Brainstorming my next book

General
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I’m using this as a topic to explore publically as I brainstorm the book I want to write next!

Rough Ideas:

Predator’s Dilemma - Why Dominance Makes You Blind

The paradox of strength: once you dominate, you stop adapting. Applies to companies, empires, even personal careers.

Burn Rate - Why We’re Consuming Our Future Before it Arrives

A cultural/economic critique: not just startups burning cash, but civilizations burning through time, trust, and resources faster than they regenerate.

Exit Velocity - Why Breaking away Matters More than Breaking through

A book about momentum: how individuals, startups, and civilizations escape gravity wells (institutions, habits, systems) - and why escape speed matters more than raw force.

The Attention Cartel - Who Really Controls what We See

Goes beyond the “attention economy” cliché: shows how a handful of platforms function like cartels, setting the price and distribution of human awareness.

Even Rougher Ideas…

Turbulence Theory - Why small disruptions change everything.

Shortcut Nation - Why we keep trying to hack success instead of doing the work.

Time Billionaire - Reframing wealth through hours, not dollars.

Fragile Giants - How superpowers fall.

The Leap - Breaking free of the default path.

High Agency - How to get what you want.

The Chaos Dividend - Why disorder fuels innovation.

Burn Rate - How Western nations are setting fire to billions.

Boarding Group One - Our obsession with status.

Liquidity - The history and psychology of cash.

Deepfake Nation - Living in a world where nothing is real.

Hard Landings - Crashing, surviving, rebuilding.

Nomad Code - In the future, we’ll never stop moving.

Culture War Inc. - How outrage gets monetized.

Woke Capital - When politics hijacks business.

The Infinite Feed - Why we can’t stop scrolling.

Empire on Credit - How debt shaped empires.

Power Users - Why superconsumers make or break companies.

Pain is the Point - Why suffering makes us grow.

Identity Traps - Why labels imprison us.

Ghost Work - The hidden human labor behind AI.

Plaguenomics - How COVID rewrote the trajectory of the West.

Subtract - The power of doing less.

Weak Gods - How comfort killed divinity.

Eat Last, Starve First - You can’t keep making yourself small.

Throne Logic - Rules every ruler secretly follows.

Garbage Empires - Waste as civilization’s true product.

Guerrilla Mind - Outthinking giants.

End Math - The arithmetic of dying.

Identity Debt - Cost of pretending to be someone you’re not.

Signal Overload - Why more data blinds us.

The Irony Age - Why sincerity vanished.

Snackocracy - Why junk food always wins.

The Caffeine Empire - How coffee runs capitalism.

Default Dead - Why most ventures fail.

Founder’s High - Addiction to risk.

Exit Timing - The art of selling at peak.

Zoomland - The economics of a camera-on world.

The Typewriter Wars - How keyboards fought for dominance.

The Focus Dividend - Why attention compounds like money.

Deadline Addiction - Why we only move under pressure.

The Second Brain Myth - Why notes don’t equal knowledge.

Survival Math - How to outlast competitors.

The Single-Feature Startup - Why simplicity wins.

Cognitive Leakage - How old tasks haunt new ones.

Story Bias - Why narratives blind us to facts.

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If anything sings out to you let me know.
If there’s an idea you want to steal, feel free!

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Great concepts Joan. As for “Rough Ideas” the 2 that strike me most are:
• Burn Rate – love the parallel between civilizations burning resources and startups burning cash. Could potentially work in a human-level parallel of the rise of individual burnout as a direct/indirect result of the startup & civilization levels.
• Exit Velocity – interested to hear more about this largely due to what I just noted above. Often think about ways my family and I could “break away.”

As for your “Rougher Ideas:”
• Deepfake Nation
• Culture War Inc
• Weak Gods

Thanks for sharing / building in public!

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I see two patterns, might work together:

  1. adapting, momentum, escape speed, breaking away, I control what I see, small disruptions, doing the work, breaking free, reality, motion and activity, doing less, divinity, sincerity, focus,
  2. Dominance, consumption, attention cartel, hacking success, dollars, failing superpowers, Western nations, deepfake, passivity, scrolling, dept and credit, labels, comfort, ruler’s logic, waste, giants, signal overload, junk food,
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I would probably find Predator’s Dilemma most interesting but The Attention Cartel most useful, especially if it goes beyond the familiar territory of books like Hari’s Stolen Focus which seem to only scrape the surface. I also think it’s the one likely to have the broadest appeal, since it’s a topic a general audience has been told they should be doing something about.

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You’re right…

I feel like there is one big idea here, and I’m grasping around it but not quite reaching it.

I’ve had that itch for a while now.
There are these…themes, and patterns and so on.

But what’s the actual defining idea I’m trying to get at?

Haven’t wound up at clarity yet…

Always keen to hear ideas / feedback on it though.

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I like attention cartel too…

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I would absolutely read Exit Velocity and the Attention Cartel.

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Revisiting the rougher ideas, I definitely like Deepfake Nation, and out of those it probably has the widest appeal because of the discourse surrounding generative AI. The scope could also be expanded to incorporate concepts from Baudrillard to Walter Benjamin.

The Irony Age also has potential, but maybe as an article rather than an entire book. Irony poisoning is a real problem, but not one that is trending or widely considered. A lot has already been written about New Sincerity, David Foster Wallace, Metamodernism, etc, but it might be interesting to incorporate criticism of those as well, since many would argue they have also largely failed.

