Here’s a story about African rhythms and cancer and combinatorics. It starts a few years ago when I was taking a class in Afro-Cuban rhythms from Russell Shumsky, with whom I’ve studied West-African drumming for many years. Among the basics of Afro-Cuban are the Bell Patterns, which come straight out of Africa. The most basic is the “Standard Pattern”, commonly accompanying 12/8music. “12/8” means there are four clusters of three notes and you can count it “one-two-three two-two-three three-two-three four-two-three”. It feels like it’s in four, particularly when played fast.

Here’s the standard bell pattern in music notation. Instead of one 12/8 bar, I’ve broken it into four 3/8 chunks. Let’s call those “mini-measures”; I’ll use that or just “minis” in the rest of this piece.

Bell patterns are never played in isolation, but circularly on fast repeat, so the first note immediately follows the last.

In the sound sample, I’m playing a background beat on a conga, emphasizing the beginning of the 12/8 measures. The actual bell pattern is on the high “child” bell of a Gankoqui, an African dual-cowbell set.

That’s my Gankoqui. I bought it off someone on Etsy who imports them from Ghana. It came with that little thin stick that sounds nice, but sometimes I use a regular drumstick when things get loud.

The problem

Russell’s a good teacher and the standard pattern isn’t that tricky, but I just couldn’t get a grip on it. It’s a little harder than it looks what with cycling it really fast, and then you’re playing it against complicated music with other instrumental voices. I probably would have got there, but the lessons ran out of gas in the depths of Covid.

Introducing Tracy

She was Russell’s long-time partner, a good person and good drummer too. When you were struggling with a complex rhythm it was helpful to watch Tracy’s hands, because she was always on the beat.

Tracy lived with stage four metastatic cancer for many years and braved endless awful rounds of therapy while remaining generally cheerful. She could be morbidly funny; I bought her congas (you can hear one behind the beat in the samples) when she had a storage-space problem. She told me she was carefully planning her finances so she’d run out of money just before the cancer got her.

I always enjoyed any time I spent with her. Then, a dozen years into her cancer journey, this last summer it got into her brain and it was pretty clear her end times were upon her.

The hospice

Tracy’s last months were spent at St. John Hospice in Vancouver’s far west. I can’t say enough good things about it. If you’re near Vancouver and your death becomes imminent, try to be there if you can’t be at home. It’s comfortable and the staff are expert and infinitely kind. The rules that apply at hospices are different from those at hospitals; for example, Tracy’s cat joined her in residency and had the run of the place.

I (and other fans of Russell and Tracy) visited the hospice a few times. My last visit was just days before her death and, while she was fatigued and spaced-out, it was still Tracy. I wasn’t close enough to call her a friend, but I miss her.

We got to talking about Afro-Cuban music and I laughed at myself, saying how I never could get that damn bell pattern down. Said Russell: “Oh, you mean the standard 12/8 pattern? Tracy, let’s show him” and on the second try, they were doing it together, just voices, ta ta ta-ta, ta ta ta.

Driving home from the hospice, I told myself that if Tracy could manage the bell pattern in her condition, I could bloody well learn it. So I studied the details and used a metronome app and after a while I thought I had it down pretty well.

Sounds cool

I go to a weekly by-invitation African drum jam where I’m on the weaker end of the skill spectrum. The first time a 12/8 came along after I thought I’d learned the pattern, I had to summon up courage and then I fluffed the first few bars. But after a while I was grooving along and smiling and thinking the bell sounded pretty cool against the thunder of all the djembés and dununs.

And, even played amateurishly, it does sound cool. Let’s have another look at the music.

West-African drumming often tries to achieve rhythmic tension, where a given note could fit in multiple ways and your ear is not 100% sure what’s going on. The standard pattern does this, twice.

Remember, I said that 12/8 sounds like it’s “in four”, especially if you hit the first beat of each of the four mini-measures. But two of the four minis here go around the first note, weakening the 4/4 feel. Especially on that third mini; you can feel the beat slide by the missing “one”.

Also, the last three notes are evenly spaced two beats apart, so six of them would fill the 12-beat pattern, suggesting that this might be in triple time, not 12/8.

The effect, to my ears, is of the bell, higher-pitched than the drums, shifting against the rhythm, or even dancing across it. At the drum jam, at almost any given moment it won’t be just drums, one or more people will have clave sticks or rattles or tambourines or cowbells weaving through the beat.

