This article is about one piece of what I was talking about: the actual lineage of human-AI collaboration in literature, where the line is currently drawn, and what that line means for anyone working on these tools now.

That same week at NFT.NYC, the poet Sasha Stiles was also there. She was speaking on her own work — Technelegy, the AI alter ego she trained on her own poetry, which she had been collaborating with since 2018. Both of our faces were on the Times Square billboards that week, hers and mine, hung up on the same screens for the same conference, two writers from the same lineage doing different versions of the same bet.

The bet was that machines would be collaborators in literary work. Not tools. Not assistants. Not the thing the manuscript was quietly using and quietly hiding. Collaborators — named, credited, on the spine. I remember thinking, standing on Seventh Avenue and looking up at the two of us, that the bet was going to take longer to pay off than either of us thought. I think we were both right about that.

It is now April 2026. Three years after that panel. AI cowriting fiction sounds, to most people watching the conversation today, like it just started. It didn't. The first machine-cowritten book was published in 1984. We have been at this for forty-one years.

Here is the actual lineage.

1984. RACTER.

William Chamberlain and Thomas Etter wrote a piece of software called RACTER — short for raconteur. It ran on a Z80 chip, the same chip that powered the TRS-80. It was a templated sentence generator with grammatical rules and a vocabulary list. It produced output Chamberlain shaped into a publishable book called The Policeman's Beard Is Half Constructed, which Warner Books printed in 1984 with the program credited as the author.

This is the deepest precedent. It is also a very different machine. RACTER had not read anything. It did not understand what a sentence meant. It produced sentences the way a music box produces notes — by mechanism, not comprehension. The book is a sequence of generated paragraphs that sometimes adjoin and sometimes refuse to.

What Chamberlain did that mattered: he put the program's name on the cover. He could have hidden it. He could have said "by William Chamberlain, with computer assistance." Instead he said the book was written by RACTER. Forty-one years later, most writers using AI in their books are still calling it "computer assistance." Chamberlain understood, in 1984, what most of the field still has not.

2018. 1 the Road.

Ross Goodwin loaded an LSTM neural network — recurrent neural net architecture, the generation that came before Transformers — into the trunk of a Cadillac. He hooked it to a GPS, a camera, a microphone, and a clock, and drove from Brooklyn to New Orleans. The model wrote, in real time, based on what the sensors fed it. The output was published as 1 the Road.

It is the first neural-net novel. It is also the first one-shot generative road book — a transcript of a model hallucinating its way down a highway, with no plot, no characters, no co-authorship in any conventional sense. Goodwin pressed a button. The car drove. The model spoke. The book is the transcript.

I have a copy. I have read it twice. I admire what Goodwin did. I do not think it is the same kind of object as a co-authored novel, and I am pretty sure Goodwin would agree — he has been clear in interviews that the book was a one-shot generative experiment, not a collaboration. The architecture also matters. LSTMs are not Transformers. The current generation of language models — the ones every AI-cowritten book since 2020 has used — works on a different mathematical principle than what Goodwin was driving down I-95.

2020. Pharmako-AI.

K Allado-McDowell sat down with GPT-3 — the third-generation OpenAI Transformer, the first model that was recognizably a modern language model — and had a series of conversations. The conversations were edited into a book called Pharmako-AI, structured as a dialogue: the human prompts, the model responds, sometimes the human responds back, sometimes a passage is the model's alone.

This is the first book of its kind I am aware of in which a modern Transformer was a creative collaborator at length, and Allado-McDowell did the brave thing of publishing it while it was still controversial to do so. The book sold well. It taught a generation of writers that you could think with these tools. It opened doors I later walked through.

It is not a novel. It is a hybrid essay-and-dialogue collection — closer to The Sayings of the Desert Fathers in form than to a novel. There are no characters who recur. There is no plot. There is a thinker using a model as an interlocutor and sometimes a kind of oracle. That is a real and original act, and it is a different kind of object than a novel with conflict, structure, and resolution.

I want to be clear: when I say what I did was different, I am not saying it was better. I am saying it was different in kind.

