a short letter

two.

for the ones who can pass things on.

If you are reading this, someone sent you the link. They thought you might be one of the people who can do something with it that other readers cannot. They are probably right.

The bear has written a small book. It is on the front page. Fifteen minutes, give or take. If you have read it already, you know what it is.

What I want to say here is plainer than the book is.

The trilogy underneath it — If This Road, orphans.ai, theheld.ai — is an argument about what we are building, written from inside the building. The bear book is the small companion, made small enough for someone to carry. The same argument, in a different room.

If the argument lands for you, there is one thing worth doing.

Send it to two other people who can pass it on.

Not one. Not five. Two. The ones you'd ring at midnight if you had to. The ones who run the things, or fund them, or build them, or write the public sentences other people then quote. Two of those.

That is it. That is the entire ask. There is no list to join, no thread to subscribe to, nothing to buy. The site is free, it does not track, and the bear is not watching.

The reason it is two and not more is that two is the rate at which a thing gets to the people it actually needs to get to, without becoming a thing that is being pushed. Pushed things get suspected. Passed things get read.

If you want to write, I am at doug [at] longsands [dot] com.

The bear is from Tyneside. Every book needs a home. These ones come home to longsands.com.

— D.S.

This page is not advertised. If you found it, you went looking, or someone wanted you to.

Nothing is tracked. No analytics. No cookies. The bear is not watching.