynamic is enabled through a stage. For two decades, it’s been stages all the way down. Apps might look different on the surface, but each one is a clone and a pivot: they each use the same foundation of feeds, likes, and followers, while introducing just one minor variation:

• Twitter = Facebook with a word count

• Instagram = Facebook with only pictures

• Snapchat = Instagram with disappearing pictures

• TikTok = Instagram with Fentanyl

• Mastodon = Twitter with a decentralized protocol

• Threads = Twitter without Elon

In recent years, the stage has gotten bigger and more hypnotizing. It became normal for these apps to deprioritize your social graph, and instead, do whatever it takes to keep you watching their show for as long as possible. I just checked my Facebook feed and analyzed the first 50 posts they showed me: 65% were “suggestions” from viral influencers (averaging 2.8 million views per post), 12 were weirdly relevant ads, and only 2 were from friends. TikTok is perhaps the first app to implicitly say, “Fuck your social graph13.” They deliver. They’ve gotten a billion people hooked on vertical videos created by 100,000 influencers. The Lurker:Idol ratio here might be even more extreme (1:10,000).

When you disguise a tyrannical stage as a “friendly place to stay in touch,” it’s no surprise that the members of our culture put themselves on the sideline. It’s no surprise we’re facing a variety of mental health crises and a “loneliness epidemic” (the ultimate irony of social media).

The good news? It seems like we’ve finally had enough. For a few years, especially since the Social Dilemma hit Netflix in 2020, it seemed like we just accepted that social media was inherently dystopian. But the turbulence in 2023 seemed to have pushed us over some edge. Platforms are crumbling and startups are emerging. People are mad, shifting around to sniff things out, and writing angry essays on what went wrong and how to fix it.

Let’s burn down the stage … but what do we rebuild?

Daily Active Posters

I can’t pretend like I know exactly how to redesign the stage. You can’t torch the whole architecture and predict the emergent social effects. Instead, we need to agree on a new core metric.

TikTok, Meta, Twitter — they’re all focused on the metrics you would expect a stage owner to optimize for. TikTok has over 1 billion “monthly active users.” (Users, not posters.) Threads boasted 100 million user sign-ups in under a week (70% of which have already left14). Not long after, Elon bragged about Twitter’s all-time high in “user seconds” (they’re optimizing for your consumption down to the blink). 

In an epic post by Esther Crawford, a former Product Manager at Twitter, she mentions the gravity of metrics.

“There was little will to think beyond quarterly earnings calls because we were all beholden to the masters of mDAU and revenue growth as a public company.”

mDAU stands for “monetizable daily active users.” The survival of social media companies hinges on consumption. It’s actually very hard to find public stats on what % of daily active users actually post. This would shatter the “global village”  illusion, and expose the talent-show-like nature of our reality. Sure, you can have over a billion users, but if less than 1% are posting, it’s a signal that you aren’t creating an approachable place for the median user to express themselves. The median user – are they posting every day, or are they silent and addicted?

What would happen if a startup optimized for daily active posters? Could it help people build and sustain relationships? Could it end the Lurker Generation and reset our culture’s psychology?

We don’t have to play American Idol. Instead, we can strive to create a digital social sphere that solves our deepest existential woe: loneliness. Being real and getting seen is seriously cathartic. The simplest starting point is to invert our intentions: let’s focus on making contributors, not consumers15. Instead of making a spectacle that no one can look away from, let’s make a place where the average person feels excited and  comfortable to post. 

How do you enable mass-daily-posting? Eliminate stage fright. We ultimately need to find a scale between the feed (1:everyone) and a direct message (1:1). This middle scale is kind of paradoxical, in that it fuses reach with intimacy. It should let someone share all sides of themselves16, but without self-consciousness. It can’t be a stage. It can’t be about blasting all thoughts to everyone. It’s about being honest and unrestricted, and letting the algorithm work for you, delivering your posts to precisely the right people17.

