In the digital age, if you don’t share content on the internet, you don’t really exist.
The internet is an evolving network of human knowledge and interaction. What we once thought of as an information super highway is now a place we spend increasing amounts of time. Learning, experiencing, sharing, and participating in cultural exchange.
Over time, the types of information-based content shared on the internet transformed into a numerous formats that serve different purposes. Some content has immediate and temporary value. Examples include social media posts or current event news.
While other types of content provide a longer term value proposition. These posts can have value that lasts for years and decades. Longer term content is sometimes referred to as evergreen content. Information that is useful and valued over a long period of time. Like an evergreen tree that can live for many years.
This post is intended to show a specific way anyone can create personalized evergreen content. Why would you do that? Because in the digital age, you want to exist online. And you want to bypass the urge to enter enter into the attention economy’s arms race.
This post provides my own personal example of an evergreen list.
Simply put, I’ll advocate by example as to why you should create your own list of evergreen content. A list of links from around the web to things you’ve read that you find yourself coming back to again over time.
Here’s why.
Why You Should Create An Evergreen Content List
Curating a list of evergreen content links is like creating a modern digital age resume.
It gives insight into your mind, the things that interest and influence you. And the twist is that it can be functionally useful to whoever comes across it. There is no better method of passively informing the world on who you are as a person than sharing an up to date version of the information you find valuable.
But what exactly is evergreen content?
It’s the information you keep coming back to time and again. Whether it’s interesting, informative, or useful.
And why does it even matter?
You should curate links on a basic webpage. Have you ever applied to a job that asked if you have a webpage? Most jobs ask for this information now. And the reason? Because it helps provide color and context to your application. But taken in greater context, it helps the world know who you are and what’s important and useful to you.
How should you think about curating these links?
Links alone wont provide the maximum insight into who you are and how you think.
You must provide some level of summary and insight into why you keep coming back to the content you’ve included in your list. When you go to an art gallery, you want to know what your looking at and why its in the gallery. The same goes for your curated list. The people that come across your list want quick dopamine hits of what they’re looking at and why it matters.
I like to approach this by breaking out links into categories of interest and relevance.
Here’s an example of my evergreen list.
My Evergreen Content List
Most of the links I keep coming back to are directly related to my career path. This path is intertwined with the changes I see taking place in the world today. And these are changes I expect to see accelerate over the coming decade. So the links I’ve curated below are a mixed bag of old and new content. The essays and videos I find myself coming back to. They help shape my worldview and inform my understanding of the global narrative taking shape right now.
You Stand Out By Being Different
The Never-Ending Now – David Perell – As we transition into the Digital Age, our lives are increasingly shaped by a 24 hour news cycle. This is important to understand. Because if you want to stand out online, you increasingly need to resist the shortened attention span that comes from digital life. Otherwise, you fight a never ending arms race to attract attention.
“The structure of our social media feeds place us in a Never-Ending Now. It sucks us into a temporal myopia. Like hamsters running on a wheel, we live in an endless cycle of ephemeral content consumption — a merry-go-round that spins faster and faster but never goes anywhere.”
“With just a couple taps, we can transform our relationship with time, ignite our sense of history and escape the Never-Ending Now.”
My Takeaway: You can’t avoid playing in the attention economy. But you shouldn’t ignore the importance of breaking out of the never ending now.
Digital Transformation
The internet has entered it’s adolescence. And with it, we are entering an angsty period of transition. A transformation from the late industrial and early information age to the digital age. And this digital transformation is marked by interesting changes in how we live and interact with one another. I am greatly influenced by content that covers topics related to this fundamental truth.
REDEF ORIGINAL: Age of Abundance: How the Content Explosion will Invert the Media Industry – One of the most profound changes of the digital transformation is that anyone with internet access can tap into the ability to consume, create, and distribute information to the world. It has shifted power away from large media companies to individual creators and curators.
“technological advancements have massively reduced the cost and time needed to create and circulate content. Though this has liberated artists, consumers are now drowning in a virtually infinite supply of things to watch, listen to and read. The answer to a world where attention is the key constraint, not capital or distribution, isn’t Big Media – it’s the Influencer Curator.”
The Technium: 1,000 True Fans (kk.org) – The internet is a global network that changes the profitability math for the distribution of goods an services. As a business operator, you’re no longer constricted by local demand.
