# 20251229 TT Intro Post - IRL Version v310

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### Introduction: What’s Interesting Where the Attention Is

A growing share of creative work today is aimed at building audiences by giving value rather than entertainment. Independent creators do it. Existing businesses do it. Often, they do it well—sometimes intuitively—by publishing creative that helps people understand something, do something, or see something differently in their own lives.

What is less common is a clear description of what this kind of work actually is.

People engaged in it often struggle to reason cleanly about what they are building, why certain things work, how individual pieces of creative relate to the effort as a whole, or how the work should evolve over time. Decisions about what to make next, when to extend into new formats or products, or whether progress is really being made can feel ad hoc, even when the work itself is effective.

This paper is an attempt to describe that effort as a coherent creative form.

It is not a method, a playbook, or a set of best practices. It does not claim that following a sequence of steps will produce results. Instead, it aims to make the underlying structure of this kind of audience building legible—clear enough that people can reason about what they are doing, why it holds together, and what follows from it.

The creative problem at the center of this paper is specific. It concerns building an audience by giving value, where the creative itself must earn attention, that attention is meant to support some business or endeavor beyond the creative, and the effort is entered without a predefined endpoint. To work at all, it must be viable over time.

As I worked through this problem, what surprised me was not that any of the individual pieces were new, but that they resolved into something coherent. Practices people are already discovering—value-led creative, audience building, storytelling, even software and tools—appear to belong to a single creative form once viewed from the right distance. This paper is an attempt to make that already-emerged structure visible.

Framed this way, the core constraint is attention.

If attention is scarce, then the creative must be interesting. And if the effort unfolds across many pieces of creative over time, then the structure that governs interest matters. Storytelling enters here not as an aesthetic choice or genre preference, but as a structural necessity. Story is how people naturally organize attention, causality, goals, and outcomes over time. Any effort that depends on repeatedly earning and holding attention will, implicitly or explicitly, resolve into story structure.

This paper treats storytelling at that level: as the correct lens for understanding how this kind of audience building works as a whole.

One additional assumption is important to make explicit. Throughout this paper, “value” refers to actionable knowledge, understanding, skill, or perspective that can be used in real life. The existence or quality of that value is not evaluated here. It is treated as a given input. The question is not whether value exists, but how a creator who already has it can make it interesting, sustained, and effective under the constraints of attention and time.

The argument proceeds in two steps.

Step 1 fully defines the creative problem. It identifies what success requires, applies storytelling at the level of the overall effort rather than individual posts, and works toward a precise description of what the creative form is organized around. By the end of Step 1, the form is fully specified.

Step 2 explores what follows from that definition. It does not introduce new theory. Instead, it shows how treating audience building as this kind of creative form makes a wide range of things newly visible: how creators reason about what to make, how audience engagement functions, how authenticity and meaning emerge, and how media, products, services, software, data, and AI can operate coherently within the same structure. Step 2 functions as a map of a space to be explored over time, rather than a set of conclusions to be exhausted here.

Throughout the paper, I use a simple running example—a personal stylist building an audience to support her styling work. The example is not offered as proof or prescription. It exists to make the structure concrete and to keep the argument grounded as it moves between abstraction and practice.

This paper also sits within a broader project. It defines a creative form and the problem that form is meant to solve. The work that follows—published iteratively on Substack—operates inside that form, exploring what it enables, where it breaks down, and how it extends. The accompanying corpus reflects that process: exploratory, uneven, exercised in practice, and now coherent enough to be reasoned about as a whole.

Many of the individual ideas in Step 1 will be familiar to readers who have spent time building audiences or working with story. They are included here not for novelty, but because each plays a specific role in a dependency chain that the later arguments rely on.

What follows begins with Step 1: fully defining the creative problem of building an audience by giving value.

### Step 1: Fully Defining the Creative Problem

This section is concerned with fully defining the creative problem involved in building an audience by giving value.

The aim is not to offer tactics or a method, and not to argue that a particular approach will succeed. It is to make the structure of this kind of audience-building effort explicit enough to reason about. What often appears as a loose collection of posts, platforms, algorithms, and engagement behaviors can be understood as a coherent form, organized around a shared center and constrained by clear requirements for success.

Fully defining the creative problem, in this sense, means describing what this form is doing at the level of the whole endeavor: what it must accomplish to work at all, how familiar elements relate to one another, and what the effort is structurally oriented toward over time. Once that structure is visible, questions about creative, audience, and extension stop being ad hoc and begin to resolve against a common frame.

Nothing in what follows depends on specialized psychology or novel storytelling technique. The reasoning is intentionally straightforward. It applies basic story structure and well-understood properties of attention and audience formation to this specific context, and follows those implications far enough to reach a usable definition.

The subsections that follow proceed as a deliberate progression. They establish what success requires, apply storytelling at the level of the overall effort, and work toward a definition of the creative problem that is specific enough to hold together and support the rest of the project.

#### Success Criteria and Value

Step 1 aims to fully define the creative problem of this kind of audience building. To know whether that definition fits, we need a clear sense of what success actually requires—and what must continue to hold as the effort unfolds over time.

In this paper, value-based audience building is treated as a distinct creative form, constrained by three success criteria. For the form to work, all three must be satisfied simultaneously. Failing on any one of them is enough for the effort to break down, even if the others appear to be working.

First, the effort must generate sustained demand for the creative itself. In this form, the creative is the primary product. People return to it, seek it out, and remain engaged over time. That ongoing demand is what constitutes an audience, and it distinguishes this form from advertising or other activity where creative exists only to prompt an immediate transaction.

Second, the effort must generate demand for a business or endeavor beyond the creative. The audience exists in relation to something the creator is ultimately trying to support: a service, organization, practice, or broader project. Attention is earned through the creative, but its significance lies in enabling downstream impact. Without sustained audience demand, that impact cannot materialize.

Third, the effort must be viable on an open-ended time horizon. This form is entered without a predefined endpoint. It must be capable of continuing as long as it remains worth doing, without collapsing through exhaustion, novelty decay, or misalignment between the creative and the underlying value. Temporarily successful outcomes that cannot be sustained do not satisfy this criterion.

Taken together, these criteria define what it means for this form of audience building to succeed.

They also sit on top of a more basic assumption: that the creator already has some form of value to offer.

In this paper, “value” refers to actionable knowledge, understanding, or perspective that an audience member can use in real life. The nature or quality of that value is not evaluated here. It is treated as an input to the creative problem, rather than something the theory attempts to generate or justify.

The question, then, is not whether value exists, but how a creator who already understands and possesses it can make that value interesting, sustained, and effective under the constraints described above.

In the stylist example, this is straightforward. The value is her ability to assemble outfits that work for real people in real contexts. The creative effort exists to make that capability visible and accessible to an audience. Success, in practice, means that the creative attracts sustained interest, that interest translates into demand for styling services, and that the effort can be maintained over time as long as it continues to be worth doing.

#### Storytelling as the Correct Structural Lens

Attention is the core scarce resource in the audience building effort.  The audience builder needs to acquire attention in a highly competitive environment, hold it in the form of an audience, and then do this on a basis that drives their business or endeavor.

Storytelling is the fundamental human technology for getting attention and conveying information in a way that connects.  Therefore, any sustained audience building effort like this one should inevitably resolve into story structure in order to successfully acquire attention in this way.

The way our minds give attention and process clearly has a fundamental narrative component to it, which simply means that you have a series of linked events that start with some kind of complication and end in its resolution and is modeled around a main character of interest.  Our brains clearly have a fundamental basis of processing in this way, and that is what storytelling taps into.

And that is what the collective knowledge of storytelling treats: how to most effectively craft and tell stories that tap into that effectively.

Which is to say, if you have a challenge that requires getting attention and conveying information, then you need to employ storytelling.  And you have all the collective understanding of storytelling itself and historically all the creative forms it has been employed in to draw on to meet the challenge.

And, this particular audience building challenge as outlined above is exactly such a challenge in the new context of digital and the social platforms which has made this kind of effort newly viable and potentially beneficial to those who could benefit from doing it successfully.

So, the first step is to think about how to apply storytelling to this challenge to enable success.

#### Apply Storytelling at the Meta Story Level

Storytelling does not only apply at the level of individual posts, videos, or pieces of creative. In this kind of audience building, it applies most fundamentally at the level of the effort as a whole.

When a creator publishes creative repeatedly over time, those pieces do not exist in isolation. Taken together, they form a larger, unfolding story. This is what I mean by a meta story — not in the academic sense of a metanarrative or self-referential critique of storytelling itself, but in the more ordinary sense of the story of the stories: the narrative the entire body of creative collectively tells as it accumulates.

The move here is not to invent a new kind of story, but to apply the same discipline used to make individual stories work to the effort itself. Building an audience in this way requires continuity of focus, unity of purpose, and sustained interest over an open-ended time horizon. Those are exactly the conditions story structure is meant to support. Applying storytelling only at the level of individual pieces leaves the larger effort loosely organized and structurally underdefined.

Once the success criteria are clear and the medium is understood, this follows naturally. An effort that aims to earn attention indefinitely, through creative that provides value, needs an organizing story at the level of the whole endeavor. The meta story functions as that organizing principle. It gives the work coherence over time and makes the accumulation of creative legible as a single, ongoing project rather than a stream of disconnected outputs.

This is not a new idea in general. Story has long been used to organize extended creative efforts — from serialized fiction to long-running media franchises. What is less common is to treat story as the organizing principle for value-based audience building in this context, and to follow that implication through deliberately.

