Spirit of Toby Shorin
@tobyshorin
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I am entering new game plus. • https://t.co/7iJXt1C49b • Squad: https://t.co/RgXfVWWGMo
Joined February 2012
My research on new psychology and spirituality is turning up not just new movements, but emerging social forms of community and belonging: . ⦿ Centers, ⎈ Campuses, ⌂ Parlors, and ✽ Practices that connect people in place and space.
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This is one of the worst objects I have ever seen
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@raihan_ I want a mouse that is a fleshy replica of a human hand so I can solve my physical contact deprivation while I’m using figma … dare to be original.
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*slaps top of DAO*. this bad boy can fit so many unpaid interns in it.
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❤️🔥A new essay. I try to answer the questions: what does the DTC brand deluge of the 2010s all amount to?. And how do we respond to the designed cultures, connected cults, and digital faiths that are superseding brands today?. This is life after lifestyle.
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Other Internet is an applied research organization. We study and build social technology. Our aim is to create alignment between technology, values, and culture. Walk with us.
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Crypto is building a world outside the nation-state. But who belongs in this new global "public?". Our new essay is about building open worlds, about protocols that enact values over profits, and about changing this game. 🆕✨🌍 by me, @hxrts, & @lottiland.
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I've been working on a new project with @tomcritchlow and it's out today!. this is Quotebacks v1.0.1. It's a tool for:.- creating linked text citations.- cross-site conversations.- digital gardening.- building public knowledge graphs. Get it:.
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my greatest wish for 2025 is for my friends who are ambient music producers to get gigs producing acceleration and brake noise for electric vehicles.
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This is the dumbest possible version of this take but I really think if we web3 turns everyone into a discord degen or an NFTlord in 30 years our society is gonna collapse. We still need to build physical things for fucks sake lol.
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🆕 I have written an essay about the emerging class of paid communities, and how they make it possible to design and run profitable, sustainable social networks.
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I got 2 moods they are “radical vulnerability acceptance spirit magic” and “ive had it with these fucking clowns” and guess which one it is today.
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The era of the atomized individual is over.The gig economy is going to fall apart.The new culture of community is emerging. it’s time for squad resilience.Squad space.Squad tools.Squad vibes .Squad production. it’s time to build SQUAD WEALTH.
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📄🆕 New Single: The Diminishing Marginal Value of Aesthetics.An analysis of challenges to the production of novelty.feat. @David_Rudnick.
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I dare you to get close enough to me that we both change.
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I hear people often express hesitance about writing something they’re thinking about by saying “it’s already been said” or “I’m sure other people have written about this.” A lot of this comes down to a fear of not being seen or accepted by others. The fear is “I’ll look dumb”.
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hey sorry i haven't responded, i'm too busy making a bunch of vague wins in different areas.
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2020 energy is ensuring your side hustle /startup / vc fund is aligned with civilizational longevity.
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It’s as good a time as any to tell you I moved to California. Please be my friend!.
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Our thesis at Other Internet is that off-chain processes will increasingly be the focus of governance design. Social spaces, informal processes, and user interfaces are forms of governance!. Presenting our first off-chain gov report, on Uniswap's Discord.
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@patrickc The apparent disappearance can be attributed to changes in psychiatric treatment philosophy that have altered both the presentation of symptoms and overall visibility of suffering. - The "mental hygiene" movement (1910s onward) put an emphasis on preventative care, this was a.
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here's a new essay by me. it's about voids, about emotions, about patterns and habits, about work and time. it's about things we do, consciously and not. i don't know how to describe it because it's about a lot of things. it's about Jobs To Be Done.
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what if i told you that every time I unfollowed, blocked, or muted someone for the last 2 years i put them in a list called “cursed timeline”.
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I wrote up some thoughts on how on how to successfully navigate a world after authenticity without turning to an avoidant hipster irony, authenticity essentialism, and nihilistic consumerism! There is another way:.