And so, when exploring the possibilities of digital businesses, you need only seek out 1,000 true fans willing to spend $100 a year to make a living online. This truth has led to the explosion of opportunities to create products and services along an infinite number of niche topics. Again, empowering the individual to make a good life for themselves through digital business.
The YouTube Revolution in Knowledge Transfer | Samo Burja – Another byproduct of this information revolution is that you can learn almost anything you want online. Especially if you know where to look. It creates an interesting dynamic for education in the digital age. If it’s never been easier to learn something new for almost no cost, why pay large sums of money for traditional higher education?
An Individual’s Approach to the Digital Transformation
Nadia Eghbal | The independent researcher – It’s becoming clear that an individual can do more now than ever before. Nadia’s post on the concept of “gentleman scientist” is an important way to approach the times. ie: anyone can now transition from amateur hobbyist to a professional on an infinite number of topics.
The Great Online Game – by Packy McCormick – Not Boring by Packy McCormick – Packy’s essay builds on these topics and equates becoming a solo creator and business operator to playing a great online game. He explores the changing rules to building credentials in the digital age and how you can easily leverage these credentials into a career. Transitioning from hobbyist to professional via the internet.
DeFi – Decentralized Finance & Web 3.0
A major driver of the next phase of the digital transformation is driven by decentralized digital infrastructure. It started with Bitcoin as digital money and has since expanded to many other digital assets and use cases.
This technology empowers new, digital-first business models and provides unprecedented levels of individual control over personal finances. Among the many changes DeFi bring, it allows users to earn a living anywhere in the world that has internet access, regardless of local infrastructure. As this technology matures, it will greatly influence society and government policy.
Learning how to use DeFi will help individuals in remote areas with poor financial infrastructure operate at a professional level on the emerging stage of global and digital business.
Lets Do DeFi – DeFi Guides Grandma Can Follow 👵🏻 “Decentralized Finance is a movement in the crypto industry which aims to disrupt central banks by offering bank-like services such as high interest-earning accounts, lending & borrowing, and currency exchange”. A great resource for learning about DeFi on the Ethereum blockchain.
Zapper Learn | Learn about DeFi – Includes tutorials and written content for learning about a variety of DeFi applications.
A little bitcoin goes a long way (coinshares.com) – Showcases how incorporating digital assets (in this case bitcoin) into an investment portfolio makes financial sense.
Network States & DAOS
An emerging derivative of DeFi and the Web 3.0 revolution are Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs). At the moment, I think of them as digital social clubs experimenting with digital assets in unique ways. But their early growth indicates an interesting and likely future impact on society.
That is, they are experimenting with political machinery that could be used to create digital age governments. ie: They could lead to the formation of a set of “Network States”, digital governments unique to the digital age.
First, these organizations will start as social clubs. Then business organizations with treasuries, hierarchies, and abilities to hire, fire, and interact with external organizations. Ultimately, the lessons learned from early DAOs will inform whether or not digital and “cloud-based” governments can form.
Learn Skills & Earn Crypto • 1729 – The concept of a Network State was first described by technologist & futurist Balaji Srinivasan. The 1729 organization publishes content about the concept of the Network State and other relevant digital topics. It’s both a fascinating read and something that addresses issues that are happening now and will continue to happen in the future.
Network States and Nation SPACs, or Westphalia Redux | by Sajith Pai | Medium – But how might a Network State transition to the physical world? In this essay, an interesting parallel is drawn to past examples of crowdsourcing assets for a large acquisition. In short, a DAO could theoretically crowdsource funds to purchase physical land in order to form a physical nation state.
Back to the Future: Modern Entrepots and the Rise of the City-States – by The Hard Fork by Marvin Liao – The Hard Fork by Marvin Liao (substack.com) And what might that actually look like? A modern, stand alone, and digital age city-state like Singapore or Hong Kong. And when combined with DAOs, The Network State is theoretically able to purchase a city from a government which desperately needs to raise funds.
Privacy & Anonymity
I’m a millennial that grew up in the dawn of social media. We didn’t and still don’t totally understand the consequences of sharing our lives online. And so I think it’s important to study and apply best practices for privacy and to some extent, anonymity.