Google+ tried to solve this middle scale in 2011 with “Circles.” You were able to create custom segments of friends to control the visibility of your posts18. Twitter has a version of this now too, but it’s a single Circle capped at 150 people. The problem with both of these solutions is that it requires you to manually set up a static group of people. A middle scale should be based on interests, not people. Each person is an evolving constellation of interests. For example, I’ve recently become intrigued with the whole UFO situation, but I have no idea which people in my audience share that interest. I’m not going to rant about Tic Tac physics to an audience who opted in for writing advice. Middle scales should be emergent, interest-based, and algorithmically constructed.

Here are two archetypal problems of stage-based social media. They’re likely very hard to solve. But if we can crack them, it could put an end to the Lurker Generation.

1. The Simba Problem – The Internet was made to share cat pictures. Let’s say I have an adorable stream of pictures of my family’s cat (of course, named Simba). I’m personally not going to share these with all 483 of my Facebook followers for fear of being known as “the cat pic guy.” I’m also not going to go around and message my cat pics to my acquaintances individually, which would be even more insane. But of the 483 followers, there are probably 26 of them who would love to see a regular stream of Simba photos. 

How can you share all your obsessions without spamming the majority of your followers, while extremely delighting a small portion of them? 

It doesn’t have to be cats. I’m sure you have some extremely wonky interest that you don’t post about for fear of your boss seeing it. What if you were unhinged? If you knew that any given post was delivered to 1) people who opted-in for that topic, and 2) people you’re open to share with, you wouldn’t hold back.

2. The Uncle Nick Problem – I bet you have a crazy family member still going on Facebook. Uncle Nick usually posts a barrage of conspiracy theories, memes, and Bitcoin predictions, but sometimes he’ll post amazing black and white family photos from the 50s. Do you put up with the noise for the occasional signal? You shouldn’t have to commit to everything anyone ever says just by following them. That’s insane. 

How can you opt-in for specific themes around the people you follow, so you can increase the signal:noise ratio in your feed?

Uncle Nick has no interest or ontological ability to categorize his own posts, but AI can do this easily19. Instead of getting every post from an account, you’d get invitations when new themes emerge. “Do you want Uncle Nick’s rants on how Barbie is woke?” No thanks. “Do you want to see 1950s Flashback images from Uncle Nick?” Absolutely.

We can use algorithms to connect instead of addict. Imagine if the people in your life who have been long silent suddenly started posting nuanced things online, things you actually resonate with and respond to, leading to renewed relationships. Imagine sharing some random shower thought and then hearing from strangers on your wavelength. If “social media” can live up to its name, it would usher in a peer-to-peer revolution (kind of the whole point of the Internet).

So let’s end this era of fame, voting, and attention hoarding. Let’s enable people to share their unfiltered self and connect over granular interest. Let’s shift from idolizing influencers to enriching friendships. Let’s value psychological transformation over performances. Let’s dismantle the stage so social media resembles a social circle more than a shallow spectacle.

Let’s burn down the stage.

Special thanks for the solid feedback to:

• Andrew

Let’s riff:

• Do you remember life on the Internet before the feed?

• Do you feel the stage effect when posting?

• Aside from your Internet friends, are the people in your life active on social media?

• Can we escape the talent show model, or are the financial incentives to keep the show going too much to overcome? What are some alternative business models?

• We’re in serious need of a UX overhaul. Can algorithms create yes/no decisions for people to connect in more granular ways? What could we learn from Hey, Readwise, Spotify, Tinder, Convertkit, , etc. Where else can we look to for inspiration?

• What are your feelings in this chaotic moment of social media?

• Any predictions for what social media will be like in 2025?

