Onboarding Guide for Employees of Spaceship Earth (request for feedback)

600 words, 2 minute read

Civilization is a big game that I feel like I’ve only now just figured out the rules to. This is a book about those rules that I wish someone had told me when I first started.

https://x.com/DefenderOfBasic/status/1821307031011184918

This is my thing I suppose. I’ve done this at every company I’ve ever joined. The onboarding docs are almost always terrible, out of date. I struggle to figure out how to setup the software, how to access internal systems, who to talk to. Once I figure it out, I take a few days to update the docs, or write my own personal guide.

It’s always paid off for me. It shows initiative on my part, it genuinely saves the company a lot of engineering time & headache. Writing the guide itself gives me greater depth of understanding. People come to me for questions and I don’t know the answer, but I ask them to write it down when they do figure it out, and that helps me too in my work. It’s win win.

This is what I’m doing now, with this book. It’s an onboarding guide for civilization. I’m writing this not for the benefit of the world: I’m writing this because it will help *me*. This book will either genuinely help others, OR I will be wrong, and someone will correct me & write a better version. In that case, I’ll just follow *that* version’s advice and *I* will thrive!

If I am right about enough things, I will get a lot of visibility on my writing, and money. The easiest way to make a ton of money in civilization is to create a value & capture some of it. That’s my goal.

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Ok! what do you think of that as a kind of “preface / intro” chapter to “the book” ? And also as a title. I’m not happy with it mostly because I need it to be ✨MORE BEAUTIFUL ✨, but I think it’s very close to the idea I want to communicate.

I think my current ~secret plan~ is:

1. Keep writing outlines / snippets of the book like this + ask for help (to improve my writing/pitch it to an editor, or others help me write this/help me find existing material)

2. Write & publish an “open source book”, currently writing “In Good Faith: A Handbook for Arguing on the Internet” with @tonyaajjackson

3. Publish 1 or more “communal science” experiments (quiz games that collect data about culture & society, anyone can analyze the data, or re-run the experiment with their own cohort to reproduce or disprove the results)

The idea is to “live out” the predictions in the book, then write about them, and continue predicting the rest of my life. It’s critical that the stuff I’m talking about is genuinely useful, so I prove it out first by doing it. A lot of it is already working.

I think the fiction book will basically paint this wild, utopian vision of civilization as an organization, and that step 0 in your employment of this org is to learn to think for yourself. The only way to do that is to write your own version of this book, and get feedback.

And you will get feedback, exactly the same way I did. If you buy the book I will read your thing, or invite others in the community to exchange feedback.

Do you see how this works? It’s a participatory book. It invites you to add a brick to the edifice. The book has to be open source for this to work, and a lot of those “communal science” experiments are paving the road for that. So that I learn how to ship these kinds of things, and see what resonates with people. To really make something that readers create as they’re reading.

I really think there’s no way around doing the work yourself. No book will fix your life. But a game that invites you to participate, find others to collaborate with, and compete, and win? That’ll do it. That, is the game of the civilization. It’s always been.

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1. Article preview photo from Wired magazine (Everynight Images/Alamy). Used without permission.