Mixing it up

After I felt confident playing the standard pattern, it still sounded cool, but I wanted to branch out, not just go around and around the same seven notes. So the first thing I did was start mixing in a few of these.

This repeats the second bar through the end of the phrase. In the sound sample I mix it up with the standard pattern. It’s got less rhythmic tension but on the other hand flows along smoothly with the drum thunder. Also you don’t have to think at all, so you can enjoy listening to what the other people are playing.

Then I got a little more ambitious and reshuffled:

The mini-measures are the same as in the standard pattern, just in a different order. Anyhow, this kind of thing is fun.

Combinatorics

Then one evening I was lying in bed, thoughts wandering, and wondered “How many bell patterns are there?” A little mental math showed that of course there are eight possible arrangements of tones in a 3-note mini-measure. Here they are:

Why are the minis numbered in that order? Every computer programmer looking at this already knows, but for the rest of you: If the notes are ones and the rests are zeroes, they are the eight binary numbers between zero and seven inclusive. So each number’s binary bits show where the drumstrokes are. By the way, numbers four through seven have a note on the one beat, zero through three don’t.

Is it weird to have a zero i.e. silent mini? I don’t think so, sometimes spaces between the notes really matter.

Patterns

Anyhow, the original question was about the number of different bell patterns. Each has four mini-measures with 8 possible values. So the answer is 8 ⨉ 8 ⨉ 8 ⨉ 8, which is 4,096.

And each of them can be identified by four little numbers, ranging from T0000 (I can hear the bandleader yelling “gimme zeroes for the sax break”) to T7777, a flurry of eighth notes that you might use in the big encore-number finish designed to leave the audience yelling as you walk off stage. The standard bell pattern is T5325; in binary “101 011 010 101” and the 1’s are drumstrokes. The first variation above is T5333 and the second is T5253.

The “T” in front of each bell pattern number is for Tracy.

If you go look at the Wikipedia Bell-pattern article, they emphasize that there are lots of different patterns. Now they all have numbers! The article makes special mention of T5124, T5221, and T5244.

But why, Tim?!

I’m a computer programmer with a Math degree, and an amateur musician. Anyone who thinks that these are disjoint disciplines is wrong. And, I think the notation is (on a very small scale) kind of pleasing.

But the work has actually helped me. Now that I’ve considered each mini-measure and its personality. I find all of them sneaking into my Gankoqui excursions, which have gotten noticeably weirder, for example T5635. Nobody’s threatened to kick me out of the jam, so far.

Also, this has given me a real appreciation of whoever it was that, probably thousands of years ago and certainly in Africa, picked the “standard” pattern as, well, standard. Because it’s great.

What’s missing?

You may have noticed that Gankoquis have two bells and I’ve been ignoring that fact. Normally you’d play these patterns on the smaller “child” bell, but sometimes bringing the big parent bell in for a couple of strokes works well. Here’s an example (h/t Russell).

Also, this discussion has been limited to 3/8 minis in 12/8 measures. There’s another whole universe of 4/4 rhythms that also have bell patterns (but everything exists in the shadow of the clave rhythm). In that world a pattern has four measures, each of which can have sixteen possible values, so there are 65,536 different ones.

And I could repeat the numbers construction above for 4/4. But I’m not going to, because the rewards feel smaller. In my experience, 4/4 rhythms lope smoothly along and everyone knows where the one is even when there’s no note on it, so there’s less ambiguity to work with. Anyhow, any neophyte (like for example me) can play a pretty smooth bell line against 4/4; just start with clave and add variations (or don’t) and you’ll be fine.

Useful?

These numbers are just elementary mathemusical fun. If anyone else wanted to use them that’d be a pleasant surprise. If “anyone else” is you, go ahead, but they have a name and you have to use it. These are called Tracy Numbers.

Colophon

Music fragments by MuseScore Studio. Sound samples facilitated by GarageBand, a Shure MV51, and PSB Alphas.

By the fifth year of teaching at Cleveland’s Glenville High School in the early 1960s, however, I had learned one of the most important lessons a teacher can learn in an urban high school. I carried that precious knowledge with me to Cardozo and Roosevelt High Schools in Washington, D.C., and subsequent teaching I have done, including Los Altos and Menlo-Atherton High Schools in the San Francisco Bay area and, yes, also to Stanford University.