Leave a comment

Footnotes:

”People who make things for the Internet endure a psychological tug of war between the artist and the algorithm. Please only yourself, and you’ll miss out on the gale force spread of a viral post. Please only the algorithm, and your work will taste like soul-sucking milquetoast.” – David Perell

The tension is real. I’m naturally drawn to a delirious range of topics. In my essay queue are ideas about AGI, the origins of Christianity, the UI of text editors, American Idol, Curious George, and a story about how my grandfather ate my dad’s pet rabbit in the 60s. None of these ideas are practical, nor is there a clear theme uniting them. But separate from this boyish urge to explore is another temptation, an urge to wrap myself in plastic, feed the algorithm, and shoot myself into the veins of the Internet as a legible, likable plastic guru, a caricature that can devour the world and myself.

Be the true artist and toil? Or be the marketer and sell out? 

It’s not a choice. Do both. That’s what Alphonse Mucha did.

Maybe you recognize the flowery, fluid, feminine style of art above. Mucha was one of the first artists to popularize Art Nouveau in the late 19th century. It was made famous again in the 1960s when everyone started tripping and dressing like the women in Mucha’s paintings.

Mucha was etched into history as “the floral background guy.” This must be his singular passion and dedication, right? Well, no. Quite the opposite. He was more interested in religious iconography and Slavic history, but Art Nouveau paid his bills.

Fame has a tendency to distort the true intentions of an artist. His personal brand as the “whimsical garden painter boy” is simple and catchy, allowing it to spread and spread and spread until he makes it into art-history textbooks, but the “real” Mucha is way more complex.

A false caricature is the price of selling out, but in the end, it proved to be worth it.

The garden style brought Mucha freedom, allowing him to graduate into a new paradigm of art, one that almost nobody knows about, but one that was the fulfillment of his life’s destiny (and his country’s destiny too). There’s a lesson we can all learn from Alphonse… 

I knew nothing about this until I went to a Mucha exhibit in North Carolina last year. Not only did it break my model of art history, but it taught me a lesson on the tension between the public’s narrow demands and the artist’s visionary purpose.

At 30 years old, Mucha was a struggling artist. His past was eclectic; he played violin and sang choir at a cathedral, designed posters for Czech rallies, was rejected from art school, and designed both illustrations and tombstone lettering.

Now he was living in an artist’s shelter and paying rent with paintings.

But in 1894, he went viral. 

He made a poster for the play Gismonda, featuring the famous actress Sarah Bernhardt (who GPT-4 says is an 1890s cross between Meryl Streep and Angelina Jolie). It was Byzantine in style, and featured an arch that created a halo around her head. She loved it. 

Sarah ordered 4,000 copies and plastered them around Paris.

Suddenly Mucha had dozens of companies begging for Angelina Jolie garden drawings with their logo on it. They wanted the “Sarah Bernhardt style” to sell their products. What did he do? He needed the money. He said yes.

Strolling through the museum, I was shocked to learn that Art Nouveau was unleashed to the public through a nefarious purpose: to sell cigarettes, champagne, casinos, Nestle’s chocolate, and bicycles.

What? It’s as if capitalism hijacked nature, held a gun to its head, and forced it to dance for its consumers. Mucha was the struggling artist, and so he was the conduit.

From 1895-1904, Much appeared to be a one-trick pony, rendering hundreds of versions of curly-haired women in serene gardens, over and over. 

His commercial work brought him both stability and fame. It enabled him to move into a 3 bedroom apartment in Paris with a dedicated art studio. He was featured in exhibits & magazines, and was known internationally as a pioneer of Art Nouveau (he was so synonymous with the style, that many referred to the whole style as his: “Le Style Mucha.”)

Was Art Nouveau the entirety of his artistic vision? Definitely not. Beneath his public caricature was a complex and multi-faceted person: he was Mucha the mystic, Mucha the Slavic nationalist, Mucha the teacher, the dissector, the experimenter.

He didn’t over-index on what the public wanted from him. 

If you look at some of Mucha’s personal art from 1895-1904, it’s shockingly different.

In that North Carolina gallery, I saw a series of paintings called “La Pater,” that sent shivers down my spine. It was the eeriest Christian art I’d ever seen, more transcendental than anything in the Vatican. 

