About

Vision

Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.
—Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626)

I want to start off by asking you a question.

What is the only organic alternative to consumerism?

I have to qualify that question especially since my use of "only" in, the only organic alternative to consumerism, implies there is only one ideal pathway through the forest of consumerism. We should be skeptical. My statement is more rhetorical and emphasizes the urgency of action. You see we have a dominant eusocial replacement term for God and that is GDP or gross domestic product. For if this intricate balance of false equilibrium that we as a species seem to worship could ever be challenged we need to produce something of greater value. As a philosopher, I hold a relatively unique perspective that returning to the Classics on Antiquity holds that value if we take full advantage of her wisdom. I am referring to the embodiment of wisdom and where it all originated from, Ancient Greece. This means embracing a telos, which I go into later in the presentation and choosing iterative improvement over revolution. I say this because we live in a very prosperous time. A time where we, as citizens, still have the option to choose. If the climate crisis and biodiversity collapse is as probable as the experts tell us then wouldn't it be reasonable to prepare and conserve?

I created a series with former CIA director Carmen Medina, who points out our bias tendencies assessing a low probability to extreme or worst-case events is deeply flawed. She knows this from her advisory role as a high-ranking CIA analyst {double check her title} in Afghanistan and Iraq. Just because a future possible event is a worst-case scenario doesn't make it less likely. As far as I can extrapolate, the worst-case scenario is the collapse of humanity. Now, what does all this have to do with the planksip vision?

I will tell you.

For me, the future will be one of scarcity, limited or perhaps governed growth, we will use the mechanisms of the market at our peril for now with limited resources we run the risk of self-annihilation. Our mission, planksip mission is to provide a platform for emerging thought leaders.

We have members with varying opinions, contrarian in fact. We don't cancel for it's antithetical with culture. We co-create and if we can't agree on a method, message or deliverable, we move on and so should you. Our unique membership cooperative has elements of competition in our peer review competitions, our tutoring program is geared more towards nurturing ideas, not egos and the co-creation strategies that we employ are for our individual means of production. We welcome you and hope you can be part of our unique concept.

Mission statement

planksip wants to change what it means to consume. Consumption doesn't have to mean an aggressive drawdown on natural resources or the production that follows. From models of GDP for economic prosperity to a marketplace of ideas, a hierarchy of sorts required to structure our society should be anchored in an exchange of philosophy and the cultural identity of the ideal made manifest.

What is planksip?

As a philosophy and culture media outlet, planksip helps emerging thought leaders with personal branding by co-creating organic content. This could be through long-form discussion videos, cultural commentary or something entirely new.

Developing a Sound Content Marketing Strategy

What will guide your strategy?

Analytics.

As you meticulously monitor, track, watch, and report, the number of visitors to your blog posts, you'll gain a greater sense of:

How to refine and improve your writing
Which tools, platforms, and apps perform best to disseminate your information
How to utilize your time and resources most effectively to grow your readership
How to blend the skills above for greater success

planksip places the tools and resources you need at your fingertips. That way, you can develop a content marketing plan, evaluate it as you go along, and repurpose and retool content along the way.

These are vital skills in the digital age, ones that academics who want to succeed mustn't ignore. Like other authors, you should know how to market yourself, whether it's to a publishing house or university.

planksip can help you develop the best content possible for achieving structured creative output.

Breathing in the Gods

Inspiration refers to the taking in of an external, divine, creative force. Literally "breathing in the gods." Or, more specifically, the Muses of ancient Greece.

As Gilbert argues, "The universe buries strange jewels deep within us all and then stands back to see if we can... find them. The hunt to uncover those jewels, that's creative living. The courage to go on that hunt... separates a mundane existence from a more enchanted one."

Countless wonderful things came out of the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment. Nonetheless, the advent of thinkers who advocated solely for the use of the five senses inadvertently impoverished one area of progress.

What am I talking about? The categorization of things that could not be "sensed" in a concrete way as "metaphysical." If it could not be measured, touched, tasted, seen, heard, or smelled, it got relegated to the dustbins of academic thought.

Formerly accepted notions such as the role of inspiration in scientific creation became strange outliers. The metaphysics label came to plague many essential aspects of human existence. It has stunted academic writing in measurable ways.

Pushing the Envelope on Your Creativity

Yet, the best authors confirm that the writing process involves something magical, inexplicable, and external. And that magical, external thing is inspiration. Unfortunately, the current "publish or perish" system of academic writing can prove anathema to inspiration.

Fortunately, the planksip platform allows academics to take back their creativity. It permits them to explore external inspiration. At the same time, they can craft academic content that gets reviewed and examined by peers.

