New Ferality
Seeking new ways of being wild in new nature
On March 1, I will have been a free agent for 15 years. In February 28, 2011, I said goodbye to my colleagues at Xerox, where I’d been a researcher for the previous five years. It was my first and last real job. I’d actually gone partly feral a couple of years earlier, by going full remote, but going truly untethered was still quite a shock to my system, accustomed as I had become to benevolent institutional environments for a decade at that point (I was 36).
We’re in a very different world today. One that makes me deeply tired in some ways. The spiritually nourishing rewilding environment I jumped into in 2011 has become domesticated and gentrified in ways that have quietly and insidiously reversed some of my hard-won ferality. I’ve become redomesticated to some extent, and I don’t like it.
It is becoming increasingly hard to tell the free-agent economy and the paycheck economy apart now, on both the indie consulting side and the “creator economy” side.
It is interesting to reread my going-indie post from March 1, 2011, Where the Wild Thoughts Are. This bit in particular:
…let me tell you about the one thing I have sort of worked out: a business philosophy. I call it my “Wild Thoughts” business philosophy, and it was put to the test the very week I sketched it out on the proverbial paper-napkin: two friends independently sent me the same provocative article that’s been doing the rounds, Julien Smith’s The Future of Blogs is Paid Access [this link appears to have bit-rotted now]. Reading it, I immediately realized that this was one decision about the future of Ribbonfarm that I could not postpone. For a variety of reasons, if I was going to consider paid access, I’d have to decide now.
I won’t keep you guessing: I decided against paid access or walled gardens of any sort. Ribbonfarm and the Be Slightly Evil email list [retired] are going to remain free. There will be no paywalls, no premium content and no paid members-only communities.
This was written when people were talking about paywalls in the context of pre-Substack solutions, and bloggers were experimenting with various bespoke business models like running paid member communities, events, boutique print publishing operations, schools/courses bolted on with Teachable, and of course, sketchy vitamins. Those of you who have been with me long enough might remember my experiments in some of these departments.
Though I technically stuck to my commitment to never paywall Ribbonfarm, I guess gradually moving a growing fraction of my writing energy to Substack after 2019, and eventually retiring Ribbonfarm in 2023, counts as a violation of the spirit of that commitment.
I’ve actually stopped using the paywall here now, though paid subscriptions are still on. But I haven’t made any new principled commitments about it.
Rather surprisingly, I find that my reasoning for this move is basically the same as in 2011. The philosophy is still about looking for Wild Thoughts. Ferality remains the True North. At the moment, I can’t think of a way to use the paywall feature that respects that principle. Going forward, posts will be un-paywalled by default, and I’m slowly un-paywalling my archives too (there is no obvious way to do it in bulk). I won’t be using the paywall unless there’s an exceptional reason to lock up something, or I can figure out a way that doesn’t mess with wildness.
The tactical problem of how to use the Substack paywall feature well in service of Wild Thoughts is symptomatic of a larger problem in the zeitgeist — the slow disappearance of open, wild public spaces.
This is true of the consulting side of my life too. There was a certain wildness to the ZIRPy gig economy I entered in 2011 that is gone now.
It feels like I have to figure out how to go feral all over again. Fortunately, there is a New Nature emerging that promises whole new kinds of wildness.
***
In important ways, I’ve learned absolutely nothing in the last 15 years. I mean, sure, I wrote a whole 2-volume book called the Art of Gig, but that was mostly things I thought others could learn from me. Not the sort of transformative learning people seem to call Personal Growth,™ featuring a good deal of Overcoming Adversity.™
Or to put it another way, I’ve grown a lot older, but not significantly wiser. Looking back at some of the impressively wise stuff I wrote in 2011, I might even have grown unwiser. This is why I don’t do the personal-journey/overcoming adversity type of reflection many people seem to, on reaching significant milestones. Personal Degrowth ™ mostly featuring ZIRPy Dumb Luck™ does not make for an inspiring story. It barely even makes a story at all.
Humans I think age on what ought to be considered depreciation curves, even if we sometimes pretend to age like fine wine rather than rusty equipment. And the depreciation rate is a function of your environment. I’ve been on the feral depreciation curve, which is about 3-5 % steeper than the domesticated depreciation curve after adjusting for inflation and interest rates. After all, feral cats and dogs don’t live as long as domestic pets, tend to be more diseased and malnourished, more cowed-down and fearful, and would probably get beaten up by their healthier domesticated cousins in a real fight (though they’d bring a certain murderous viciousness to the party). So why should humans be any different? I mean, sure there’s a lot of posturing about being more street-smart, and knowing where all the best dumpsters are, but come on.
