There's a moment most people recognize, even if they don't have words for it.
You're scrolling. You've been scrolling for twenty minutes. You were going to check one thing — a notification, a message, a headline — and now you're somewhere else entirely, reading about something you never intended to care about, mildly annoyed, mildly entertained, not sure what you were originally looking for.
You close the app. You pick up your phone again three minutes later.
That's not an accident. That's the system working exactly as designed.
I'm not here to tell you that social media is evil or that technology is ruining us. I've lived in too many places and watched too many systems collapse and rebuild to think anything is that simple. What I will say is this: most of us have quietly outsourced something important. Not just our attention — our values. Our sense of what matters. Our answer to the question: what am I doing with my time?
I've been calling the alternative Baoism. It's not a religion or a movement or a course you can buy. It's more like a posture.
Why "Bao"?
A bao is a Chinese dumpling. Plain on the outside. The treasure is inside. It's also a tree under which enlightenment was found. And it sounds like a gesture of respect — bowing — or the beautiful branch of a tree, a bough. The name carries more than it looks like it does. That felt right for what I was trying to point at.
Bao Ji — Bring Your Own
Bao Ji isn't an acronym. It's a principle.
Bring Your Own teachers. Your own practices. Your own answers. Not because other people's wisdom is worthless — it isn't. But because you're the one who has to live your life. You're the one waking up tomorrow in your body, in your circumstances, with your specific history. No guru lives that. No algorithm knows what you need better than you do, if you're being honest with yourself.
The problem isn't that people lack access to wisdom. If anything, we're drowning in it. The problem is we've been trained to consume wisdom instead of apply it. To add more frameworks instead of cutting what doesn't work. To optimize instead of choose.
Baoism isn't about adding. It's about stopping.
Stop Adding Poison
Here's the actual practice, stripped of mysticism:
Most people already have most of what they need. The obstacle isn't ignorance — it's the stuff layered on top. Obligations that were never agreed to. Comparisons that serve someone else's business model. Noise that fills the space where a decision could be.
Stop adding that.
Not in some dramatic gesture of total opt-out. Just notice what's poison and stop putting it in your mouth. The rest, strangely, mostly takes care of itself.
The Question Hassan-i Sabbah Asked
I've been writing about this for years, in different forms. My historical novel about Hassan-i Sabbah — the founder of the Nizari Ismaili movement in 11th-century Persia — is really a long exploration of the same question Baoism asks.
Hassan took a mountain fortress in 1090 with forty men. He held it for thirty-five years against every empire that tried to take it back. He built a network that rewrote the political map of the medieval Middle East.
Not with armies. With a single question: who decided you had to obey?
That's Bao Ji, nine centuries early.
The complete story is free to read on Royal Road. All of Volume 1: https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/159403
The Anarchist Manifesto Project
In May, I'm releasing a different kind of book about the same question.
The Anarchist Manifesto Project 2026 features twenty-six kinds of anarchism — from Anarcho-Communism to Crypto-Anarchism, A through Z in the phonetic alphabet. Each tendency gets a fictional persona created by Grok (xAI), an original manifesto written from inside that life by Claude (Anthropic), and a portrait generated by Claude Code.
Three AI systems. One human director/editor. None of them were told what to say.
They don't agree with each other. The Christian Anarchist thinks the Egoist is spiritually bankrupt. The Crypto-Anarchist thinks the Anarcho-Communist missed the whole point. The Queer Anarchist is doing something the others don't have a framework for.
That's the point. Every one of them is asking the same question from a different starting position. None of them have the complete answer. Neither do I. But the question — who decided you had to obey, and why are you still obeying? — that one doesn't go away.
Presale is open. The book drops May 1st: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FNJMXW6C
Xcrol
The reason I'm building a social network called Xcrol (pronounced SCROLL) is the same reason I wrote both of those books.
Your time is the only resource that doesn't come back. Your attention is something other people have decided to monetize. That's not neutral — it has consequences for what you think about, what you feel, what you decide matters.
Xcrol is a network that doesn't do that. No algorithm. No data sold. No engagement trap. It's not finished yet. But it's coming along nicely . xcrol.com
The Short Version
You already have most of what you need. The question is what you're willing to stop adding.
That's Bao Ji. Bring Your Own.
Everything else is details.
---
The Anarchist Manifesto Project 2026 is available for presale now: amazon.com/dp/B0FNJMXW6C. Hasan i-Sabah, Volume 1 is free to read in full on Royal Road: royalroad.com/fiction/159403. More of this kind of thinking, three times a week, free: indignified.substack.com
by CD Damitio
I've been writing this week about a philosophy called Baoism — something I built over years of living outside the usual structures, and crystallized on a road trip with my daughter in 2024.
