Good morning folks,

I mentioned in my previous update that my work throughout most of 2024 has been through Native, a studio that I founded to "shape the ideas that shape us." I've spent my days working with founders on research, messaging, and articulating a narrative that their community can believe in. It's become very clear to me that the work I'm doing with founders is directly aligned with our goal here at Believe in Something, which is why I mentioned that I now view BIS as living under the Native "umbrella."

Here's an excerpt from the Native website:

We are all native to our built environments. We shape them, and then they shape us.

Frontier technologies are making our environments more malleable than ever. As technology softens, exponentially more people will be able to shape their environments in more opinionated ways. Anyone can start a podcast. Anyone can build an app. Anyone can make a movie. Anyone can...

We've already seen the effects of that malleability gone unchecked. As the cost of building new technology decreases and content slop increases, our environment becomes more aggressive in attacking our focus – and therefore our beliefs. The world is full of empty narratives fighting for our attention but stripping us of our agency.

Founders and tech leaders can no longer simply build product. To truly differentiate in the market, they must refocus the attention of their network. They must give people something to believe in. This is not only good business – it's a moral imperative.

Those who shape the future will be those who lead with ideas we can believe in.

If Native Studio is my vehicle for bringing founders along for the mission, then Believe in Something is our vehicle for creating a culture that aligns with our worldview. We're in the business of scene-building, and our goal is to create a scene of believers.

Grant-giving is the ideal vehicle for bootstrapping a scene. Three reasons:

1. Grants accelerate network effects by directly capturing the attention of our ideal potential members.

2. Grants force us to be thoughtful with who and what ideas we choose to highlight, since funds are finite.

3. Grants are community-funded, and thus give individuals a direct way of supporting our worldview without the coordination overhead.

An Experiment in Networked Writing

At Believe in Something, we believe that the writer-practitioner – the individual who builds and writes about their mission – is uniquely positioned to change the world. From our manifesto:

Why "writer-practitioners"? Because you can't change the world without understanding it and having a perspective, and writing is the best way to develop both.

Members of our community, then, should be practicing what they preach. My goal for this newsletter is twofold:

1. To summarize the work being done throughout the community and log the journey.

2. To be a central node in our networked writing experiment, sparking conversation and highlighting the best ideas in our community.

From Tom Critchlow:

I often talk about blogging as “networked writing”. For me, it’s the key difference between other forms of writing and blogging. The idea that blogs exist within the network is crucial to understanding the medium (the medium is the message - could one say the blogosphere is the blog?).

We'll be using the BIS Farcaster channel as a members-only home for writing. I expect curation and conversation to happen in our token-gated group chat, and the channel to be a home for public (but gated) conversations around our community's own writing.

I'm sure this will evolve over time. But the core goal will remain: promote great writing from our community that accelerates their progress, promotes their own intellectual development, and attracts like-minded believers.

Starting next week, the /believein channel will open the week with a writing prompt. Members are encouraged to use channel for sharing drafts and offering feedback. Members are encouraged to use the group chat for sharing readings and sparking conversations around the readings and aligned topics.

Until next time,

Jihad