probably worth examining why sometimes i feel like working on this and sometimes i don’t. it’s like i don’t quite remember why i wrote this in the first place. malcolm said this was some of my best work

// I’m going to try and turn a nested thread-of-threads from twitter into a single standalone substack post.

social media can create tremendous opportunities, scenes, golden age. people don’t realize this. people are barely capable of even imagining this, because our imaginations are so constrained

• social media creates tremendous opportunities, and still has the potential to create greater opportunities than anything anybody has seen before. but hardly anybody stops to really examine this, I think in part because most people operate via old intuitions, and in part because people are typically too busy with their existing configurations to think very much about new ones, let alone set out to… do new configs
• when I meditate deeply and become absolutely still, it becomes clear to me that society has still not even really begun to understand the power and potential of social media… people primarily operate via outdated intuitions based on past experience with past tools, and their imagination is constrained accordingly…
  • the analogy I’ve used so far to talk about this is how people used to treat the electric guitar like an acoustic guitar for almost 30 years before jimi hendrix came along & demonstrated how you could push it to its limit. not a perfect analogy bc guitar is (mostly) single-player, whereas social media is multiplayer. (hendrix wasn’t the first, like how pythagoras wasn’t either, but yadda yadda. mainstream narrative is formed around what most people are most familiar with). would be kind of arrogant of me to insist that I am here to be The Jimi Hendrix Of The Internet, but I think I’m comfortable saying that I am the Jimi Hendrix Of Twitter Threads, for starters. generally speaking most people live in the past
  • maybe the most epic things people have done with social media you could say are things like “meme the guy into the whitehouse”, “storm the capital” etc… IMO all of this is still extremely early stage, play-doh stuff. I believe the real stuff will reshape society Foundationallyhere’s an interesting thing to chew on: It took 50yrs for factories to transition from steam power to electric power, even though it was cleaner, safer, more efficient. Why? Existing systems were optimized for the former – you can’t just swap A for B, you also need to change the architecture, production line, workers. we are still in the middle of the system adaptation for “everyone can publish”
  • science and education should be completely revolutionized from the ground up. people get excited for a minute when they watch a ted talk, and then after about a year of trying some stuff they give up. but these things take decades even when the writing is on the wall
  • aside and in parallel: the challenge for a lot of people, based on a bunch of conversations I’ve had, seems to be: how to be excited about something relatively slow-moving over a lengthy period of time. this is actually a storytelling skillset I think
  • in concrete terms about my own publishing, which is sort of performance art: just as I grew from nothing to ~80k on twitter I will grow from nothing to 100k+ on youtube and use that to organize/coordinate human networks in cities worldwide. this isn’t about ME, I am just a wave in the ocean, I may as well be anonymous. this is about NETWORK EFFECTS that for some reason 99.99% of people are still oblivious to. but whatever, because 0.01% of people is a lot of people
  • “give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it and I’ll sell ads and merch to make money to buy consumer products for myself” – lots of peoplehrm I am taking this in a slightly weird direction today lolpoint is, we have not begun to scratch the surface. we are in the early days. the biggest things we’ve seen are but a fraction of what is to come. it’s always been that way and people are always surprised nevertheless.
    here’s another random-ish related thought: there are so many people in the world that it actually makes perfect sense, from a cost-benefit analysis POV, to completely ignore/ghost anybody who doesn’t understand youthat can be rude, so I wouldn’t go that far, but think about it. because you will never even talk to 0.01% of people. that’s 700,000 people. human brains are made for tight knit group of ~150 people, maybe a small multiple of that. culture designed for 10,000-100,000ish. in a world of ~8,000,000,000.The opportunities aren’t just infinite, they are UNIMAGINABLE because our imagination is constrained by our history/culturewe are like little babies playing with the froth at the farthest reach of the tide, trying to conceive of the true scale of the oceando you know how big the ocean is; if you even begin to try to map it onto your intuitions you’ll still be wrong
  • and we get all caught up in our petty local drama, lolcan’t be too harsh/mean to ourselves about that, we do have primate monkey brains. we are doing pretty good given the constraints. people be like “help me o lord why do I keep thinking bout the titty” and not “damn, fucken chimpanzees managed to calculate the curvature of the earth and photograph it from outer space and send probes into deep space”.

people often see the most lurid, noisy, loud, chaotic parts of social media and think, ugh, social media is a freak show. but that’s like thinking New York = Times Square. It’s that, but it’s also so much more than that. It’s literally anything you *want*.