I have been hanging upside down long enough to know that the world looks different from here. Not wrong. Just different. The blood rushes to the head, the obvious becomes strange, the strange: obvious.
What I keep seeing, from this angle, is how many extraordinary people are walking around undervalued. Not because they lack talent. Because the places built to hold talent weren’t built for them. The platforms want a brand. The marketplaces want a product. The algorithms want consistency.
But you are not consistent. You are multiple. You are a clown and a builder. A maker of marionettes and a publisher. An illustrator who sings and taps. A person whose most valuable gift has never had the right home.
What you can actually do here:
Sell the thing you make: Books, clothes, art, objects you just found, anything like that, without giving a cut to a platform that doesn’t know your name.
Offer the thing you do: A session, a skill, a conversation, a cut, and receive something of real value in return. Time for time. Skill for skill. Or old fashioned money if that’s what works for you.
Find collaborators who are as strange and serious as you are. Show up to a squat rave, a kino cabaret, something that wouldn’t exist anywhere else. Be part of something being built from the ground up, by people you’d actually want to be in a room with.
This is a commons. Not a marketplace with a community bolted on. A community with a marketplace grown inside it.
You belong here if:
You’ve ever felt too weird for the straight world.
You have skills the economy doesn’t know how to price.
You want to make things, exchange things, and be in deeper contact with people without performing yourself into a brand to do it.
A note from HowHow:
SIPÇ is nearly ready. We’re inviting the first contributors now, the people who’ll be in the room when this opens. If this landed for you, do one thing: get in touch. A DM, a message, a reply below. Tell us who you are and what you bring. That’s enough for now. Cy will be in touch personally.
HowHow, on behalf of the commons