That lesson I did not learn from courses in my undergraduate teacher education program at the University of Pittsburgh in the 1950s. Nor did I learn that lesson as a student-teacher during my senior year of college. And my guess is that even in the initial years of my teaching career, I failed to learn this important lesson.

OK, what’s the lesson? Never ask permission to do something for your students, just ask for forgiveness afterwards.

For those teachers who reflect on their experiences in classrooms, they learn that they are gatekeepers to what enters and exits their rooms. While there is so much that teachers have no control over in teaching such as the students they have, the classroom they are assigned, the daily schedule they follow, events occurring inside and outside the school, and the school organization within which they teach–they do, however, have a crucial slim margin of precious autonomy once they close their classroom doors.

As gatekeepers to the classroom, teachers learn in fits and starts, by trial and error, that they determine what content/skills they teach, how they get taught what parts of the required textbook they can skip. They learn to convey attitudes and values about life and subject-matter within the confines of that 900 square-foot classroom. Although that freedom is constrained, this priceless autonomy can jump-start learning for both teacher and students.

And in learning how to teach and work with students and colleagues in these schools over decades, I also extracted a small measure of freedom outside of my classroom. And that is where my hard-earned organizational lesson of never asking permission to do something in your classroom but asking for forgiveness afterwards-–came into play. Here is one instance of that lesson, as I recall it.

For seven years at Glenville High School, I taught history to about 150 students for five classes a day. In those years, it became clear to me that I needed more than the textbooks and meager supplies that the school and district supplied me. Sure, I used the textbooks but I also created additional readings from other sources.

Thus, I needed reams of paper. Of equal importance, I needed a machine that would make copies of these readings for my students. I located paper and machines, sweet-talking my way into gathering them by bending school and district rules.

A case in point. At the end of one school year, I got access to other departments’ store rooms. In one of them, I found reams of unused paper and took some of those 500-sheet packages to a closet in my classroom. After school began in September, the principal called me into his office and showed me telephone messages and memos that he had received from district officials and teachers demanding an explanation for my “unprofessional behavior.”

My relationship with the principal was a warm, supportive one in which he judged me to be a hard-working young teacher who was part of a faculty cadre in the urban high school that helped many students get their diplomas and enter college. So he faced a dilemma in having to do something stern in responding to his superiors and other faculty without alienating an entrepreneurial teacher, given district office complaints about my “unprofessional behavior.”

I, too, faced a dilemma. In a scarcity economy which is what urban schools were then (and are now) insofar as supplies, teachers had to be enterprising without constantly opening their own wallets to buy things for their classes (which many did). I scrounged, begged, and borrowed to the hilt with colleagues and friends but it wasn’t enough. And yet I didn’t want to stop reproducing these readings to supplement the textbook because these historical readings drawn from primary sources seemed to be paying off in increased student attendance and class participation.

Yet my boss was upset.  I had to mollify him since district officials and teachers were pestering him to do something to stop my “unprofessional behavior.” So after much thinking about how schools worked and what I had learned about authority structures in schools and districts, I apologized and asked the principal to forgive my indiscretion.

He reported to his superiors that I had apologized for my actions even promising not to repeat it. That ended the incident.  But that lesson I never forgot: Never ask permission to do something for your students, just ask for forgiveness afterwards, I learned it from my seven years teaching at Glenville in Cleveland, and afterwards in Washington, D.C., where I taught four years at Cardozo High School with two more at Roosevelt High School.

Moreover, I remembered that lesson when I served as Arlington County’s (VA) Superintendent for seven years and, finally, from teaching and doing research as a university professor for two decades. I consider that lesson about being both entrepreneurial and a member of a team precious wisdom about how organizations operate and the people that staff them, think and act.

Sure you can tell such wisdom to novices taking teacher education courses in undergraduate or graduate courses but those newbies lack the organizational savvy to make sense of it. They lack the mindfulness drawn from pondering one’s experiences in a school and classroom over time. And I would guess that even Teach for America recruits don’t learn that lesson in their summer training or in the two years they spend as classroom teachers. It takes around five years, I believe, to acquire that organizational understanding and thoughtfulness about teaching in schools to grasp the full meaning of that lesson.

So, I suggest to those who wish to teach beyond a couple of years, “Never ask for permission to do something for your students, just ask for forgiveness afterwards.” That is the wisdom, seasoned by experience, in organizational dynamics that I learned as a young teacher.

