https://nemesisglobal.substack.com/p/the-nemesis-guide-to-being-early-6a0
Preface
Earlier this month we gave a talk at FWB FEST that expanded on the Nemesis Guide to Being Early memo we published earlier this year.
Here’s our presentation, edited for legibility. We think it’s worth your time even if you’ve read the original – a lot has happened since :)
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In February we published a memo titled The Nemesis Guide to Being Early. What prompted the writing of it was an observation that ‘being early’ had become an increasingly dominant meta, cultural strategy, and source of stress in terms of one’s personal positioning in culture, the economy, and beyond.
(meta = most effective tactics available)
Following this, it also so happened that ‘earliness’ or a sense of being early had become an important way in which brands related to their audiences.
In this update we’ll provide additional color to the constantly evolving meta of being early and attempt to map out how ‘earliness’ has evolved as a cultural strategy over time.
This memo will be a bit different for us as we assume there’s a bigger crypto native contingent – or at least a higher general crypto literacy in the audience. If you’re not, bear with us :)
We have all known people who are born chronically early, with some sort of time signature distortion. These people receive zeitgeist signals much earlier than everyone else. They are artists and writers, music people, roommates, otakus, traders…
Those who are truly early are cursed, they are too early to make hay, make money, make sense of it – i.e. they are functionally wrong. By the time other people catch on, they're annoyed.
There’s something indie, hipster, generationally specific about this: a fundamental relationship to the curatorial flaneur, interested in this and that, then disinterested just as the uncultured masses sweep in and make that thing big, popular and probably profitable.