There were 7 paintings, each representing one line of the Lord's Prayer. At first I had no idea it was Mucha. It was radically off-brand: no color, and all the pretty gardens were replaced with eerie visions of suffering, transcendence, and glowing-eyed demons. It was a serious work of mysticism, and definitely not a vibe you could use to sell Pepsi Cola. 

When did he make La Pater? 1899! At the peak of his popularity for “Le Style Mucha.” 

While his “meme-self” was going viral selling cigarettes and biscuits in international magazines, his “real-self” was untethered, moving in the same circles as other rogue artists, mystics, and nationalists.

Mucha's "meme-self" (the floral background guy) enabled his real-self (the Pan-Slavic mystic painter) to come to life. Selling out worked, because he didn’t lose himself to his public image. His commercial work paid well, letting him practice and experiment, and ultimately enabling him to pivot into a new career that was totally on his terms.

In 1904, Mucha stopped taking commissions. Instead of seeking more money and fame, he began an all-consuming passion project that would take him 18 years: 

The Slav Epic.

Mucha used the money from his Art Nouveau work to buy 27-foot canvases. His lifelong dream was to render epic scenes of Slavic mythology. In a letter to his wife, he said, finally, he'd be able to make something good, "not for the art critics, but for the Slavic souls."

Mucha personally funded this project for a decade, blowing through his own savings. It was a financial strain. Thanks to his reputation, he was able to find funding from an American industrialist who shared Mucha’s interest in Slavic culture. 

Alphonse Mucha created 20 of these masterpieces. 

The project came at a time when the Czech Republic was reforming after the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian empire. He became a figure in the Slavic independence movement. They asked him to design the currency of the new republic of Czechoslovakia.

These projects are "off-brand" & unknown to the international public. But to Mucha, it was all that mattered. The commercial work brought Mucha to his destiny. Years before he ever took an Art Nouveau commission, he dreamed of making art to honor his Slavic roots. It happened. And it happened largely because he was willing to play the mini-game of garden advertisements.

The tensions of online creators

Mucha gracefully straddled the line between commerce and visionary art. This story played out over century ago, but the tensions Mucha faced haven’t gone away in our digital age. If anything, they’ve increased. Thanks to our hyper-connected social platforms, the temptation to brand yourself into a commercial vehicle is more accessible and appealing than ever.

So what then? How do we translate Mucha’s story into lessons for today? Do we submit to the algorithm for 10 years and pray that
”one day” we can return to the work that matters?

No. It’s more nuanced than that. Mucha’s pursued his commercial phase in a balanced and tactful way. There are a few points we can extract and codify for our own creative practice: 

• Double down when you pluck a nerve. A “pure artist” might’ve resisted the endless stream of Art Nouveau commissions. They might’ve resented the “floral background guy” reputation too. Don’t ignore the market’s taste. If you pluck a nerve on the Internet, double-down and ride it out; see it as a fortunate opportunity. It may define you, but it doesn’t have to consume you.
  

• Get paid to practice your craft. Even if your commercial work is off-spirit, it can still elevate your technical craft. Mucha was fortunate to have paid himself through painting, printing, and lithographs. If he spent 9 years distracted with non-artistic odd-jobs, it would’ve been hard to bust out the “Slav Epic” from a cold start. In 1901, Mucha even released “Documents Decoratifs,” a study that broke down the craft of his organic style, but outside the context of advertisements.
  

• Pursue off-brand experiments. Don’t become pigeon-holed by your public brand. Remember Mucha’s “La Pater” Christian experiment? Even if you become a one-trick viral sensation, find and protect another outlet for your weird explorations. Take the stuff that doesn’t get views or money just as seriously as the stuff that does. Don’t over-converge on the expectations of markets, and trust your inner-conviction, even if people don’t get it yet.
  