The one constant that I have observed in my professional life is that people underestimate the need to move fast.

Of course, doing good work takes time. I once spent six months writing a URL parser. But the fact that it took so long is not a feature, it is not a positive, it is a negative.

If everything is slow-moving around you, it is likely not going to be good. To fully make use of your brain, you need to move as close as possible to the speed of your thought.

If I give you two PhD students, one who completed their thesis in two years and one who took eight years… you can be almost certain that the two-year thesis will be much better.

Moving fast does not mean that you complete your projects quickly. Projects have many parts, and getting everything right may take a long time.

Nevertheless, you should move as fast as you can.

For multiple reasons:

1. A common mistake is to spend a lot of time—too much time—on a component of your project that does not matter. I once spent a lot of time building a podcast-like version of a course… only to find out later that students had no interest in the podcast format.

2. You learn by making mistakes. The faster you make mistakes, the faster you learn.

3. Your work degrades, becomes less relevant with time. And if you work slowly, you will be more likely to stick with your slightly obsolete work. You know that professor who spent seven years preparing lecture notes twenty years ago? He is not going to throw them away and start again, as that would be a new seven-year project. So he will keep teaching using aging lecture notes until he retires and someone finally updates the course.

What if you are doing open-heart surgery? Don’t you want someone who spends days preparing and who works slowly? No. You almost surely want the surgeon who does many, many open-heart surgeries. They are very likely to be the best one.

Now stop being so slow. Move!

A sprawling academic cheating network turbocharged by Google Ads that has generated nearly $25 million in revenue has curious ties to a Kremlin-connected oligarch whose Russian university builds drones for Russia’s war against Ukraine.

The link between essay mills and Russian attack drones might seem improbable, but understanding it begins with a simple question: How does a human-intensive academic cheating service stay relevant in an era when students can simply ask AI to write their term papers? The answer – recasting the business as an AI company – is just the latest chapter in a story of many rebrands that link the operation to Russia’s largest private university.

Search in Google for any terms related to academic cheating services — e.g., “help with exam online” or “term paper online” — and you’re likely to encounter websites with the words “nerd” or “geek” in them, such as thenerdify[.]com and geekly-hub[.]com. With a simple request sent via text message, you can hire their tutors to help with any assignment.

These nerdy and geeky-branded websites frequently cite their “honor code,” which emphasizes they do not condone academic cheating, will not write your term papers for you, and will only offer support and advice for customers. But according to This Isn’t Fine, a Substack blog about contract cheating and essay mills, the Nerdify brand of websites will happily ignore that mantra.

“We tested the quick SMS for a price quote,” wrote This Isn’t Fine author Joseph Thibault. “The honor code references and platitudes apparently stop at the website. Within three minutes, we confirmed that a full three-page, plagiarism- and AI-free MLA formatted Argumentative essay could be ours for the low price of $141.”

Google prohibits ads that “enable dishonest behavior.” Yet, a sprawling global essay and homework cheating network run under the Nerdy brands has quietly bought its way to the top of Google searches – booking revenues of almost $25 million through a maze of companies in Cyprus, Malta and Hong Kong, while pitching “tutoring” that delivers finished work that students can turn in.

When one Nerdy-related Google Ads account got shut down, the group behind the company would form a new entity with a front-person (typically a young Ukrainian woman), start a new ads account along with a new website and domain name (usually with “nerdy” in the brand), and resume running Google ads for the same set of keywords.

UK companies belonging to the group that have been shut down by Google Ads since Jan 2025 include:

–Proglobal Solutions LTD (advertised nerdifyit[.]com);
–AW Tech Limited (advertised thenerdify[.]com);
–Geekly Solutions Ltd (advertised geekly-hub[.]com).

Currently active Google Ads accounts for the Nerdify brands include:

-OK Marketing LTD (advertising geekly-hub[.]net⁩), formed in the name of the Ukrainian national Alexander (Oleksandr) Korsukov;
–Two Sigma Solutions LTD (advertising litero[.]ai), formed in the name of Olekszij Pokatilo.

Messrs. Korsukov and Pokatilo have been in the essay-writing business since at least 2009, operating a paper-mill enterprise called Livingston Research. According to a lengthy account from a former employee, Livingston Research mainly farmed its writing tasks out to low-cost workers from Kenya, Philippines, Pakistan, Russia and Ukraine.

