Far Beyond The Stars: The Archives

Written by Everett Bogue | See you on the other side.

Sometimes a year of work can be reduced to a few bits of data.

The density of a moment contains information stretching back to the beginning of the universe.

Looking deeply into someone’s eyes can transfer more information than you’ll ever receive online.

On February 15th, 2011, a few things are going to happen:

1. Augmented Humanity is launching exclusively on Ebookling. It’s my new e-book, about second selves and mental cybernetics. The price will be $30.

2. Ebookling is re-launching as an beautifully simple space to purchase e-books worth reading. Colin and Miles are working decisively to craft an incredible platform.

The Ebookling launch is pretty self-explanatory, so I’ll let it happen when it happens.

If you buy the book you’ll get a link you can retweet, email, or link to which will give you 25% commission on any book sales from Ebookling. No one has ever created an e-bookstore that pays people to read in this way.

3. I’m going to wipe Far Beyond The Stars completely, cleaning the slate. All of the writing and research is being condensed into the two e-books. Minimalist Business will remain available, but the price is rising from $47 to $50. The $37 option will no longer be available for sale. Both my e-books will be hosted exclusively on Ebookling.

The archive of Far Beyond The Stars is back in the sidebar. I’m uncopywriting all of the work I’ve done on FBTS over the last year and a half (except the e-books). You have until the morning of February 15th to do whatever you want with the content. Archive it, republish it, read your favorite article one last time.

The future of the work is in your hands.

Keep an eye on Gwen too, she’s up to some mischief as well.

Anyone who signs up for the Letter.ly ($25 per month) will receive a free copy of Augmented Humanity on February 15th. I will continue to write about the deeper work that I’m doing there — work that won’t be available anywhere else.

I’ll be deleting the feedburner list, so you’ll have to resubscribe to the new blog (when/where it launches) or follow me on Twitter.

Written by Everett Bogue | Twitter made us minimalists.

Information is flowing faster.

An idea that we come up today will be adopted by the collective tomorrow.

Remember two months ago when everyone thought I’d lost my mind when I started to talk about cyborgs/augmented humanity? Then suddenly Eric Schmidt and Amber Case start talking about the same thing, and we’re living in a world-wide cyborg-coming-out party.

I like to call this idea-triangulation. The same thing happened when people were terrified about the idea of becoming a minimalist a year ago. As Derek Sivers mentioned: “The first follower transforms a lone nut into a leader.”

This is just one example of how much faster info travels than it did one year ago.

When I wrote The Art of Being Minimalist, the world needed instructions. It needed someone to tell the world, point blank: here’s what happens when you throw out all of your stuff.

And this, admittedly prescriptive knowledge worked, for a time.

However, then one day I realized that I wasn’t a minimalist at all. I was an augmented human, I had been from the start.

Then, I began to see the pattern in augmented humanity everywhere: minimalism was simply a side-effect of developing skill in mental cybernetics.

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We are responsible for the ideas that we put out onto the Internet.

Once the ideas go out, they can’t come back.

Information propagates infinitely faster than we can hit the delete key.

That being said, we can (and should) take responsibility for distribution to a point. If an idea is no longer valid, we can’t continue to sell it.

When I look at The Art of Being Minimalist, I see a movement that had it’s time.

Minimalism is an element of augmented reality. There will always be space to teach that knowledge, and many will continue to do so.

As humans begin to see the way that augmented humanity is living, the incentive will be to transition into this new life. The ideas behind minimalism will allow that, but it needs an upgrade first.

I leave that up to you.

As for me, I’m stepping away from minimalism as a movement.

I live out of a bag. I live anywhere. My second self takes care of me. The mental tools of a newly augmented world make this possible. To follow this journey, follow me on Twitter –one of the most powerful mental cybernetic tools to cultivate.

The choice of minimalism was to embrace our cultural evolution, the choice came, the choice went.

Minimalism, the movement, can now be reduced to a simple equation:

“Rent a dumpster, throw your crap in it, join the future.”

