Montaigne, Mary Emerson, and the Race to Own Yourself

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In this issue:

• Montaigne’s paradoxical path to power

• The genius of Mary Moody Emerson

• Quivr: Private open-source AI tooling for writers

Important: Today is the last day you can request an invitation to join our 4-week writing accelerator starting this Monday. Requesting an invite does not obligate you to enroll, but you need to request an invite today if you’d like the option to enroll. Request an invitation (5 min).

Montaigne’s Paradoxical Path to Power

One of the key lessons from the life of Montaigne is that true humility is, paradoxically, a path to power. If you're seeking power, the desire often thwarts the accrual. When you are sincerely humble and relinquish the drive for power, you become capable of thinking, acting, and writing in ways that are unique, authentic, compelling, and unpredictably impressive. These intermediate products of humility command respect and admiration through a slow, gradual process that is invisible and counterintuitive to the extreme.

Read the whole piece at otherlife.co/montaigne-paradox

Mary Moody Emerson: "Society is like a corpse that purges at the mouth”

You've heard of Ralph Waldo Emerson, but there's a second genius in the Emerson family you've probably never heard of. Mary Moody Emerson was "the best writer in Massachusetts," according to her nephew Ralph. I recently learned about aunty Mary in a 1996 biography of Emerson by Robert D. Richardson, Jr.

A mysterious and eccentric woman, Ralph's aunt (on his father's side) was more like a prophet than a writer. She was known for her great physical energy, bursting in and out of rooms like a banshee. Her obituary in the Boston Commonwealth said she had "the power of saying more disagreeable things in half an hour than any person living." Four feet, three inches tall, Mary Moody wore a burial shroud when she traveled and slept in a bed shaped like a coffin. You can begin to understand why she is sometimes remembered, if she is remembered at all, as an eccentric Dickensian character in the larger plot of Ralph's biography.

Read the whole piece at otherlife.co/mary-emerson.

Quivr: Private Open-Source AI Tooling for Writers

Github: StanGirard/quivr

If an original thinker has content spread across multiple sites like Twitter, Youtube, and blogs—I'm not too worried about companies sucking up all that data for massive general-purpose models. Maybe the creators have some right to something, but who cares about that? It seems like a red herring.

If you're publishing original and thoughtful work across the internet, your unique alpha is only a latent dimension of all that data.

That's the important thing, and it can’t be fully synthesized or exploited by anyone unless a third party decides to organize all of that specific data and develop it's implicit direction as a specific project. That will never be profitable for a third party to do, since the creator will always have a huge advantage developing that particular alpha (essentially many TBs of tacit knowledge the third party can’t access).

This is why I'm very interested in private, open-source AI tooling for writers (I think about this use case more than any other). It seems like eventually every original creator must own and control a private, proprietary model. The software productivity gains from LLMs are racing against commercial projects trying to sell you your own clone. As those companies grow, it will also get cheaper and easier for creators to create and manage their own proprietary clones.