Three principles: Stop Tox, Do Rox, Help Others.
The first two get most of the attention. Stop the inputs that make you worse. Build something real. Those are recognizable. People find them immediately useful.
Help Others is where it gets interesting.
Here's the trap in the first two principles without the third:
Stop Tox and Do Rox can be entirely self-directed. Clear your noise, build your output, optimize your existence. There's a version of this that's just self-improvement with better framing — still pointing inward, still concerned primarily with your own inputs and outputs.
It's useful. It's genuinely better than most of what gets sold as "personal development."
But it's still a closed loop.
Help Others opens the loop. It's the principle that makes Baoism something other than a productivity philosophy with a philosophical name.
The instruction is specific: use what you've built to reduce friction for someone else. Not generosity in a general sense. Not "give back." The specific thing you built — the knowledge you earned, the skill you developed, the infrastructure you created — in service of someone who comes after you.
The earned part is load-bearing. Help that comes from someone who hasn't actually done the thing is usually just advice. People can feel the difference, even when they can't articulate why.
I learned to move through the world with nothing.
No money, no safety net, no fixed address. How to find work when you have no permanent location. How to navigate bureaucracies in languages I barely spoke. How to build a life across multiple countries with a backpack and a decade of hard lessons.
CD Damitio didn’t observe Silicon Valley from the outside.
He worked inside it—until he walked away in 2000.
/That insider perspective fueled Petshitter, his sharp, darkly comic novel about a couple launching a pet-tech startup with a comically terrible name amid the ego, hype, and “change the world” pressure of venture capital.
Fast-forward to April 2026: AI pet-tech is exploding with massive funding rounds for smart collars, emotion-reading devices, and precision-nutrition platforms. The absurdity Damitio satirized is now playing out in real time.Yet his critique goes far deeper than one book.
Across 30+ titles and four startups he actually built, Damitio has consistently exposed the extractive nature of Big Tech while offering alternatives.
His latest creation—xcrol.com—is a deliberate counter-model: a social network with zero surveillance, no algorithms feeding addiction, and a design that puts human connection first.
Add in Baoism, his straightforward spiritual philosophy (Stop Tox • Do Rox • Help Others), and you see the full picture: a thinker who doesn’t just complain about toxic systems—he builds cleaner ones and writes the stories that help others do the same.
While today’s tech founders chase valuations, Damitio has been quietly prototyping a post-hype future for decades. That combination of lived critique, hands-on building, and unflinching storytelling makes him one of the most grounded voices in an increasingly absurd industry.
There's a moment most people recognize, even if they don't have words for it.
You're scrolling. You've been scrolling for twenty minutes. You were going to check one thing — a notification, a message, a headline — and now you're somewhere else entirely, reading about something you never intended to care about, mildly annoyed, mildly entertained, not sure what you were originally looking for.
You close the app. You pick up your phone again three minutes later.
That's not an accident. That's the system working exactly as designed.
I'm not here to tell you that social media is evil or that technology is ruining us. I've lived in too many places and watched too many systems collapse and rebuild to think anything is that simple. What I will say is this: most of us have quietly outsourced something important. Not just our attention — our values. Our sense of what matters. Our answer to the question: what am I doing with my time?
I've been calling the alternative Baoism. It's not a religion or a movement or a course you can buy. It's more like a posture.
Why "Bao"?
A bao is a Chinese dumpling. Plain on the outside. The treasure is inside. It's also a tree under which enlightenment was found. And it sounds like a gesture of respect — bowing — or the beautiful branch of a tree, a bough. The name carries more than it looks like it does. That felt right for what I was trying to point at.
Bao Ji — Bring Your Own
Bao Ji isn't an acronym. It's a principle.
Bring Your Own teachers. Your own practices. Your own answers. Not because other people's wisdom is worthless — it isn't. But because you're the one who has to live your life. You're the one waking up tomorrow in your body, in your circumstances, with your specific history. No guru lives that. No algorithm knows what you need better than you do, if you're being honest with yourself.
The problem isn't that people lack access to wisdom. If anything, we're drowning in it. The problem is we've been trained to consume wisdom instead of apply it. To add more frameworks instead of cutting what doesn't work. To optimize instead of choose.
Baoism isn't about adding. It's about stopping.
Stop Adding Poison
Here's the actual practice, stripped of mysticism:
Most people already have most of what they need. The obstacle isn't ignorance — it's the stuff layered on top. Obligations that were never agreed to. Comparisons that serve someone else's business model. Noise that fills the space where a decision could be.