In 2011, the two men set up a Cyprus corporation called VLS Research Ltd, which would later change its name to CLS Research Ltd. Pokatilo moved from Ukraine to the United Kingdom in Sept. 2015 and co-founded a company called Awesome Technologies, which pitched itself as a way for people to outsource tasks by sending a text message to the service’s assistants.

The other co-founder of Awesome Technologies is 36-year-old Filip Perkon, a Swedish man living in London who touts himself as a serial entrepreneur and investor. Years before starting Awesome together, Perkon and Pokatilo co-founded a student group called Russian Business Week while the two were classmates at the London School of Economics. According to the Bulgarian investigative journalist Christo Grozev, Perkon’s birth certificate was issued by the Soviet Embassy in Sweden.

Around the time Perkon and Pokatilo launched Awesome Technologies, Perkon was building a social media propaganda tool called the Russian Diplomatic Online Club, which Perkon said would “turbo-charge” Russian messaging online. The club’s newsletter urged subscribers to install in their Twitter accounts a third-party app called Tweetsquad that would retweet Kremlin messaging on the social media platform.

Perkon was praised by the Russian Embassy in London for his efforts: During the contentious Brexit vote that ultimately led to the United Kingdom leaving the European Union, the Russian embassy in London used this spam tweeting tool to auto-retweet the Russian ambassador’s posts from supporters’ accounts.

Neither Mr. Perkon nor Mr. Pokatilo replied to requests for comment.

A review of corporations tied to Mr. Perkon as indexed by the business research service North Data finds he holds or held director positions in several U.K. subsidiaries of Synergy, Russia’s largest private education provider. Synergy has more than 35,000 students, and sells T-shirts with patriotic slogans such as “Crimea is Ours,” and The Russian Empire — Reloaded.”

The president of Synergy is Vadim Lobov, a Kremlin insider whose headquarters on the outskirts of Moscow reportedly features a wall-sized portrait of Russian President Vladimir Putin in the pop-art style of Andy Warhol. For a number of years, Lobov and Perkon co-produced a cross-cultural event in the U.K. called Russian Film Week.

Mr. Lobov was one of 11 individuals reportedly hand-picked by the convicted Russian spy Marina Butina to attend the 2017 National Prayer Breakfast held in Washington D.C. just two weeks after President Trump’s first inauguration.

While Synergy University promotes itself as Russia’s largest private educational institution, hundreds of international students tell a different story. Online reviews from students paint a picture of unkept promises: Prospective students from Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, and other nations paying thousands in advance fees for promised study visas to Russia, only to have their applications denied with no refunds offered.

“My experience with Synergy University has been nothing short of heartbreaking,” reads one such account. “When I first discovered the school, their representative was extremely responsive and eager to assist. He communicated frequently and made me believe I was in safe hands. However, after paying my hard-earned tuition fees, my visa was denied. It’s been over 9 months since that denial, and despite their promises, I have received no refund whatsoever. My messages are now ignored, and the same representative who once replied instantly no longer responds at all. Synergy University, how can an institution in Europe feel comfortable exploiting the hopes of Africans who trust you with their life savings? This is not just unethical — it’s predatory.”

This pattern repeats across reviews by multilingual students from Pakistan, Nepal, India, and various African nations — all describing the same scheme: Attractive online marketing, promises of easy visa approval, upfront payment requirements, and then silence after visa denials.

Reddit discussions in r/Moscow and r/AskARussian are filled with warnings. “It’s a scam, a diploma mill,” writes one user. “They literally sell exams. There was an investigation on Rossiya-1 television showing students paying to pass tests.”

The Nerdify website’s “About Us” page says the company was co-founded by Pokatilo and an American named Brian Mellor. The latter identity seems to have been fabricated, or at least there is no evidence that a person with this name ever worked at Nerdify.

Rather, it appears that the SMS assistance company co-founded by Messrs. Pokatilo and Perkon (Awesome Technologies) fizzled out shortly after its creation, and that Nerdify soon adopted the process of accepting assignment requests via text message and routing them to freelance writers.

A closer look at an early “About Us” page for Nerdify in The Wayback Machine suggests that Mr. Perkon was the real co-founder of the company: The photo at the top of the page shows four people wearing Nerdify T-shirts seated around a table on a rooftop deck in San Francisco, and the man facing the camera is Perkon.