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i am very grateful everyone who came to my talk at fwb fest and those who helped me out with it recently. in some ways this talk took 6 years to put together. the basic theory of "lifestyles," identity, and brands was there by 2016, but i was missing a strong notion of culture
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substacks are just recipe blog preambles but for men.
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Probably the best use of chatgpt I have found is personal trainer. Have been prompting it to get a decent 12 workout week plan and this is so much better than scouring the internet to cobble together a program for my specific goals.
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The new Other Internet essay, by Laura, Sam, and Toby. How do the swirling regulatory forces of 𝗺𝗮𝗿𝗸𝗲𝘁𝘀, 𝗰𝗼𝗱𝗲, 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗻𝗼𝗿𝗺𝘀 make the crypto "space" what it is today?. Can we learn from the law?. Can social norms realize crypto's dreams?.
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🌟🆕 I have written an essay about authenticity and two decades of its aesthetic fallout.
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New year, new axes to grind. This year I'm working on the following topics:. - reinventing design education from the ground up.- independent research funding.- beyond cultural relevance, what's important to build.- aligning businesses with values.- equitable capital distribution.
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anyone who answers "sapiens" here is blocked.
what do you think are the most important books on history or philosophy of history to understand our present moment?.
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📄New Single: 𝗣𝗿𝗲𝗺𝗼𝗻𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻. This essay addresses the looming question: what is about to happen to culture?. feat. @kneelingbus on Space.@karakittel on Technology.@keikreutler on Politics.@geomorphologies on Death.
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It’s curious that appending the word “economy” another word to make a phrase, as in “experience economy,” lsharing economy,” and “passion economy” is largely a rhetorical device used a to signal the phrase-coiner’s interest in financial gain and indicate an investable category.
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The real flippening is when corporate dictatorships and internal command economies are ideologically defeated and replaced with cooperatively managed economic mini-democracies.
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lots of founders i've met think they're moving the culture forward because they have a brand. In reality, most of the products are simple utilities that shouldn't have any pretensions of coolness or cultural relevance. A lot of them don't even need to exist.
it seems to me ljke a lot of greedy ppl come up with wack products as an excuse to run a brand. to reduce waste we should just let ppl create brands without having any product at all. i think they would actually save a lot of money that way.
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living in new york is meeting people at parties and having really vulnerable and open conversations with them, telling each other you want to hang out again and really meaning it, and never seeing them again.
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Just putting it out there. To the first crypto person to build a physical public institution this majestic, worthy, public-spirited:. I will write an inscription for the wall as timeless and inspiring as this one in honor of your nobility
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thinking about holding a brand theory discussion group in nyc. we would likely select one piece of interesting academic literature or relevant cultural theory to read, or host an experimental presentation, followed by group discussion. who would be interested in joining?.
Continually amazed that professional marketers don’t read any of the academic literature on consumer research and brand theory that gets produced every year. some of it is actually good.
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The Thiel Fellowship is a venerated Silicon Valley institution. every year at Stanford, they put all the graduating CS majors’ names into a hat and pull out 10. These esteemed “Thiel Fellows” are gifted 500 twitter followers to seed their accounts and sent on their merry way.
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I have a new project called Care Culture, a newsletter and membership community focused on mental health, wellness subcultures, and integrative practice. my first post is live! I document my field trip to Vitalia, the longevity-themed city in Honduras.
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Do you have a powerful idea for something that benefits the public?. Are you part of an org that wants to take action to scale public goods efforts?. We’ve opened an RFP for public goods projects that create positive externalities. Submit by 8/17 here!.
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finally finished v1 of my library page! thanks to friendly folks in the @AREdotNA discord for help figuring out the API.
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I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the true essence of madness is seeing everything around you as a meaningful symbol.
Quick thread on coincidences, synchronicity and magic. I think it was Gordon White who defined magical practice as working to maximize the number of meaningful coincidences in life. Coincidences are powerful, in a way that's hard to understand at first.
