This digital garden's raison d'être
2023-04-24
To put this website in context, I love Andy Matuschak's idea of thinking and writing notes for the self, disregarding the audience. (See also Writing for Pleasure 為了爽而寫.) This resonates with how I felt all along when blogging became a thing in the early 2000s. I intuitively agree that this way of presenting oneself to the world "creates more invested, interesting followings over the long term." See below also for his insights:
-
Working with the garage door up
-
Anti-marketing
Work with the garage door up
Metadata
- Title: Work with the garage door up
- URL
Page Comment
- #evergreen-notes
Such a powerful message. Love it! Quoting it all, spreading it, putting it on my digital garden.
Highlights & Notes
- One of my favorite ways that creative people communicate is by “working with their garage door up,” to riff on a passage from Robin Sloan (below). This is the opposite of the Twitter account which mostly posts announcements of finished work: it’s Screenshot Saturday; it’s giving a lecture about the problems you’re pondering in the shower; it’s thinking out loud about the ways in which your project doesn’t work at all. It’s so much of Twitch. I want to see the process. I want to see you trim the artichoke. I want to see you choose the color palette. Anti-marketing.
- I love this kind of communication personally, but I suspect it also creates more invested, interesting followings over the long term. That effect’s probably related to Working on niche, personally-meaningful projects brings weirder, more serendipitous inbounds. It’s also a way to avoid the problems described in Pitching out corrupts within.
Related
- Essay: A Brief History and Ethos of the Digital Garden by Maggie Appleton
- The Learn in Public ethos - swyx
- 數位花園