What Are We Trying to Do?

Gamifying life through the power-maxxing protocol

Influence is broadly the utility function

Before doing anything, it’s reasonable to ask why: why am I planning to start writing long-form articles on Substack? Why am I planning to do anything at all? Why do I spend my free time the way I do? What’s my utility function? How do I specify a proximate utility function which is real-time parsable, allowing for conscious optimization? These are complicated questions, and I won’t try to walk you through how I’ve tried to get the answers (unless you’d really like me to). But I will give you the conclusion: the variable I’m currently trying to maximize is personal ideological influence, that’s the utility function. You can call it power-maxxing. It’s fairly straightforward, and I try to make sure that everything I do is pegged to it. I’ll go one step further and suggest you copy my utility function too — it’s a fun one, and if you’re reading this, odds are you’re a lost soul. You’ve probably long yearned for this sort of guidance. If you’re in, keep reading! Influence is much easier with even loose forms of collective coordination.

Isn’t influence too much of a moonshot?

At this stage you may be wondering:

There are over 8 billion people in the world, chances are, a good portion of them would also love to have ideological influence, which is somewhat status-exchangeable. What are the odds that you or I can beat them to it? Aren’t we just rat-racing to nowhere?

Not at all. You’re reading this, which means that you’ve already self-selected into an incredibly advantageous position in the global network. You’re 0, 1, or at most 2 steps removed from most of the influential thinkers, politicians, and businessmen of our time. Don’t believe me? Try this: pick a name that you think fits that description. Look them up on X, they probably have an account. How many mutuals are you away from direct contact? How many of your tweets has Elon liked? Have any made it to the White House? How many reciprocal interactions have you had with Marc Andreessen? Sam Altman? BAP? Eliezer Yudkowsky? Nick Land? Curtis Yarvin? maybe JD Vance?… You’re already in the epicentre of global power, culture, and capital: if not physically, then cognitively. You’re extremely privileged. Your success isn’t actually bottlenecked by gruelling large-number stochastics. There’s world-scale power locked inside your phone and it takes something like 5,000 good posts to get it out.

The Protocol

Alright, you’re sold. Let’s maximize influence. How exactly do we go on about this? What are the actual openings? What’s the tangible protocol? Circling back, how do I personally plan to go on about this? How have I been going on about this so far?

These are great questions. Keep reading.

There exist a number of ways in which one can maximize their ideological influence. In the remainder of this piece I’ll specifically focus on the intellectual pathway. Other pathways include maximizing one’s disposable capital (getting rich), maximizing one’s political stature, marrying a person who has already maximized or will subsequently maximize one or more of these, and so on. Most people whom I consider exemplar power-maxxers have either combined the intellectual and political pathways (e.g. Henry Kissinger), or the intellectual and disposable capital pathways (e.g. Peter Thiel, George Soros). The reason I chose to focus on the intellectual pathway here is that it’s the pathway that needs to be maximized in public, through domains such as this one. It’s obvious why — you can’t intellectually influence people unless they’re hearing what you have to say. Capital doesn’t work like that.

The intellectual pathway of power-maxxing

I like to model the intellectual pathway of power-maxxing as a two-stage process:

1. In the beginning, we don’t have an audience. No matter what we say, or how well we say it, no one will hear it. Therefore, the natural first stage is to actually gain an audience of people who will listen to us and are worth talking to. Let’s posit that we will be following the digital form of intellectual power-maxxing (as opposed to the traditional institutional forms, such as those managed through the academy, a church, or legacy journalism). You and I have an obvious natural advantage in the digital form, we’re young and chronically online. The digital form also happens to be the most viable one, thanks to both the rapid and universal proliferation of social media access and addiction, as well as the overwhelming range of degrees of freedom it offers to an independent operator. Opting for digital intellectual power-maxxing makes the suitable audience apparent — we need to find persons who are themselves chronically online and possess world-scale influence of their own. This narrows the list of viable options to a relatively small cluster of American coastal elites, mostly tech, finance, policy, and academia adjacent, who all happen to hang around in the same circles on X. Our first stage goal is to amass an audience consisting of a moderate swathe of such people (you’ll reach the rest through network diffusion). I think I've done a relatively good job at this, so I consider stage 1 broadly completed. This leads me to stage 2.

2. What happens after we’ve completed stage 1? We now have an audience of people who are themselves influential and listen to us, now we need to navigate how to say the right things. How and in which direction do we plan to influence our audience? The right sequence of tokens can hack anyone’s brain — there’s always a combination of words you can utter that will get the person of your choice to spawn at your doorstep in the shortest physically realistic time interval “or something”. How do we go on about finding these combinations? What makes me so confident that these people will listen to us? What should we be posting and writing about now? These questions will be covered in my next piece. In the piece after that, I’ll actually try to start saying these right things.

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Appendix

I thought you hated long-form?

In short-form content, I both like and find it necessary to be provocative. It’s obvious why — provocation enhances reach — this is crucial in a media ecosystem which has gone from in some ways supply-constrained to overwhelmingly demand-constrained¹. While being provocative, I naturally make many provocative claims. One such claim is that the rapid proliferation of short-form media has made long-form media anachronistic and redundant. I think this is an exaggeration and only directionally true. The production of high-quality, targeted long-form writing remains one of the highest-leverage ways of influencing key decision makers, who usually do not have the time to form their own lengthy thought-chains, and end up having to resort to arbitrating among those ready-to-wear ones they are presented with. They “outsource their thinking”. I’m trying to make it such that I’m one of those people to whom they outsource it.

In addition, one of the many obvious affordances² of long-form writing is that it encourages epistemic rigor and structured, long-memory thought chains. This means that the more long-form writing you do, the more you practice these things, which are a necessary counter-balance to the attention-erosive tendency of short-form over the long run.

1. Goodman, E. P. (2004). Media policy out of the box: Content abundance, attention scarcity, and the failures of digital markets. Berkeley Technology Law Journal, 19(4), 1389–1472.

2. Hutchby, I. (2001). Technologies, texts and affordances. Sociology, 35(2), 441–456.