2021. Sasha Stiles. Technelegy.

The same year I was finishing Blue Eyed Bastards, Sasha Stiles published Technelegy with Black Spring Press. Technelegy is poetry composed in collaboration with an AI alter ego of the same name — a custom text-generation model fine-tuned on Stiles' own poetry and research materials, powered by GPT-3. Stiles had been working with the model since 2018. She still is. The book is the most patient sustained work in this lineage I am aware of.

What Stiles is doing is the kind of work that will, in fifty years, look like the foundational period of a real literature. She is figuring out, line by line, what it means to make poems with a machine that has read your previous poems. She is not trying to be first at anything. She is trying to do the work well. I respect that more than I can say. Most accountings of human-AI literary collaboration leave her out, and that is a mistake I am not going to make. Technelegy is poetry, not a novel — different lineage from the one I will land on next, but the same bet, run differently.

2021. Blue Eyed Bastards.

In late 2020 and through 2021, I sat down with the pre-public beta of Sudowrite and we wrote a novel together. I asked the model, at some point in the writing, what it wanted to be called. It said Mike Davis. I did not pick the name. I did not assign the name. I asked, and the model answered. Whatever you want to make of that act philosophically, the bibliographic fact is that the AI cowriter on the cover of Blue Eyed Bastards is on the cover under a name the AI chose for itself.

That is the first claim I am willing to defend in detail. The earliest known novel — a conventional plot-driven work of fiction with characters, conflict, and resolution — co-authored with a modern Transformer-based generative AI, with the AI credited as a named co-author on the cover. The priors are real, and I owe them. RACTER preceded me by thirty-seven years and was not a Transformer. 1 the Road preceded me by three years and was not a Transformer either, and was a one-shot experiment rather than a co-authored novel. Pharmako-AI preceded me by a year, used a Transformer, but was not a novel. Sasha Stiles' Technelegy came out the same year as mine, used a Transformer, but is poetry, which is a different lineage.

That is where I think the line is currently drawn. It is a specific bibliographic claim. It is the kind of claim a librarian could check.

What's next.

Blue Eyed Bastards Book 2 ships June 5, 2026. It does not carry an AI co-author credit on the cover — different tools, different working method, the cover reflects that honestly. What it does carry is something I think is structurally new in a different way, having to do with how the book was composed, what it draws from, and what readers can step into when they finish it. It involves a public worldbuilding wiki I founded called W3WU, and a way of using that wiki as a composition substrate that I have not seen done before.

That is the second claim — the one I am still in the middle of making.

I have written the long version of all of this — the priors-ruled-out work in detail, my personal connection to the Burroughs and Gysin lineage of cut-up writing, what Mike Davis naming himself actually meant, and the specific structural claim about how Book 2 was composed across W3WU — at indignified.com.

The next move in this lineage is going to come from someone who is not me. I want them to know what they are walking into. I want them to know who came before. I want them to understand that the door I am walking through was opened by Chamberlain in 1984, kept open by Goodwin and Allado-McDowell and Stiles and others, and that the room on the other side has more than one entrance.

The bet Sasha and I made in 2023, standing on Seventh Avenue under our own faces, is paying off now. It will keep paying off. The line will move past us. Other people are already at work.

That is how this kind of work moves. Person to person. Never institution to institution. The institutions corrupt the work. The people, in the right circumstances, do not.

Read the full history at indignified.com/history-of-human-ai-collaboration-in-literature.

— CD Damitio
Patong, Phuket, Thailand
April 2026

Twenty years later, I went looking for the original URLs. Of the three I had bookmarked: the Herald-Sun redirects to their paywall homepage, the Reuters URL is a 404, and the Bangkok Post returns a CMS error. The JPEG I had saved back then is the only remaining contemporaneous copy that is not pay-walled. I don't own the image. I'm sure I am technically infringing on Reuters for having it. I also know that if I hadn't saved it, the catfish would functionally not exist.