Zoomland is interesting too, but maybe with a different name. The idea of being constantly on camera is familiar to everyone, both in work settings but also in public with the awareness that you could be recorded anywhere and included in a viral video (a fact that has been blamed for gen z’s reluctance to dance in clubs or introduce themselves to strangers). The performance of self in digital spaces is definitely something that would be interesting to explore with the camera as a framing device.

Hans-Georg Moeller’s work on what he calls profilicity would overlap with both this and the move away from authenticity.

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I’m starting to think a book-length version of this post would be a good idea!

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Weak Gods also sounds interesting to me.

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I’m intrigued by it! I wonder if it’s worth testing that one as a blog post first and seeing how people respond to it.

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So far, everything I’ve read from you has seemed interesting to me. I know it sounds condescending, but it’s the truth. That’s why I subscribed: you have focus, you make very reasonable connections, and you always go deep. I’m sure you could make a book out of any of these topics. Some even touch on each other. Still, I’m leaving you the ones that interested me most—a completely selfish choice, focused on my interests, not necessarily on what the world needs.

The predator’s dilemma: why dominance leaves you blind. The paradox of strength: once you dominate, you stop adapting. This topic has interested me for a while: without competition, without friction, skills are lost. I like a phrase that—even though coming from Lance Armstrong it may no longer carry much weight—I always found to be true: if you want to be first, you must train like a second.

The attention cartel: who really controls what we see. I also wonder how to get out of there. I see many articles about the dangers of the system, but it’s curious that we can only read them because they appear on our screens. It’s paradoxical: we try to destroy the medium that makes us visible.

Boarding Group One: our obsession with status. This is my favorite. I believe that in that obsession lies the engine of contemporary consumption. The products that grow are those that best respond to that anxiety: people buy to feel less poor, or richer.

Deepfake Nation: living in a world where nothing is real. I remember a recent text of yours where you mentioned the dark forest theory. If everything is a lie, if you no longer believe in anything, the only thing left is what you can touch. Go out, look, feel… even though that implies running the risk of discovering that nothing you see is real.

Identity debt: the cost of pretending to be someone you’re not. That topic seems complex to me. Perhaps, as Sartre said, only the choice is ours. Many don’t know or don’t believe they’re pretending. And do you only pretend when you’re conscious of it?

Default Dead: why most companies fail. Necessary. In a world full of “foolproof formulas,” it’s healthy to remember that most companies, in reality, end up going bankrupt.

Deadline Addiction: why we only act under pressure. I’d love to know why.

The second brain myth: why notes don’t equal knowledge. I discovered this concept recently and since then I’ve been trying (without success): my notes are still scattered everywhere. But, as you say in another text, the ideas that obsess me most always come back. Others remain there, forgotten since I saved them.

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I do keep coming back to this…I wonder if there’s enough to make it a full book.
But then again, most books could be shorter than they are…maybe a mini book is the right call here.

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The products that grow are those that best respond to that anxiety: people buy to feel less poor, or richer.

I’m sure you would have a more nuanced take on this and explore it in more depth, but as presented, this is the only idea here I actively dislike. I don’t disagree with pixel’s general observation, but a discussion of status anxiety as marketing advice could read as cynical or out of touch.

It reminds me of Eugenia Kuyda, the founder of Replika. She read Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together and somehow interpreted it as support for her mission to make people more alone. She even took the quote “Technology is seductive when what it offers meets our human vulnerabilities.” and printed it on T-shirts, thinking it meant seductive in a positive way rather than dangerous. Turkle talks about this in a recent interview which is pretty hilarious.

I’m not saying that’s your intent at all, but it would be easy to interpret it that way given this description, as a manual for growing your business by exploiting anxiety around status, or worse, a mundane branding guide with tips for how to position your products like Apple or Hermès instead of Android or Michael Kors.

That said, there is still a lot here which could make for an interesting read, but as critique rather than brand strategy. Something in the direction of an updated version of Alain de Botton’s Status Anxiety, but less smarmy and insufferable than de Botton.

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I hadn’t seen it from that angle, but I think you’re right to point out the dangers.

At first, before mentioning which ideas I found most interesting, I said it was a very personal view —though I didn’t realize how limited it also was. That self-centered perspective shows up here.

I’d like to know what Joan sees in this, whether she perceives the same thing I do about our obsession with status.

When I ask people why they prefer Apple, I rarely hear a technical reason. They usually say things like it has more storage, takes better pictures, or doesn’t get viruses. It’s always the same. And many of us —myself included— use it for the basics: writing, photos, meetings, and so on.

here are deeper motives, of course. The same happens with other brands —people buy “pro” running shoes but never run. That kind of contradiction fascinates me.

Still, I think you’re right to warn about the risks.

I remember a podcast where they interviewed an anthropologist who works with companies. In one of his projects, he went out to interview mothers about whether they bought snack cakes for their kids. Most said no. But when he visited their homes, he found the opposite —they did buy them, they just wouldn’t admit it in front of other moms.

The company used that information to work on the shame those mothers felt, changing the product’s story with slogans like, “You’re not a bad mom for giving your kids snack cakes.”

Of course, that made me uncomfortable. Wouldn’t it be easier to change the product so it’s less harmful? It might even be cheaper than hiring an anthropologist and a marketing team to convince people that something harmful isn’t.

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Bernays and his consequences have been a disaster for the human race. The snack cake example reminds me of his strategy for making it socially acceptable for women to smoke by framing it as liberation.

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Stated vs. actual behaviour is never beating the allegations…

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