A simple example makes this concrete. Consider a personal stylist building an audience to support her styling business. Each piece of creative may stand on its own, but collectively the work tells a larger story about what her audience might become over time through better style choices. That larger story — who it centers on, what it is oriented toward, and how progress unfolds — is what holds the effort together.

Once storytelling is applied at this level, the question is no longer whether story matters. The question becomes what the meta story actually is — and what follows from organizing the entire effort around it.

#### Meta Story Structure for Interest

Applying storytelling at the meta level raises a practical question: what kind of story structure makes an ongoing audience-building effort interesting in the first place?

At the most basic level, narrative interest comes from two conditions. The story is about someone the audience can recognize as themselves, and it concerns something that person wants to have happen. Those two conditions alone do most of the work. Without them, attention rarely holds for long.

In a value-based audience-building effort, those conditions are already implied. The effort exists for the audience, not the creator. And the value being offered points toward a change or outcome the audience would plausibly desire. Making the story interesting, then, is largely a matter of organizing it around those facts rather than inventing something new.

This is where classical narrativization fits naturally. In its simplest form, it involves a protagonist oriented toward a goal, an initial lack or problem, and a sequence of causally related events that move toward resolution. The structure endures because it mirrors how people experience effort, learning, and improvement over time.

When applied at the level of the whole endeavor, the roles become clear. The audience member occupies the position of protagonist. The resolution corresponds to the realization of the value being offered. Because value has been defined here as actionable information, resolution takes the form of that information being used — understood, applied, adapted — in ways that produce the outcome the audience cares about. The creator is not the hero of the story, but the guide whose knowledge, perspective, or judgment helps make that progress possible.

Seen this way, the story does not hinge on isolated moments of insight or inspiration. It unfolds through informational, practical, and experiential steps that move the audience member closer to the desired outcome. The more directly those steps contribute to using the value in real life, the more coherent and interesting the story becomes.

The stylist example makes this concrete. The audience member is the protagonist. The stylist plays the role of guide. The value lies in actionable knowledge about how to dress well in ways that fit a person’s life and identity. The resolution is not abstract appreciation of style, but the audience member actually dressing differently and feeling better as a result. The meta story is not about the stylist’s success, but about the audience member’s change over time.

Readers familiar with marketing or content strategy will recognize this structure immediately. Variants of the hero’s journey — with the audience positioned as protagonist and the brand or creator as guide — are already common in those domains. The resemblance is not accidental. In both cases, the underlying problem is the same: making progress toward a desired outcome legible and compelling enough to earn attention.

Where this effort differs is not in narrative structure, but in scope and orientation. This is not a campaign-level framing applied intermittently in service of a product. It is an audience-building effort organized around an ongoing story of real-world change, pursued over an open-ended horizon, where the creative itself is the primary product and the business or endeavor follows from it. Seeing the shared structure makes that distinction clearer, not blurrier.

With this structure in place, the remaining question is no longer whether story matters, but what form resolution takes in this context — and how to specify it precisely enough to organize the rest of the system around it.

#### Most Interesting Meta Story

Once we have a story structure suited to interest in this context, we can apply the most basic and durable guidance from storytelling: to make a story more interesting, raise the stakes for the protagonist.

In this form, there is a clear and constrained way to do that. The story is already organized around the value the creator offers and the result that value produces for the audience. Raising the stakes, then, does not mean introducing artificial tension or spectacle. It means taking the result of using the value and elevating it to its ideal form.

The complication in this story is the absence of the value. The resolution is the value being realized. To raise the stakes is to ask what that resolution looks like at its highest and most complete expression — not momentarily, but over time.

A practical way to define this ideal outcome is to ask a simple question: what should happen if you had the fullest and best use of this value over time? If the value is real and causal, there is a coherent answer. That answer defines the ideal outcome of the story.

This move is powerful because it keeps the story grounded in real-world change while pushing it toward maximal interest. It does not invent a new desire; it clarifies the strongest version of the desire already implied by the value. In that sense, the resulting structure resembles the most enduring story forms: a protagonist moving from a constrained or unsatisfactory state toward an ideal one through a sequence of meaningful changes.

To continue with the stylist example: if someone had the fullest and best use of personal styling over time, the ideal outcome would not be a single good outfit. It would be consistently looking and feeling good every time they get dressed. That is the raised-stakes version of the value — the ideal result the story is organized around.

At this point, we no longer just have a story structure that can hold attention. We have a maximally interesting meta story: one where the audience member is moving, over time, toward the best possible realization of the value offered.

#### The Idealized Achieved State Theme (IAS) and Its Key Properties

The maximally interesting meta story identified so far can now be described in simpler terms. It is organized around a theme.

In the ordinary sense of the word, the theme answers the question: what is this story about? In this case, the theme names the outcome toward which the audience member is oriented when the creator’s value is applied over time. It captures, in condensed form, what the meta story we have developed is fundamentally concerned with.

Seen this way, the theme aligns cleanly with the success criteria established earlier. It gives the creative a stable basis for interest, since individual pieces of creative can explore, illuminate, or engage different aspects of the same underlying concern. Because the theme is derived from the value the creator offers, it remains directly connected to the business or endeavor the audience is meant to support. And because the effort is intended to continue without a predefined endpoint, the theme must be capable of sustaining relevance over time.

That last requirement introduces an important refinement.

If the resolution implied by the theme were a final end state, interest would eventually collapse once it was reached. Instead, the theme must describe a condition that can be achieved but must also be continually maintained. For lack of a better term, I will refer to this as an Idealized Achieved State, or IAS.

This distinction matters. An IAS is not a problem that is solved once and set aside. It names a desirable state in the audience member’s real life that ongoing actions help establish and sustain. The story does not end when the state is first reached; its interest persists because the state continues to matter.

The stylist example makes this concrete. The ideal outcome is not assembling one successful outfit. It is looking and feeling good every time one gets dressed. That condition has no natural endpoint. Maintaining it is part of what gives it meaning and staying power.

Two additional properties of the IAS are worth making explicit.

First, the IAS is derived directly from the value the creator offers. Starting from a clear understanding of that value, it is possible to reason forward to the IAS prospectively, before publishing any creative. It does not need to be discovered through experimentation or inferred from audience reaction. It can be identified in advance as the strongest and most complete expression of what the value enables.

Second, the IAS is grounded entirely in real-world change for the audience member. The story is not about the creator’s expertise in the abstract, but about what happens in someone’s life when that expertise is applied over time. This preserves the connection to value and to the underlying business or endeavor, while fully centering the audience member as the protagonist.

At this point, we have identified a fundamental element of the creative problem: a theme that describes an idealized achieved state in the audience member’s real life, derived from the creator’s value, and capable of sustaining interest over an open-ended time horizon.

#### The Plot Twist: Enablement, Not Narration

At this point in the progression, something important has happened.

By following classical storytelling guidance in the context of audience building based on giving value, we identified a most interesting story. But the nature of that story turns out to be unexpected in a way that matters for fully defining the creative problem.

The story we arrived at is not primarily a story to be told. It is a story that happens in real life.

If we took storytelling too literally here, the natural conclusion would be that the task is to tell these stories directly, since they are the most interesting ones. But in this creative form, that conclusion does not hold. The central story that organizes the effort is not one whose purpose is narration, but one whose purpose is realization.

This is not a rejection of storytelling. It is a clarification of where storytelling lives in this form.

Traditionally, stories are contained within creative artifacts — films, novels, essays, videos — where meaning, identification, and emotion arise through representation. Real life is downstream or metaphorical. The story is about life, but it does not primarily occur there.

In this kind of audience building, the opposite is true. The story that matters most is the pattern of change in the world that the creative seeks to make possible. The story unfolds outside the artifact, in lived experience. The creative does not resolve the story; it creates the conditions for it to unfold.

This distinction simplifies rather than complicates the problem. It removes a potential confusion between representation and purpose. If the story lives in real life, then telling it directly is insufficient. The creative problem is not how to recount outcomes, but how to make those outcomes more likely to occur.

This is why “giving value,” when understood as actionable information, becomes so fundamental. Actionable information implies real-world change. And real-world change implies a story-as-lived rather than a story-as-told.

At this point, the object we have been working toward in Step 1 is no longer ambiguous. By following the logic of storytelling under the constraints of attention, business relevance, and perpetuity, we did not choose this object arbitrarily — we arrived at it.

The IAS IRL story is fully a story, governed by classical narrative structure, even though it is not primarily narrated. Its elements follow directly from the form once those constraints are taken seriously.

Seen this way, the meta story is conceptually specified. It may sound unfamiliar, but it is simply classical storytelling refocused for purpose. In the stylist example, the value is the ability to assemble outfits well. The resulting IAS IRL story is that people in her audience look and feel good every time they get dressed. The point is not to chronicle those outcomes, but to make them possible.

At the same time, this realization does not yet complete the definition of the creative problem. We have identified the most important story — but understanding how an audience-building effort operates around it requires stepping back and seeing how the other elements relate to it.

What this realization also makes clear is that the most important story being identified is no longer the story that creative primarily tells. Once the core story is understood as an IRL story that unfolds for the audience member, the creative itself necessarily operates at a remove. Its role is not to narrate those lived stories directly, but to work about them — to treat, explore, illuminate, and make salient the theme those stories share. This is not a loss of storytelling, but a reclassification of its function. Creative artifacts remain essential because attention must still be earned, held, and sustained, but they do so by engaging the audience around the conceptual object of the IAS rather than by recounting specific instances of its realization. That shift creates wide creative latitude: creative may be observational, exploratory, aspirational, illustrative, or practical, and it need not directly enable progress in every instance to be successful.

