Joining a New Media Community

“Dollowers” (dollar-weighted followers) are an important part of the future. Normal followers are nonpaying commenters, and subscribers are quiet paying supporters. But dollowers are engaged and pay creators. They often support individuals rather than institutions.

Platforms like Substack, Patreon, and Ghost allow writers to optimize for dollowers. Dollowing is a scarce and valuable behavior, unlike following. In the battle of ideas, dollowing is more important than following or just retweeting. We could compile lists of people who deserve support and organize mass financial support of those creators.

Unlike local newspapers, new media communities gather for an ideology instead of geography. Individual writers are accountable for their own work. Then the new “newspapers” are dynamic bundles of different individual’s work.

Crypto payments protect everyone’s privacy, prove who is actually a supporter, and allow support across borders. Eventually, crypto will allow creators to cite on-chain events as a way of proving predictions or preventing deletion. A community of 10,000 folks spending $1,000 per year could support one hundred individual creators at $100k/year. Virtue signaling could become value signaling. For example: How much have you done to support creators in our community? And what have you created?

Now, $1,000/year is not trivial; some might be able to contribute only $100 or even $10. But $1,000 is within reach of many people, especially if they truly believe in a cause. Financially supporting a cause gives people who want to do something a concrete something to do. Either fund or create, either dollow or build. This applies to open source software, art, writing, and more. We can have a community of engineers, artists, and writers all working toward a common goal, supported by dollowers.

Good writers and artists should be rewarded. We just need to change the incentives.

People who know math and science, who have experience in managing and investing, who are technological progressives rather than technological conservatives—these people need to learn to write, report, publish, and direct. We need to consciously build a parallel tech-driven decentralized media ecosystem, and we need it to become the first port of call for anyone seeking to learn about technology.

In this we will have allies around the world. Only the very richest people can afford to be cynical about the merits of technological progress. The billions of people who just got their first smartphones had their lives dramatically improved. They are too pragmatic to romanticize the past.

People with scientific and technical backgrounds have not taken it upon themselves to write about technological progress as a duty. We need to take time out of our busy days to make the case, repeatedly and with high production values, that technological progress is the most important thing we can do for broad prosperity, economic growth, and for life itself.

We may not get life extension or the whole suite of transhumanist technologies (brain-machine interfaces, stem cells, CRISPR gene therapy, and more) unless you, personally, evangelize them online. Not just with tweets, but with articles. Not just with articles, but with videos. Not just with videos, but with feature films. Not with just a few films, but with an entire Netflix original library's worth.

We need to create a parallel media ecosystem full of inspirational content for technological progressives—a lifetime's worth of content that makes the case for immutable money, infinite frontier, and eternal life.

Media corporations are against free speech for the same reason Microsoft was against free software. They are for-profit corporations that want to eliminate all competitors.

But they’ll lose. Every citizen is becoming a journalist, and every company is becoming a media company.