Glenn Greenwald: Why privacy matters | TED Talk – I follow Glenn because he is a notorious privacy advocate. And while I don’t always agree with his takes, he often shares important perspectives on privacy issues around the world. This talk on why privacy matters is a good introduction to the topic.
A Modest Privacy Protection Proposal (lopp.net) – Even if you want to incorporate better privacy best practices into your life it can be intimidating. That’s why this guide can be a good place to start. Breaking down the questions you should ask yourself and establishing the goals you want to achieve.
guide-dark.pdf (anonymousplanet.org) – This guide is a significantly more advanced tool for securing your digital privacy. At nearly 250 pages in length, the guide covers most topics an average privacy advocate would care about.
Metaverse
The digital transformation and all the technologies that support the adoption and expansion of the internet culminate in the Metaverse. You can think of the Metaverse as the next evolution of the internet. It’s an always on, ubiquitous, and increasingly immersive internet.
This “Metaverse” is a transition of the internet from an information highway to a place where you go to spend time and interact with peers. In the digital age, it will take center stage for society’s cultural influences.
GitHub – M3-org/awesome-metaverse: Awesome metaverse projects – A fantastic repository of resources to learn about a variety of topics related to the Metaverse. Theories, companies working to expand the concept, and relevant people to follow.
Metaversed – A comprehensive writeup and description of the Metaverse with a strong focus on digital gaming and cryptocurrencies will shape our future digital experience. Why gaming and crypto? Because gaming includes social and financial mechanics that likely scale across the larger digital economy. And crypto provides the interoperable backbone that is likely needed to tie decentralized communities together into one big “thing”.
‘The Metaverse Primer’ — MatthewBall.vc – One of the most straightforward and easily digestible sources of content on what the Metaverse is. It places special emphasis on the business case for the metaverse, the infrastructure to pay attention to, and how we can expect it to evolve to in the future.
Philosophy
Agency (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) “An agent is a being with the capacity to act, and ‘agency’ denotes the exercise or manifestation of this capacity.”
We live in unprecedented times. Never before have so many people been able to take so much control over their individual lives. Agency in the digital age is an essential term to understand as society evolves. It is an analog to freedom. And freedom is becoming a luxury good in the digital age.
OODA loop – Wikipedia – Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act. A decision making framework used by the military to take quick and decisive action. A framework that becomes important in a world of constant and accelerating change. As the digital age expands, the rate of societal change will increase. I try to learn about frameworks like the OODA loop to make quick decisions to adapt to the changing times faster than my competition.
Microsoft Word – DESTRUCTION AND CREATION.doc (goalsys.com) Further reading on OODA loops.
Pumping Iron. (Any views expressed in the below are… | by Arthur Hayes | Medium – This article is long but it covers an interesting investment strategy that I think all people should be aware of. More specifically, it focuses on the changing economic nature of the digital age and why an investment strategy integrating crypto makes sense.
“The barbell investment strategy resonates uniquely with my past. It consists of constructing a portfolio comprised of beta to participate in the upside, and volatility hedges that compensate and eclipse losses on the downside. This strategy is the simple output of Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s musings about anti-fragility and engineering a life that exhibits positive convexity.”
6 Harsh Truths That Will Make You a Better Person | Cracked.com – This one is well written and contains some sound wisdom like the importance of ABC (Always Be Closing). It’s contains especially relevant advice as the world becomes interconnected. ie: these lessons become more important as you compete for resources on a global scale.
Time Billionaire – by Anthony Pompliano – The Pomp Letter (substack.com) The digital age is an age of abundance. But what’s missing when you can have access to limitless information, technology that increases productivity, and a society making technological breakthroughs at unprecedented pace? Time. There is only so much time in the day and over the span of a persons life. This essay makes an important point on how we should look at what we value in an age of abundance.
My Favorite Example of An Evergreen Content List
Want another example of a curated and personalized list of evergreen links? Check out David Perell’s list. It’s one of my favorites.
Final Thoughts
An evergreen content list is a good tool to share information with the world. It’s personal. It shouldn’t be like anyone’s list anywhere else on the internet. And that’s what makes it valuable. Don’t think of your list as temporary. It’s an evolving encyclopedia of content that is valuable to you and your network. You can constantly add to it and delete links that no longer matter.
At the end of the day, you are the curator that can decide what’s important and not.
Photo by Klaudia Piaskowska on Unsplash