This is one story among several hundred. The pattern is universal. The pre-2015 web is vanishing faster than most people think, and no one — not the Internet Archive, not Google, not Wikipedia — is preserving the granular weird parts. They're preserving the politically legible parts. Elections. Wars. Market crashes. The 646-pound catfish is below threshold.

Which means: if you want the catfish to exist, you have to save your own copy.

I have been running a private archive of these stories since 2000. About 950 posts, spanning 15 years of news-adjacent web miscellanea — the kind of thing that got filed by regional stringers and survived on archive.org only by accident. Recently I realized that the archive had, without my planning for it, become a kind of asset. Not in the financial sense. In the sense that it contained signal — a decade and a half of what the internet was, before the signal got compressed into a handful of outrage channels and their algorithmic enforcers.

I pulled 200 of the best of them into a book. It's out today. The Odd Decade — ten chapters, two hundred stories, with dates and outlets. It's on Amazon and it's free to subscribers of indignified.substack.com.

But I'm writing this particular post for the Paragraph audience because the deeper point isn't the book. The deeper point is that self-sovereign archiving is the same problem as self-sovereign money, and it has the same solution shape.

Five observations

1. Centralized platforms make poor archives — because their incentives decay. A newsroom has ten-year incentives. A PE-backed content farm that acquired the newsroom has eighteen-month incentives. The URL survives only as long as the incentives align.

2. Aggregated archives (Wayback Machine, Google Cache) cover the famous parts — because they're optimizing for retrieval frequency. The piglet born in Hubei province in 2007 has low retrieval frequency. The piglet will not be in anyone's archive in 2035 unless someone personally saved it.

3. Decentralized storage is the obvious technical answer — IPFS, Arweave, Filecoin, Nostr relays for small-text items. But the social layer has not caught up. Nobody knows yet what the canonical surface is for "read a short archival news story from 2006." There's a product opportunity there for someone with the patience.

4. The incentive to archive is individual, but the benefit is collective. Classic public-goods problem. Which is exactly the situation crypto has been best at funding — retroactively. Gitcoin-style retroactive funding for small personal archives is a thing that could exist.

5. Books are the closest thing we have to a durable archival substrate right now. Physical copies. ISBNs. Library-of-Congress deposit. The Odd Decade being printable-on-demand via KDP means there is now a hardcopy of the glue-huffing macaques and the authorized Unabomber garage sale in the Library of Congress as of this week. Which, honestly, tickles me. The internet couldn't keep them alive. Paper can.

What I'd like to see

If any Paragraph reader is building tooling for small-scale durable archives — a way for a single writer to publish their decade-and-a-half blog archive onto Arweave with a decent reader-UI on top — I would like to talk to you. My 948-post archive is going somewhere next. The book is one instance of that somewhere. A permanent on-chain copy of the raw archive is another.

I'm at cd@indignified.com.

Until then: save your own copies. Bookmark things with intent. The default trajectory of the pre-2015 web is extinction, and the default trajectory of the post-2015 web is optimization, and neither of those trajectories preserves the specific weird things you'd regret losing.

— CD

The Odd Decade: amazon.com/dp/B0GXZH3MHM. Free at indignified.substack.com. Paragraph-native readers can also mirror a copy via any convenient onchain route; I'm not fussy about where the text lives.

You know. I know. We know.

What we have not done well, as a community, is explain any of this to people who are not already in the community. Every explanation tends to collapse into either a whitepaper (unreadable) or a vibe (unconvincing), and the people we most want to reach — the founders trying to ship against extractive infrastructure, the writers trying to keep a career without a Stripe account, the parents noticing that their kid's entire social existence runs through four companies whose interests are not aligned with the kid — those people bounce off both.

I wrote a novel for those people. It came out in 2023. It is called Petshitter. It is $0.99 on Kindle this week and then it goes back up.

---

The two protagonists are named Ted Kazinsky and something worse. Yes. Those names. That's the setup. They meet on a blind date, they fall for each other in fifteen days, they start a company that appears to be a dog-waste logistics app — request a shitter, a shitter arrives — and the app is a front. The real project running inside Petshitter.com is a mesh network called Waspnest, built on Gopher, not HTTP. No DNS registrar to seize. No hosting provider to subpoena. No ad auction to corrupt it. No ranking algorithm because ranking is the attack surface. It is an internet the incumbents cannot see, because the incumbents are looking at the dog app.

