The Next 5 Years of Other Life (Part 2)

In 2024, I wrote and published about 40 anonymous essays on philosophy, history, religion, and technology.

One reason I never shared them under my own name is I wanted to see if I could earn a genuinely interested audience from scratch.

I was paid well, too. I had complete autonomy. I even managed to make a few discoveries, I daresay, humble and fragmentary though they may have been.

This was, by far, the best paid work I’d ever been offered, and ever done, in my life.

And this is how I figured out the final, missing piece of the indie scholar equation.

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In December 2023, I was approached by my old friend Logan Allen. I’ve known him for quite a while, dating back to some early esoteric Twitter circles. He was now building an applied cryptography startup called Zorp and he needed someone to help craft and execute a messaging and content strategy. He already had a clear vision but needed someone who could design and produce genuinely interesting work to earn the attention of high-IQ, high-agency entrepreneurs and developers while he and his engineers were building.

The offer was almost too good to be true: Just publish a weekly essay on the company blog, and grow the Twitter, by developing a genuinely interesting perspective on philosophy and technology. Of course it would need to reflect the perspective and vision of the company, but in my case this meant complete autonomy, because Logan and I share so many of the same references—continental philosophy, accelerationism, Catholicism, and especially certain crypto-Catholic perspectives on technology, like McLuhan, etc. So Logan let me loose for the better part of a whole year. He gave feedback here and there, but I was completely empowered and never blocked or compromised. Logan would occasionally have great ideas of his own, and I would write those up, so a handful of the posts are really by Logan. It was a collaborative venture, and the most agreeable and intellectually productive one I’ve ever had with a company.

I wrote about Plato, Bataille, Sloterdijk, Deleuze, Illich, Land, Sam Houston, Stephen F. Austin, Hernán Cortés, and quite a few others.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about this experiment with Zorp is that it worked. We built a small cult following of highly intelligent and aligned individuals, who reply to the emails and reply to our tweets and really, sincerely care. We threw a party in Austin last month and at least 3 people flew in from around the world, partially due to the promise of Zorp’s visionary tech, but partially thanks to the strength and peculiarity of our writing. Some of them said this explicitly. I’ve grown the email list to several thousand subs, added thousands of followers to their company Twitter—all just by thinking and writing to the best of my ability, with complete freedom.

With the early success of our approach, I now help Zorp with many different things. As they move toward a public launch of their main product, we’re winding down the esoteric philosophy a little bit, in favor of a more technical tone, which is the only reason I’ve written this particular story in the past tense. Though esoteric philosophy will not always be the best approach for every company at every stage, it’s a small miracle that it turns out to be a great approach for certain companies, at certain stages. And I think you’ll be seeing a lot more of it, in different forms and vehicles. For a glimpse, consider what Mike Solana does for Founders Fund (essentially a whole distinct media company).

Anyway… This is how I realized that we are still in the very early innings of this indie scholar thing. The American tech economy has been arguably the single greatest source of asymmetric returns for decades now, and the new indie scholar economy is uniquely inter-operable with it, but in ways that are still illegible. Even inside of cutting-edge companies today, there is an awareness that all the old marketing and PR playbooks are over—there is an awareness that original, provocative, high-IQ “content” can be worth millions of dollars if it gets you on the desk of a few high-leverage people scrolling Twitter in the morning—but there is no official language for any of this yet, it’s still so obscure. It’s almost impossible to hire for. But the indie scholar can do it, perhaps better than anyone. I’m increasingly convinced that the exodus of indie scholars out of the academy will combine with the tech economy in a variety of fruitful and profitable ways we’ve hardly even begun to test.

One of the reasons The Independent Scholar has been delayed is that I’m still figuring this out in real time (the party I mentioned was the same week I was originally targeting for publication, while quite profound data from this year’s experience is still streaming in…). But at least all of this stuff will be in the book now!

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In a technologically accelerating economy, and in a culture as fluid and chaotic as ours, it is extremely valuable to be educated, thoughtful, and capable of developing original and non-trivial ideas in the public square. These simple but rare skills and traits can generate thousands and even millions of dollars for companies, especially cutting-edge tech companies where impressing one high-leverage individual (who reads Twitter/X every morning) can be the difference between the company raising its next round or dying.

The most conducive economic engine for the indie scholar is not necessarily getting a million subscribers on Youtube, or 300k subscribers on your newsletter, or even publishing successful books (I winced recently listening to the decorated novelist and biographer Paula Byrne talk about how her books don’t make money). All of these things might play a role, depending on the details of your work and goals, and in the book I advocate that you target a strategic mix of income streams. But I think one of the most conducive economic engines for many indie scholars today—and the one that is most illegible and underrated right now—lies in the cultivation of creative partnerships with companies.

On Saturday, I’ll send you the third and final installment of this series, explaining how my larger vision has evolved given the lessons I learned this year.

Sincerely,

Justin Murphy