Substance over speculation
Amplifying the good, true, and beautiful
Attention and money are age-old measures of value, and they serve a legitimate role across our systems. But over the years, these measures have become aims; they’ve been distorted and taken to the extreme.
On one hand, the change can be easily understood. The internet, spurred by social media, moves information with unprecedented transparency and speed. And this drives our financial and idea markets towards increasingly tight feedback loops with often volatile outcomes.
As a result, everything has become speculation: every moment an opportunity for performative content; every event, a financial instrument. Engagement bait and ephemerality of The Current Thing; meme stocks, crypto pump-and-dumps, prediction markets — they’re consequences of this infrastructure and incentives. Why invest 15 years, or even seek fifteen minutes of fame, when a mere fifteen seconds can garner billions of eye balls and millions of dollars?
Collectively, this cultural mindset is an “upside-maximizing nihilism”: we’re willing to trade anything for immediate, measurable, and asymmetric ROI. The pull towards attention and money have become so strong — so loud and in your face — that it takes a Herculean effort to escape their gravity.
In the process, we’ve lost sight of real value and inverted the order of operations. Attention and money are not the goal: they are currencies and byproducts of pursuing what’s true, good, and beautiful — of using creativity, curiosity, and craft towards human flourishing.
I believe the pendulum is starting to swing and people are looking for a remedy to cultural decay. We need signal and direction, deeper and richer experiences. We need to re-focus on sources of real value.
And I want to curate, create works, and amplify creative agents to help.