Tetragrammaton

Tetracketka

Tremat I've always believed that the things you read and the media you consume in general is not just how you spend a big chunk of your life. It changes you.

And so great writing and great culture in general is this deeply valuable thing.

And so now I was like, I should write. How hard could it be? I would love that. I have ideas.

I know how to type. Like, I'm a programmer. I love reading. And I started writing what I thought

was going to be an essay or a blog post or a screed of some sort, like

detailing my frustrations with the media economy on the internet.

Kind of just complaining in broad strokes, look, the internet came along, smashed a lot of the

business models that used to sustain culture and hasn't really, I mean, it's created a lot of wonderful things.

There's been a lot of promise, but it hasn't yet replaced, especially like the economic

engines that made those things go in a way that was satisfactory to me.

Yeah.

And I was just kind of whining.

I was going off and saying, well, wow, you know, your Craigslist killed the classifieds, and, you know, maybe Facebook is not an unalloyed good. And I sent it to my friend Hamish, who's actually a writer. And he let me down very gently. He's like, these are all good points you make, but it's 2017 and you are not quite as

original as you think you are.

Other people may have noticed that some of these trends are going on, but he's like,

here's how you could make this essay you're writing better, because you should add a section

that just says, so what do you do about it? How could this be different?

It's easy to complain. It's easy to say, here's everything that's wrong. It's much more

interesting, though. It would be more interesting as a reader to have a theory of, well, what could a new

and better thing be? And we started arguing, basically. And that argument turned into what became the core idea for

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