Speaking of inflation and interest rates, someone reminded me that I’m apparently on record at some point having said that indie consulting was a ZIRP phenomenon.
It’s sort of true. The whole free-agency model I benefitted from, 2011-2019 or so, was powered in part by free distribution at scale, which led to things like viral hits and wildcard lead-gen for gigs. That era is toast. Some of the advice I offer in Art of Gig probably needs qualification now, given that “going viral” is no longer as sound a strategy for finding lucrative and interesting leads.
Speaking of leads, I don’t think I’ve received a single consulting lead from my 7 years of Substack writing.
Whatever leads I still get these days, not counting the spammy ones, originate from my old blog, Ribbonfarm, and networks spawned by that. You could say I captured the network effects of the old blog in a way that is neither possible, nor worthwhile, on Substack. The outlier wildness of the blogosphere has become farmland expanses on Substack. It makes sense for Substack the company to run that old aggregation theory playbook and capture the aggregate network effect to harvest what’s left of the old media landscape, but individuals can only really climb leaderboards here, not trees. Going “viral” in the old sense, of not just enjoying a spike of high reach, but reach into unusual places, triggering weird outlier opportunities and serendipity, is no longer really a thing. It’s not about Twitter getting Muskened, or Substack gentrifying blogs. It’s not about any one specific thing. It’s about the whole ecology being transformed.
Whale hunting has given way to a sort of creative yield-farming.
Not that I’m complaining. Fortunately, a couple of steady, meaty gigs for the last few years (Ethereum Foundation and TensTorrent), both the result of old Ribbonfarm equity, have kept me happy and lazy. I’m sure I’ll pay the price eventually.
***
Doing some vibe-multiple-regression eyeballing my archives, I think only about 52% of the consulting lead-gen failure from Substack can be attributed to my visibly growing decrepitude and lack of “I need to hire this guy” insight density in my writing. I’m sure it doesn’t help that I now mostly write weird shit about monsters and ooze instead of useful, actionable things like management insights distilled from TV shows like I used to.
But the other 48% is Substack’s fault. To borrow the term from that old VC debate, it has replaced a Black Swan farming game with a Moneyball game.
Well, not exactly Substack’s fault, but the fault of the zeitgeist Substack is part of, and in some ways leads — a glorious retreat to culturally conservative grinder modes of being and doing online.
These are modes that make readers cast writers into different cultural roles in their mental models. The blogosphere was where the most eclectic readers went to find not just alpha, but liveness, before 2019 or so, while the normies read The World is Flat and Sapiens. Bloggers were emissaries from wild cultural margins. Substack is LinkedIn for domesticated free agents.
I mean, shit, people work on their substacks like it’s a job. If you quit your job today to go “free agent” today and by that you meant starting a substack leveraging your network from your old job, I’m not entirely sure you’d be able to tell the difference. In 2011, we all aspired to the 4-hour work-week selling sketchy vitamins, not the 168-hour work-week producing monumental thudposts. We aimed to 0.1x the effort required to survive in the paycheck economy, not 10x it.
Sure, I never quite hit the 4-hour mark, (and always thought Tim Ferriss was full of shit and likely worked way harder than he let on, tbf), but I mean he was oriented right. He pretended to do/aspire to the right thing. Today, people are more likely to brag about how they worked 1000 hours on a big “drop” than how they cunningly arbitraged a vitamin supply chain to generate passive income while they relax on the beach.
See, the thing is, free agency is about risk-adjusted return for time-rich people, and in 2011, the emphasis was almost entirely on taking weird risks that were too small for big risk-capitalists like bankers to care about, and too marginal and subcultural for normies to even spot. This called for a certain ferality of disposition, and a certain picaresque attitude towards personal narratives. It drove divergence and variety rather than convergence and competition.
In 2026, free agency is about visibly virtuous and competitively benchmarkable hard work, featuring a kind of retail-grade New Sincerity. The emphasis is on using the time much more intensely than idly trawling for weird risks to take. Picaresque attitudes are rounded down to pure grift, reputationally. Affection for charming rogues is at all time low. Esteem is reserved for effortmaxxing agentic juggernauts going hypomanic with Claude Code.
In other words, in 2011, going free agent felt like trying to engineer weird luck for yourself (and I certainly managed to engineer several lightning bolts of weird luck for myself). In 2026, the goal seems to be to figure out a “system” that gets you self-employed in a grinder job you can’t be fired from, and where bureaucrats and middle managers can’t stop you from putting in 168-hour work-weeks.
It’s weird. Humans should aspire to a certain degree of laziness befitting our position as the apex villain species of the Anthropocene.