You can submit this content into regular contests for $500 - $8,000 prizes. You can also publish as often as you'd like. Learning to embrace the mystical sparks of inspiration, tempered with the Logos and fueled by authors of the past, has never been easier.

Now, what's that worth to you as an academic, writer, and artist? As Gilbert assures her readers, "Inspiration is always trying to work with you. Trust it, and it will trust you. The work wants to get made and it wants to be made through you."

The planksip Publishing Model

At this point, you're likely wondering, "What is planksip, and how can it further my academic journalism career?" Started in 2016, the program is a boutique digital book publishing agency and media outlet.

It specializes in publishing content related to:

Philosophy
Psychology
Astronomy
Quantum physics
The ethics and science of climate change
Biology
Neuroscience of behaviour and culture

What makes the planksip platform so unique?

Its contextualization within the tradition of Hellenic Western Philosophy. A tradition whose torch gets carried among contemporary thought leaders today.

This tradition provides the starting point for planksip's preferred cultural narratives. It also informs the curation of authorship on the site.

planksip offers a subscription-based service for North American authors. One with subsidized incentives for those in need.

The ultimate goal? Designating a fecund space where authors and thought leaders can come together. A place where they can compete on the world stage of thought and idea dissemination.

A New Approach to Publishing

The pressure to routinely publish, to consistently create new content can be wearisome for academics and laymen alike. Though deadlines and the formal standards of academic writing can be highly useful in helping your content come into being and take shape, sometimes you don't want to be overly concerned with limited time, length, jargon, and the prestige of the container your work is published in. You just want to focus on the work and the ideas conveyed in it themselves.

This is the goal of planksip: to impose no such restrictions, to allow for the creation and distribution of authentic, meaningful work, while also receiving a paycheck.

The Audacity of the Imagination

Perhaps nobody said it better than John Dewey when he observed, "Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of the imagination." Let planksip help you cultivate that "audacity of the imagination" with an unparalleled platform.

When you join, you'll be in the company of colleagues. You'll compete against one another and peer review each other's work, honing your content creation skills along the way.

To start, you'll need to articulate a clear vision of your goals for success. The program can help you define these objectives and develop the right strategy to complement your career trajectory. It'll also help you identify your strengths as well as areas that require further growth.

Then, through the platform's unique approach to publishing and mentorship, you'll gain the guidance to make leaps and bounds when it comes to compelling academic writing. So, what are you waiting for? Learn more about planksip and how it can help you get your academic content in front of the right audience.‌

Content Creation for Academics

When it comes to content creation for academics, you must have a fresh mindset. That means cultivating the ability to problem-solve and continuously learn new things. While content marketing is far from rocket science, it does require a learning curve.

This learning curve is steep in the beginning. Fortunately, with the planksip journalism program, you can draw on the advantages of working with an established platform to promote your work.

You'll hone the ability to experiment with idea dissemination, drawing on inspiration from the past. What's more, you'll gain real-world knowledge of how content marketing works while developing a public persona and platform of which you can be proud.

Who knows, you might make a few thousand friends or two. The reverse is also true but this is a matter of order and nothing predictive in nature. The rest is up to you my friend.

Member Benefits

All members, whether they be in the academic field or are aspiring writers, will have access to these benefits:

For those who publish through our site, 100% profit is yours.
We set up a monthly YouTube podcast for you, in which you can choose from our selection of hosts.
Writing contest. Up to $8,000/month prize money. Winners are decided by co-op members.
Every piece of writing gets a private link.
planksip has a quality threshold now. Great writings are rewarded with publication and SEO-enhanced visibility directly on the planksip front page!

A Training Ground For and Community of Writers

In addition to offering publication services to members of academia seeking more freedom in writing and publishing, planksip also offers training for new writers who wish to improve their critical thinking and writing skills. The various aspiring writers who employ our services will be brought together within the site to form a community, in which each member can freely exchange ideas and constructive criticism, in addition to receiving professional guidance from our team of PhD editors (for an additional cost).

In order to facilitate the exchange of ideas and the interaction between the members of our planksip community, planksip will provide a community forum as well as regular writing contests in which members can discuss and write about thought-provoking topics. In the spirit of planksip’s overarching goal of facilitating deep, meaningful thought even outside of the context of academia, these topics will focus on the ideas of great thinkers in the past, to whom intellectual curiosity, reflections, and writing were not strictly affixed to professions and specialities. As an incentive, cash prizes will be offered to the winners of these contests as well as the opportunity to be published on the planksip website.

Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord

Do you have the ovaries to test your ideas against real-life philosophers? Then participate in planksip’s Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord—a multi-tier debate arena where you choose the level of criticism your ideas will receive/withstand in the face of real-life philosophers who specialize in the subject of your choice.

How many flames can you stand?

Baalzebul (🔥) — Gentle criticism and nudges, meant to guide you in the right direction and help you discover ideas that you never fully realized that you had.
Mephistopheles (🔥🔥) — Friendly but firm criticism, clearly demarcating areas in need of clarification
Asmodeus (🔥🔥🔥) — Proper criticism where it's due, pointing out blind spots, raising objections.
Maxima Satanas (🔥🔥🔥🔥) — Maximal counter argumentation for people training for life on-the-air or public forum debates.
Optional: We will stream your PGMO Session live!
Optional: We will store it on the planksip YouTube channel!

JOINING THE PLANKSIP WRITER'S COOPERATIVE

The planksip writers cooperative gives members writing assignments, of which they compete for cash prizes. This article highlights the benefits of membership as well as outlines the rules and guidelines for submissions. Becoming a planksip writer is easier than you think. Becoming a better writer? Well, that is up to you.

Eusocial and Ephemeral!

What we do with this knowledge is up to us.

Theory

Our shared approach to cultural myelination is fundamentally an ethical claim and reflects the entire corpus of collected information of human knowledge, epistemology as it is; replicable and pluralistic. Multiple nodes of propagation are antithetical with a manageable amount of contradiction and so the leitmotiv of the möbius metaphor is evident throughout the planksip's identity. However ironic this may sound, the contradiction has utility, an opportunity to define further breakthroughs of knowledge individually and socially.

Like the planks on Theseus's ship, our shared identity is always changing, directional and formes the mutual agreement under social contract.

Mentorship

An Organic, Objective Framework

The planksip platform started with an organic yet objective framework. One designed to engage with famous intellectuals of our past.

It's the internet's version of a 17th-century salon or atelier. A place where ideas get cultivated and explored in meaningful, growth-producing ways.

Unlike the academic publishing paradigm above, the planksip model provides the framework to better your writing. It also makes you a better researcher, reviewer, and thinker. All while promoting the free exchange of ideas, past and present.‌

The program is rooted in planksip's "Figures of Speech." This page of the website is dedicated to helping academics create content.

How? With inspiring quotations from eclectic thought leaders. "Figures of Speech" is a collection of more than 1,500 carefully collected quotations from the giants of the past. The collection continues to grow, promoting academic co-authorship.

"Figures of Speech" contains ideas worth remembering, celebrating, and expanding upon. They represent ephemeral reflections, culturally transmitted through the Logos of learning.

These tidbits of knowledge permit academic authors to liberate their inspiration. These ideas allow for exploration of the full richness and depth of natural philosophy--both past and present.

Mendel's Hidden Genius

Developing the planksip model of publishing meant seeking inspiration from natural processes, including human genetics.

For example, we call a variant form of a gene an allele. Some genes have a variety of different forms. These forms are located at the same genetic locus, or position, on a chromosome.

Why are humans referred to as diploid organisms? We have two alleles present at each genetic locus. In other words, we inherit one allele from each parent.

We refer to each pair of alleles as the "genotype" of a specific gene.

These genotypes get described as homozygous when two identical alleles occur at a particular locus. Alternately, we call them heterozygous if the two alleles differ.

Alleles contribute to an organism's phenotype or outward appearance. Some alleles are recessive, while others are dominant.

What does it mean when an organism is heterozygous at a specific locus? It carries one dominant and one recessive allele. In other words, the organism expresses the dominant phenotype.

A Return to Experimentation and Self-Discovery

Alleles represent a fascinating metaphor when it comes to pairing the ideas of great thinkers from the past with the inspiration for modern scholars. They beg the question, "What academic fruit might be born from such co-authorship pairings?"

Genetic inheritance was first ferreted out by Gregor Mendel. Mendel was an Augustinian friar, abbot of St. Thomas' Abbey in Moravia, and a natural philosopher.

Through his work with pea plants, he stumbled upon the fundamental laws of inheritance. Publishing his work in 1866, it met with underwhelming recognition.

The profound significance of his work didn't get recognized until the 20th century. Only then did he receive his just desserts as the "Father of Genetics."‌

Nevertheless, it's tempting to long for the days of Mendel, when you could experiment and share your results without institutional pressure. Free from the woes of the "Publish or perish" mantra! With planksip, you gain a platform for experimentation and self-discovery, a haven to express your ideas.