Spyglass - The Rings of Power

On January 22, 2024, exactly one quarter ago, I launched Spyglass. Over that span, I've sent 12 newsletters – only missing one week due to travel – and written just over 150 posts. The latter may surprise many of you because I've actually only sent 8 – yes, eight – posts via email. I know this was mildly confusing – as I've heard from a number of you – but it was also quite intentional. I was simply gearing up to launch the paid tier of Spyglass. Which I'm doing today.

The Inner Ring

As stated from the get-go, Spyglass aims to be three products in one:

1. A superb new link blog
2. A fantastic new column
3. A fun new newsletter

The first and third have been fully operational since that first week. The second item, the column, I've just been testing here and there, but that's what I'm launching today with the paid tier of Spyglass. This tier, called 'The Inner Ring' – more on this in a minute – costs $10/month or $100/year. It will enable access to the aforementioned columns via email and on the site. The aim is to send two to three of these a week.

These columns will feature thoughts and analysis by me, mainly about technology, but I reserve the right to flex outside of that wheelhouse on occasion. I aim for them to be smart and insightful, obviously – but hopefully they'll be fairly fun as well. For all the writing I've done on the internet over the years, I've never had a column where I've been paid directly to produce it for subscribers. I take your time and support very seriously and love the notion of where I can take this beyond simply writing into the ether of the broader internet.

At first, I know I'll just be writing for a few people. Just like the early days of blogging. Hopefully that readership grows over time, but I also know I'll have to earn that right to write. It's terrifying, liberating, and exhilarating all at once.

I hope you sign up here:

The Outer Ring

Of course, if you don't sign up at first, that's perfectly fine too. Again, I know I have to work for this privilege to be in your inbox and wallet. The free tier of Spyglass, henceforth known as 'The Outer Ring', will continue to exist, of course. This tier, which everyone who has signed up for Spyglass to date is already a part of, gets you the 'From Afar' newsletter. This is the weekly newsletter with some thoughts on topics of the week, link roundups, and other hopefully useful bits. It will be sent on Friday, just as it has been. Free subscribers will continue to receive this (as will paid subscribers, of course).

One More Ring

The link blog is the vast majority of those aforementioned 150+ posts to date. They're links to elsewhere with commentary from me. They reside on the website, and I haven't sent them out via email. Again, this was on purpose because there are a lot of them – one, two, or three a day, sometimes four – and I actually would like to do more, I just have to learn how to write less within each one 😄.

But over these past few months, I've gotten a surprising number of emails from folks noting that they'd actually like every post – meaning, all the link blog items – sent via email as well. I had set up Threads and Xitter feeds for this content (on top of RSS, for those who still celebrate that older piece of technology). But I now acknowledge that some people just want to consume everything via email, and so I've set up a way to do that.

To be clear, this will not be on by default for anyone, but if you wish to enable it, you can simply go to your account page here and toggle 'One More Ring'.¹ This will enable you to get an email for every link blog post I publish, when I publish. (You'll still want to have 'The Inner Ring' and 'The Outer Ring' toggled to get the columns – if you're a paid subscriber – and newsletter emails respectively, and these are on by default for anyone who signs up.)

One Ring to Rule Them All

As for Spyglass' new paid tier name, 'The Inner Ring',² it's taken from a famous essay (which was actually at first a lecture) by C.S. Lewis. It's a warning to future generations about the way things actually work in the world. Often not by transparent and straightforward means, but instead by nebulous and secret structures. The Inner Ring, in Lewis' telling is something you'll aspire to, but absolutely should not.

To a young person, just entering on adult life, the world seems full of “insides,” full of delightful intimacies and confidentialities, and he desires to enter them. But if he follows that desire he will reach no “inside” that is worth reaching. The true road lies in quite another direction.

This may seem like a weird name for the Spyglass membership tier, but I think it's quite perfect; as I believe an underlying theme I'll be exploring in the column will be related to such inner rings, and the demystification of them. Said in English: the notion that while much of tech, and the people driving it forward in various ways, seem all-knowing and all-powerful these days, it's often a group of folks who are just as flawed and clueless as everyone else. Or, as Steve Jobs once said:

Life can be so much broader once you discover one simple fact, and that is that everything around you that you call 'life' was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it.

¹ Yes, it's a clever name. And how's that working out for me? Being clever? Great, I'll keep it up then.

² It also, of course, is drawn from the Spyglass logo, which features three rings: an outer (the newsletter), a middle (the linkblog), an inner (the column).