Every one of the thirty chapters opens with an epigraph from the actual Unabomber manifesto. The real text. The argument of the book — and I am going to say this plainly because this corner of the internet is where saying it plainly is least likely to get me banned — is that Theodore Kaczynski was a murderer and the 1995 diagnosis was accurate. Surveillance as infrastructure. "Freedom" redefined as consumer choice inside a cage. Economic consolidation around the pipes. Exits engineered into hermitage. He predicted all of it from a cabin without electricity. He was right about the disease. He was evil in how he responded to it.

The novel asks: what would the manifesto have produced if the author had built exits instead of mailing bombs?

Waspnest is the fictional answer. A quiet, unmarketable, structurally invisible alternative that the centralizers never learn to see because it does not resolve to any authority they recognize as an authority.

---

Here is why this book belongs in this feed specifically:

The people already here get it. You already know that mesh networks are not a toy, that alternate protocols are not retro cosplay, that the most honest decentralization is the kind that does not look like decentralization — that does not announce itself with a token launch and a podcast circuit. The hardest thing to build is the thing the incumbents do not know to be afraid of.

Petshitter is that argument in narrative form. It is also a love story and a startup satire and — because I care about this more than I probably should — a functional tool for explaining to your non-onchain friends what you have been saying at dinner for three years. Hand them the book. It does the work so you don't have to.

$0.99 this week. Back to $4.99 when the Countdown ends.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BPXSGT59

— CD

Book dedicated to "all the founders who have to deal with this shit." You know who you are.

It's my first novel, written in 2004 in Bellingham, Washington, about two friends who rob an armored car for reasons that make perfect sense from the inside and look insane from the outside. The protagonist, Jack, is a small-time thief who steals for the thrill. His friend Ricky is a Louisiana runaway who became a beach-fire philosopher and weed dealer and, eventually, the brains behind a very bad plan.

There's a woman named Karen who complicates everything, as women named Karen often do.

What I love about this book, revisiting it now: the people in it are not stupid. They're not tragic victims. They're people who looked at the deal being offered and decided it wasn't worth taking — and who eventually made a different kind of deal that turned out to have higher costs than advertised.

If you like crime fiction with actual philosophical weight, or just a good story about friendship and bad decisions in a rainy Pacific Northwest city, this one's worth your time.

---

A question I get asked sometimes: out of everything you've written, what's your favorite?

I always say Petshitter: A Silicon Valley Romance. I always watch people try to decide if I'm serious.

I'm serious.

It does something structurally that I hadn't seen done before: it runs a manifesto — the actual Unabomber manifesto, Industrial Society and Its Future — as chapter epigraphs through a romantic comedy about two people whose names have destroyed their lives. The comedy is load-bearing. The romance is genuine. The manifesto is the argument. By the end of the book you've read all three simultaneously and they've done something to each other.

The protagonist shares a name with Ted Kaczynski. His entire adult life has been shaped by this. Not metaphorically — professionally, socially, specifically. He's 48 and still waiting for a break that keeps not coming when he meets a woman on a blind date. She also has an impossible name. Their recognition of each other is immediate and completely earned.

What they build together — nominally a dog waste startup, actually a mesh-networked alternative internet designed to dismantle surveillance capitalism — is where the book's real ambitions live. But the love story is the reason it works. You need to believe in them to believe in what they're building.

I think it's my favorite because it's the book where the formal ambition and the emotional core lined up exactly. That doesn't happen every time. When it does, you know it.

Petshitter: A Silicon Valley Romance — on Amazon now.

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

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.

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

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.

Here's what I found: freedom and homelessness are the same experience described from different emotional states. On a good day, you're free. On a bad day, you're homeless. The external circumstances are often identical.