On Febraury 10th at 11:59pm EST, I’m taking The Art of Being Minimalist off the market.

You can buy The Art of Being Minimalist for $17 below.

You can buy Minimalist Business and The Art of Being Minimalist together for the reduced price of $60 below.

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There will be more to come in the next few days, keep your eyes on this space via Twitter.

“Blank Page…?”

Interview by Thom Chambers with Everett Bogue.

Thom has a digital magazine on the future of business on the web at In Treehouses. His two latest stories passed through my filter and into my radar, on how the web is becoming more beautiful with the addition of filter/social apps such as Instagr.am (which I use regularly) and how Colin Wright and Miles Fitzgerald are relaunching Ebookling.

Thom asked me to do an interview on how my platform is becoming multi-dimensional with the addition of my Letter.ly to the already fairly layered existence my second self has on the web.

Here is the interview:

Thom: Letter.ly is still quite unfamiliar to many. What made you decide to start up a letter.ly newsletter rather than putting that content on a blog?

Ev: A few months ago I discovered that I was a member of a group of people called ‘augmented humans’, a term that Eric Schmidt the soon-to-be-ex CEO of Google used at DLD2011 to discuss the future of human evolution. Augmented humans use mental cybernetic technologies, such as Twitter to extend their consciousness beyond themselves — creating personalities on the Internet called second selves, which allow them to unplug from the Internet.

While pre-augmented humanity is tethered to a computer screen answering emails, augmented humanity is having tea –discussing how to let technology do it’s thing, while we do our human thing.

I started the letter.ly because I began to realize that talking about advanced mental cybernetics to an audience of 85,000+ people was incredibly confusing for the audience. People were stumbling across the articles, and had no idea what I was talking about. At best this made people incredibly confused, at worst I was ripping people’s brains through the space/time continuum.

I had to make a choice: either dumb down the content for a mass audience, or ask people for a commitment before they entered the time-machine. Once I made this choice, it took a lot of the pressure off me to make sure everyone got it — which is impossible at this point. Augmented humanity is such a fringe topic that explaining it to a small audience is much easier than dealing with all of the backlash that came from proclaiming that there’s a generation of cyborgs living amongst us.

Thom: How hard was it to choose a price point? Have you got any advice for others considering a letter.ly newsletter when it comes to pricing?

Ev: Many people were charging $1.99 – $3.99 for their Letter.lys. My fellow-collective-buddy and augmented human @rosshill and I had a discussion (which for us is like two tweets) about how we could price our Letter.lys at a point where the people who received them felt like they were getting value from them. $25 seemed to be the right price point.

I’m teaching people how to create second selves that take care of them, essentially letting them earn a living without having to be tethered to a screen all day. The value return can be, when applied, many to the power of many times what the small group of people who subscribe are paying for.

When pricing a letter.ly, the biggest concern I had with extremely low price points is simply that it will just seem like an inconvenience to sign up. What is the difference between free and $1.99? Not much, it’s simply a barrier of entry. I think if you’re going to charge, you might as well charge a real amount.

This funds the research, and also creates a more dedicated following/interaction with the people who receive. If someone isn’t interested, they’re going to unsubscribe. This creates a stronger base of support for the work, because disinterested people leave naturally.

Thom: How have people reacted to the decision to charge for your content? In a world of so much free information, do you often find yourself having to justify the decision?

Ev: I don’t feel the need to justify the decision to anyone. If they want it, they can subscribe. If they feel like it’s not worth the value, I’d honestly rather them invest their money in another way. There’s a lot of information on the Internet, and research into augmented humanity really is only interesting to people who are either waking up to the fact that they are cybernetic life-forms, or are interested in becoming augmented themselves.

Thom: Without wishing to be too indelicate about it, how good is the income from the newsletter? Would you encourage others to take it up as a viable income stream?

Ev: The launch has been slow, purposefully. I haven’t been pushing the letter.ly on people, because I don’t think it’s necessary. That being said, while not revealing actual figures, the monthly revenue has quickly risen to become a significant amount of income for my business. It’s a nice bonus on top of e-book sales, occasional 1-to-1 consulting, and once-in-awhile affiliate revenue.