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a special place nearby to god's throne is reserved for uploaders who make PDF page numbers exactly equivalent to book page numbers
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People really need to stop doing manifestos for dinky pieces of software.
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The look of performative guilt on the Cambridge Analytica dude's face in every photo is the biggest giveaway of his obvious expectation to be given the Chelsea Manning or Snowden treatment despite the fact that everything he says indicates the whole episode has been a game to him
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self-identified tech people have the energy and resources to build the next great society, but we don't have a clear political mandate or a vision for what the political economy of the future should look like.
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a “career counselor” but for guiding young people in their trajectory through online microidentities…. mentors who are familiar with online subcultures & their niche variations and dramas, and who don’t stigmatize any particular radicalization path but can provide nuance.
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I appreciate all the recent talk about exclusivity sparked by @gaby_goldberg, @parisrouz, my friend @thecpe, @masonnystrom and others. It's a complicated topic and I want to share some more nuanced, even counterintuitive views on what overcoming exclusivity could actually mean.
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I did a tiny review of every book I finished this year this is very fun to do, would encourage others to do the same
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I have been thinking about this a lot.
if you stay off your phone, you'll realize it's still 2005 outside.
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twitter is a social network for meeting and staying in touch with people who are lot like you and share your interests but who are complete sociopaths.
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currently undertaking a syntopic reading of these books for our protocols project. makes for a very fascinating study of ideas, invention, and discursive boundaries. this covers poetry, science, philosophy. we’re missing one on social movements. is there an equivalent classic?
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A login screen with no password; it only unlocks when you enter your true intention for the session.
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i will never give up css, i will never stop looking up shit like "make div height fill parent height".
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If you're privileged you should spend the next 2-3 years figuring out your deep values and then only work on projects and with people that match them. If you already figured out your values what are you waiting for.
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once you understand the rules, you realize how easy it is to play the game.
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extremely online people are finally in their element. this summer is *our* hot girl summer.
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My collaborators Sam @hxrts and Laura @lottiland and I are introducing a new conceptual primitive for cryptoeconomics: Headless Brands. In our first paper on this topic, we explain some of the emerging dynamics of decentralized orgs + narrative control.
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I'm open sourcing the little tool I built to do live iframe-based citations on my blog!. includes:.- how-to-build tutorial.- boilerplate implementation for jekyll.- some thoughts on improving knowledge tooling for writing and reading.
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I only have one big idea and everything I write is about it. Here is how I came up with it.
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😌 the madman has done it. without a shadow of a doubt he really de-aged himself to 18.
Steve Jobs praised death's design. Elon Musk races towards it. Zero asks what if?
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friends, i have a new blog post out this afternoon, which is about how american ideas about mental health are getting almost as wacky as they were in the 19th century.
happy email from @tobyshorin day to those who celebrate.
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It’s too easy to make money in crypto —> all the smart people just go make money in stupid and too easy ways. For now Web3 is just a new version of the classic “brightest minds of my generation are working on ad tech” problem.
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here we go, first blog of the year down. It's a quick post about the project @karakittel and I are working on over the summer, "credit cultures," and how the ways we think about originality, ownership, and credibility at large might be changing.
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almost any question worth asking today immediately leads over the precipice of casual conversation and into the deep pit of fundamental social structure problems.
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A book club that shows up at authors’s house unannounced for real talk.
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i'm developing an allergic reaction to the concept of the future.
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once again I have written a miniature review of every book I read this year (now on my shiny new home library page!). this is always fun and rewarding - if you give it a shot post your blog or your own arena channel of your year in books below.
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as usual I've done a 2-3 sentence review of all the books I read this year. I didn't like all of these but the bangers really delivered.
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My learning is that "agency" is only something someone "has" insofar as they "have" relationships with other people, with their environment, with their self system. It's always mediated (s/o @notplants and @dantaeyoung for this one)
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the second Care Culture post is here. I examine the so-called "loneliness epidemic" and how this attempt to influence the lexicon of well-being is playing out. What incentives and institutions drive the Loneliness Apparatus?.
