My Internet

Last Friday I updated my little nook: andytrattner.com. My professional identity and internet persona have evolved in a new direction. Along with moving to SF, this post-Shuffle chapter merits a shift from my previous page.

I love the internet.

Just like language and money, the internet is one of those incredible systems that links us all. Specifically, it gives us a home and a voice.

Before the internet, you could have phone calls and write letters. You could send documents back and forth by pony. You could read the newspaper on your doorstep, an impressive feat pre-Amazon. You could go to the library.

But you might not know what book you wanted, and searching for it would be costly relative to today. Bringing in a candidate to look over their resume pulled from their briefcase is vastly more intensive, and perhaps lower signal, than scanning LinkedIn + GitHub.

The internet liquifies books into pixel streams that plug into our eyeballs at the speed of light. Ideas are no longer caged, frictionful, held behind artificial barriers from our brains.

(or from LLMs, which in a sense were born from the internet. And soon AI will remove even more constraints on human creativity, by many orders of magnitude.)

It takes a bit of effort to upload a Youtube video or write a blog post or make a web page. But now we as individuals are the barrier—rather than the world around us.

As far as I know, Seth Godin has been saying this the most clearly for the longest. We each have the opportunity, every morning, to wake up and try again. To do better or to double down. To live our best lives, online or off.

I'm going on a deep work retreat with a dozen founders for the month of October. I bought a few extra copies of The Practice to gift around. It's my favorite, Seth's condensed and most comprehensive teachings. A bible for internet dwellers, perhaps. I'll conclude with a couple powerful and relevant excerpts below.

After being in Ecuador and Singapore since 2020, I'm grateful to be an American again and to live accordingly. I wholeheartedly embrace free speech, as evidenced by this daily blog.

Software has eaten the world. The crazy thing is, whether we like it or not, we are all internet dwellers now.

When you have no real choice but to grow up eating something or singing something, then you do it.

If culture is sufficient to establish what we eat, how we speak, and ten thousand other societal norms, why isn't it able to teach us a process to make art? Isn't it possible for the culture to normalize goal setting and passion and curiosity and the ability to pursuade?

It can.

And you don't have to wait for it to happen. You can begin now.

...For a very long time, people have been telling you that you didn't have the right paperwork, weren't chosen, weren't good enough.

And now, perhaps, you see that it's all been up to you. In fact, it's up to each of us.

Where is the fuel to keep us going?

Anger gets you only so far, and then it destroys you. Jealousy might get you started, but it will fade. Greed seems like a good idea until you discover that it eliminates all of your joy.

The path forward is about curiosity, generosity, and connection. These are the three foundations of art. Art is a tool that gives us the ability to make things better and to create something new on behalf of those who will use it to create the next thing.

Human connection is exponential: it scales as we create it, weaving together culture and possibility where none used to exist.

You have everything you need to make magic. You always have.

Go make a ruckus.

–Seth Godin, The Practice (228-256)