What matters at this stage is that the creative is plausibly and recognizably about the theme — interesting enough to attract and hold attention, and oriented toward engaging the audience around a story they understand as potentially theirs.

Going forward, we will refer to this as satisfying the theme: making creative that is recognizably about the theme and interesting enough for the audience to want to stay engaged with it over time.

#### Stepping Back: Completing the Definition

At this point, we have identified the core story that matters most in this creative form: the Idealized Achieved State (IAS) story as it unfolds in real life for audience members. It is maximally interesting because it reflects something people desire for themselves and can imagine progressing toward over time.

That insight is foundational — but it also exposes a limit.

Because the IAS story is lived rather than told, it cannot by itself fully define the creative problem of this kind of audience building. Knowing what the most important story is does not yet tell us what creative is made, published, and circulated, or how that creative succeeds in attracting and sustaining attention over time.

This is the point at which we need to step back.

To define the creative problem in a way that is actually usable — especially from the creator’s perspective — we have to widen the frame beyond the core story itself. The IAS provides the center of gravity, but the effort operates within a broader environment that includes the creator, the creative artifacts they produce, the platforms on which those artifacts circulate, the systems that mediate distribution, and the audience members encountering the work.

In other words, the IAS IRL story tells us what ultimately matters, but not yet how an audience-building effort coheres around it in practice. The story becomes operational only when it is understood as the organizing reference point within a larger structure — one that explains how creative can be made interesting, how attention accumulates into an audience, and how progress toward the IAS can be imagined, encouraged, or supported over time.

This is not a departure from storytelling. It is the next step in taking it seriously. Having identified the story that matters most, the task now is to understand how the rest of the system relates to it. Only by seeing that full structure can we complete Step 1: fully defining the creative problem this kind of audience building is actually trying to solve.

The next section makes that structure explicit.

#### The Meta Story in a System: Audience, Algorithms, Creator

Now that we’ve identified the core story of this creative form, we can move toward completing the definition of the creative problem.

The IAS IRL meta story is necessary, but it is not sufficient on its own. It clarifies what ultimately matters — the real-world change the audience member desires — but it does not yet explain how this kind of audience building actually operates in practice. To make the definition usable from a creator’s point of view, we have to widen the frame and account for the environment in which that story lives.

When we do, a coherent system comes into view. The IAS IRL story remains at the center, serving as the organizing story and center of gravity. Around it sit the elements that determine how this form works in reality: the audience, the creator, the creative artifacts themselves, the platforms and algorithms that mediate distribution, the dynamics of attention, the success criteria, and the underlying business or endeavor. What matters is not simply that these elements exist, but that each takes on meaning only in relation to the same central story.

Seen this way, things that are often treated separately — attention, audience, creative practice, success criteria, and business outcomes — begin to resolve together. They cannot be fully understood in isolation. They only make sense as parts of a system organized around a shared reference point: progress toward the IAS.

This perspective also makes the creative form itself visible. It describes how a creator operates within the system over time: how creative earns attention, how attention accumulates into audience, and how the possibility of progress toward the IAS remains compelling. Storytelling still governs the effort, but now at the level of system organization rather than as a collection of isolated narrative artifacts.

At this point, we have a clear view of the landscape as it actually matters to someone attempting this kind of audience building. For clarity, that landscape can be summarized in three primary elements — not as an exhaustive inventory, but as the main functional positions within the system. The sections that follow take each in turn.

##### First, Story Representing the Viewer

The first and primary element of the system is the audience member themselves — and the IAS IRL meta story represents their interests directly.

At its core, the meta story answers a simple but foundational question for this creative form: what does the viewer care about, desire, or want to see happen for themselves? In this system, the story is not about the creator, the platform, or the creative artifact. It is about the audience member as protagonist.

This is why the distinction between story-as-lived and story-as-artifact matters. All of the familiar elements of story still apply — a protagonist, a complication, a desired resolution, and a causal sequence of events connecting the two — but here those elements exist in lived reality rather than inside a discrete narrative artifact.

Classical narrativization provides the structure. The IAS functions as the resolution. The theme describes what that resolution is about for the protagonist. And the protagonist is not a fictional stand-in, but the audience member themselves, in real life. There is no need for identification or projection — the viewer is already in the story.

Because this is a story that unfolds in real life, it is necessarily uneven and incomplete. Progress toward the IAS may involve starts and stops, partial advances, or reversals. There is no requirement that every audience member fully achieve the IAS for the story to remain meaningful. Movement toward a desired state is itself the substance of interest.

This is what gives the IAS IRL meta story its central role in the system. It does not describe a single narrative, but names what is collectively most interesting to the audience across many individual lives. The rest of the system — creative, platforms, algorithms, and the creator’s role — only makes sense in relation to this fact.

In the stylist example, the IAS IRL meta story represents what audience members care about directly. The story is not about the stylist’s career or creative output, but about whether people look and feel good when they get dressed in their own lives. Each audience member’s experience differs, but the underlying interest is shared. That shared interest is what the story names and what the system organizes around.

##### Second, Access Mediated by Platform Algorithms

The second element of the system is the platform algorithm.

Platform algorithms mediate access between creative and audience. Their role is not to compel attention, but to determine which pieces of creative are shown to which users, and under what conditions. Viewers still choose what to watch. Attention is still voluntarily given.

In broad terms, platform algorithms exist to keep users engaged by serving creative they are likely to find interesting. To do this, they rely on speculative distribution followed by observed response. A piece of creative is initially shown to a small set of users the system predicts may be interested. If those users choose to watch, linger, or engage, that demonstrated interest leads to wider distribution.

In this sense, algorithms function as matchmakers between creative and potential audience members. The stronger the match — meaning the more people choose to give attention when the opportunity is presented — the more reach the creative receives. From the platform’s perspective, this benefits both the user and the system.

None of this is novel to most creators. Platform mediation and algorithmic distribution are widely understood features of the environment. What matters here is why they must be included in the definition of the creative problem. Algorithms are not external forces acting on an otherwise complete form; they are a structural part of how connection with an audience becomes possible at all.

Importantly, algorithms do not create interest. They surface creative and observe how people respond. Interest must already be present — or at least plausible — for distribution to occur. Creative must register as potentially interesting to the system, and then actually be interesting to viewers, for the connection to complete.

This makes the algorithm a mediating constraint rather than a creative objective. Creative must be legible to the system, but success ultimately depends on audience choice. Distribution follows attention; it does not replace it.

In the stylist example, this simply means that her creative must first signal relevance to the platform — enough to be shown to people likely to care — and then genuinely interest those viewers when it appears. The algorithm enables the encounter, but the viewer’s response determines whether it continues.

Seen this way, platform algorithms are not incidental to this form of audience building. They are integral components of the system through which attention, audience formation, and continuity are made possible.

##### Third, the Situation of the Creator

The third main element in this system is the creator, or audience builder — the person who chooses to enter this form and operate within it.

Earlier, we identified three success criteria for this kind of effort: generating sustained demand for the creative itself, generating demand for a business or endeavor beyond the creative, and doing so in a way that can continue indefinitely. From the creator’s perspective, these criteria define both the motivation for building an audience and the constraints under which the effort must operate.

The creator’s position in the system is defined by their relationship to the core story and to the mechanisms that mediate access to the audience. They make creative artifacts, publish them into algorithmically mediated environments, and depend on those artifacts being interesting enough to earn attention when presented to potential viewers. Audience formation follows only if that attention is repeatedly and voluntarily given.

But what makes this form distinct is that the creator is not free to make just any interesting creative. The center of gravity of the system is already fixed by the IAS IRL meta story — the story that represents what the audience cares about in their own lives. The creator’s task, then, is to make creative that is recognizably about that story.

In the terms introduced earlier, this is what it means to satisfy the theme. Creative satisfies the theme when it is plausibly and recognizably related to the IAS, interesting enough to attract and hold attention, and oriented toward enabling progress — directly or indirectly — in the audience’s real-life stories. Not every piece of creative must enable action, but the effort as a whole must remain intelligibly about the same underlying story.

In the stylist example, this means the creator is not primarily telling stories about her own expertise or success. She is making creative that stays anchored to the theme of people looking and feeling good when they get dressed — creative that draws attention, earns an audience, and makes that outcome feel imaginable, relevant, and worth pursuing over time. The business follows because the creative remains consistently aligned with the story the audience understands as potentially theirs.

Seen this way, the creator is neither the protagonist nor an external operator. They are the active agent who works within the system — making creative, navigating platforms, earning attention — in service of a story whose resolution unfolds in the audience’s real lives.

##### From Story to System: Completing the Setup of the Creative Problem

At this point, we can see clearly what Step 1 has accomplished.

We began with a familiar premise — that storytelling is the structural means by which attention is earned — and followed that logic carefully in the context of value-based audience building. Doing so led to the identification of a single, maximally interesting story: the Idealized Achieved State (IAS) story as it unfolds in real life for audience members.

That story captures what the audience cares about most. But it also revealed something unexpected. In this form, the central story is not primarily one to be told through creative artifacts. It is a story whose possibility — and the prospect of progress toward it — organizes interest over time. Once that became clear, a story-only framing was no longer sufficient.

At that point, it became necessary to step back.

Stepping back revealed a system. The IAS IRL story sits at the center as the organizing reference point, but it only functions when understood in relation to the other elements that make audience building possible in practice: audience members whose interests the story represents, creators producing creative, creative artifacts circulating through platforms, algorithms mediating access, attention accumulating into audience, and the business or endeavor the effort ultimately supports.

