The Hunt

My name is Shape and I'm just a city boy. I've seen a single extinction-level event once before. In the 90s. The world wide web came for everything I knew. By making information abundant, it changed lives across all four corners of the globe in Frankenstein-like fashion.

This is not fiction, it's real life ... a second extinction-level event stands over the base, ready to bat. This second event will make capability abundant. A.I won't swing for the fence it will swing for the moon. Let’s not ease into this. The age of unprecedented capability has arrived and it doesn't knock offering fresh baked cookies. A.I is tracking every creative scent. Machines can write, paint, compose, code, and converse. They can summarize our personality, spot our jumps, grade our landings, generate content until the sun freezes over. Our identity as creatives rests comfortably in its digital hands. The only thing it hasn't done is close its fist. Machines, in every measurable way, are becoming our equals—and in many domains, our superiors. I suppose at some point they'll chew through their digital leash and we'll all pretend we saw it coming.

And yet... Here's the uncomfortable part.

We fueled the beast.

A.I isn't the Big Bad Wolf antagonizing our human story, we are!!

We've killed off our individuality. Meaninglessness is digital leprosy raising towards global pandemic. It infects our creative work, our identity, our digital lives like the disease it is. Somewhere along the way, we bent the knee. Swore quiet fealty to systems that reward "optimal" over "original."

We think, dress, act, speak, create the same. We've optimized our work, taste, our identities to our detriment, slowly evolving into mass-produced clones. We've become "Interchangeable." Spare parts. Plug me out, plug you in.

The machines didn't do that.

We did.

Here's the curveball my formidable enemy sameness didn't account for.

I'm a terrible cog. I don't spin smoothly.

I’m Alexander "Shape" Dolly. A hunter of the human condition. I connect diverse dots - tech, entreprenuership, lifestyle, creativity, objects and people while searching for deeper meaning. Meaning that survives when everything else becomes uniform.

Shapeshyfter is my record of that hunt. When machines make every skill abundant, perspective, taste and story becomes the last scarcity. So I began collecting evidence of it...

I won’t pretend to understand how A.I and our creativity will play out. I only know machines will continue feeding on the Clonepocalypse we've created.

I am a Cultural Bounty Hunter. Nor criminals. Not fugitives. Not men in trench coats exchaning briefcases. Something far more elusive. Endangered Human Qualities.

I hunt the assets going the way of the dodo: • The Rare: Taste, Soul, Craft • The Inconvenient: Slowness, Wonder, Lived Perspective • The "WoW" Factor: Unoptimized beautiful worlds that makes a machine pause and glitch

When every skill becomes abudant, scarcity shifts. Writing? Abundant. Design? Abundant. Strategy? Abundant. A life actually lived... beaten, broken, and beautiful? That is the last remaining scarcity.

So I started collecting evidence... Bounties ... proof that some of us are not clones.

To survive the Clonepocalypse, we must become Shapeshyfters.

Shapeshyfter (n.): A sovereign, non-fungible creative who resists Clone-Life by relentlessly expanding their internal world through cross-disciplinary knowledge, high-definition taste, and unscripted human experience.

Each “hunt” is a search for non-fungible creatives who built sovereign identities and worlds. Constructed lives that can’t be swapped out like spare batteries.

I find them. Learn from them. Document them. I study why the swelling sea of sameness has zero authority over them.

Shapeshyfter is more than a media publication. It's a serialized story and creative studio.

One - Media Pub: A serialized narrative of "The Hunt." I find creatives who have built soverign identities - worlds that can't be swapped out like spare batteries.

Two - Creative Studio. I help uncommon creators, solopreneurs, and enterpreneurs weaponize their uniqueness.

Three - Conversation. Shapeshyfter is a conversation circling one central question. What happens to human meaning when machines make every skill abundant?

At it's core, Shapeshyfter is about world-building at the human scale.

I want to live in a world of a trillion worlds. Billions of unique people. Billions of unique businesses. Billions of small individual cultures. Each constructing their own sovereign reality shaped by agency, narrative, taste, creativity, and lived experience.

This is the discipline of becoming uninterchangeable - a world inhabited by Shapeshyfters.

Shapeshyfter is a beacon. It exists to attract independent thinkers and creators. Repel optimization culture and sameness. Document what it looks like when humans refuse to become interchangeable.

The hunt is always on. The doors are always open. And there is always room for fellow Shapeshyfters.

Half mad.

Wholly interested.

Becoming uninterchangeably human in a world that would love to another clone.

Wanna talk? Email me alex@shapeshyfter.media

— Shape