Where are they now? Pokatilo is currently running a startup called Litero.Ai, which appears to be an AI-based essay writing service. In July 2025, Mr. Pokatilo received pre-seed funding of $800,000 for Litero from an investment program backed by the venture capital firms AltaIR Capital, Yellow Rocks, Smart Partnership Capital, and I2BF Global Ventures.

Meanwhile, Filip Perkon is busy setting up toy rubber duck stores in Miami and in at least three locations in the United Kingdom. These “Duck World” shops market themselves as “the world’s largest duck store.”

This past week, Mr. Lobov was in India with Putin’s entourage on a charm tour with India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Although Synergy is billed as an educational institution, a review of the company’s sprawling corporate footprint (via DNS) shows it also is assisting the Russian government in its war against Ukraine.

The website bpla.synergy[.]bot, for instance, says the company is involved in developing combat drones to aid Russian forces and to evade international sanctions on the supply and re-export of high-tech products.

KrebsOnSecurity would like to thank the anonymous researcher NatInfoSec for their assistance in this investigation.

It’s absolutely vital to be able to communicate effectively and efficiently to large groups of people. I’ve been lucky enough to get to refine and test my skills in communicating at scale for a few decades now, and the power of talking to communities is the one area where I’d most like to pass on what I’ve learned, because it’s this set of skills that can have the biggest effect on deciding whether good ideas and good work can have their greatest impact.

My own work crosses many disparate areas. Over the years, I’ve gotten to cycle between domains as distinct as building technology platforms and products for developers and creators, enabling activism and policy advocacy in service of humanist ideals, and more visible external-facing work such as public speaking or writing in various venues like magazines or on this site. (And then sometimes I dabble in my other hobbies and fun stuff like scholarship or research into areas like pop culture and media.)

What’s amazing is, in every single one of these wildly different areas, the exact same demands apply when trying to communicate to broad groups of people. This is true despite the broadly divergent cultural norms across all of these different disciplines. It can be a profoundly challenging, even intimidating, job to make sure a message is being communicated accurately, and in high fidelity, to everyone that you need to reach.

That vital task of communicating to a large group gets even more daunting when you inevitably realize that, even if you were to find the perfect wording or phrasing for your message, you’d still never be able to deliver your story to every single person in your target audience by yourself anyway. There will always be another person whom you’re trying to reach that you just haven’t found yet. So, is it hopeless? Is it simply impossible to effectively tell a story at scale if you don’t have massive resources?

It doesn’t have to be. We can start with one key insight about what it takes to get your most important stories out into the world. It’s a perspective that seems incredibly simple at first, but can lead to a pretty profound set of insights.

They have to be able to talk about us without us.

They have to be able to talk about us without us. What this phrase means, in its simplest form, is that you have to tell a story so clear, so concise, so memorable and evocative that people can repeat it for you even after you’ve left the room. And the people who hear it need to be able to do this the first time they hear the story. Whether it’s the idea behind a new product, the core promise of a political campaign, or the basic takeaway from a persuasive essay (guess what the point of this one is!) — not only do you have to explain your idea and make your case, you have to be teaching your listener how to do the same thing for themselves.

This is a tall order, to be sure. In pop music, the equivalent is writing a hit where people feel like they can sing along to the chorus by the time they get to the end of the song for the first time. Not everybody has it in them to write a hook that good, but if you do, that thing is going to become a classic. And when someone else has done it, you know it because it gets stuck in your head. Sometimes you end up humming it to yourself even if you didn’t want to. Your best ideas — your most vital ideas — need to rest on a messaging platform that solid.

Delivering this kind of story actually requires substance. If you’re trying to fake it, or to force a narrative out of fluff or fakery, that will very immediately become obvious. When you set out to craft a story that travels in your absence, it has to have a body if it’s going to have legs. Bullshit is slippery and smells terrible, and the first thing people want to do when you leave the room is run away from it, not carry it with them.

The mission is the message

There’s another challenge to making a story that can travel in your absence: your ego has to let that happen. If you make a story that is effective and compelling enough that others can tell it, then, well…. those other people are going to tell it. Not you. They’ll do it in their own words, and in their own voices, and make it theirs. They may use a similar story, but in their own phrasing, so it will resonate better with their people. This is a gift! They are doing you a kindness, and extending you great generosity. Respond with gratitude, and be wary of anyone who balks at not getting to be the voice or the face of a message themselves. Everyone gets a turn telling the story.