• Don’t lose sight of your purpose. A commercial boom is a blessing, but be careful. Don’t let success consume you. Know when to close the valve. Don’t chase fame and money for fame and money’s sake. They’re the means to your vision, not the end goal. In Mucha’s case, he stayed level-headed during his 9-year commercial stretch, and it enabled his 18+ years phase of artistic freedom.

If we had to distill this all into one point, what is “The Mucha Method” in today’s Creator Economy?

It’s all about the straddle.

There is a spectrum between [the marketer] and [the artist]. The marketer has a consistent brand identity and pre-designed content strategy, while the artist is a rogue explorer, sniffing ideas and digging to see what emerges. The marketer writes for their audience, the artist writes for themselves.

Some people pick one or the other.

Some people try to balance the two.

Instead, straddle both sides in an extreme way. This is what Mucha did. He took over 100 commissions replicating the same style (the popular style). This is Mucha the Marketer. But he also pursued his own weird off-brand experiments as Mucha the Artist.

My thesis is that being a marketer on social media actually enables your ability to be an artist in your essays.

Check out my latest Twitter threads. They’re all about writers and the craft. Focused. On-brand. Commercially-viable. This is the approach of the marketer. I updated my header and made my bio value-focused: “Using visuals to help you make sense of history's best writers.” This is Michael Dean the Marketer. Through being consistent, I’ll develop my own “Le Style Mucha.”

• Vonnegut, Vonnegut! (a visual thread on repetition for writers)

• Beyond Architecture: Frank Lloyd Wright (he was a writer)

• Hunter S. Thompson’s Epic List Sentence (list sentences)

• Untangling the Myth of Jack Kerouac (a writer’s biography)

Check out my latest Substack essays. Random AF. No discernible theme. Confusing for newcomers. No one can define this body of work (including me) and that’s the point. This is the approach of a stubborn artist who relentlessly chases their curiosity, regardless if it’s legible to anyone else. To someone who only knows my craft work on Twitter, they might be shocked to find a “La Pater” on my Substack.

• Teleportation, $97/month, coming soon (Apple’s XR headset)

• Greenwood Lake (stream of consciousness about upstate New York)

• Resurrections on Demand (put LSD back in the communion wine)

• The 1,000 Day Molt (how to make decisions like an insect)

There’s a very intentional delineation. On Twitter, the goal is to stay on topic, follow the metrics, and refine my value-proposition. But Substack is my protected place. It’s an oasis. I force myself to pivot topics each week, follow curiosity, log furiously, and write for no one but myself.

Either of these approaches are lacking on their own. A pure artist lacks reach. A pure marketer lacks spirit. But if you can embody both parts, they weirdly orbit around each other, sustain motion, and accelerate in force. Since I know I have an “uncorrupted place of artistic boundlessness,” I feel totally fine, in fact, excited, to become a marketer on Twitter. I used to loathe self-promotion and resist defining myself, but now I see it as this isolated, illusory, temporary mini-game (like Mario Party).

Approaching both is complex. It’s a paradox. Definitely easier said than done. My Substack self publishes and walks away. My Twitter self publishes and nervously checks notifications every 10 minutes. Attention is an alluring, poisonous fruit. Unnatural doses of it can short circuit any psyche. None of us are wired to be celebrities, and if we’re not careful, we’ll get tricked and devoured by our meme-self. I do think balance is possible, but only if the artist has a resilient, self-aware core.

That’s it. Straddle the paradox. Be an uncompromising artist on one platform, and a relentless self-promoter on another. The marketer enables the artist, and the artist grounds the marketer. They require each other to survive.

So don’t pick. Do both (do The Mucha Method).

Let’s riff:

• Where do you stand on the artist <> marketer spectrum?

• Do you think it’s possible to straddle the two?

• Does public image need to match the full self?

Leave a comment

We all know the pain of distance in some form: scattered families, long-distance love, Zoom fatigue, commuting on trains, and planes, and buses or whatever it takes to hug or get paid.