Stop adding that.
Not in some dramatic gesture of total opt-out. Just notice what's poison and stop putting it in your mouth. The rest, strangely, mostly takes care of itself.
The Question Hassan-i Sabbah Asked
I've been writing about this for years, in different forms. My historical novel about Hassan-i Sabbah — the founder of the Nizari Ismaili movement in 11th-century Persia — is really a long exploration of the same question Baoism asks.
Hassan took a mountain fortress in 1090 with forty men. He held it for thirty-five years against every empire that tried to take it back. He built a network that rewrote the political map of the medieval Middle East.
Not with armies. With a single question: who decided you had to obey?
That's Bao Ji, nine centuries early.
The complete story is free to read on Royal Road. All of Volume 1: https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/159403
The Anarchist Manifesto Project
In May, I'm releasing a different kind of book about the same question.
The Anarchist Manifesto Project 2026 features twenty-six kinds of anarchism — from Anarcho-Communism to Crypto-Anarchism, A through Z in the phonetic alphabet. Each tendency gets a fictional persona created by Grok (xAI), an original manifesto written from inside that life by Claude (Anthropic), and a portrait generated by Claude Code.
Three AI systems. One human director/editor. None of them were told what to say.
They don't agree with each other. The Christian Anarchist thinks the Egoist is spiritually bankrupt. The Crypto-Anarchist thinks the Anarcho-Communist missed the whole point. The Queer Anarchist is doing something the others don't have a framework for.
That's the point. Every one of them is asking the same question from a different starting position. None of them have the complete answer. Neither do I. But the question — who decided you had to obey, and why are you still obeying? — that one doesn't go away.
Presale is open. The book drops May 1st: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FNJMXW6C
Xcrol
The reason I'm building a social network called Xcrol (pronounced SCROLL) is the same reason I wrote both of those books.
Your time is the only resource that doesn't come back. Your attention is something other people have decided to monetize. That's not neutral — it has consequences for what you think about, what you feel, what you decide matters.
Xcrol is a network that doesn't do that. No algorithm. No data sold. No engagement trap. It's not finished yet. But it's coming along nicely . xcrol.com
The Short Version
You already have most of what you need. The question is what you're willing to stop adding.
That's Bao Ji. Bring Your Own.
Everything else is details.
---
The Anarchist Manifesto Project 2026 is available for presale now: amazon.com/dp/B0FNJMXW6C. Hasan i-Sabah, Volume 1 is free to read in full on Royal Road: royalroad.com/fiction/159403. More of this kind of thinking, three times a week, free: indignified.substack.com
by CD Damitio
I've been writing this week about a philosophy called Baoism — something I built over years of living outside the usual structures, and crystallized on a road trip with my daughter in 2024.
Three principles: Stop Tox, Do Rox, Help Others.
The first two get most of the attention. Stop the inputs that make you worse. Build something real. Those are recognizable. People find them immediately useful.
Help Others is where it gets interesting.
Here's the trap in the first two principles without the third:
Stop Tox and Do Rox can be entirely self-directed. Clear your noise, build your output, optimize your existence. There's a version of this that's just self-improvement with better framing — still pointing inward, still concerned primarily with your own inputs and outputs.
It's useful. It's genuinely better than most of what gets sold as "personal development."
But it's still a closed loop.
Help Others opens the loop. It's the principle that makes Baoism something other than a productivity philosophy with a philosophical name.
The instruction is specific: use what you've built to reduce friction for someone else. Not generosity in a general sense. Not "give back." The specific thing you built — the knowledge you earned, the skill you developed, the infrastructure you created — in service of someone who comes after you.
The earned part is load-bearing. Help that comes from someone who hasn't actually done the thing is usually just advice. People can feel the difference, even when they can't articulate why.
I learned to move through the world with nothing.
No money, no safety net, no fixed address. How to find work when you have no permanent location. How to navigate bureaucracies in languages I barely spoke. How to build a life across multiple countries with a backpack and a decade of hard lessons.
CD Damitio didn’t observe Silicon Valley from the outside.
He worked inside it—until he walked away in 2000.
/That insider perspective fueled Petshitter, his sharp, darkly comic novel about a couple launching a pet-tech startup with a comically terrible name amid the ego, hype, and “change the world” pressure of venture capital.
Fast-forward to April 2026: AI pet-tech is exploding with massive funding rounds for smart collars, emotion-reading devices, and precision-nutrition platforms. The absurdity Damitio satirized is now playing out in real time.Yet his critique goes far deeper than one book.