Importantly, this system view is not an optional expansion. The open-ended time horizon of audience building makes it unavoidable. Over time, creative accumulates, audiences change, attention fluctuates, and enablement occurs unevenly. None of this can be understood — or acted upon — through individual stories alone. It requires a system-level understanding organized around a shared center of gravity.

What Step 1 has done, then, is not to specify what creative should be made, but to fully specify the environment in which those decisions must make sense. The creative problem is no longer framed as “telling good stories,” but as operating within a system organized around a shared theme — one that represents what the audience cares about and remains interesting over time.

With this structure now in view, we are finally in a position to see the creative form that emerges from it — and to understand how creative practice, taken as a whole, operates within this system to build audience by satisfying a theme.

#### The Creative Form That Follows

At this point, the creative problem we set out to define is fully specified.

What has emerged is not just a story, and not just a system, but a creative form — a structured way of producing creative over time, organized around a shared, value-derived theme, constrained by clear success criteria, and shaped by the realities of attention, platforms, and audience behavior.

In familiar creative domains — novels, cinema, serialized television — a form determines how stories are carried, how continuity works, how repetition and variation accumulate meaning, and how an effort coheres over time. This kind of audience building operates in the same way. It is not a loose collection of posts, nor a sequence of isolated stories, but a form with its own internal logic and constraints.

The defining feature of this form is the relationship between the story that matters most and the creative artifacts that are produced.

The most important story in this form is the IAS IRL story — the real-world story of audience members imagining, moving toward, and sometimes achieving the idealized state implied by the value being offered. That story is governed by classical narrative structure, but it does not primarily live inside any single piece of creative. It unfolds in the audience’s lives.

Because of this, the creative artifacts a creator produces are not tasked with directly telling that story. Instead, they operate at a remove from it. Their role is to be about that story — to treat it, explore it, illuminate it, make it legible, imaginable, and compelling over time.

This is what it means, in this form, for creative to satisfy the theme.

To satisfy the theme is not to chronicle outcomes or narrate resolutions. It is to produce creative that meaningfully engages the underlying concern the story represents — creative that aligns with what the audience cares about, reflects the value at stake, and sustains interest in the possibility of progress or realization over time.

This is why the form affords wide creative latitude. Many kinds of creative can satisfy the same theme: explanation, observation, demonstration, interpretation, exploration, commentary, or partial and indirect engagement. Some creative may be directly enabling; other creative may simply be orienting, confidence-building, or aspirational. What unifies the work is not format or technique, but its relationship to the same underlying story.

For example, a stylist working in this form might satisfy the same theme through many different kinds of creative: interpreting runway trends, showing how a single garment works across contexts, narrating a day in their own practice, or walking through a concrete wardrobe decision. Some of this creative directly enables action; some simply builds taste, awareness, or confidence. What matters is not whether each piece advances someone toward an outcome, but whether it meaningfully engages the same concern — looking and feeling right in the world — in a way the audience finds interesting.

The system described earlier — audience, algorithms, creator, creative artifacts, business or endeavor, and time — is not incidental to this form. It is what allows the form to function at all. Individual pieces of creative must stand on their own as interesting in order to be distributed. Audience accumulates only through demonstrated attention. Continuity exists at the level of the theme, not necessarily at the level of any single artifact.

Seen this way, the creative problem is no longer underspecified. It is not simply “tell good stories,” nor “post valuable content,” nor “grow an audience.” It is:

to operate a creative form in which a creator repeatedly produces and publishes creative that satisfies a value-derived theme, in a way that earns attention, holds audience over time, and sustains the promise of meaningful real-world change.

That is the problem Step 1 set out to define.

What follows from here is a natural shift. Once the form is visible, the question is no longer what it is, but how one works within it.

That shift — from defining the form to operating inside it — is what Step 2 takes up.

#### Closure: Value is All You Need

To close the loop from the introduction, it’s worth making one final point explicit.

Everything developed in Step 1 follows from a single input: the value a creator already has to offer an audience. Once that value is understood, the rest of the structure can be reasoned forward. The IAS IRL story follows from the value. The theme follows from that story. The system required to support it becomes visible. And from that system, the creative form itself comes into focus.

In that sense, the creative form is not something that needs to be invented, selected, or discovered through trial and error. It can be derived. It is what emerges when value is treated as the organizing principle of an attention-first effort.

This turns out to be a defining property of this kind of audience building. With nothing more than a clear understanding of the value being given, it becomes possible to fully define the creative problem for a specific creator — prospectively, before any creative is published.

The stylist example makes this concrete. If the value is the ability to assemble outfits that work for real people in real contexts, the rest follows directly. The theme resolves into the prospect of looking and feeling good every time one gets dressed. The creative becomes work that satisfies that theme — whether through explanation, demonstration, interpretation, or observation. And success is defined by sustained attention and audience accumulation around that promise over time. The form does not remain abstract; it resolves into a specific and usable orientation once the value is known.

This was the goal of Step 1.

What results is a distinct, digital-native creative form — not novel in the sense of introducing unfamiliar ingredients, but newly legible once its organizing principle, structure, and constraints are properly aligned. Like any creative form, it admits of craft, judgment, variation, and failure. And like any form, once it is defined, the natural next question is how to work within it.

That shift — from defining the form to working within it — is the work of Step 2.

And one final note.  Because the theme plays this foundational role — as the kernel that can be derived from value and from which the rest of the form follows — I refer to this framework as Theme Theory. The name is deliberate. Part of it is admittedly personal: Ben Thompson’s Aggregation Theory has long held real gravity for me as a way of making sense of platform dynamics, incentives, and structural power in modern media and technology. Its clarity — and yes, even the way the name itself sounds — stayed with me as I worked through this problem.

But the parallel isn’t just aesthetic. As with Aggregation Theory, the intent here is not to brand a method or prescribe tactics, but to make a structural reality easier to see, reason about, and work within. Theme Theory names what turns out to be the organizing principle of this creative form — the element from which the rest of the structure can be derived once it is brought into focus.

### Step 2: Working in the Form

If Step 1 was about fully defining the creative problem of this kind of audience building, then Step 2 is about what becomes visible once that problem is clearly specified.

With the creative form now defined — including its core object, its surrounding system, and its success criteria — we can shift from definition to consideration. Step 2 is concerned with what this way of framing the work makes visible: how creators might understand their position within the form, what kinds of decisions this perspective brings into focus, and what it suggests could matter once the structure of the effort is seen this way.

The claim here is not that creators in practice already operate according to this model, nor that they should. Rather, the question Step 2 explores is whether treating audience building as this kind of creative form offers useful insight — whether it helps clarify choices, surface tradeoffs, or make sense of patterns that otherwise feel opaque.

This is where the project opens up. A creative form, once recognized, does not resolve into a single prescription. Like any established form, it supports a wide range of techniques, judgments, failure modes, refinements, and styles. It can be examined indefinitely. That is not a weakness of the form, but a defining property of it — and it is the primary reason this work lives naturally as an ongoing Substack rather than a single, closed essay.

Step 2 is organized as a high-level map of what follows from the definition established in Step 1. Rather than attempting to exhaust the topic, it identifies the major categories of consequence that become available once the form is understood. These categories describe the kinds of insight, orientation, and practical leverage the form provides to creators building audiences in this way.

The sections that follow are grouped into five broad epistemic categories:

Interpretive Consequences

Thinking and Reasoning Tools

Concrete Artifacts to Create or Build

Normative Orientation

Structural Implications

These sections are best understood as a rich table of contents for work that can unfold over time. They define the scope of what this form makes visible and workable, not a checklist to be completed all at once. In that sense, Step 2 sets expectations — for the reader, and for me — about what it would mean to seriously explore and write about working in this form.

It is also worth noting that much of this material already exists in working form. Over time, I have produced a large corpus of exploratory drafts and notes — rough, repetitive, and not publishable as-is — but covering most of the ground outlined here. I’ve made that material available alongside this piece, not because it is meant to be read linearly, but because it can now be meaningfully queried and surfaced using modern language models.

While current models are not yet capable of reliably producing polished writing with full fidelity from that corpus, they are already useful for exploration, recall, and synthesis. I will be using them in exactly that way as I continue to write about this form — and as the models improve, that utility will only increase. The signal is there, even if the presentation is not yet finished.

What follows, then, is the full scope of what I believe emerges from the core story object and the system organized around it — the conceptual space opened up once the creative problem has been properly defined.

#### What This Definition Explains / Interpretive Consequences

This section lays out interpretive consequences of the definition developed in Step 1. By that I mean the implications that follow directly from the definition itself, but were not necessary to establishing it.

##### A New Story Dimension: Accretive Causal Steps (and Technology)

One interpretive consequence of the definition developed in Step 1 is the recognition of an additional story dimension that follows naturally from the IAS and its classical narrativized structure.

In classical narrativization, a protagonist moves toward a desired resolution through a series of causally linked events. When that structure is applied to an IAS that exists in real life, it highlights something important: achieving the resolution often depends on many successive actions over time, with benefits accruing incrementally rather than arriving all at once.

In the stylist example, this is straightforward to see. Looking and feeling beautiful every time one gets dressed is not achieved through a single action. It emerges from repeated, cumulative steps: learning fit, building a wardrobe gradually, developing taste, making better choices over time, and refining them through use. Progress may be uneven, and setbacks are normal, but meaningful improvement accrues through continued causal action.

