Dear Ms. Brann
It’s been a while.
When I wrote to you last, I said it was my turn to make the prayers. I confess the practice has been irregular. Prayers, as it turns out, are far easier to request than to compose. But I have come to think that these letters are my way of making them. So here I am — three days late by my own schedule, and about two years late by any decent standard.
Much has changed on my side. I found a new home. Ludium, the land of play I once described to you, has carried me to a harbor called Formula Labs. We used to educate builders and raise communities; now we do marketing. It was less a pivot of vision than a lesson in survival: I have learned, in the most literal way possible, that the first condition of any sustainable enterprise is not its cause but its revenue. So we are a crew of four now, paying off the debts of the old voyages while quietly scouting the footholds for the next leap. Our flag carries no grand manifesto these days. It reads, simply, “twelve months of runway.” I find it strangely clarifying.
Formula Labs — the new house flag
And, as everyone does these days, I spend my hours wrestling with a machine. Its name is Claude. My motto for this season is to automate the preprocessing: I begin the day with an agent, close the day with an agent, and in between I hand over whatever can be handed over. In fact, this very letter is being set down through one — I can almost see the look on your face. What surprises me most is how approachable the whole craft is. Years ago, when I studied blockchain smart contracts, every small intention had to be argued into the machine line by line; building with AI is far more intuitive, and the distance between a thought and a working thing is the shortest I have ever known. What I feel, living with these agents daily, is that technology changes neither as fast nor as slow as advertised.
AI-FL-OS — the system we are building: full automation from internal operations to marketing and client management, with people keeping the judgment calls
The world outside insists otherwise, of course. Only last year, at the peak of what they called the AGI hype, mankind was to be finished any minute, everything replaced. This year the same mouths announce that the AI companies will be bankrupt by tomorrow morning. Meanwhile crypto, the industry that raised me, has emptied out — the people are gone, and the cycle is heading toward its bottom, or perhaps is already crawling along it. Having lived through one full turn of this wheel, my dominant feeling is a familiar one: so it passes, once again. Nothing new under the sun, as the Preacher says. And yet a small voice keeps asking whether this time might be different.
They say the world is steadying itself, that with the rise of AI a boom is upon us. I cannot shake the unease. The wars have not ended; the crises underneath are real and ongoing. What troubles me is not the bad news itself but the cheerfulness laid over it — quarterly results announced as if nothing were wrong anywhere. The pretense of normalcy amplifies the anxiety more than the danger does. Not that I believe something must happen tomorrow. But when I ask the people around me how they are, the answers have grown uncannily uniform: “I no longer know what I am supposed to do with my life.” Everything seems to change at once, and nothing moves at all. In such weather, everyone’s deliberation runs deep.
Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (1818)
I am no exception. Marketing is my newly widened field, and I am still searching for the breakthrough in it. Around this time of year, a festival called Korea Blockchain Week used to bring deals to our door; one way or another, the livelihood never quite choked. This year the door has been quiet. And every new market I survey seems as unforgiving as the one before it. I cannot yet say, with any confidence, “this is the way through.” I can only say I am looking.
Still, I keep myself in order. I exercise almost every day now, and I tend to myself with more care than I used to. Taking up writing again, after leaving it for so long, is part of the same tending. I would like to write more often. Then again, this letter alone took me three days, so I will make no bold promises — only that I intend to keep writing, and to let the writing show me finding my work, rather than waiting for the work to find me.
Consider this letter one of the prayers I owe you. It is clumsy and it is late, but it was made in a quiet hour, which I believe is the proper time for such things. I hope the grass is still green where you are.
Agwn