Transmission / ψ-01
another world
I'm in a taxi, winding up the hills of São Paulo.
I've got a bag, a vague plan, and the beginning of a new life waiting for me somewhere around the next bend.
The driver's talking in Portuguese. I'm half-understanding, half-absorbing everything outside the window…
The tropical vegetation spilling over walls. The graffiti layered on graffiti. The particular way the afternoon light hits these streets that look nothing like any street I've ever lived on. The air is different. Everything is signaling that I've crossed into somewhere else entirely.
And then, on the radio, "Englishman in New York." That song hits different when you're actually the foreigner in the back of the cab. "I'm an alien".
I am an alien.
I've stepped into another world.
What I couldn't have known was how deep that world went. Over the coming weeks and months, São Paulo would crack open layer by layer. The neighborhoods, each one its own universe. The food, the language, the rhythms of how people moved through their days. And then the music took me somewhere else.
I found Cartola in a record shop.
Born in the hills of Mangueira in Rio, he didn't write songs so much as he gave shape to an entire culture. Mangueira with its green and pink, verde e rosa, its samba school, its people, its lore. When you listen to "O Mundo é um Moinho," you're stepping into a man's philosophy of life, a community's identity, decades of history layered into a few minutes of music. Cartola built a world.
And then there was Caetano Veloso, Tim Maia, Gal Costa, Milton, Hermeto Pascoal, and countless more.
Each record I found became a door. And behind every door was another room, and in every room I felt like an alien in a new world, not as an invader but as a guest with a Brahma in hand and the warmth of a welcoming people.
That feeling, of stepping into something so layered that it becomes part of you, that's what I want to talk about. Because it's a principle. And it's one we can learn from, study, and apply to the creative work we make.
Whether you're building a brand, shaping a body of creative work, crafting a community, or trying to make sense of your own story, the principles of world building give you depth that lasts.
World building is a human craft with ancient roots.
Storytelling has been with us as long as we've been us. World building is an evolution of that instinct, formalized over the last century through sci-fi, fantasy, and genre fiction, but drawing on something much older. It's the discipline of creating spaces people inhabit.
We need to redefine what a "world" actually is.
A world is any creative space with enough coherence, lore, and texture that people can step into it and feel something real. An artist's body of work is a world. A cultural movement is a world. Your own life, your story, your perspective, your accumulated experiences, is a world. Once you see it that way, the possibilities open up.
World building principles can be applied to any creative space.
The same thinking that makes a fictional universe feel alive and real can be used to shape a brand, an artistic practice, a platform, a life. And when you do it with intention, you create something that earns a lasting place in people's lives.
And here's what sits underneath all three of those points: the worlds worth building are the ones that bring real value to people.
Not value in the way that word gets used in pitch decks and ad campaigns. Not engagement metrics or time-on-screen. We're talking about worlds that actually enrich how people live, how they connect with each other, how they understand themselves. The kind of value you felt the first time a piece of music or a place or a story cracked open a new world.
We live in an era where most technology is optimized to extract. Your attention, your data, your time. Most content is built to hold you in place, not to send you somewhere real. What we're proposing is the opposite: creative work with enough depth and intention that it pulls people out of passive consumption. Not escape. Not distraction. Connection.
That's the new bar for creating another world.
conor garrity / founder, unk
*This is the first in a series. In the next article, we'll break down the layers of a well-built world, the structural elements that give a world its depth, its internal logic, and its ability to grow. Those layers will be the foundation for everything that follows.