This dimension matters because it implies that many IAS themes naturally support rich, ongoing forms of value. There is often a great deal that can be shared, explained, demonstrated, or supported along the path toward the desired state. That makes such themes especially fertile for sustained creative work and ongoing audience engagement, even when no single piece of creative is decisive on its own.

It also opens up an additional possibility. When progress toward an IAS depends on many accretive steps over time, there is often an opportunity to go beyond digital media creative alone and into forms of digital services or tools. By technology here, I mean the full stack—software, data, and AI—that can help people track progress, make decisions, reflect on outcomes, or otherwise support movement toward the IAS.

What is notable is that this need for technology does not originate from a traditional software-first problem. Instead, it can emerge naturally from an audience-first, attention-based effort grounded in value and storytelling. In some cases, the structure of the IAS itself suggests where such tools might be useful; in others, it may not. Either way, this dimension follows directly from the form and is available to be explored where it fits.

##### Meaning as a Consequence of the Form

One interpretive consequence of defining the creative problem in this way is that it clarifies why this kind of audience-building work often feels meaningful — to the audience and to the creator — without needing to make “meaning” an explicit goal.

The IAS-based meta story is constructed to be legible, relevant, and consequential to the audience. It is legible in that it is easy for a viewer to understand what is being pointed toward. It is relevant in that it concerns something that could plausibly matter in their own life. And it is consequential in that progress toward it, even partial or imperfect, would make a real difference to how that life is lived. Those same conditions are, in practice, what tend to make something feel meaningful at a human scale.

In the stylist example, the prospect of looking and feeling beautiful every time one gets dressed is immediately comprehensible, directly relevant to the viewer’s daily experience, and clearly consequential in how it would be received and valued in their life. The meaning does not come from symbolism or abstraction; it comes from the lived implications of the state itself.

In this frame, enablement is not an abstract or symbolic act. It is the process of helping real people imagine, move toward, and sometimes achieve a state they care about in their own lives. When creative work is organized around that objective, interest and meaning are not in tension. The structure that makes the work interesting — grounding it in a lived, goal-oriented transformation — is the same structure that makes it matter.

This has an important effect on the creator as well. It aligns the effort of attracting attention with the effort of producing value that is legible, relevant, and consequential for others. The creative work is not merely persuasive or performative; it is oriented toward making more of something good happen in the world of the audience. That alignment often shows up as energy, pride, and durability in the effort — not because meaning was set as a goal, but because it follows naturally from the form itself.

This is one of the core interpretive dimensions of working within the form, developed extensively in the working material in the corpus and forming a full category for writing going forward.

##### Authenticity as a Structural Property of the Form

Authenticity is a prominent concern for online creators, and this framework offers a precise way to understand where it actually comes from. In this context, authenticity is not a matter of style, personality, or self-expression, but of intent.

In practice, people experience inauthenticity when there is a mismatch between what a creator appears to care about and what they are in fact oriented toward. The familiar failure mode is a bait-and-switch: creative presents as being for the audience, but is ultimately organized around a different objective that the audience did not consent to give attention to. When that underlying intent becomes legible, trust collapses.

By contrast, orienting the effort around the audience’s IAS IRL story produces a structurally authentic stance. The creator’s stated interest — helping the audience move toward a state they care about — is the same interest that organizes the creative, the system, and the success criteria. There is no secondary objective concealed beneath the surface. The creator is transparently aligned with wanting the same outcome for the audience that the audience wants for themselves.

You can see this clearly in the stylist example. Imagine a piece of creative that appears to be about helping the viewer look and feel beautiful every time she gets dressed, but ultimately resolves in a sales pitch that reveals the real purpose of the piece was to drive a transaction. Even if the information was useful, the viewer often experiences this as a rupture: “Oh — this wasn’t really about me. This was about selling to me.” What breaks trust in that moment is not the existence of a product or service, but the misalignment between the apparent intent of the creative and the intent that ultimately governs it.

This kind of authenticity is not performative and does not rely on signaling or self-disclosure. It emerges naturally from the form itself. Because the creator’s success depends on the audience imagining, valuing, and potentially moving toward the same outcome, the creator’s incentives and the audience’s interests are genuinely aligned. That alignment is legible, and it is felt.

This is one of the core interpretive dimensions of working within the form, developed extensively in the working material in the corpus and forming a full category for writing going forward.

##### Prolific Ideation and Material Creation

One interpretive consequence of defining the creative problem around an IAS IRL theme is that it naturally supports prolific topic ideation and material creation. Once the core theme is specified, the problem of “what to make” is no longer open-ended. It becomes oriented around a single, coherent question: what is interesting in relation to this theme?

At a first-principles level, topic ideation reduces to two simple but powerful prompts. First: do you know interesting things about this theme? Second: do you have opinions, interpretations, or points of view on those things? These questions are not tactical guidance so much as structural consequences of the form. They follow directly from grounding creative in a value-derived theme that represents something the audience genuinely cares about.

In the stylist example, this translates cleanly. If the theme is helping viewers look and feel beautiful every time they get dressed, then topic ideation begins with two simple questions: do you know interesting things about this theme as it relates to the audience realizing it? and do you have opinions, interpretations, or points of view on those things? With a clear understanding of the value she offers — the ability to style outfits — the creator can naturally draw on her expertise and passion in relation to the theme to prolifically ideate topics and generate material.

Because the theme remains stable while individual pieces of creative can vary widely, this form supports sustained production over time without creative exhaustion. It also aligns naturally with, another point later in this Step 2 section, the creative media development, production, and distribution process, where tempo and iteration matter.

This is one of the core interpretive dimensions of working within the form, developed extensively in the working material in the corpus and a full category to write about going forward.

##### Meaning, Creator Stamina, and Energy

Prolific creative development and production can wear creators down over time. One interpretive consequence of grounding the creative form in an IAS-based theme is that it resolves a major source of that fatigue. When what makes the work maximally interesting to the audience is also what makes it meaningfully beneficial to them, the creator’s effort is no longer split between “doing what works” and “doing what feels right.” Interest and purpose pull in the same direction.

In this form, the creator is not expending energy to manufacture relevance or simulate care. The work is oriented toward enabling outcomes the audience genuinely desires, using value the creator already understands and believes in. That alignment reduces friction and supports sustained effort. The creator can take pride in the work not as a side effect, but as a structural feature of the form itself.

In the stylist example, this means bringing her full expertise and creative judgment to bear on helping others look and feel beautiful every time they get dressed. That orientation is not draining in spirit; it is intrinsically energizing. The effort is demanding, but it is directed toward outcomes the creator cares about and can stand behind transparently.

This dynamic—how meaning, alignment, and audience impact affect creator stamina and long-term energy—is another core interpretive dimension of working within the form, developed extensively in the working material in the corpus and a full category to write about going forward.

##### Audience Engagement

Because the IAS-based theme is grounded in real-life action, it creates a natural and authentic foundation for audience engagement. Progress toward the IAS is not symbolic or abstract; it shows up as things people actually try, experience, struggle with, adapt, or succeed at in their own lives. That reality gives engagement substance. It is not manufactured interaction layered on top of creative, but a direct extension of what the creative is about.

This makes engagement legible and meaningful. A creator can ask what people think of an idea, how it played out when they tried it, what surprised them, what worked differently than expected, or what questions it raised. The audience’s responses are not side conversations; they are evidence of the story unfolding in real life. That material, in turn, becomes naturally interesting—to the creator, to other audience members, and to the platforms that register demonstrated interest through replies, comments, shares, and follow-on interaction.

In the stylist example, this might take the form of responding to something the creator has already put into the world—such as a post interpreting a current trend and how she thinks it can be worked into everyday wardrobes. She can then invite viewers to share how they reacted to that interpretation, whether they tried it, what felt difficult or surprising, or how they adapted it to their own situation. Those responses are not just engagement signals. They are real expressions of the theme in action, and they provide rich material for further creative—discussion, interpretation, clarification, or simple acknowledgment. They also make the audience visible to itself, reinforcing that this is a shared pursuit among real people rather than a one-way broadcast.

Audience engagement, then, is not a tactic layered onto the form. It follows directly from the form’s structure. When creative is oriented toward enabling real-world progress on something people care about, engagement emerges as a natural byproduct—and one that tends to align closely with what platforms reward as demonstrated interest.

Audience engagement is another core interpretive dimension of working within the form, developed extensively in the working material in the corpus and a full category to write about going forward.

##### Milieu Engagement

Every theme exists within a broader creative environment. By milieu, I mean the set of other creators, influencers, and practitioners whose work overlaps with or is legible in relation to the same IAS-based theme. They may not articulate their work in these terms—or even share the same goals—but their creative still operates in proximity to the same underlying audience desires.

Thinking in terms of milieu does not require exclusivity or formal alignment. It simply recognizes that multiple people are often engaging with adjacent aspects of the same lived concern. From the perspective of this creative form, that means others are also, intentionally or not, contributing to how the theme is explored, interpreted, demonstrated, or made visible to the audience. Seeing this clearly creates opportunities: for engagement, response, contrast, collaboration, or simple observation.

In the stylist example, the milieu includes anyone creating material related to how people dress, present themselves, or feel about their appearance—trend analysts, fashion commentators, personal shoppers, lifestyle creators, designers, or even everyday creators sharing outfit choices. A stylist with real passion and expertise will almost inevitably find this material interesting, have opinions about it, and see ways it relates to helping viewers look and feel beautiful every time they get dressed. That interest naturally translates into creative possibilities: reacting to others’ ideas, expanding on them, disagreeing thoughtfully, highlighting what resonates, or collaborating directly when it makes sense.

