I’ve been thinking a lot about mimetic formation, how a thought becomes an idea, and how that idea gestates and evolves as it’s progressively shared in wider and wider circles.

During a recent product review of Day One, I was struck by how central the app is to my perspective on humans, relationships, and what we share. There are several layers to it, ranging from your innermost thoughts to what you share with the world. Each layer has its own context, challenges, and possibilities, and Automattic offers technology and products tailored to each.

1. Layer one is your internal thoughts. Your consciousness, what exists only in your mind, or what I like to call meatspace. This space is yours and yours alone. This generative space is at the core of human creativity and existence.

2. Layer two is triggered as soon as you put something into a medium, like writing it down. It’s everything that leaves your head, but is just reserved for you. In the past, we only had physical journals. Today, we have Day One as our strongest product in this space, but many people also have a private WordPress installation just for themselves. There are so many tools out there that help you create! Colors, brushes, canvases. Harper, for example, helps you write better — think of it as an open-source Grammarly, right now just in a few limited contexts, but in the future everywhere you write. 

3. Layer three is you and someone else. This is everything you share with one other person, which is an incredibly sacred act. Shared journals on Day One, messaging on Beeper, DMs, private blogs with your best friend. A shared Google doc. This is its own special space. It has an intimacy and privacy that is core to the human experience. This is also phase 3 of Gutenberg, which is all about real-time co-editing and collaboration. This layer is the one I’m most excited about expanding in 2025 and 2026.

4. Layer four is sharing within a finite group. N+1. It’s a space of collaboration and brainstorming with families, tribes, and teams. P2, Linear, Github, group chats, and cozy communities. You lose some of the intimacy of layer three but gain more group intelligence.

5. Finally, we have the fifth layer. This is the public layer, where I have spent a lot of my time at Automattic. It is an extremely competitive space of social media and blogs: WordPress, WordPress.com, and Tumblr. Once you publish publicly, you open yourself up to the beauty and chaos of the wider world. The best reason to blog is comments, the people who find you and add to your thoughts, who you never would have imagined. This is a crucible, but makes your own writing and thinking so much better, it’s worth the mishegoss. 🙂

This has been kicking around in my head and at layer four for a while. Thanks to Kelly Hoffman for helping me get this to layer five.

P.S. Happy 22^nd birthday to WordPress! Very excited about the new AI team on .org.