#initiatives that once begged now find themselves being asked, being invited to partner with the Market. The question now shifts from ‘how to get funded’ toward how to become something the long money can contract with
#the Market is the adversary or simply absent from the equation. This is the part of the journey where every regen initiative struggles through funding challenges. Anyone involved in this work for any length of time knows this struggle all too well.
It’s in this stage that the tough lesson is learned: the initiative that has to beg from the system it opposes remains small, ineffective, and exhausted
#Stage Two: Repair in Opposition
In this stage, passionate individuals end their involvement in protests and start doing the work themselves
#Stage 1: necessary, but ultimately ineffective in accomplishing much more than raising awareness. No change will come about as a result of any of these protests
From Japan to Europe, same challenges ahead: reduce bureaucracy, promote risk-taking (entrepreneurship), rebuild local communities that can last.
#The projects that work here won’t be the ones that scale fastest. They’ll be the ones built to last.
#Japan doesn’t need a new kind of country, but it does need to reduce its bureaucracies, promote risk-taking, and adapt to the technological pace of the world, in ways that still fit in its unique cultural context.
#Bullish Japan
The raw material is unusually good. Houses are cheap, foreigners can still buy them, and the state already has policies for part-time belonging and remote workers. Daily life is safe, affordable and well run, which matters more to most people than ideology. AI is making small-team infrastructure cheap. And fandom has already shown that Japanese networks will travel to a place they love.
There’s also a cultural fit people underrate. Japan already practices shared baths (onsens), neighbourhood festivals, and group clean-ups. Collectivist cultures tend to orient decision-making and growth for the group, over the individual.
A node that joins those rituals instead of inventing its own could settle in faster here than in most Western towns. And the country’s problems are exactly the ones these projects claim to solve: empty houses, lonely people, and towns that need new residents.
#keeping takers out matters more than recruiting saints, and that founders need to protect the givers before the whole culture tips
#the usual arc: a founder starts something, carries it, burns out, and the project dies unless others intentionally take on the work. The fix is boring and necessary: clear roles, clear expectations, and taking care of the people who do the invisible work.
#permanence starts with land and a working relationship with the host state. Only then can you recruit from the cloud at scale. Cloud and land go together, but securing land is a legitimizing first step
#the principal-agent problem. The people who pay or decide (principals) aren’t always the people doing the work (agents), and their interests drift apart unless roles are spelled out and enforced.
#Japan has houses looking for people, and the internet has people looking for a place
#Adult diapers have outsold baby diapers here for over a decade
#Japan is the most futuristic country I’ve lived in, and also the most haunted by its own past. The trains run on time, the food is cheap and good, and the streets are safe at 2AM. It also has more empty houses than it knows what to do with, and fewer newborns every year.
#A long time ago, I described Elon Musk as a bullshitter who delivers. This is the perfect expression of that. This car was first shown a decade ago, with another stunt, and it never shipped. Now there’s another stunt, and another huge wave of PR and admiration.
But meanwhile, there’s the scaled car company, and the self-landing rockets!
Henry Ford was a brilliant industrialist, a terrible manager and a racist piece of shit. Several things can be true at once.
#Bluesky and Mastodon are too small for most people to care about — and, worse, they are the networks where politics are, in my experience, unavoidable.
#I see more interesting posts on X than I do on Threads, Bluesky, and Mastodon combined. I wish that weren’t so but it is.
#There are hundreds of interesting people and accounts I follow that post on X very regularly and do not post anywhere else at all
#there has been a substantial increase in the number of solopreneurs earning over $100,000 in our index, but an even larger increase in the number earning at higher income thresholds, with a clear acceleration since 2023. More than twice as many solopreneurs earned over $1 million in 2025 than in 2023, and close to three times as many crossed $5 million and $10 million.
Sure you can now build a business alone with AI. But life sucks when you are alone. Entrepreneurs need to switch gear from making money to hire people, to making money to build community. Success is how much you get to contribute back to the community.
#let us remember that misfortunes invite resilience, and resilience invites growth
#It is painful to reflect on the hours we spent on Artizen’s gamified funding mechanism. In retrospect, I wish we spent those hours working on a more reliable, sustainable funding strategy
#The hub’s defining feature will be its ability to serve multiple members of a household. It is designed to recognize who is speaking to it or approaching it, and then display personalized content and provide answers based on that person’s data and accounts
We are entering the era of collective devices. And with that, an entirely new category of applications not for individuals but for communities.
#we have built an incentive system that makes decollaboration the rational choice
#High-quality ideas are slow to generate, and historically much of that slow generation happened between people: at the whiteboard, in the corridor
#the output is becoming cheap, and it is the thinking together that is becoming precious
#certain frictions in learning and thinking, effortful retrieval, delayed feedback, the struggle to get an idea onto the page in your own words, are not obstacles to durable understanding but the mechanism of it. Remove the difficulty for the sake of comfort, and you do not get the same understanding faster. You get less of it, delivered more smoothly.