Humans have an impeccable drive to flatten the world. My grandparents fell in love through handwritten letters across the Atlantic, and throughout my life, we keep collapsing distance through higher and higher forms of remote connection:

• In 2nd grade I’d call Ryan in the summers over a landline after he moved.

• In 5th grade my whole class signed onto AIM at once.

• In 8th grade I sent stupid pictures to cousins on flip phones.

• In 11th grade, we’d video chat with nomadic Uncle Larry via Skype.

Now I carry around a small-glass rectangle in my pocket, and I’m only one click away from anyone’s high-res lag-free touched-up face. It’s still not enough. We’re divinely unsatisfied, and through the great pandemic we learned that glass-to-glass contact is no fill-in for the joy of meatspace. Remote work has limits.

We won’t stop tinkering until we’ve reached the final solution: teleportation.

Yes, teleportation is several orders of degree more ridiculous than even the flying car, but we’ve also never walked it through a proper thought experiment. It’s always mired through some fantastic context: a space war, a mad scientist, a freak of nature.

We’ve never seen it in a consumer society where it costs $97/month, it just works, and it’s irresistibly cool. Everyone’s doing it: your cousins and co-workers, the country people and the city people. Imagine business as usual, except your body and consciousness become untethered from the boring suburban chair you sit in and suddenly you can wormhole your way across Earth: wake up in New York, meditate in Utah, share breakfast with long lost college friends in a Catskills Cabin, before shooting over to Siberia to meet your brother’s 3-month old infant, and then finally zip into Kansas to co-work with Garrett in his parent’s living room.

We should get ready for this reality, because it’s freakishly close.

I’m not saying we’ll ever be able to de-atomize your body and poof you across great Oceans, but I am saying our XR technology is about to get radically good, radically fast, and society will reshape itself as if teleportation was just invented.

Apple’s new Vision Pro isn’t an XR headset, it’s humanity’s first “teleportation device.”

If you and I each cave in and splurge on these stupid-looking $3,500 ski goggles, I think we’d achieve a v1 of teleportation. We won’t ever have to use Zoom again. This is more than screen-to-screen video chat; you’d get the impression that my body is in your room walking around.

The June 5th (2023) Apple Keynote didn’t really tap into the peer-to-peer potential of this device. Almost all of the use-cases shown off were single player: infinite monitors, massive monitors, table-top basketball games, themed theaters, and a holographic butterfly that could flutter onto your finger without a pinch. All very cool. All very isolating.

You probably thought, “why would I spend $3,500 to strap a Macbook Pro with M2 processors to my face so I can watch Ted Lasso by myself on a 200” monitor while melting into the fabric of my couch?” Fair.

The “spatial computing” framing definitely appeals to nerds (like me) more than to the public. People are lonelier than ever, and the last thing they want to do is retreat into a digital, private Wonderland. The social pain of distance is real, and people would pay to fix it.

The keynote did show Facetime in the headset, but it was still trapped in the old paradigm. Look at all these fine people trapped in squares with beveled edges. It didn’t show two holographic bodies in the same room, which, based on the absurd specs in the Vision Pro, is totally possible.

So what could XR <> XR Facetime actually be like?

This GIF from Amelia Kallman shows how cameras can capture the body and digitally ‘teleport’ it across space. What you see is the feed through a Hololens. It’s 4 years old, pixelated, and laggy, but it will get better and better until eventually you won’t be able to tell unless you reach out for a fist bump and realize they’re made of air.

This could be the ultimate destroyer of distance. The commute from Siberia to New York will go from 37 hours down to seconds.

Facetime XR will be the killer app that solves our long-distance woes, converting skeptics into believers.

So if I want to enable the supernatural feat of my brother teleporting into New York, I need a photo-realistic 3D model of the space I’m in. This used to be pretty hard to obtain. I knew a guy (“Vinny from the Future”) who traveled around with this absurdly complicated tripod device in his van, and if you had several thousand dollars to spare, he’d create a 3D LIDAR scan of your house (that you’d have to manually import into some convoluted piece of enterprise software like 3DS Max).