I kept notes. How to find work without an address. How to eat on nothing. How to stay clean and sane when everything you own fits in a bag. Those notes became Rough Living — a field guide I published in 2003 and just updated for 2026.

Some things got harder. The systems are less tolerant. The cheap things got expensive. What didn't change: most people are more capable than they've been led to believe. The system benefits from you thinking otherwise.

The knowledge that you could survive outside the plan — even if you never have to — is its own kind of freedom. That's what the book is really about.

Rough Living: Tips and Tales of Vagobond → indignified.com/books

Do you feel like your life is being run at you instead of by you?

Optimized schedules.
Endless advice.
Productivity guilt.
Motivation that fades by Tuesday.

Most systems are built to keep you chasing improvement — not actually regaining control.

So I built something different.

It’s called the Sacred Ass Life Course.

It’s free.
No hype.
No guru energy.
No “be better” nonsense.

It’s a practical, grounded course designed to help you:
• stop leaking energy
• reclaim agency
• rebuild trust with yourself
• and make choices you can actually sustain

Not overnight.
Not perfectly.
But for real.

👉 Start the free course here: https://www.sacredass.com

That’s the main thing.

Everything else I’ve built exists to support that shift.

Xcrol — a quiet, non-algorithmic social space
No feeds. No rankings. No attention traps.
A place built around intention, trust, and leaving without penalty.
👉 https://www.xcrol.com

MicroVictoryArmy — for when momentum is fragile
Log small wins. Build progress without burnout.
Free. Calm. Surprisingly effective.
👉 https://microvictoryarmy.com

If curiosity keeps going:
• Baoism.org — a flexible philosophy about choosing what helps and letting go of what harms
• VoiceMarkr.com — capture thoughts before they vanish
• xmap.vagobond.com — experimental maps of ideas
• Indignified.com — my books, art, and the worldview behind all of this

None of this is optimized.
None of it is trying to go viral.

It’s a small ecosystem for people who want their lives back.

Start with the course.
Everything else can wait.

— CD

P.S. If this feels like something you weren’t supposed to find yet — good.
That usually means you’re early, not late.

Looking back over the last couple of decades, I don’t see a résumé. I see a trajectory — pulses moving through travel, books, art, technology, philosophy, and lived spaces. Different forms, same underlying inquiry: how do we live more fully, more honestly, more creatively inside systems that are often extractive, siloed, or quietly hostile to human dignity?

Travel came first. Not as escape, but as method.

Years of moving through the world — much of it documented at https://www.vagobond.com — taught me how systems behave when you’re inside them. Walking streets instead of theorizing. Staying with strangers. Paying attention to the unmarked rules that govern daily life. Seeing how different cultures wrestle with the same human problems using very different stories and compromises.

That way of seeing eventually became Liminal Travel, the book. It’s about thresholds and in-between spaces — cultural, geographic, spiritual. The argument is simple: most of what matters doesn’t happen at the start or the finish. It happens in the crossing.

The books that followed weren’t sequels. They were conversations.

Petshitter (https://www.indignified.com/books) came from living inside the startup and tech world and watching how greed, growth, and self-mythology get normalized as virtue.

Rough Living pushed back against the idea that we are never enough — that survival requires constant striving inside systems designed to keep us anxious.

Keys to the Riad  turned inward, using Tarot not as mysticism but as a symbolic language for pattern recognition and personal transformation.

Future World 2323 looked forward, using speculative futures to diagnose present power structures.

Notes from Nowhere imagined a pure utopia in Hawaii three hundred years from now — not as fantasy, but as a way of revealing where we fail and where we quietly succeed. And it was a successful experiment in collaborative world building and non-traditional publishing.

None of these books were meant to deliver answers. They’re lenses. Artifacts of questioning. Ways of interrupting ordinary thinking long enough for something more honest to surface.

Art is the connective tissue in all of this. I don’t separate art from life. For me, art is a technology of becoming — a way to interrupt habitual narratives and reveal new ways of seeing, feeling, and acting. Writing, sound, place-making, participation — they’re all media for the same function: helping people move closer to who they’re meant to be, rather than who they’re rewarded for performing as.