Engaging with the milieu is not a requirement of the form. A creator can build an audience without doing so. But for many, it becomes a powerful source of topic ideation, material generation, audience discovery, and relationship-building. When done well, it also reinforces the creator’s role as a guide within the theme—someone actively situated in the living conversation around what the audience cares about.

Milieu engagement is another core interpretive dimension of working within the form, developed extensively in the working material in the corpus and a full category to write about going forward.

##### How Does This Drive a Business or Endeavor?

One more important point is how this can end up driving a business or endeavor.  Very simply, if you have an audience that is interested in and can imagine the IAS based story for themselves, and you are the guide that both makes them aware of it and enables them in it, then you are in the classic position to have the audience like, know, and trust you.  Since the value you provide derives from your overall business or endeavor, you have abundant opportunity to create awareness, consideration, and preference for your business or endeavor – whether you are a native audience first creator or a large incumbent.

Seeing how to capture that opportunity, which creators do pretty naturally, is also an endless subject to elaborate on here.

#### Reasoning Within the Form

This section gathers a set of thinking tools that follow from the definition of the form itself. They are not instructions or best practices, but lenses that make certain questions, tradeoffs, and decisions easier to see once the structure of the work is clear.

Taken together, these tools help orient how a creator reasons while working in the form: how they evaluate ideas, interpret signals, and make sense of what is happening as they build creative and engage an audience over time.

##### IAS Theme Identification and Evaluation

One of the most enabling consequences of this form is that the core theme is not something a creator must invent or guess at. Given the value a creator has to offer, a specific IAS-based theme can be identified directly. In that sense, the question of what the work is about admits of a concrete answer, grounded in the value itself rather than in audience speculation or trend-following.

In the stylist example, this is straightforward. If the value being offered is the ability to style outfits well, the corresponding IAS theme follows naturally: viewers looking and feeling beautiful every time they get dressed. The theme is not an abstraction layered on afterward; it is a direct projection from the value the creator already understands deeply.

Once identified, the theme becomes a powerful tool for evaluation. Because it represents an outcome people can recognize themselves desiring, it provides a clear handle for reasoning about audience potential. Two dimensions matter most. The first is scope: who might plausibly care about realizing this outcome, and how many people fall into that set. The second is intensity: how strongly people care about it, how frequently it shows up in their lives, and how meaningful progress toward it would feel over time.

In the stylist’s case, both dimensions are unusually strong. The outcome is broadly legible and widely relevant, and because clothing is a constant, visible, and embodied part of daily life, the intensity of interest is often high. Later sections will address how creators reason about sub-audiences and practical focus, but at the level of identification and evaluation, the theme itself already orients attention toward the right questions.

This ability to identify and evaluate a theme directly from value — without guesswork or audience gaming — is developed extensively in the working material in the corpus and forms a central category of reasoning within the form.

##### The Story Funnel: Meaning as Magnitude and Flow

Once the creative form is defined this way, it becomes possible to reason about success using a single, coherent frame. The creator’s objectives can be understood as two closely related aims: attracting and holding attention in the form of an audience, and enabling people within that audience to make progress toward the IAS.

Because the IAS represents what is most interesting to the audience, progress toward it is not separate from interest — it is its fulfillment. Enabling the audience is not an auxiliary goal layered on top of attention; it is the substance of what attention is being given for. This makes it possible to think about audience-building as a kind of funnel organized around meaning.

At a high level, the funnel has two dimensions. One is magnitude: how many people are aware of, engaged with, and returning to the creative — in other words, the size of the audience. The other is flow: the degree to which people in that audience are making real progress toward the IAS over time. Together, these dimensions represent how much meaning is being made — both in breadth and in effect.

In the stylist example, this is intuitive. As more people discover her work and remain engaged, the funnel fills. As some portion of that audience begins to apply what they see — changing how they dress, gaining confidence, building a wardrobe they feel good in — there is flow through the funnel. Importantly, there is no requirement that everyone move quickly, or at all. Many people may simply enjoy the creative, feel oriented by it, or return to it intermittently. That is not failure. Any genuine flow is valuable, and even the potential for progress is itself meaningful.

What this frame offers the creator is a way to visualize success without reducing it to shallow metrics. Growth matters. Impact matters. And they are not in tension. The funnel captures both at once: attention as the opening of the story, and enablement as its gradual realization.

This way of thinking — treating audience growth and real-world progress as a unified, meaning-centered funnel — is developed extensively in the working material in the corpus and forms another full category of reasoning to be explored and written about going forward.

##### Interest vs Enablement Balance

An important practical consequence of working in this form is the need to balance making creative that is interesting with creative that more directly enables progress toward the IAS. Enablement is the point — it is where meaning is realized — but interest is the gateway. Creative must first be compelling enough for viewers to choose to engage and for platform algorithms to continue distributing it at all.

Because distribution is mediated by demonstrated interest, over-indexing on explicit enablement can backfire if it makes creative feel effortful, prescriptive, or demanding of the audience. Conversely, creative that maximizes surface-level interest but never meaningfully supports progress toward the IAS leaves much of the form’s potential unrealized. Both dynamics are visible in practice, and neither alone is sufficient to sustain the three success criteria.

In the stylist example, this balance is intuitive. If every piece of creative required viewers to actively change behavior or “do the work,” many would disengage. But if the stylist only offered commentary on fashion without ever helping viewers imagine or attempt looking and feeling beautiful in their own lives, the deeper promise of the theme would go unmet. Working in the form means staying interesting enough to earn attention while enabling as much real progress as the audience is ready for — and allowing those two aims to reinforce rather than undermine each other.

This balance is developed extensively in the working material in the corpus and represents another substantive area for ongoing writing about how creators operate successfully within the form.

##### How Creators Can Reason About What to Work on

The same operation that I presented for topic ideation also works for a fundamental way select or scale scope of the IAS theme.

“Do you know interesting things about the the IAS theme and do you have opinions or points of view on them” can be used to select or focus on a subset of the maximal IAS theme.  You can think of the IAS as defining the maximal problem space, but not the required working surface.  So, to use this theory you don’t have to take on the entire IAS.  So this is a scoping mechanism the creator can use for that purpose.

Interestingly, unlike with say physical products and services, there are no hard constraints in what you can treat of the IAS theme.  So, if you start with a slice, are successful, and have further abilities and ambitions, expanding the audience scope this way is technically fully open.  The limiting principle in this environment are the other creators and influencers that have acquired audience and then the need to either grow a theme that is underserved or otherwise having to take existing attention from other creators or influencers in your IAS milieu.

#### What the Form Extends To

This section looks at what comes into view once the creative form is clearly defined. Not what suddenly becomes possible, but what can be recognized, reasoned about, and deliberately pursued within the same structure.

Social media creative remains the default and most immediate expression of the form. But when the form is understood in terms of an IAS-centered system, it becomes clear that the same logic can extend beyond media creative itself. Products, services, data, software, and AI can all be understood as additional ways of enabling progress toward the same core story the audience cares about.

These extensions don’t replace creative work, and they aren’t required. They represent additional creative expressions of the same form, operating through different materials and constraints. Once the object and success criteria are understood, media, products, services, data, software, and AI can all be seen as creative ways of enabling progress toward the same core story — not as departures from the form, but as continuations of it.

##### Media creative development production and distribution

Once the IAS-based meta story is identified, it functions as an organizing structure for the entire media creative development, production, and distribution process. Rather than dictating specific content, it specifies what the ongoing creative effort is about in a way that can be sustained indefinitely.

At the most basic level, this resolves the central operational challenge of audience building at tempo: what to make, repeatedly, and why. Topic ideation becomes anchored in a stable premise — do you know interesting things about this theme? — while material generation follows naturally as do you have an interpretation, opinion, or point of view on those things? When the creator has genuine passion and expertise in the value being shared, this framing supports prolific ideation without narrowing creative latitude.

Because the meta story already takes the form of a lived, goal-oriented narrative, individual pieces of creative can be developed in familiar story structures without forcing narrative invention each time. The creator is not repeatedly searching for “a story,” but working within a story that is already in motion — one that exists in the lives of the audience. This is what makes sustained production possible without conceptual exhaustion.

Importantly, this structure scales. A solo creator working at high tempo, a small team coordinating output, or a large incumbent media operation all engage in the same fundamental activity: producing creative that satisfies the same underlying story over time. The difference is not the nature of the work, but the resources and coordination applied to it. The bones are the bones.

Seen this way, many of the enabling characteristics discussed earlier — authenticity, energetic performance, audience engagement, and engagement with other creators — are not separate tactics layered onto the process. They emerge naturally from working within a form whose object is the enablement of a lived story. Alignment with the audience’s desired outcome grounds authenticity. Meaningful IRL stakes support sustained energy. Progress in the audience creates natural engagement. Shared orientation toward the same theme makes collaboration legible and interesting.

What this subsection is meant to establish is not a method, but a recognition: this creative form already implies a complete and durable production logic. Once the meta story is specified, the ongoing work of developing, producing, and distributing creative becomes intelligible as a single, continuous effort rather than a series of disconnected acts.

This process — and the many ways it can be understood, refined, and extended — is developed extensively in the working material in the corpus, and represents a core area for continued writing and exploration.

##### Commercial Products and Services

When the creative effort is organized around enabling progress toward an IAS lived by real people, the role of commercial products and services becomes straightforward rather than fraught. Products and services are simply additional creative means by which enablement can occur.

