Note: This is a slightly edited (for the web) issue of a previous email newsletter. (If you’re not subscribed, join here, it’s free.)
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“The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.” — David Foster Wallace (This is Water)
In a previous essay, The Email Engine, I made a case for rethinking how we use email to communicate with our citizens — the Harpers — of our World.
When we think of our World as a system — the “place” we’re building for the people we care about serving — we recognize that email is part of something bigger.
It’s the “engine” that interacts and interconnects with other parts of the system, creating emergent properties that can’t be seen within the individual parts themselves.
It’s easy for systems thinking to give us a headache. However, when we look at (some of) the “underlying structure” that makes up the system, the resolution sharpens up.
In this essay, I’ll unpack four core layers of a World shaped by the principles of a TDW:
I’ve embodied my eight-year-old self to help with the visuals. 🙂
Note: These elements appear hierarchical — but only because we’re constrained by two dimensions. In truth, a World is a non-linear interconnected system. Trust may sit at the center, but it often emerges last. The whole is more recursive and relational than the diagrams can show.
Let’s take a slow walk through each layer — not as fixed steps, but as interwoven parts of a living system.
Trust
In our Worlds — as sovereign creators and caretakers of places that matter — trust is the gravitational center around which everything orbits.
Trust is the foundational principle.
It’s the gravity that binds our World.
It doesn’t shout for attention. It pulls. Quietly. Persistently. A kind of emotional gravity that draws the right people in (and intentionally repels the wrong people).
Attention is earned, and it’s trust that does the earning.
But trust doesn’t operate like a switch: Click.
Rather, it feels more akin to a gravitational field. It accumulates. It builds. It exerts its pull quietly over time, inviting people into orbit — not through urgency or manipulation, but through presence, coherence, and care.
Trust is what lets someone slow down long enough to notice that something feels different here.
That difference might not be fully articulated at first — it’s a felt thing. Subtle. Subconscious. It shows up in small signals:
- The language is calmer…
- There’s no oppressive sense of a ticking clock…
- Invitations feel optional, not forced, engineered…
- The worldview is consistent…
- Email doesn’t feel like bait for an inevitable pitch just around the corner…
Trust is the reason someone keeps returning.
It’s the invisible warmth that makes our World feel alive — safe, generative, worth exploring, allowing a relationship to take root.
Trust, then, is the first principle.
It’s what holds the system in orbit.
It’s what filters for resonance.
And it’s what makes everything else possible.
Without it, we’re building funnels.
With it, we’re building Worlds.
Relationships
Once trust is established — once that quiet pull is felt — a new layer begins to form, to emerge…
Relationships.
Like any meaningful friendship, it doesn’t happen by “force.”
Relationships resist engineering.
They emerge.
They take shape around trust, much like planetary rings form around a planet’s gravitational pull.
A relationship is not a tactic, of course.
It’s a signal that someone has entered the field of trust and decided to stay for a while because “the water is warm.”
Relationships are expressions of a trusted environment.
They are secondary — not lesser, but sequential.
They don’t precede trust; they follow it.
Relationships bloom in the soil that trust makes fertile.
If trust is gravity, relationships are the orbit — the pattern that emerges when someone feels safe enough to stay in motion around our World, to come closer, to linger, to return.
Some relationships will be casual, like wide-orbit passes.
Others will tighten over time, pulling closer as alignment deepens and shared values compound.
Not all relationships are visible…
Some happen in silence: a bookmarked essay, a quiet moment of resonance or reflection, a newsletter that lands just when it’s needed. (I receive many email acknowledging this, which is always humbling.)
Others become reciprocal, explicit, enduring.
But they all share one thing in common:
They flow from trust.
If trust is the gravity that draws people in, and relationships are the orbits that form around that gravity — then email is the touchpoint keeping everything alive.
It’s the “engine” of our World.
But not an engine in the industrial sense. There’s no combustion, no noise, no pushy acceleration towards transactions.
