Introduction to Build in Public University

Welcome to the first ever Memetic Marketing Monday! I decided to launch this initiative with Build in Public University because I've been trying to figure out what I'm actually good at anymore. It's really weird - I've always fancied myself as a builder of things, an engineer. I had this vision of who I was.

And this is the power of the memes that we carry. This is why I wanted to include the word "memetic" here. This is something at the core of my research - we are the memes that we carry around about ourselves. This became obvious to me last week.

I had to confront the reality that I am not a particularly great builder anymore. I burnt out. There was a time when I was a great builder. I had the ability to engineer systems and make them reliable and "me-proof," which is one of the benefits of having ADHD. You're a great product tester because you're constantly breaking things wherever they're flawed.

My Journey from Engineer to Marketer

I was an early employee at Copy.ai and was there for about two and a half years. During my time there, I realized something about what the future would look like. With the rate of development of AI systems, we need pipelines of people learning our systems as they change and constantly helping upskill existing users.

I wanted to create a self-sustaining social network. This was during my social networking research, and I thought, "If I can restructure my role as a social network engineer, this could work." When I presented this idea, my manager came back with, "So you want to be a marketer now? You know there's a pay cut for that."

I didn't realize how much I internalized that as lowering my value by defining myself as a marketer. I've had a hell of a time defining myself. I do build software, but I also write, do podcasting, and have my Idea Supply Chain YouTube channel, which we're now live streaming to under the Build in Public University umbrella.

The Power of Memes and Online Virality

When the pandemic hit, I started writing online. I wrote for Medium, which is where I made my first internet dollar. I was writing about having figured out that I was ADHD and autistic. I suddenly felt like I had the right instruction manual for how my brain worked.

I realized I could take all that knowledge and start making money online. My salary was pretty linear, and my entire experience was: linear growth for a couple years, then you have to jump ship because otherwise you're never going to be paid what you're worth. The rate of salary increases were in no way correlated with the amount of learning someone did, especially for fast learners like me.

When I started writing online, I saw this exponential possibility. I thought, "I'm making $1 now and I just wrote one article. If I write 100 articles, I'll make $100, right?" This was a very naive observation, but this is the power of memes - there is a meme of being able to have an exponential outcome for your life.

We're seeing more people realize this - the rise of creators, the rise of startups. People are realizing that the employment offer is getting less and less appealing because there are so many exponential possibilities out there. Why would you settle for a linear one?

The Viral Post That Changed Everything

I took a writing course on Medium because I wanted to figure out how to make more money writing. One of the exercises was about writing with emotion, which was new to me because I'd realized I was autistic and had avoided emotions because data was easier.

I ended up getting into a huge fight with my dad over politics - this was back in 2020. I wrote a post with an emotional headline: "Today I gave my dad a choice, Trump or his grandkids." Hell of a headline in terms of capturing emotion.

It created an adrenaline rush. I was getting into social media arguments, watching the numbers climb. The more I fought with people, the more the numbers went up, which meant I was making money.

As the adrenaline wore off, I thought about what I'd been doing and realized, "This is not what I started out doing. This isn't what I intended." I took the post down and replaced it with links to a couple others, including one that described how I had structured the article since it was designed for virality.

Then things got weird. I started getting targeted harassment, which was a new experience. People tried to get me fired from work. The harassment went offline, which was scary - I got physical hate mail. I had to call the cops to check out the suspicious mail.

This experience made me rethink social media and my approach to content. I realized I had been infected by a mind virus. Our brains are designed to make predictions about the future based on the information we get. When we let algorithms dictate what we see, we risk being infected with these mind viruses.

Risk Distribution in the Modern Economy

In my economics research around memetics, I've discovered that in large organizations, the vast majority of the work is done by the people creating the data, the people doing the work. Meanwhile, the people making decisions tend to make bad decisions and overly reward themselves.

They've created a system with no accountability for failure where they can continue to fail and get rich because of the work everyone below them is doing. In a hierarchy, the value of information flows to the top because they're looking at a longer-term picture with a more complete map.

What's happening is that people at the top are compressing the information created by people underneath them and using it badly to make bad decisions. The richest are accumulating the most power in a system designed to give them what they want.

Everything starts from a demand, an intention, a desire. Elon Musk wants to go to the moon, so all his work is designed around this goal, requiring power, resources, and what he needs. This is true of every entrepreneur and every employee.

We've done a terrible job upholding what used to be a good deal when you couldn't measure everything. As the search cost of replacement has gone down, risk has pooled at the local level. The people at the bottom are absorbing the risk, while banks are optimizing against risk.

We've got one part of the economy pushing all risk out of their systems to the bottom where they have the least visibility and power to change their situation. Then we've got financial structures saying, "You're not predictable, so you're risky." The rich get richer, and the poor get excluded from the system.

The Birth of Chaos Marketing

All the existing systems end up benefiting the incumbents. When you have the most data, you have the smartest AI. But that's no longer true because we're creating data faster than people can capture it and new types of data that existing systems weren't designed to handle.