The Vision Pro has LIDAR scanners right on your nose, meaning I can build a 3D model just by walking around the first floor of my parent’s house and looking around. All the walls, chairs, and tables, the seasonal decorations, the positions of shadows, and the new landscaping out back — everything is captured, as if my vision now turns matter into light that can bend around the world.

We’ve been able to make 3D models from iPad LIDAR for years, we just never had a need for them.

I capture, compress, and shoot the space over to my brother through iMessage. Imagine that, your whole house as an attachment in a text message. Now my brother in Siberia puts on his Vision Pro, slides the sleek knob to fade out his apartment, and fades into my parents house.

For this to convince my brother, cartoon avatars won’t work. My avatar has to look like me and breathe like me. So I point the Vision Pro back at myself, and use LIDAR to create a semi-realistic avatar of my face and body. When I put the headset back on, it has cameras that track my eyes, cheeks, and hands. All my micro-expressions and body language in New York will animate my avatar in Russia.

My brother is in VR, and I’m in AR. Distance collapses, and we meet in a shared hallucination. He’s immersed in a digital dream of my parents house, and I see him as a ghost in the kitchen.

Real environments, realistic avatars, real-time micro-expressions. As he walks through his apartment in Siberia, I see him glide around my parents house in New York. Both simulations are synced perfectly in real-time, giving the full illusion of teleportation.

So while it seems like we’re both inside of a real space, it’s technically a computer simulation. Meaning, we can do Harry Potter shit: spawn monitors with our hands, play holographic ping pong, or turn the kitchen table into a 3D model of his Siberian town.

This is the first true iteration of “technology turned magic.” As always with XR, you have to try it to get it. Consumers at home are feeling “meh” about this whole premise, but the lucky few in Cupertino are trembling and in awe of a strange future that is rapidly approaching.

If you get the Vision Pro on a 3-year payment plan, you get teleportation for only $97/month. This is already 3x cheaper than a monthly train ticket from Queens to Manhattan, and this thing also lets me commute to Siberia, and anywhere else in the world.

Of course, I can only “teleport” to other people who have a Vision Pro. Each person becomes a hyper-link, a holo-pad, a node in the network. In many ways, the adoption of this thing is very much like the adoption of the telephone (but this is the “ultimate” telephone). It’s useless to one person, useful for two, and society-altering at scale.

So it’s teleportation, but with a twist: everyone needs to buy in. At the moment, the form factor is the barrier. Even I wouldn’t wear the Vision Pro in public (can’t imagine buying coffee with the googly eyes). However, I do wear AR Rayban glasses from Meta daily. No one notices. They’re functionality is extremely limited (just cameras and speakers, no display), but it’s proven to me that when the technology does shrink, it’s not a barrier to wear everyday.

Computers were mocked as nerd toys from the 1960s - 1980s, but when the connectivity of the Internet hit in 1993, it became cool. It feels like XR is finally exiting a similar 3-decade phase. Since the 90s, XR has been goofy, isolating, and extremely unappealing. But when they enable an insanely valuable form of remote connection, people will get it. This whole thing might quickly spiral from a joke to our new reality.

We’re heading towards a ‘holographic society,’ and life might start to feel like a dream. Distance will become irrelevant, and we’ll all leap out of our bodies like astral travelers. We’ll see shocks across the transportation industry, real estate markets, and workforce. I’m not saying this will lead to some kind of utopia. The whole thing will be super disorienting. But I don’t think XR technology will be isolating. It’s the opposite. It will lead us into a new paradigm of hyper-connectivity, and we’re about to feel the shockwaves of teleportation.

By the end of the decade, I imagine a 12-person gathering at my parent’s house with everyone wearing sleek digital glasses. My brother, his wife, and 7-year old child beam in from Siberia, appearing to us as holograms. No one will need to be trapped in an iPad, and the whole thing will feel surprisingly natural.