This is a living engine: subtle, rhythmic, hydraulic. More like “irrigation” than horsepower.
Email is the system that deepens and distributes trust over time across our World.
Email carries nutrients — our ideas, values, invitations — throughout the ecosystem of our World.
It reaches those in the outer rings (new to our World), those orbiting nearby (paid members, peers, superfans), and even those who’ve drifted into a quiet, distant path but haven’t fully left.
Email, in this context, is not a blunt-force broadcast tool…
It’s a circulatory system.
It doesn’t shout into inboxes — it seeps into attention gently, predictably, patiently.
It delivers not just information, but continuity.
A well-structured email system — a welcome sequence, a serialized newsletter, an occasional broadcast announcement — becomes the heartbeat of our World.
A low, steady pulse. A reminder — not from the system, but from me: “I have your back.”
Email irrigates the landscape, ensuring that trust doesn’t dry out, that relationships are fed, and that the World remains lush.
Over time, this ongoing flow creates a compounding effect:
- More touch-points…
- More moments of alignment…
- More invitations to step closer…
- More opportunities for dialogos — that quiet, invisible asynchronous conversation between us and Harper.
And crucially, it allows us, the ‘world builders,’ to step away, to rest, to think, to not have to keep showing up in real-time, while the World keeps living. (See this essay for a deeper dive into this.)
Artifacts
A World without artifacts is just a landscape of potential — fogged, indistinct, unshaped.
Artifacts give our World form.
They are the visible structures that reveal the territory and invite exploration.
Unlike fast-food content, artifacts are designed to endure — to be reread (or rewatched).
They’re evergreen, not because they’re algorithmically optimized, but because they’re rooted in something deeper and weightier: meaning, intention, content expressing timeless questions.
Artifacts don’t chase attention. They anchor it.
They orient newcomers.
They act like Sheikah Towers in Breath of the Wild — once discovered, they unlock and reveal the fogged map…
They give shape to the previously unknown.
They provide vantage: zoomed-out clarity and zoomed-in resonance.
You read an artifact and suddenly things click into place:
- The World’s ethos becomes legible…
- The World feels (more) coherent…
- The path forward becomes visible, though still open-ended.
Good artifacts do more than explain. They evoke.
They leave space for reflection and invite Harper to return…
If you’ve ever read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, you’ll know what I mean. It’s a book meant to be reread, again and again, each time revealing new truths, new dimensions.
Each artifact holds layers of meaning that reveal new insights and perspectives depending on who’s reading — and when they’re reading it.
Artifacts aren’t just content. They’re landmarks.
And they’re fractal: each one contains the pattern of the whole.
A single essay can teach someone everything about our World. A Values page can set the tone of the entire philosophy. A Manifesto can ignite a personal transformation.
Placed intentionally across the World, these artifacts create “wayfinding,” orienting the Harpers of our World.
They make the invisible feel navigable. They invite “dialogos” — not just between reader and writer, but between reader and self.
And collectively, they create world-context.
Artifacts help Harpers locate themselves, orient to what matters, and decide — without pressure — whether this is a World worth lingering in, perhaps calling their “digital home.”
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A world isn’t built linearly.
It emerges.
Artifacts are discovered, relationships take shape, and trust crystallizes — quietly, at the center. This isn’t a hierarchy. It’s a living system.
While trust is the foundation in terms of what everything ultimately rests on (what binds the World), it’s often the last thing to emerge from Harper’s experience of our artifacts, emails, and relationships.
So, from a lived perspective:
- Harper encounters an artifact →
- Feels drawn to stay →
- Begins to orbit →
- Engages with emails and invisible dialogos →
- … and only then, in some hard-to-name way, feels trust.
This is emergence, not construction.
In a strict hierarchy, we’d expect to build from the bottom up. But in a TDW-inspired model, we’re more gardener than architect — we cultivate conditions for trust to take root.
I hope this resonated.
AndrĂ© “Digital Soulcraft” Chaperon