*March 31, 2025* There's this pattern of internet writers and commentators: * Making small contributions in the form of podcasts, writing / tweets, etc * Incrementally gaining visibility + tuning their message / POV * At the right time - after having delivered enough value - compressing the gestalt into a tighter, manicured format and *selling* I don't think this is recent, actually - I have the entirety of Calvin & Hobbes in a box set, from a birthday almost 2 decades ago, and this is the basic description of a million old things eg. standup comedy - but there's something underdeveloped about the *internet manifestation* of the format that I think is interesting. I'm thinking of Stripe Press taking eg. Dwarkesh Patel podcast transcripts and deciding that, with some editing, they could be a book. Or Passage Press petrifying obscure right-wing Wordpress blogs and pulp philosophy into hardcover books. Zines, etc. Can you tell I read really narrowly? Something feels virtuous - humble, rare - about the: * "put little things into the world, constrained in scope + payoff, with minimal opinion about the end-game" * → * "look at this serious, substantial contribution that *emerged* from it all" * → * memorialize arc. It feels biological, or even "wu wei" etc. And as an end-consumer of this kind of thing, there's something satisfying about buying the compressed Stripe checkout version at the end of the tunnel. My pithy twitter draft was that "people buy things that they made with you;" I am along for the journey because the content of these things is interesting to me, but the satisfaction at checkout comes from my having been along for it - as if I made it be - and wanting to snapshot that. I may also be overthinking what is "watching Spongebob for a few years, and then the SpongeBob movie with David Hasselhoff comes out." At minimum; I'm paying for "art", "writing", whatever - when I *really don't have to*. That sticks out to me, as someone who grew up *not* paying for anything on the Internet, even when I should have been. You send humble portions of earnest into the void, I tag along because they resonate, and when you're ready to turn them *into something* - I'd like to memorialize it for myself, especially in light of how ephemeral it all is in its format of birth. In any case, a few directions into which I think this gets interesting: * I think the "invest in the art you like, early - as if it were a startup" meme - having always felt like room-temperature IQ wordcel-ism to me - actually has legs. * Maybe no one's done it the way it must be done, yet. * Maybe the way it's finally done would not be legible in that meme's formulation of it. * The path these sorts of creative careers take still feels relatively indeterminate, almost against all odds. * What does a structure around them end up looking like? * Is it just eg. Youtube + boutique book publishers? If it were just those two, it'd certainly feel *lindy*, but I feel like there's more to do there. * (Substack?) * My "slow-burn manifesto" tweet was my gut sense at the time that long-form writing was dying, and in its place was this "slow-burn" realtime thinking phenomenon that twitter was home to. I think this might have been premature and wrong; I think these things ossify and turn into more. I am the demand for the ossified / higher-bar version that I didn't think really existed a few years ago.