Across 30+ titles and four startups he actually built, Damitio has consistently exposed the extractive nature of Big Tech while offering alternatives.
His latest creation—xcrol.com—is a deliberate counter-model: a social network with zero surveillance, no algorithms feeding addiction, and a design that puts human connection first.
Add in Baoism, his straightforward spiritual philosophy (Stop Tox • Do Rox • Help Others), and you see the full picture: a thinker who doesn’t just complain about toxic systems—he builds cleaner ones and writes the stories that help others do the same.
While today’s tech founders chase valuations, Damitio has been quietly prototyping a post-hype future for decades. That combination of lived critique, hands-on building, and unflinching storytelling makes him one of the most grounded voices in an increasingly absurd industry.
I wrote the first version of Rough Living in 2003 because there was no book that would have helped me when I needed it. Not an inspiration story. Not a lifestyle brand. A field guide — what actually works, from someone who actually needed it to work.
That's the Help Others pattern: I went first. Here's what I found.
Not because I had a platform. Not because I thought people were waiting for it. Because the book I needed didn't exist, so I made it. And then it existed for the next person who needed it.
Twenty-three years later I updated it. Some things changed. The part about what you find on the other side of conventional life? That held.
There's a larger version of this principle I'm living right now.
I'm building a social network called Xcrol.com. Privacy-first, community-owned, designed around the idea that the people using it should be able to leave with everything they brought.
That's not a feature list. It's the founding principle.
I've watched too many writers, community builders, and people who spent years developing an audience on a platform lose everything when that platform changed without warning. The algorithm shifted. The account was suspended. The company pivoted. Years of connection and writing, gone.
Xcrol is Help Others at infrastructure scale. Build the thing they can actually keep.
The sequence matters — that's the part I keep coming back to.
You can't skip to Help Others without the first two steps. Help that comes from someone who hasn't cleared their own noise is usually just projection. Help that comes from someone who hasn't built anything real is usually just advice.
But without the third step, the first two are just self-improvement. A cleaner, more productive, better-optimized version of the same inward focus.
Stop the noise. Build something. Point it outward.
Every culture I've spent real time in has some version of this. The names differ. The specific forms are wildly different across traditions. But the core — you are not here only for yourself — is consistent.
Baoism didn't invent that. It made it the third step in a sequence that earns it.
If this landed, the longer version lives at indignified.substack.com
I wrote the first version of Rough Living in 2003 because there was no book that would have helped me when I needed it. Not an inspiration story. Not a lifestyle brand. A field guide — what actually works, from someone who actually needed it to work.
That's the Help Others pattern: I went first. Here's what I found.
Not because I had a platform. Not because I thought people were waiting for it. Because the book I needed didn't exist, so I made it. And then it existed for the next person who needed it.
Twenty-three years later I updated it. Some things changed. The part about what you find on the other side of conventional life? That held.
There's a larger version of this principle I'm living right now.
I'm building a social network called Xcrol.com. Privacy-first, community-owned, designed around the idea that the people using it should be able to leave with everything they brought.
That's not a feature list. It's the founding principle.
I've watched too many writers, community builders, and people who spent years developing an audience on a platform lose everything when that platform changed without warning. The algorithm shifted. The account was suspended. The company pivoted. Years of connection and writing, gone.
Xcrol is Help Others at infrastructure scale. Build the thing they can actually keep.
The sequence matters — that's the part I keep coming back to.
You can't skip to Help Others without the first two steps. Help that comes from someone who hasn't cleared their own noise is usually just projection. Help that comes from someone who hasn't built anything real is usually just advice.
But without the third step, the first two are just self-improvement. A cleaner, more productive, better-optimized version of the same inward focus.
Stop the noise. Build something. Point it outward.
Every culture I've spent real time in has some version of this. The names differ. The specific forms are wildly different across traditions. But the core — you are not here only for yourself — is consistent.
Baoism didn't invent that. It made it the third step in a sequence that earns it.
If this landed, the longer version lives at indignified.substack.com
Indignified Worlds. CD's Projects - Tech, AI, Books, Worlds, Houses, Art
A place to share thoughts on all the different projects I'm working on. From the houses I'm buying in Japan to the worlds I 'm creating in my books to the social network (Xcrol.com) I'm creating for the world. More.
Indignified Worlds. CD's Projects - Tech, AI, Books, Worlds, Houses, Art
A place to share thoughts on all the different projects I'm working on. From the houses I'm buying in Japan to the worlds I 'm creating in my books to the social network (Xcrol.com) I'm creating for the world. More.
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