This is where chaos marketing comes in. It doesn't require a defined system to work. Companies move slow, so they hire agencies to help. Agencies move faster and are designed to learn as much as possible about specific areas of the economy.

As the internet grows and incentive structures change, everything gets more complex. More social media platforms, constantly changing formats. For large companies, it's simply cheaper to spend money than employee time. If you need results, you just buy access to big enough audiences.

That's the easiest way to buy attention - buy a big audience. It's also the least effective way to gain an audience. If you're in Kim Kardashian's audience, does she have any clue who you are? Or are you just a stat?

With large audiences, you only get one-way broadcast communication. That's great statistically but bad predictably. Given a large enough data set, you can guarantee outcomes will happen the number of times you need.

How Chaos Marketing Works

With chaos marketing, I want to look at how we can connect a path through multiple different network channels to create predictable outcomes. This is different because there's no guarantee of a predictable path through a chaos network.

In a chaos network, imagine you're in a graph of nodes with connections coming and going. You're never sure which connections will be there. To navigate this network, you travel to the next node, see which nodes are available from there, and make a decision about which connection is most likely to get you closer to your desired end state.

I think of it like a roguelike video game. I'm at some position in the network, and I've got information from a brand partner. My performance is based on how many people I can get to sign up through my referral link.

What I'm looking to do is create a "chaos engine" that simulates the network I want to test against. At each node (person or system) in the network, you have options of interacting with that system or finding a connection to a different node.

You generate many starting points and send them through the chaos engine, which simulates traversal through the nodes. Then you try to predict which nodes are more likely to exist at a given point in time. By collecting data from all these chaotic runs, you can overlap them and see patterns emerge over time.

Trust as the Essential Currency in Chaos

In this network, each edge has a trust value. You have to overcome the risk for a person to put their trust at stake in this network. People are already facing too much risk, especially as large companies push risk down to the bottom of the economy. This makes them less willing than ever to risk anything.

The beauty of chaos marketing is that it breaks through the cynicism of the market. There's a huge lack of trust in everything right now - institutions, the market, our leaders. We need to optimize for trust because in chaotic network environments, trust is the one thing you can rely on.

That's what system designers get wrong, and what I got wrong for so long. I was trying to make everything data and easily computable, but humans aren't that. One of the things I've found with chaos marketing is that if you don't have enough nodes in a network, it pretty much guarantees failure. You need a network where there's always a path through.

Make the Internet Weird Again

This is the idea behind the "Make the Internet Weird Again" marketing campaign. I'm building a social network - the outermost level of it. There's a reason I'm selecting "weird."

I want to attract two types of people:

1. Creative people positioned against the huge homogenization and optimization of everything
2. People who are not winning in the current systems

I've tried talking to people who are winning in the current systems, but they aren't always interested in hearing how the current systems aren't great. They're not incentivized to care as quickly as someone with no money.

With this email list, I'm trying to build a specific network of what I'm calling "chaos agents." I'm giving them an identity, something they can tie onto. People need identities to understand where they fit in the world.

One of the things I've found is that the easiest way to minimize the activation energy needed for something to happen is to maximize the amount of fun. People will do fun things because they're fun. What happens online when that happens? Someone sees others enjoying themselves for free and says, "I gotta get in on that action. If they're doing this for free, I can make them pay for it."

The Future: Chaotic Networks vs. Predictable Systems

When everything is predictable, the incumbents win. They have more resources to make it more predictable. But when you know what someone's predicting, you can be not predictable. You can be chaotic. You can break the frame.

Your network is truly the most valuable thing you can have. And a network is not about how many connections you have on LinkedIn. It's not about schmoozing at events, though that can be part of it.

We're in a loneliness epidemic right now because we've mixed people, marketing, economics, and education. We've thrown everything together and decided what's valuable. Over time, the world will realize it's all about small, trusted networks. We're going back toward tribalism, but not in the way it looks on social media. Social media amplifies the negative, big, loud tribes. It's not showing the quiet, builder, cooperative tribes.

This streaming show is a chance for that to change. I'm going to show the builders, the optimists, the creators who are doing human things for human reasons. We're going to use products to build marketing campaigns and do some vibe coding.

Conclusion: Inviting You to Join the Chaos

That's it for the first episode of Memetic Marketing Monday. Next up is Technical Tutorial Tuesday, where we'll explore vibe coding and experimental projects. If you're a startup, an indie hacker, a creator, or anyone doing something new and experimental, I want to work with you.

Go sign up at maketheinternetweirdagain.com to become a chaos agent. Let's build something fun together, because when you're optimizing for fun, that's when the magic happens.

If you build something and want to show it off, let me know. I'm launching a weekly build showcase for all the weird, cool stuff people are creating. Let's get it seen.

When everything is predictable, the incumbents win. When you know what someone's predicting, you can be not predictable. You can be chaotic. You can break the frame and create something truly new.