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Our report on PoolTogether's community & off-chain governance is live! . How did @PoolTogether_ build one of the most positive communities around? And what's it like to work for a DAO?. featuring the most complete view of DAO compensation models yet done.
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people ask me about incentives for funding public goods and I’m like bro lemme tell you about a little thing called Becoming Good.
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exploring @MenanderSoter's twitter visualization in 3d is really something else. this gives me a hint of a feeling i've been seeking for a long time, the feeling of viscerally confronting just how massive, how vast this thing that is hidden behind a flat feed really is
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Thinking about when I met a chaos magician at the ethereum conference and he told me about the time he accidentally banished his housemate to the shadow realm.
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If you take this line of thinking seriously, it becomes clear that to make society tenable we must drastically reduce the cost and complexity of investing in one’s physical environment, so that the real world can be compete with games.
I keep running into these absolutely cursed fucking comics and reminded of what @tobyshorin was saying about the increasing disparity between gray, controlled real world and colourful, intellectual property’d virtual
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One weird thing about living in the post-“lofi beats to chill and study to” era is that random bumps you’ve heard that really slap will stick with you and come into your head time and time again, but you’re never able to trace their origin - they’re as lost as dreams.
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I like Bryan and respect his project but I continue to feel like I don’t share common ground with longevity enthusiasts on this point. We all succumb to entropy. Many big questions are about how to suffer that well.
fuck longevity. I wanna die.
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𝗧𝗼𝗯𝘆.some esoteric but real ass truths.🔁1 🤎22. 𝗧 𝟬𝘅 𝗯𝘆.some unequivocal crypto bullshit.🔁159 🤎2185.
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wow this really blew up. since y'all are here i'm accepting wife dms and introductions.
I’m tryna have a wife guy summer.
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everyone knows "dress for the job you want" but have you tried dressing your website for the job you want instead.
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dirt-cheap hardware, abundant solar energy, censorship-resistant domains and p2p storage solutions will soon combine, ensuring every new website launched today will remain online forever, browsable eternally in the next 200 years of vapor-ized solarpunk futurenow.
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I'm realizing a lot of people do not understand 'squad' the way we do. the friendships & trust bonds are way more important to a successful small group than any formal coordination mechanism. If you make the group deal with financial incentives + voting too early, it will fail.
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things are changing in our minds much much faster than things are changing in the physical world.
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there is a need to make working on green electrification, cheap and clean transit, just infrastructure, better social policy etc as lucrative as it is (and more rewarding) than yield farming.
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if u try to skip from the "being depressed and anxious all the time" phase of life to the "feeling mostly positive and ok about things" phase without going through the "learning about and confronting your deepest fears" phase u just end up trying to convince yourself you're happy.
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@otherinternet__ squad has published iconic reports on.- protocol gtm.- decentralized branding.- public goods.- identity formation online.- pre-dao DAOs.- spatial software.- off-chain governance dynamics.- lore. What other topics/themes would you like to see us research & digest?.
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at the end of the year I like to write a mini review of the books I read (you can find these in "Toby's Library" on Arena or on my personal website page). When I look back at the list, I realize that this was basically my year of "reckoning with Western culture and philosophy"
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artists can have a little business model as a treat.
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🆕Here's an essay, adapted from my talk last week at @trust_support, about automated governance, animism and affordances, and coming to understand agency in a new way:.
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I love my friends and i am so proud of them and i am happy to make more friends that i can love and be proud of. I trust everyone i fuck with to surpass my highest expectations.
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@chaserchapman Chase! This is simply untrue. No work practice used by DAOs today solve this problem. - With grants and full-time work, performance level can't be specified. - Retroactive comp, like tips or coordinape reward only the most visible. - Bounties don't allow for negotiation.
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