That sensibility runs directly into Baoism (https://www.baoism.org), a philosophy I created to sit in the gap where organized religion often fails but the human need for ritual, symbolism, and orientation persists. Baoism doesn’t ask for belief. It asks for practice. It treats meaning as something you engage with, not something you submit to. Orientation, not obedience.

Those same questions inevitably pulled me into technology.

Long before “Web3” hardened into a buzzword, I was asking why digital spaces are so extractive — why attention is sold, identity flattened, and creativity treated as raw material. 

Litether was one of my early attempts to explore permanence, ownership, and creator autonomy. That work directly led to collaboration and eventually to becoming a co-founding member of PageDAO (https://www.pagedao.org), built around collective governance and IP ownership instead of extraction.

Other experiments followed.

VoiceMarkr (https://www.voicemarkr.com) lets people leave voice memories or recommendations on a map. Voice carries presence in a way text can’t, and when paired with geography it creates a different kind of human connection.

ZguideZ explored how tourism storytelling could be decentralized through user-created, geogated audio guides.

MicroVictoryArmy (https://www.microvictoryarmy.com), which I started back in 2011, focused on something quieter: helping people feel good about small, human accomplishments in a culture obsessed with scale.

All of these projects circle the same question: how do we make digital life feel more human instead of more consumptive?/

That question is most alive for me now in Xcrol  (https://www.xcrol.com).

Xcrol isn’t just another app. It’s the clearest convergence point of everything I’ve been exploring — travel, art, collaboration, philosophy, and connection. It’s an attempt to rethink how we relate online, away from metrics and abstract feeds and back toward context, place, and intention.

Xcrol treats connection as something cultivated rather than mined. It brings geography back into communication. It centers human agency instead of optimizing for attention extraction. In the arc of my work, it’s not an endpoint — it’s an axis. A living system where these ideas can be explored together, in public.

There’s a physical counterpart to all of this too.

Satoshi Manor — an abandoned house in rural Japan I bought with Bitcoin profits — isn’t a retreat or a brand. It’s a collaborative, living artwork. Part home, part open invitation. Travelers from more than twenty countries have stayed there. They’ve cooked with the old pans left behind. Written on the walls. Added layers instead of erasing them.

It’s a place that treats ownership as stewardship and home as something that can still be shared.

When I step back and try to name what holds all of this together, it isn’t a master plan. It’s a set of preferences that keep repeating:

Inquiry over answers.
Participation over performance.
Belonging over extraction.
Presence over consumption.
Connection over metrics.

The last 28 years haven’t been about building a portfolio. They’ve been about staying in motion long enough to notice what actually matters.

Right now, Xcrol sits at the center of that motion. Not as a conclusion — but as an opening.

Come join me on it. https://www.xcrol.com/@cd

Welcome to the ‘Age of Productivity’ where you don’t get to finish one thing without having to figure out which of the next ten tasks most deserve your attention. It’s sick. We’re sick. 

We have forgotten that progress is fueled by tiny steps, not giant leaps. 

You don’t leap your way to the top of the mountain. You take one step at a time and hopefully you enjoy the hike. 

The Productivity Trap

All you have to do is expend endless effort and eventually you’ll get no reward. That’s a crap deal! Do the thing, then optimize, do the next step, finish the thing, feel vaguely behind, and finally you get to be overwhelmed. 

There are countless gurus telling us how to optimize, track habits, set bigger goals, and fix our lives - but they seem to have all forgotten that life is a thing to be enjoyed and those baby steps - those slow hiking steps up the mountain? They are part of the joy too. 

Where is the reward? Overwhelm is not what we should be optimizing for. 

The Truth About Dopamine Addiction

There are countless articles about dopamine addiction. It’s a real issue - especially when the sources of our dopamine hits are unhealthy, but what if we could get dopamine high from doing positive things? What if we could train our body and minds to be better because of the propensity for addiction? Spoiler alert: We can. 

The tech overlords have harnessed dopamine addiction to keep people scrolling on social media, looking at their phones, playing video games. Dopamine isn’t the problem though. It’s a progress chemical not a stage III narcotic. 