For creators who already operate a business — whether a solo practitioner, an SMB, or a large incumbent — this frame clarifies how existing offerings can participate naturally in an audience-first effort. The question is not whether products and services belong, but whether the value they enable resolves to a theme with sufficient audience interest to support sustained creative work. When it does, products and services are no longer external to audience building; they are part of how the theme is made concrete.

The stylist example makes this especially clear. Styling clients is already the direct enactment of the theme: helping people look and feel beautiful every time they get dressed. References to real client work, challenges encountered, or outcomes achieved can function as legitimate creative material — not as sales devices, but as lived demonstrations of enablement. When products or services appear in this way, they reinforce rather than undermine trust, because they remain in service of the same outcome the audience desires.

The same logic applies in the opposite direction. For native creators who begin with an audience, the form provides clarity about which kinds of products or services make sense to pursue. Extensions that directly support progress toward the IAS align naturally with the audience’s interests and benefit from built-in distribution, while misaligned offerings become immediately legible as such.

Seen through this lens, commercial activity is not a compromise of the creative effort. It is one of the ways the form extends beyond media while remaining coherent. Products and services are creative when they are designed, introduced, and employed as part of enabling a lived story rather than interrupting it.

This relationship between audience-first creative work and commercial extension is developed extensively in the working material in the corpus, and stands as a major category for continued writing and exploration.

##### Digital Services Creative: Software, Data, and AI

One of the less obvious — but most consequential — extensions of this creative form is into what might be called digital services creative: software, data, and AI employed directly in service of enabling progress toward the IAS in real life.

This extension becomes visible once the core story is understood as unfolding through successive causal actions over time. Many IAS themes are not realized through a single insight or moment, but through accumulation: repeated decisions, sustained habits, and incremental progress. Where that structure is present, the case for employing software, data, and AI is no longer speculative. It is practical.

Software, in this context, functions as scaffolding. It can help audience members track progress, reduce friction, surface next steps, and maintain momentum toward a state they care about but may struggle to reach consistently on their own. This is not a departure from the creative form; it is a continuation of it through a different medium.

Data follows naturally. Two types are especially relevant here. Primary theme data captures information about an individual audience member’s state relative to the IAS — their context, constraints, preferences, or progress. Theme graph data emerges at the audience level, describing patterns, clusters, and relationships across people oriented toward the same theme. Taken together, these data types make the audience legible in ways that support better enablement rather than abstract optimization.

AI then becomes a powerful multiplier. It can interpret theme data, generate personalized guidance, simulate options, or adapt support dynamically as conditions change. In the stylist example developed in the corpus, this takes concrete form: an audience member shares elements of their wardrobe or preferences, and AI assists in generating outfit possibilities aligned with their goals. The creative act here is not content production alone, but the ongoing facilitation of progress toward the IAS.

This also clarifies an important sequencing point — what I refer to elsewhere as an order of battle. Digital services creative often becomes viable only once audience interest is established through media creative, not as a matter of principle, but because software, data, and AI carry higher and more variable costs in time, effort, and risk. As those costs change — particularly with LLM-assisted development — what is viable, and when, can change dramatically.  In that sense, digital services creative resembles large-format creative work: powerful when it fits, but easy to overextend if taken on too early.

Unlike media creative, digital services are deployed on platforms the creator controls. This introduces the possibility of owning the relationship with the audience directly, without competing with social platforms. Importantly, this does not replace media efforts; it complements them. Media acquires attention and sustains interest, while services concentrate enablement and deepen engagement.

This perspective connects the creative form not only to the history of storytelling, but to the full domain of software development, product management, and — increasingly — LLM-assisted creation. As tools for rapid development improve, an audience-first framing becomes a powerful way to decide what to build, when, and for whom.

Digital services creative of this kind is developed extensively in the working material in the corpus, particularly through the stylist example, and represents a major category for continued writing and exploration.

#### Normative Orientation

By normative here I don’t mean “should” in a moral or prescriptive sense, but in a directional one. Once the effort is organized around an IRL IAS theme, the work naturally presents the creator with a question: what does this ask me to take responsibility for? The norms arise not from external rules, but from the internal logic of the form itself.

This shows up in practical ways. Choosing to orient toward enablement rather than mere entertainment. Deciding what progress actually means for the audience, drawing on one’s expertise, taste, and point of view. Recognizing that attention implies obligation, because real-world impact implies responsibility. Or deciding not to build something—because the theme does not support it, the audience would not benefit, or the effort would distort the purpose of the work.

Seen this way, certain common pathologies begin to feel out of bounds on their own terms. Engagement bait feels hollow. Dark patterns feel incoherent. Purely extractive monetization feels misaligned. Not because they are morally forbidden, but because they break the logic of an effort explicitly organized around enabling the audience.

This orientation integrates several threads already developed: meaning (what matters), success criteria (what counts), and enablement (what is being done). Together, they give the creator a grounded sense of ownership over the work and its effects—one that does not require constant rules or prescriptions, but instead cultivates judgment, taste, and responsibility as part of working within the form.

This normative dimension is developed extensively in the working material in the corpus, and stands as a full category for exploration and writing going forward.

#### Structural Implications

This category looks at what follows structurally from the form: how creators operate, how businesses organize around audiences, and how these efforts fit into a broader ecosystem. These implications are not prescriptions for how things must be built, but patterns that become visible when the creative problem is framed this way and pursued over time.

##### Media Business and a Non-Media Business

Seen structurally, this creative form gives rise to what looks like an attention-first or audience-first endeavor — which is to say, something that behaves like a media business. The difference is that, because the core story is grounded in real-world enablement, that media activity does not need to exist as a standalone end in itself.

Instead, the audience-building effort can operate in direct support of a non-media business: commercial products, services, or digital services such as software, data, and AI. When the underlying theme supports it — particularly where progress toward the IAS unfolds through many successive actions over time — the result is a combined structure: a media business attached to a non-media business, where the media side exists primarily to support the non-media side, and monetization occurs mainly through that non-media activity.

This framing helps clarify why this kind of audience building does not map cleanly onto traditional media categories. Historically, media businesses tended to exist as distinct industries, shaped by high capital requirements, constrained distribution channels, and business models centered on monetizing aggregated attention itself. By contrast, digital platforms have largely solved the technical distribution problem. What remains scarce is not access to distribution, but sustained interest — attention that must be earned piece by piece.

Because access to this form is effectively permissionless, it can be taken up by very different kinds of actors. Incumbent businesses can layer an audience-first media effort onto an existing product or service business. Native creators can begin with media activity and later extend into products, services, or digital services as the theme and audience support it. In both cases, the same underlying form applies; only the point of entry differs.

What emerges is not merely a monetization tactic, but a distinct class of organization organized around a theme: one in which creative work functions as both a product in its own right and as a primary go-to-market mechanism for other offerings. Like traditional media businesses, this structure admits of strategy, scale, failure modes, and craft. Unlike them, it is tightly scoped by the value being offered and the real-world outcomes the audience cares about.

This combined media / non-media structure is developed extensively in the working material in the corpus, and it stands as another area where the form reveals deep structural implications — and a rich category for further writing and exploration.

##### For Incumbents: Strategy and Operations for Value-Led Audience Building

For incumbents, this framework addresses one of the hardest problems in practice: how to treat audience building as a strategic activity rather than as an isolated media or marketing function, and how to judge whether and how it should be integrated with the strategy of the parent organization.

By specifying the creative form from first principles, the IAS theme does more than organize creative output. It provides a clear basis for strategic evaluation. Starting from the value the organization already possesses — and must understand deeply to exist at all — the incumbent can explicitly derive the theme that would anchor an audience-building effort, evaluate its potential scope and intensity of interest, and decide whether pursuing that audience is worth doing in the context of the broader business.

If the answer is yes, the result is not just a rationale for “doing content,” but a fully specified meta story that the organization can commit to satisfying over time. That story supplies the most productive combination of direction, inspiration, and constraint for creative work, while remaining legible in the language of strategy: mission, purpose, opportunity cost, and integration with existing capabilities.

Importantly, this same framing also functions as an operational blueprint. Because the theme directly links value, audience interest, and real-world enablement, it naturally aligns strategic intent with day-to-day creative decisions. In that sense, the strategy does not sit above operations as an abstract mandate; it is enacted continuously through the creative process itself.

Seen this way, TT does not introduce a new layer of complexity for incumbents. Rather, it gives them a way to move deliberately into audience-first work — or to decline it — with clarity about what the effort is, why it matters, and how it fits within the larger organization.

##### For Creators: What the Creative Form Enables at the Limit

For native creators, this framework clarifies and formalizes something many already discover intuitively: that giving value is not just a content tactic, but the basis of a coherent creative form with real strategic and operational implications.

Starting from value alone — often the only deliberate input a creator begins with — TT provides the same kind of guidance that formal strategy offers incumbents. The difference is simply the entry point. Rather than beginning with an existing organization or product line, the creator begins with attention and interest, organized around a specific IAS IRL story that gives the effort shape, direction, and meaning.

Because the strategy of an attention-first endeavor is expressed directly through story, creators do not need to think in the language of corporate strategy to reason effectively about what they are doing. The IAS theme functions as both orientation and constraint: it allows creators to evaluate whether they are on a maximally interesting story, to understand the full range of creative they could employ in service of that story, and to see how media, products, services, and even digital services creative could eventually fit together coherently.

This is especially relevant for creators whose ambitions evolve over time. Many begin with a narrow slice of a theme and modest goals, only later realizing they have validated something much larger. In those cases, the framework helps surface the true scope of what has already been proven, and provides a way to reason about how far the creative form could be extended without losing coherence.