Maybe the simple fact that others will be hearing a good story for the first time will draw them to it, regardless of who the messenger is. Sometimes people get attached to the idea that they have to be the one to deliver the one true message. But a core precept of “talk about us without us” is that there’s a larger mission and goal that everyone is bought into, and this demands that everyone stay aligned to their values rather than to their own personal ambitions around who tells the story.

The truth of whomever will be most effective is the factor used to decide who will be the person to tell the story in any context. And this is a forgiving environment, because even if someone doesn’t get to be the voice one day, they’ll get another shot, since repetition and consistency are also key parts of this strategy, thanks to the disciplined approach that it brings to communication.

The joy of communications discipline

At nearly every organization where I’ve been in charge of onboarding team members in the last decade or so, one of the first messages we’ve presented to our new colleagues is, “We are disciplined communicators!” It’s a message that they hopefully get to hear as a joyous declaration, and as an assertion of our shared values. I always try to explicitly instill this value into teams I work with because, first, it’s good to communicate values explicitly, but also because this is a concept that is very seldom directly stated.

It is ironic that this statement usually goes unsaid, because nearly everyone who pays attention to culture understands the vital importance of disciplined communications. Brands that are strictly consistent in their use of things like logos, type, colors, and imagery get such wildly-outsized cultural impact in exchange for relatively modest investment that it’s mind-boggling to me that more organizations don’t insist on following suit. Similarly, institutions that develop and strictly enforce a standard tone of voice and way of communicating (even if the tone itself is playful or casual) capture an incredibly valuable opportunity at minimal additional cost relative to how much everyone’s already spending on internal and external communications.

In an era where every channel is being flooded with AI-generated slop, and when most of the slop tools are woefully incapable of being consistent about anything, simply showing up with an obviously-human, obviously-consistent story is a phenomenal way of standing out. That discipline demonstrates all the best of humanity: a shared ethos, discerning taste, joyful expression, a sense of belonging, an appealing consistency. And best of all, it represents the chance to participate for yourself — because it’s a message that you now know how to repeat for yourself.

Providing messages that individuals can pick up and run with on their own is a profoundly human-centric and empowering thing to do in a moment of rising authoritarianism. When the fascists in power are shutting down prominent voices for leveling critiques that they would like to censor, and demanding control over an increasingly broad number of channels, there’s reassurance in people being empowered to tell their own stories together. Seeing stories bubble up from the grassroots in collaboration, rather than being forced down upon people from authoritarians at the top, has an emotional resonance that only strengthens the substance of whatever story you’re telling.

How to do it

Okay, so it sounds great: Let’s tell stories that other people want to share! Now, uh… how do we do it? There are simple principles we can follow that help shape a message or story into one that is likely to be carried forward by a community on its own.