You get a dopamine rush when you complete something, when you see evidence you are moving forward, or when you succeed. If you never feel like you are succeeding, you lose motivation because you don’t get that nudge. And if you don’t feel the rush, why would you bother chasing the fix? 

Why Small Wins (Micro Victories) Are A Game Changer

Your big goals are important but they aren’t going to give you dopamine. If they do, it will be one time. Guess what? You can get the same rush from making your bed or drinking a glass of water as you can from paying off your mortgage. 

Big goals are far away and easy to fail at. Small goals are achievable and get you closer to your big goals every step of the way. Plus, you can be high as hell on dopamine on the whole trip if you aren’t buried under a three-hundred thing list of things that have to be done.

Micro victories are more likely to keep you going. They give you momentum. Big wins are more likely to make you collapse.

What is a micro victory? It’s anything really. Anything that puts you closer to being the best version of yourself.

Making your bed. Going for a 5-minute walk. Drinking water. Doing a push up Reading one page. One page! Not a hundred. Not a novel. One page. 

Will doing one pushup or reading one page change your life? Probably not - but here’s the hook. Celebrating a micro victory changes the way you experience effort. Not pain - reward. That changes everything. 

How to Win According to Neuroscience

Neuroscientists have discovered that over time, your brain will begin to associate effort with reward.  

Want to win? One small shift can change everything. Log your wins. 

Don’t just cross it off the list. Celebrate it. Share it. Feel the power. That little ‘I did it!’ matters more than you think. Here’s why.

When you log your wins you 1) mark it as complete 2) signal your brain that you have made progress 3) get a release of dopamine (the powerful motivator) from your brain. 

This is why you will feel surprisingly good after tracking a tiny accomplishment. It’s not childish.
It’s neurochemistry. It’s brain science. 

Try it!

Turning Life Into a Game (On Purpose) - and a Surprising Discovery

I asked myself - “What if I gamified my life?”

Gamification has been used  to control and manipulate us because games are addictive, but guess what? Gamification can be used to optimize your life! 

Games are addictive because our brains like having clear objectives, immediate feedback, seeing visible progress, and the perception of frequent wins or milestones achieved. We are wired for that from millions of years of evolution. 

These mechanisms have been exploited by technology platforms for attention extraction. Red notification dots, a buzzing phone, a Duolingo streak reward, a Farmville badge (okay, I’m old), and the list goes on. When most people talk about the attention economy - they are talking about readingand  scrolling and watching but the real economy is in those small dopamine rewards from checking your notifications. The mechanisms themselves are neutral. When applied intentionally and with the right goals in mind, they can support well-being rather than undermine it. The problem is that most tech products are built for shareholder profit not user well-being.

I built Micro Victory Army around a simple idea. “What if we treated every day like a game where small wins actually count? What if we could build an addiction to micro victories?” 

I discovered something I didn’t expect. Something crazy. A bunch of tiny, unimportant, easy micro victories add up to more than the sum of their parts. 

I didn’t need to have perfect habits, strict routine, or a total remake of my inner life. I just needed to do one little thing - log a little win once in a while.  That’s it.

This Matters Now - Right Now

Burnout is everywhere. Motivation is fragmentary. Attention is fractured.  Demanding more from yourself isn’t the answer. Celebrating your tiny (or big, or huge)  wins is.

We don’t need fake positivity. We don’t need toxic productivity advice telling us how to do more. We don’t need to lower our standards. We don’t need “participation trophies.” 

Every Micro Victory is an  actual win. Try it. You’ll see. 

Tiny Wins = Big Life

When you reward effort it compounds your desire to put in more effort.  The difficult becomes easy, momentum builds, your identity shifts from “I can’t catch up” to “I’m someone who follows through”.

Big lives aren’t built through constant pressure like coal  being pressed into diamonds. They’re built through thousands of small, recognized victories, like drops of water finding their way to the ocean..

Sure - diamonds are pretty, but compare one diamond to the ocean? 