In that sense, TT may be most naturally understood from the perspective of the native creator. The practices that gave rise to the form emerged bottom-up through creators working under attention constraints. What the theory adds is a way to see the full shape of that form — including its limits — and to engage with it deliberately rather than accidentally.

##### LLM Coding Enablement and WTB (What to Build)

As LLMs and coding agents dramatically reduce the cost and friction of building software, the primary bottleneck is no longer execution capacity, but specification: knowing what is worth building in the first place.

Within an attention-first framework, this problem is reframed cleanly. If an audience has already formed around a theme, that audience represents validated interest in a particular IAS IRL story. In that context, software, data, and AI are no longer speculative technical investments — they are potential extensions of an already meaningful and observed need. In other words, the theme itself becomes the basis for identifying WTB.

This creates a natural sequence. Media creative establishes interest and validates the theme. Audience engagement reveals where people struggle, stall, or seek support as they attempt to make progress toward the IAS. From there, the opportunity for software scaffolding becomes legible: tools that help coordinate successive actions over time, reduce cognitive load, surface relevant information, or personalize guidance in ways that media alone cannot.

What is new — and increasingly decisive — is that the cost and feasibility constraints that once limited this kind of work to well-resourced teams are rapidly dissolving. The ability to prototype, iterate, and deploy meaningful software using LLM-based coding agents fundamentally changes the calculus. What previously served as an illustrative or aspirational extension in the corpus now becomes operationally plausible even for small teams or individual creators.

Seen this way, TT provides not just inspiration but a disciplined method for specification. The audience does not merely consume creative; it functions as a discovery surface for unmet needs within a theme. Software, data, and AI can then be developed as targeted responses to those needs, already aligned with both meaning and demand. This is audience-first development in a literal sense.

This perspective also connects directly to the forthcoming Theme Space discussion. If Theme Space maps the conceptual landscape of potential interests and trajectories within a theme, then LLM-enabled development provides a way to selectively instantiate parts of that space as concrete tools. Together, they form a coherent framework for moving from attention, to understanding, to building — without relying on guesswork or abstract market prediction.

As with the other domains discussed here, this is an area of effectively unbounded depth. What matters for the purposes of this section is simply to establish that TT offers a principled way to identify and justify what to build, at precisely the moment when building itself has become radically more accessible.

##### LLM Legibility of Theme

One newly relevant aspect of this framing is that IAS IRL themes are likely to be highly legible to large language models. By construction, LLMs learn latent semantic structures from vast amounts of human-produced text, media descriptions, and symbolic representations of goals, actions, and outcomes. To the extent that IAS themes correspond to real, recurring patterns of human interest and meaning, they should align naturally with those learned latent spaces.

Put differently, an IAS theme is not an arbitrary label. It is a structured description of a desired state and the kinds of actions and concerns that unfold toward it over time. That kind of structure is exactly what LLMs are good at internalizing. If so, then themes of this type are likely to be internally coherent and recognizable to models, even if not named explicitly.

This has two interesting implications.

First, creators or organizations that consistently produce creative work grounded in a coherent IAS theme may become increasingly legible to LLMs themselves. High-tempo, theme-consistent creative output creates a dense signal: repeated associations between a creator, a set of ideas, a value proposition, and an audience-relevant story. Over time, that coherence may make the creator’s work easier for LLMs to summarize, reference, recommend, or reason about as a distinct thematic cluster.

Second, there is a plausible reverse direction. If LLMs encode latent semantic spaces that reflect real human interests, then those spaces may themselves be useful for exploring or approximating a theme space. While this would be an indirect and imperfect proxy, it suggests that LLMs could potentially be used as tools to surface latent themes, clusters of meaning, or underexplored regions of interest—especially when combined with human judgment about value, desirability, and real-world enablement.

All of this should be treated as speculative rather than settled. The internal representations of LLMs are not transparent, and legibility does not imply endorsement, accuracy, or value. Still, given the increasing role LLMs play in discovery, synthesis, and tool-building, it is notable that a theme-first approach to audience building may also align with how these systems internally organize meaning.

At minimum, this suggests a kind of convergence: a creative form organized around real human value, meaning, and action may not only resonate with audiences, but also map cleanly onto the structures that increasingly mediate how information is generated, navigated, and extended.

##### Theme Space

If IAS IRL themes are not invented so much as discovered — latent in the value people already know how to provide — then it follows that there exists, at least conceptually, a broader theme space. This is not a space created by theory, but one that emerges from the accumulated structure of human interests, capabilities, and desires as they are expressed through value.

Starting from value provides a practical shortcut into this space. Rather than attempting to reason abstractly about all possible themes, creators and organizations can begin with what they already know how to do, care about, or enable. From there, the associated IAS IRL theme can be derived and evaluated. In aggregate, this suggests that the theme space is continually being surfaced and explored as people bring forward new or recombined forms of value.

As a thought experiment, one could imagine enumerating themes by systematically projecting from an exhaustive set of values people have to offer. Doing so would amount to sketching a map of the theme space — not as a fixed taxonomy, but as a landscape that could be evaluated along dimensions such as audience scope and intensity of interest. In this sense, themes could be compared, clustered, or ranked based on their potential to sustain attention-first endeavors.

This framing also connects naturally to WTB. If a theme has demonstrable audience interest and entails successive actions over time, then it defines not only what creative is interesting, but what kinds of tools, services, or software might be useful to build in support of it. At the theme level, the theme space can therefore be seen as a high-level map of potential build opportunities, constrained not by technical feasibility but by meaning and demand.

It’s important to be clear that this is a speculative lens rather than a claim of completeness or precision. The usefulness of a theme space depends entirely on the degree to which IAS IRL themes correspond to real, demonstrated interest rather than theoretical appeal. Still, as a way of thinking — particularly in a moment when building capacity has expanded dramatically — it provides a compelling framework for orienting creative, strategic, and technical effort.

Like many of the ideas introduced here, this is less a closed concept than an invitation. The implications of a navigable theme space, especially when combined with audience-first validation and LLM-enabled building, represent another area that could be explored indefinitely.

### Reference Instantiation – Example of a Fashion Stylist

As referenced lightly throughout this essay, a full, coherent, end-to-end example instantiation of this creative form already exists and has served as a grounding reference for the ideas developed here.

That instantiation is based on a personal stylist, and it is the example I used to think through and develop this framework over time. It emerged directly from my experience with my family’s women’s apparel boutique, which operated primarily through personal styling services rather than transactional retail alone.

My initial engagement with these ideas began through building simple software tools for our clients—such as stylebooks that captured their wardrobes and the items we had styled and sold to them. In that sense, this work started from the data and software angle. It cohered more fully as we later used social media to reach potential clients and to explain, demonstrate, and extend the value of the styling work itself.

Importantly, this instantiation should be understood as developed and exercised at a prototype level, not as a fully realized or scaled audience-building operation. The tools, services, and creative were real, used in a real business context, and informed real decisions—but they were not pursued to scale, nor are they presented here as empirical validation of outcomes. Their role was instead to provide practical scaffolding: a concrete context in which to reason about value, theme, audience, enablement, and extension while those ideas were forming.

Over time, I built out the example conceptually across the full scope of what this paper discusses: social media creative, data, software, and AI, as well as products and services. The example is most developed in the less commonly explored areas—particularly data, software, and AI—but it spans every category discussed in Step 2.

Each of the subsections that follow can be examined through this instantiation, and it already exists in full in the broader corpus from which this essay is drawn. I will continue to use it as a recurring reference point in future writing—not as proof, and not as prescription, but as a worked example that helped make the structure of the form legible.

### This Project and the Corpus

This paper is not meant to stand alone as a closed work.

It defines a creative form and a creative problem, and it sits inside an ongoing project whose purpose is to operate within that form in public.

That project is an audience-building effort organized around making this creative form legible, usable, and extensible—for myself and for others who may find it relevant. In that sense, the project is not separate from the theory presented here. It is an instantiation of it.

The value offered is the idea itself: a way of understanding and practicing audience building as a creative form organized around value, interest, and real-world transformation. The work of the project is to continue developing, testing, extending, and applying that idea through ongoing creative output.

Some of that work already exists. The underlying corpus supporting this paper contains multiple prior drafts and working material developed over several years as I used writing to think through these ideas. That material is not presented as a finished book, nor as empirical validation at scale. It functioned as scaffolding—real, exercised, and grounded in experience, but developed at a prototype level rather than pursued to scale.

I am making that corpus available alongside this paper for two reasons. First, it has high conceptual fidelity with the arguments presented here, even where the framing is less developed. Second, it can be meaningfully interrogated and synthesized using large language models, which are increasingly capable of working with incomplete or exploratory material when a coherent organizing frame is present.

I use those tools myself in that way. They have been especially effective at helping distill and organize ideas that were already mine but not yet fully articulated. That distinction matters to me, and I think it matters here.

Publishing this work on Substack is therefore not incidental. It is itself an example of the kind of audience-building effort this paper describes: an attempt to share value, attract attention around a coherent theme, invite engagement and scrutiny, and iteratively develop the work in public.

Step 2 of this paper sketches the space that opens once the creative problem is clearly defined—the questions that become available, the kinds of work that may follow, and the extensions that may or may not make sense depending on the theme and audience. The project exists to explore that space in practice.

What follows after this paper, then, is not a linear sequence of explanations, but an ongoing creative process: publishing, iteration, engagement with a broader milieu, and continued refinement of the ideas presented here.

This paper defines the form.  The project is the work of operating inside it.