Whether you get a W2, 1099, or 1099K at tax time is irrelevant. If you solve for steady income and freedom to grind to the limit of your capacity as your main thing, then you have a job. The only question (in the US) is whether it comes with good health insurance.
***
It’s not just Substack. We live in grinder times. Some people on here write heavy lift thudposts that probably represent more effort that I would have put in over an entire year a decade ago on Ribbonfarm, during my peak effort years (the peak being a smallish hill, well short of “mountain”). And even that’s apparently not enough for some. I see people out there registering domain names and putting up fancy sites for single essays formatted with the care of illuminated manuscripts, and representing epic research journeys.
I expect to see Essay Unboxing videos on YouTube soon.
Don’t get me wrong. I appreciate this effort, especially when it’s shared for free with high-minded generosity. I even sometimes read such things without LLM help.
But damn.
So. Much. Grinding.
The magnitude aside, there is also a difference in the nature of the effort. All the effort is much more narrowly focused. Not wild, scattershot effort. Much less gambling, much more AI-in-the-loop Protestant Ethic-ing.
And many people preach this ethos. In 2011, people would have been apologetic about it, and somewhat embarrassed at not finding their 4-hour-work-week hack. In 2011, people bragged about passive income rather than being agentic.
Many actually refuse to believe low-effort happy-go-lucky wing-and-prayer trajectories are even possible. They think people who claim low-effort results are just lying.
I don’t blame them. The era when that was the norm is already a fading memory.
This is a much harder world to survive in than 2011, and to the extent people like me can get away with not doing effortmaxxing grinding, it’s because we’re living off accumulated fossil fuel from happier, lazier, more rascally times.
The loss of variety, vitality, and sheer fun, due to this shift from risk-orientation to effort-orientation is very real, and costly both for individuals, and for the economy as a whole. It is not a good thing for the world when the supposedly “free agent” economy becomes indistinguishable from the paycheck economy, in terms of risk profiles and effort-allocation patterns.
And speaking of grindsets, man, the quality control of this era deserves an ISO 9000 certification. It’s all over the free-agent economy, but is particularly evident in the corner of the writing economy visible on Substack. This is war-mode six-sigma hand-crafted writing in a John Henry existential death-struggle with the slop tsunami. Shitposting now seems like transgression rather than the low-effort default.
That’s what makes me tired by the way. Not me working hard, but watching everybody else work so radically hard I get tired just watching it.
Me, I just publish literal slop instead, half the time. Substack has already introduced a “report slop” button for the Notes feed, and the environment here is only going to get more hostile I think. When that button is added to the essays themselves, it will be game over for me.
The other half of the the time, I only write hand-crafted stuff when it’s easier than forcing ChatGPT to be sloppy enough to sink to my low standards. About 99% of my thoughts simply cannot rise to the level of gravitas ChatGPT brings to every topic. If I’d tried to prompt this essay out of ChatGPT for instance, it would have taken 100x the effort.
***
Anyway, 15 years, huh.
What have I been doing if I haven’t been grinding away or experiencing Personal Growth™?
I suppose I was busy trying to get lucky. And succeeding to the extent the environment was wild, and I was sufficiently feral in inhabiting it.
This wasn’t hard under ZIRP conditions. Freebie luck was available to anyone who paid attention to things in peripheral vision in the late aughts and tens, and I did nothing special to snag my share of that luck.
Under non-ZIRPy conditions, I suppose tunnel vision pays off more.
There was also luck as in being in the right place at the right time at the right age. I suppose I can claim some credit for that. Far too many people stayed put in the wrong places during ZIRP.
I’ve been on the Tech Coast during the right age for me. You see, 35-50 is an age when people in Tech listen to you as the voice of experience, without expecting you to do stuff, but haven’t yet written you off as a has-been. And they’re hungry for this. I was perfect for filling this role, at least while free, wild distribution was a thing.
Through these years, I’ve been part of two major intersecting milieus: The corporate tech economy and the popular discourse blogosphere loosely associated with it. Both have been the right place at the right time for me.
Neither is anything like it was when I started, and I’m not sure either is right for me anymore. Which makes me wonder where I could go next, socially speaking.
I have some stuff brewing (all good, to be shared soon) that’s going to trigger some significant lifestyle changes for me this year, but one of the things I’m thinking hard about is how to discover a New Ferality, and engineer it into at least my personal circumstances in ways that give it the inviolable force of New Nature, with no unwary redomestication possible.
The last time around, I backslid from ferality towards unwitting re-domestication through the gentrification of the environment around me.
This time around, I’m going to be looking for ways to shift gears from don’t become domesticated to can’t become domesticated.