Everything is an experiment. I don’t think I necessarily would have started out with a letter.ly as the first product that I ever launched. It could work, but figure that I launched my letter.ly to a rather large audience with a significant number of extremely dedicated readers. Results will vary.

Julien Smith explains the economics of launching this kind of business in his article: The future of blogs is paid access.

Thom: Letter.ly allows people to unsubscribe at any time. Have you found that your audience is loyal or does the fact that it’s easy to leave make people more fickle, do you think?

Ev: I really hope anyone who isn’t interested in the content I’m writing will unsubscribe, it’s not worth their attention honestly to continue reading. The money, in my mind, is secondary to the attention that people are putting into the content they’re reading.

There’s an incredibly easy-to-click unsubscribe link on the bottom of every letter.ly. I hope everyone’s first instinct is to click it if they’re suddenly not vibing with the content.

That being said, I’ve only had a half a handful of people unsubscribe so far.

Thom: What are the benefits to a newsletter, do you think, over an ebook or a course or a blog? What excites you about the medium?

Ev: Information is traveling faster and faster. I’m noticing that a new idea that I have will be instantly adopted by my collective within a few hours of my writing it — and vis-versa. The internet is bringing us all closer together in our ideas, especially augmented humans. I know to some extent what is going on in the minds of a group of people who my 3rd brain is synced with in Melbourne Australia, and they know somewhat of what is going on in my mind.

This speed means that ebooks really need to be based around information that is timeless, instead of timely. I haven’t really ever taken a course, or given a course, so I can’t comment on that. However, when I look at the blog, I see information that floats just above the surface — enough to puzzle people a little about the possibilities available in their lives. When I look at the Letter.ly, I see a way of transporting people deeper into their understanding of a way of consciousness that’s just beginning to emerge in our culture. When I look at the ebooks, I see a complete story being told from beginning to end that takes your mind from this point to that point, and hopefully by the end you’ve jumped forward in evolution closer to where my collective is currently riding the wave.

Thom: In terms of content, have you found that particular themes or styles are more suited to the newsletter – or is it similar to blogging with its time-tested traditions of headlines and list posts?

Ev: I’m beginning to believe that “time-tested” traditions like list posts and impulsive headlines are going away. I want to write a headline that makes sense for my Letter.ly, I want to make a headline that makes sense for my blog, I want a book with a title that makes sense for the book.

This is a shift for me, because I wasn’t always approaching the work this way. I’m just finding that the more I travel into the future and bring information backwards down the evolutionary chain to people who need it, the more it’s not necessary to pad the content with superfluous techniques that they teach you in marketing school.

The web is becoming more intelligent to that stuff, and so are our minds. We won’t be tricked anymore, and we’re seeing that as some of the sites that rely on those techniques begin to fall in relevance.

Thom: Where do you see the newsletter going? Do you have a plan for it or do you run it more out of sheer enjoyment?

Ev: It’s an experiment, it’s also a stopgap. I have a major goal this year of eliminating email from my life completely (in order to show the world that it can be done, and so others can follow.) In order to that, I’m going to need to find another home for the Letter.ly content. I’ve made it clear for everyone involved that it may not be around forever.

Until then, I’m enjoying time-traveling with everyone much farther out than we could ever go on the blog. That’s incredibly fulfilling and enjoying for me, and for the people who are involved in the project.

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Thank you Thom for allowing me to cross-post this interview on my blog. You can check out the new issue of In Treehouses on Febuary 14th.

My Letter.ly is here.

My three favorite Letter.lys right now are by Ross, Gwen, and Crystal.

Written by Everett Bogue | Tweeting gives you Jedi powers.

Blogging is in transition.

Many of us who have practicing blogging for awhile are becoming incredibly aware of the limits of the web as a medium for communication.

We have so much inside ourselves that we want to communicate, but our ideas end up getting caught in a technology that hasn’t changed very much since I was a teenager.

