Strat scraps v207

Old slides and stream of consciousness thought

Digital Gardens.

Community Spaces.

Dark forests. etc.

Different ways to explain that mass platforms like facebook are becoming less preferred to smaller, more community oriented places like newsletters. Or discord/slack. Rob’s Salmon Crew whatsapp group, or Yancy Strickler’s (Author of the article linked above) newly released DARK FOREST OPERATING SYSTEM (DFOS — more on that in a sec).

And its cool. I like the shift. But we also have become accustomed to abundance and personally I still love the internet for its biggest strength– discovery. But I am starting to see the tension. You can’t join every small group you stumble across. A community starts to feel lifeless if half the members are there because they joined after finding it but don’t have the bandwidth to contribute.

I suppose any neighborhood has involved neighbors and others that lurk in their houses. But I wonder how many small digital groups one can be a part of before checking them all becomes too cumbersome?

No real end thought here, but worth thinking about what we will give up to find true community. We can’t belong to everything? Or maybe in the far future, groups will consolidate and merge like corporations. Venture capital will get involved and the whole era will be over.

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But that said, if you are a paid subscriber, keep an eye out for an additional email coming your way today. It is a DFOS space I created for those who have chosen to pay. Not a ton there will be net new, but it will be a single place to find a lot of the higher value resources/tools/experiments I have shared here over the years. It also have more of a community space orientation with the option for anyone to ask everyone else a question/for sustained conversation etc. Just something I am trying out, bare with me as we find out together what is most useful.

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Found myself flipping through the strategy scrapbook recently, and there were a few page spreads that I continue to enjoy every time I see them and/or repeatedly find value in.

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This of course put me down the path of revisiting similar things I’ve put together in the past and I forgot how much I liked the "77 bits from the past 100 emails”

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Working on the equivalent for emails 100-200 now.

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In the spirit of nostalgia for me and sharing random shite with you, here are some screen grabs from old decks.

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Laughing to myself because this works great for certain types of clients and agency people as well.

Whats interesting is this was way more true prior to going freelance.

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This is worth a read. And thematically is relevant beyond its subject matter.

The Computer Room

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Speaking of worth a read; Ben Duhl’s recruitment company blog remains one of my favorite examples of the format. One where the value is less about the content of the post and more about how the content relates to you and your situation in the moment, making it worth revisiting every so often.

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If you work in advertising, you are a thief.

Fight as hard as you can to give something worth what you take.

The good (?) news is the better what you leave behind, the more you are able to steal.

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worth a save: What makes a good question?

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I like this inversion of which part is the hard part.

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Reminder: if you use AI in your work, it is still just a prediction engine….

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WEEKLY MONSTER

Some old creations that kind of sum up the whole vibe.