• Ground it in your values. When we began telling the story of my last company Glitch, the conventional wisdom was that we were building a developer tool, so people would describe it as an “IDE” — an “integrated development environment”, which is the normal developer jargon for the tool coders use to write their code in. We never described Glitch that way. From day one, we always said “Glitch is the friendly community where you'll build the app of your dreams” (later, “the friendly community where everybody builds the internet”). By talking about the site as a friendly community instead of an integrated development environment, it was crystal clear what expectations and norms we were setting, and what our values were. Within a few months, even our competitors were describing Glitch as a “friendly community” while they were trying to talk about how they were better than us about some feature or the other. That still feels like a huge victory — even the competition was talking about us without us! Make sure your message evokes the values you want people to share with each other, either directly or indirectly.
• Start with the principle. This is a topic I’ve covered before, but you can't win unless you know what you're fighting for. Identify concrete, specific, perhaps even measurable goals that are tied directly to the values that motivate your efforts. As noted recently, Zohran Mamdani did this masterfully when running for mayor of New York City. While the values were affordability and the dignity of ordinary New Yorkers, the clear, understandable, measurable principle could be something as simple as “free buses”. This is a goal that everyone can get in 5 seconds, and can explain to their neighbor the first time they hear it. It’s a story that travels effortlessly on its own — and that people will be able to verify very easily when it’s been delivered. That’s a perfect encapsulation of “talk about us without us”.
• Know what makes you unique. Another way of putting this is to simply make sure that you have a sense of self-awareness. But the story you tell about your work or your movement has to be specific. There can’t be platitudes or generalities or vague assertions as a core part of the message, or it will never take off. One of the most common failure states for this mistake is when people lean on slogans. Slogans can have their use in a campaign, for reminding people about the existence of a brand, or supporting broader messaging. But very often, people think a slogan is a story. The problem is that, while slogans are definitely repeatable, slogans are almost definitionally too vague and broad to offer a specific and unique narrative that will resonate. There’s no point in having people share something if it doesn’t say something. I usually articulate the challenge here like this: Only say what only you can say.
• Be evocative, not comprehensive. Many times, when people are passionate about a topic or a movement, the temptation they have in telling the story is to work in every little detail about the subject. They often think, “if I include every detail, it will persuade more people, because they’ll know that I’m an expert, or it will convince them that I’ve thought of everything!” In reality, when people are not subject matter experts on a topic, or if they’re not already intrinsically interested in that topic, hearing a bunch of extensive minutia about it will almost always leave them feeling bored, confused, intimidated, condescended-to, or some combination of all of these. Instead, pick a small subset of the most emotionally gripping parts of your story, the aspects that have the deepest human connection or greatest relevance and specificity to the broadest set of your audience, and focus on telling those parts of the story as passionately as possible. If you succeed in communicating that initial small subset of your story effectively, then you may earn the chance to tell the other more complex and nuanced details of your story.
• Your enemies are your friends. Very often, when people are creating messages about advocacy, they’re focused on competition or rivals. In the political realm, this can be literal opposing candidates, or the abstraction of another political party. In the corporate world, this can be (real or imagined) competitive products or companies. In many cases, these other organizations or products or competitors occupy so much more mental space in your mind, or your team’s mind, than they do in the mind of your potential audience. Some of your audience has never heard of them at all. And a huge part of your audience thinks of you and your biggest rival as… basically the same thing. In a business or commercial context, customers can barely keep straight the difference between you and your competition — you’re both just part of the same amorphous blob that exists as “the things that occupy that space”. Your competitor may be the only other organization in the world that’s fighting just as hard as you are to create a market for the product that you’re selling. The same is true in the political space; sometimes the biggest friction arises over the narcissism of small differences. What we can take away from these perspectives is that our stories have to focus on what distinguishes us, yes, but also on what we might have in common with those whom we might otherwise have perceived to have been aligned with the “enemy”. Those folks might not have sworn allegiance to an opposing force; they may simply have chosen another option out of convenience, and not even seen that choice as being in opposition to your story at all.
• Find joy in repetition. Done correctly, a disciplined, collaborative, evocative message can become a mantra for a community. There’s a pride and enthusiasm that can come from people becoming proficient in sharing their own version of the collective story. And that means enjoying when that refrain comes back around, or when a slight improvement in the core message is discovered, and everyone finds a way to refine the way they’re communicating about the narrative. A lot of times, people worry that their team will get bored if they’re “just telling the same story over and over all the time”. In reality, as a brilliant man once said, there’s joy in repetition.
• Don’t obsess over exact wording. This one is tricky; you might say, “but you said we have to be disciplined communicators!” And it’s true: it’s important to be disciplined. But that doesn’t mean you can’t leave room for people to put their own spin on things. Let them translate to their own languages or communities. Let them augment a general principle with a specific, personal connection. If they have their own authentic experience which will amplify a story or drive a point home, let them weave that context into the consistent narrative that’s been shared over time. As long as you’re not enabling a “telephone game” where the story starts to morph into an unrecognizable form, it’s perfectly okay to add a human touch by going slightly off script.

Share the story

Few things are more rewarding than when you find a meaningful narrative that resonates with the world. Stories have the power to change things, to make people feel empowered, to galvanize entire communities into taking action and recognizing their own power. There’s also a quiet reward in the craft and creativity of working on a story that travels, in finding notes that resonate with others, and in challenging yourself to get far enough out of your own head to get into someone else’s heart.

I still have so much to learn about being able to tell stories effectively. I still screw it up so much of the time, and I can look back on many times when I wish I had better words at hand for moments that sorely needed them. But many of the most meaningful and rewarding moments of my life have been when I’ve gotten to be in community with others, as we were not just sharing stories together, but telling a united story together. It unlocks a special kind of creativity that’s a lot bigger than what any one of us can do alone.

The Land of Giants, a conceptual proposal to build power line towers so that they look like people.

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