Yes, blogging has definitely gotten more widgets — but the most important decisions I usually make on my blog is turning all of the little functions off. Essentially many of us are blogging in the same way that we did ten years ago. The only difference is how we get the blog posts out, which these days is mostly by Twitter.

I turned off the Facebook ‘Like’ button, because as much as I loved the large number on the top of my posts that resulted from people pressing it, the actual traffic to my site was negligible. This is because Facebook wants Facebookers to stay on Facebook where they can be shown ads and click ‘Like’ on photos of girls/boys they will never sleep with.

Regardless, all of the smart people I know are leaving Facebook anyway.

Blogging needs two things to make it more successful as a platform:

1. Bandwidth.

Bandwidth is a term that we cybernetic yogis use to convey the depth of an information transfer between two humans. F2F (face to face) is universally the highest definition, holograms are the next (but are kind of hard to find in the world right now — soon enough) next is 3d video, video, still photos, audio, and then finally text.

Blogging tends to find itself in one of the lowest bandwidth ranges — text. The good thing about text is the low bandwidth means that it can travel much farther and faster than higher-bandwidth creations. A tweet can be read by 5000 people instantly, a blog post by 2000, but a video will probably only be played by 200, and F2F only conducted with one person at a time.

This results in an ecosystem of how we interact on the web. As my blog grows in popularity, my threshold for F2F has grown with it. Whenever I say ‘Wheels down in X-city’ I commonly get dozens of requests to connect — hardly any I can answer because F2F takes an incredible amount of energetic power, especially if it’s a one-way conversation.

2. Dimensionality.

Dimensionality is how smart the blog is in relation to its readers. For example, not everyone who comes to my work is in a place where they want to read about cybernetic yoga. They might want to time-travel back to when I was writing about how to reduce your possessions to less than 100 things.

This is where the intelligence of the web itself needs to evolve, I’m not sure how much blogging or even my own ability to curate the content can correct for the huge variables involved in breadth of the knowledge that readers who stumble across this blog may have.

To generalize, my blog used to have some pretty solid content for 20-somethings who were uncomfortable with their jobs — but over time my content has shifted to a place where I imagine my core audience is centered on Silicon Valley futurists.

What if people who needed my ‘how to quit your soul-sucking job’ posts could get be shown that content instantly? What if the people who really needed to declutter a desk could be shown that content instantly? What if the people who want to learn mental cybernetics could be shown that content instantly?

A lot of the tension surrounding my blog right now is the fact that decluttering-desks people are accidentally stumbling across posts on mental cybernetics. Not everyone is in the same place, it’s a big leap from clutter to maintaining your 3rd brain.

I think blogging systems will need to learn to adapt to this level of dimensionality if blogging is going to evolve.

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I’ve been blogging on Far Beyond The Stars since October of 2009, since then my strategy has changed a lot. I’ll take the rest of this post to point out some ways in which I’ve changed my blogging strategy.

1. Business strategy entirely F2F (face to face).

I used to get my blogging knowledge from places like Problogger and Copyblogger, which I’m not linking to, because after a few months of experimentation I realized that almost everything those sites teach you is wrong. Everyone still thinks those sites are popular because 80% of bloggers have been trained (like little blogging puppies!) to suck up to established authorities in the off chance that they get linked to by an ‘A-List blogger’. The reality is that when I was linked to by Problogger last month it resulted in a grand total of 34 click-throughs.

If I do need intelligent advice on getting traffic to my blog, I commonly will buy Corbett Barr three beers or some good Scotch and ask him his honest opinion about my blogging strategy. The next best thing to buying Corbett drinks is reading his blog.

The lesson here is that all of my learning these days is not being done from blogs, instead I’m reaching out to people who I respect in real life. The highest bandwidth is real life, so if you want to learn how to blog successfully, the #1 strategy that you can employ is to meet a successful blogger in real life. Obviously this is hard to do, I commonly get upward of dozens of requests for drinks when I land in any city.

Start by reaching out to bloggers who are around your same level and in your city. For example, one of the first bloggers I met up with was Ash Ambirge in New York — now we’re both rockstar bloggers. Why? Because we supported each other until we found success.

