Will Manidis – Julie Fredrickson

Day 2016 and Cracks in Timelines and Stratum Corneum

I write every post on my blog with my own mind and my own hands. I type on my phone whatever my mind has managed to organize on a given day. It’s a ritual for thinking more than an attempt at being read by others.

Funnily enough, on Day 804 aka March 15 2023 (the day I first met Isaiah) I wrote about how AI writing seemed primed to over take all natural human brain brewed artisanal content.

Three years later Isaiah’s reactor went critical, I’m still writing my human brain derived content, and timelines from Twitter to Substack are drowning in pithy highly readable artificial intelligence written content. Poor Will Manidis has jokingly taken responsibility but feed slop was coming one way or mother.

It does make a chronological feed as a timeline a much better choice for personal use as algorithmic buffing of content will make a night river of a platform into a million tributary parts. The feeds crack as the water of thought are routed elsewhere.

This metaphor has clearly reached me as yesterday I went to some effort to do a full shower, exfoliate, shave and wash routine with new products meant to improve my epidermis from tip to toe. I ended up giving myself a number of itchy red notches and spent the evening slathering on lotions and cortisone creams.

My stratum corneum cracked just as my timeline did. The moisture in my skin is we sucked out by acids and scrubbing. I’d taken off a few dead skin cells and irritated the rest.

Just like the insights and prose have been buffed and pumiced to a flat surface of legibility in our feeds. Nothing was buoyant or smooth. It was flat with the occasional warm to the touch but of discomfort. Slopping on occlusives might help my skin but I have no fix for the timeline.

The crazier the informational world gets, the more inclined I am to tune it all out. The flows of information are fun sure but it’s only useful to financiers, degenerates and the global management class. I really only rate into very bottom of one. No, not the degenerate class.

As 2026 has become the year of repositioning for “whatever is coming,” I am unsure of much I wish to return from the hinterlands into the flow. Being inside the flow looks enticing but it’s Thor the only way to do business.

The thing is that I began my own career by participating (in a small way) in what Will Manidis calls The Flow. Being inside has its perks and I saw a lot which enabled me to make some very good investments.

What is the flow? It’s a metaphor for a 24/7 club of information, a formal and informal circuit of social and business obligations, and series of social & professional inputs that sometimes generate spectacular output.

It’s no wonder people think investing looks like gambling when you put it that way. It takes a lot of shrewd social manners and access to resources to be inside the flow and those are distinct barriers for anyone outside the global ten percent.

So where to go if you are an American? Well, stay put somewhere you can be stable and secure. Sure the middle powers will tell you that they can save the liberal order but in reality it’s all state capitalism by strong man and technocrats. And I’m not either and I’d wager most truly new things that will matter won’t be easily secured by old mechanism of power.

What Manidis rightly points out in his Flow essay, is that you can build businesses and make good money for investors and limited partners outside of the flow. You can focus on your unique insights and build something great.

I hope I offer some proof of that myself. I flash the codes for my odd little node and traffic occasionally routes through me. I found crypto winners and the future of atomics outside the flow. And I think I’d rather like to spend my Sundays seeing what’s happening outside the nightclub of financial flows.

If you want to be outside you can be. I just might be already. You can find me in the proverbial parking lot of the Flow (the open internet) yapping, chilling, lighting and fighting with the cool kids. You will always know where to find me. I’ll be one DM away.