Prologue 000 - How My Father Became a Ghost
My Origin of Sameness
LifestyleCulture
10 min read
Half Mad andWholly Interested.Gathering "The Rarest Humans" Left.We're Building An Ark.
A.I winter is coming.You already know something inside your brain, your heart, and the world ain't right. We have too many interests. Too many rabbit holes. More facets than a diamond. Never quite finished. Don't fit in nowhere. Don't know what we mean to the machine.
You're not damaged. You're early. There's a word for you and me. Took time to find it. Consider our little odyssey together an A.I survival tale - told by a madman.
I'm just up the road. Catch up!
Currently Hunting
Exploring the Japanese philosophy of Ma
Building a science fiction novel called Shapeshyfter
Investigating what makes human creativity irreplaceable
Learning Brazilian Portuguese
Documenting the art of slow living in fast cities
Exploring the Japanese philosophy of Ma
Building a science fiction novel called Shapeshyfter
Investigating what makes human creativity irreplaceable
Learning Brazilian Portuguese
Documenting the art of slow living in fast cities
Building The Future I Want To Inhabit
A World of a Trillion Rare Worlds
Maison Shapeshyfter
Highly whimsical. Character-led. Shipped twice a week. Roughly. When the hunt demands it. I'm building a world I actually want to live in. These are my dribbles. While everone else is lamenting about the machines. I'm doing something far more fun - enjoying myself. Digging into the future like a Michelin Star meal. Tech, design, philosophy, taste. This isn't a newsletter. It's a serialized story with no ending. If you believe the future of work is a lifestyle lived with depth, taste, and meaning than drop anchor.
Subscribe→The Deep Woods (Apollos)
How about a confession? I have more swinging moods than reckless teenagers. I blog mostly when the mood strikes. Once a week. Three times a week when I'm feeling uncharted. For readers who want a closer relationship with Shape and his ideas.
Read Apollos→World of a Trillion (Paid)
I have it on good authority A.I will completely change the creator economy, solopreneurship, entrepreneurship as we know it. Most people are building brands for a world that's already ending. I'm building one for what comes next — with the garage door flung wide open so you can watch every mistake, pivot, and accidental breakthrough in real time. This is the cockamamie experiment. Hurl an asteroid at how media companies, creative studios, and one-person businesses get built. Hurl it with vim and vigor. Document the wake of damage and the wins equally.
Join WOAT→The Guild
Fellow future inventors. Pied Pipers on the frontier. I'm here to help you become unswappable. If you're an uncommon creator, solopreneur, or entrepreneur floating adrift perhaps in a sea of sameness - your sovereign POV, curiosity and personal story isn't a problem, it's the entire asset. I help you excavate it, weaponize it, and build something A.I can't easily replicate.
Explore Services→Before the hunt, I drowned in sameness
Before you dive into the main quest, you need to understand where Shape came from, and why he's hunting what he's hunting.
Prologue 001 - I Don't Know You
The Night I Decided to Become Uninterchangeable
LifestyleCulture
8 min read
Prologue 002 - The Illegal Sausage Operation
Bucharest, Strawberries, and What It Means to Be Seen
LifestyleCulture
6 min read
Meet Shape
I'm Alexander "Shape" Dolly, a Shapeshyfter. By day I help brands escape sameness on multiple fronts - futurist, worldbuilder, storyteller. My work is grounded in the interplay between culture, creativity, technology and humanity. By night, I develop taste by collecting stories, ideas, and artifacts that remind us what it means to be irreplaceably human. This space is my attempt to curate the uncommon - moments, creative work, people, and ideas that machines can't replicate. If Anthony Bourdain, Virgil Abloh, Leonardo da Vinci, and Lara Croft raised an inner-city kid, you'd have me. I don't fit in boxes. I tried to. Then I stopped.
Learn More About MeWork With Me
Hire a Shapeshyfter
We have a common enemy - sameness. Brands, creators, and entrepeneurs find their way here when they have a disposable problem. Interchangeable. Like every other key player in their space. I work with visionaries who refuse to be a dead ringers. Let's shake a few trees and find what makes you irreplaceable.
Get Clear
Define your world, discover your narrative, curate your worldview.
Get Building
Build your world one layer at a time.
Become Uninterechangable
Build a brand AI can't touch and communities can't leave.
Join Maison Shapeshyfter
When I was young I looked like a bucktooth aardvark. I wanted to be good at everything like my best friend Drew. I still remember going to high school parties and watching him make the jocks skedaddle. The girls belly laugh. Drew could charm a rattlesnake. Won every pick up game. Killed every talent show. Ace every test. Cook. Swim like a Sturgeon. Throw a football 70 yards. We lost touch for almost two decades. Then, summer of 2018, I saw Drew at Trader Joe's. Looked lobotomized, mummified and strung out. Waiting for his next social security payout. I footed a week's supply of food. Turns out Drew excelled at everything except timing. He couldn't keep a job. Pay a bill on time. Take advantage of opportunity. Keep relationships. He had skills but no strategy. How much time do we have until A.I takes the jobs, our identity, makes us all the same? Six months? A year? Two? How long will you wait until you realize your future sovereignty needs to be built now. In an era of algorithmic sameness and artificial intelligence, the most radical act is to become deeply, uninterchangebly human.
No spam. Just dribbles from the frontlines of human creativity.