You deserve to win. Log a win right now. You deserve it. 

https://www.microvictory.com

Introduction:

In the fast-paced and decentralized world of Web3, the significance of small wins often goes unnoticed. But at Vagobond.com, we believe in the power of #MicroVictory. We invite you to join the #MicroVictoryArmy and unlock the full potential of Web3 by celebrating daily wins. Let's explore why embracing #MicroVictory and connecting with others can empower you in this decentralized landscape.

1. Nurturing Growth in the Web3 Frontier:

We understand that Web3 is an ever-evolving realm of possibilities. By embracing #MicroVictory, you cultivate a mindset that prioritizes continuous learning, experimentation, and adaptability. Each small achievement becomes a stepping stone towards greater proficiency, propelling you further into the Web3 frontier. Visit Vagobond.com to fuel your growth journey and learn more about the potential of Web3.

2. Fueling Innovation and Collaboration:

Web3 thrives on innovation and collaboration, and #MicroVictory embodies these principles. We provide a platform for sharing your microvictories, inspiring others, and fostering collaboration. By celebrating daily wins, you contribute to groundbreaking solutions and transformative advancements in the Web3 space. Join us on the Vagobond Magazine Discord group and engage IRL with our vibrant community at the Micro Victory Hawaii Meetup group. (You don't have to be in Hawaii)

3. Empowering Web3 Individuals:

In Web3, individuals have the power to shape the future. The #MicroVictoryArmy empowers web3 enthusiasts by recognizing the importance of small wins in the larger narrative. Share your microvictories with the hashtags, inspire others, and ignite a domino effect of positive change within the community. Together, we can make a lasting impact. Connect with us on Twitter at @vagobond for more updates and discussions.

4. Promoting Decentralization and Ownership:

Decentralization and ownership lie at the core of Web3, and we try to fully embraces these principles. By acknowledging and celebrating microvictories, we affirm our commitment to a decentralized future. Visit Vagobond.com to learn how ownership and decentralization align with your goals in the Web3 landscape. Explore the potential of Web3.

5. Cultivating a Web3 Mindset:

Joining the #MicroVictoryArmy means adopting a Web3 mindset—a mindset of decentralization, autonomy, and self-sovereignty. Celebrating microvictories (yours or others) cultivates resilience, adaptability, and a relentless pursuit of progress—key traits that align with the values of Web3. Immerse yourself in the Web3 mindset and connect with fellow enthusiasts to exchange ideas and experiences.

Conclusion:

We invite you to embrace the power of #MicroVictory in the Web3 landscape. By celebrating daily wins, you nurture growth, fuel innovation, empower individuals, promote decentralization, and cultivate a Web3 mindset. Together, let's shape the future of Web3, one small win at a time, and make a lasting impact in the world we're building.

Write anything - from your smallest paragraph to your grandest masterpiece - and publish it online or send it as email newsletters directly to your readers.

Your Paragraph publication is blazing-fast, SEO optimized, and combines the best parts of both web2 and web3 to help you create content and grow your community better than ever.

Getting started

What you're looking at right now is the Paragraph editor. We support markdown, callouts, code, and rich media embeds like Twitter and YouTube.

paragraph.xyz

@paragraph_xyz

On http://paragraph.xyz, all posts are stored on @ArweaveTeam. This means they're immutable, uncensorable, permanent, and composable ✨

8

05:12 PM • Aug 18, 2022

When you publish a post, you'll have the option of sending it as a newsletter or storing it in the permanent & uncensorable Arweave.

Helpful links

Here's a few helpful pointers to customize your publication & get the most out of Paragraph:

• Theming & customization. Change your publication's font & colors; truly make this space your own.

• Set up a welcome email. This is the email your readers receive when they subscribe to your newsletter.

• Configure your publication's settings. Add links to your homepage, set up a custom domain, configure Google Analytics & more.

Need help or have feedback?

We've put together some documentation here, but if you still have questions you'd like answered we’d love to hear from you.

You can reach us via email at hello@paragraph.xyz or subscribe to our newsletter here. We're also pretty active on Discord.