Getting access to a rockstar blogger/entrepreneur F2F is difficult, but can upgrade your success at an incredibly fast rate — if you’re open to their suggestions.

2. Stopped caring about stats.

When I first launched my blog, I was obsessed with how many people read my blog posts. I’d click on google analytics three times a day (even though it only updates once a day!) I know, it seems silly now. Anyway, now I don’t care about stats so much.

I’d rather have a small group of enthusiastic readers than a large group of confused readers.

When you write for the masses, you end up writing stupid posts that no one cares about. One of the most surprising elements of transitioning from writing about minimalism to writing about augmented humanity/the cybernetic yogi lifestyle is that my blog traffic has actually gone up (though, I’ve only checked it once this month).

Why is that? Because blogging success comes from pushing your own personal edge. Too many young bloggers are trying to write what they think other people want to read, instead of writing work that actually challenges themselves.

Culture exists on the fringes. The center is boring, and secretly everyone wants out of the mediocre middle.

3. Pushing audience interactions to higher levels.

Many blogs will encourage you to ‘join the conversation’ in a place called “The Comments”.

“The comments” is where your good ideas and time (your most valuable commodity) goes to die. The reason for this is no one actually sees comments, because it’s generally assumed by the majority of smart Internet users that the commenting section is a place where the low-life of the Internet go to play.

Many people go straight to the comment section of larger blogs and post a “me too!” comment, because Darren Rowse told them that posting comments on other blogs is the #1 way to build your blog audience on his aforementioned blog that should be re-titled Unproblogger.com

There are two more important ways to “join the conversation” (whatever that means.) These two ways are guaranteed you put your interaction in a space where others can actually see it.

1. Respond on Twitter. “The most awesome cybernetic yogi I know is @evbogue! Here’s a link to his blog post –> TK TK url” or perhaps “Wow, @evbogue has really gone off the deepend and I don’t even understand what he’s talking about anymore.” Can really do wonders for how many people see what your opinion is. This way all of your followers can see it, and check out whether I’m really awesome/lost it themselves and weigh in on Twitter. When your followers see you responding to creators on Twitter, they will learn how to respond to your creations on Twitter, thus bringing more attention to your work! Yay!

2. Respond on your blog. If you read something online that really blows your mind, one of the most powerful actions you can take is to respond on your own blog. This can be as simple as linking to a post “this post made me think.” or can be a 2,000 word exposé building on the awesomeness of the material that you’ve been reading. They call it The Web for a reason, there are hyperlinks connecting everything. If you avoid hyperlinking out from your blog, no one will ever know your blog exists.

Both of these are what I consider ‘high-level’ interactions on the web. You know how in the middle ages all of the kings and royalty had great parties in the castles while all of the serfs got to sit outside the castles and live miserable lives? Twitter and blogging = building castles. Dwelling in comments or on Facebook = rolling in mud while we giggle at you from the castles. The good thing about modern day royalty is you don’t need to be born into the castle to stay there, all you need to do is launch a blog or sign up for Twitter.

A good way to start using Twitter is to follow me, and then follow everyone I follow. It’s a small list. This will instantaneously flood your brain with useful information, and you can change your follow list from there as time goes on and you discover more awesome people on Twitter.

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Oh! As many of you know I’ve moved most of the deeper writing here to a subscription-based Letter.ly. The reason I did this is because I began to notice that my writing was going too deep for general consumption. Random folks were stumbling across blogs on mental cybernetics which burned their brain in a really bad way.

The price of the Letter.ly is going up from $20 to $25 a month tonight, February 1st 2011, at midnight EST. If you subscribe before then, you’ll be locked in at the lower rate.

You can subscribe to the Letter.ly here. Everyone who signs up for the Letter.ly will receive a free copy of my new e-book tentatively set to launch on February 15th 2011. The book will cost more than $20, but I haven’t settled on a price yet.

[Update: The E-book is tentatively called “Second Self” and is on creating a “second self” digital presence that will take care of your physical body.]