I agree: social media streams aren't the places to persist knowledge. But they are a wellspring of fresh new seeds to plant into the fertile soil of your idea garden.

That's how I use the platform: in my conversations with my peers and everyone else who I happen to run across, I learn of new concepts or get to re-envision old ideas in new ways. I then experiment with those thoughts in tweets to see if I'm "mostly right" — and THEN I take these things to the blog.

A blog that lives very intentionally not on Twitter. The blog, and by extension, its audiovisual outlets, the podcast and the YouTube channel, are off-platform and much more long-form. They are the things that leave traces. The long tail that Mark describes as showcasing the "emerging whole" of his decade-spanning work.

I'm 4 years in, and I have noticed the same effect. So, if you want to both have a fresh source of ideas and persist them for your future prosperity, tweet AND write. Two distinct things that, in tandem, are Perpetuum mobile of sharing your thoughts and building a legacy. ​
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As an East German, I am a huge fan of David Hasselhoff. After all, he single-handedly tore down the Berlin Wall while singing “I’ve been looking for Freedom” (or, “Happy Lucky go Frieden,” if you ask the East Germans who didn’t understand English but enjoyed the newfound exposure to Western pop sensations.)

I digress.

Hasselhoff’s prime role for me was Michael Knight in the TV show Knight Rider, with his AI-powered Pontiac Firebird called KITT. As a kid, I relished in the idea that a car could drive autonomously, and I longed for a future in which this is possible. Stross writes about this techno-optimism in his essay, and it got me thinking: maybe Musk, Zuckerberg, Thiel, and all the other billionaires are just finally living the Sci-Fi fantasy of their youths, now they have the cash to do it? Is Tesla’s hunt for a working “autopilot” little more than someone really wanting KITT to be a real thing?

If that’s the case, then we should be VERY careful with what kind of sci-fi we put out there. Because if it spawns ideological movements like TESCREAL, we have to be extremely diligent. “Move fast and break things” is fun and games inside the codebase of a startup, but becomes critically problematic when whole societies are at stake — or the lives of people on the streets our wishful-thinking-KITTS roam.