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Something Happened by Us: A Demonology
3
Christians who talk about demonic activity tend to make a distinction between possession and oppression. Those possessed by demons — or, to use the language I here prefer, those who have been absorbed into the demonic realm — lack volition. They feature in a behaviorist puppet show. The more fortunate, though perhaps also the more miserable, are the merely oppressed: The demonic acts on them from without, they feel its force but are capable of resisting it; or perhaps only of desiring to resist it. “For what I am doing, I do not understand,” writes Paul to the church at Rome; “for what I will to do, that I do not practice; but what I hate, that I do.” Faced with an intractable dividedness, a spiritual gridlock, he can only cry out — this is one of the screams that a scream can elicit — “O wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?”
9/1/2022, 12:55 PM
In a 1976 lecture, Michel Foucault said that it is a mistake to study power by looking at what we think of as the center — a national capital, say — or at those who stand at the top of the pyramid. Rather, “we should make an ascending analysis of power, or in other words begin with its infinitesimal mechanisms” — the tiny ways that power manifests itself in everyday relations — “which have their own history, their own trajectory, their own techniques and tactics, and then look at how these mechanisms of power, which have their solidity and, in a sense, their own technology, have been and are invested, colonized, used, inflected, transformed, displaced, extended, and so on by increasingly general mechanisms and forms of overall domination.” Power replicates at something like a cellular level rather than being exercised by leaders.
9/1/2022, 12:55 PM
A friend once wrote to me about a mutual acquaintance, “He’s deeply driven, but it’s not entirely clear to me that he is in charge of the forces that drive him — at times they seem a bit, in the proper sense, demonic, not demons exactly but extra-personal agential forces that grip him and compel him to act in ways he later not so much regrets as doesn’t recognize as ‘his actions.’”
9/1/2022, 12:55 PM
A Website Is a Sanctuary
9
I will keep some random stranger on the internet a little warmer because they will know they are not alone.” I’m also inspired by h0p3, a person who writes on the website philosopher.life. They have a personal axiom that resonates with me: "find the others." And this is literally connected to fireflies: when fireflies shine their light, they are looking for other fireflies in the vast darkness.
9/1/2022, 10:15 AM
I return to my original motivation in creating the Firefly Sanctuary: I appreciate whenever someone resists the forces at large and contributes to the web in their own way. This often enables a new way of looking at the world for others. It might encourage connection to realize, “I’m not the only one.”
9/1/2022, 10:15 AM
I've had a dream to have some kind of ambient notification in both the physical and digital spaces to allow for more cross-pollination of presence. For example, maybe a light shows up in the corner of the apartment to indicate that someone is on the website, or a light in the corner of the website to indicate that someone is physically in the apartment.
9/1/2022, 10:15 AM
I’m also reminded of house numerology, where if you add up the digits in your address, and then come to a number, the number means something. My address adds up to 9, which means “a warm and nurturing home where everyone feels welcome.” That feels true to the sanctuary.
9/1/2022, 10:15 AM
Things don’t find their places automatically. You have to live somewhere to know how to design it
9/1/2022, 10:15 AM
The word that most comes to mind is world-building. Like you have your own little Marvel Cinematic Universe, but the audience is way, way smaller. And the objects in your apartment become characters in that universe.
9/1/2022, 10:15 AM
A website allows a quietness and separateness that are key to the sanctuary. I also have a live feed looking out my window, which could only have worked on the website.
9/1/2022, 10:15 AM
I like to pay attention to language of everything technological. We use the word “ping” to mean some kind of incoming notification from a friend or app. But I’ve been thinking about what it means to get a “ping from the universe,” and how that's a helpful metaphor for the whisper of intuition. Having that name is really helpful. Because when I get a good idea, I think to myself, “Oh, I know what that is. That's a ping from the universe.” And I can note it down.
9/1/2022, 10:15 AM
Last year, I wanted to make more personal work. I thought, well, if I'm already putting so much energy into my apartment, why not share it? My friend Becca said the website is a way to “honor this space as a being.”
9/1/2022, 10:15 AM
Here's to the Fools Who Dream
3
The less beaten path is often less beaten for a reason. But if it feels right to take it – pushing aside the debris and brush and walk the trail because something, a bird or perhaps a ray of light, caught your eye – then take it.
9/1/2022, 10:15 AM
Who will teach me to write? a reader wanted to know.
The page, the page, that eternal blankness, the blankness of eternity which you cover slowly, affirming time’s scrawl as a right and your daring as necessity; the page, which you cover woodenly, ruining it, but asserting your freedom and power to act, acknowledging that you ruin everything you touch but touching it nevertheless, because acting is better than being here in mere opacity; the page, which you cover slowly with the crabbed thread of your gut; the page in the purity of its possibilities; the page of your death, against which you pit such flawed excellences as you can muster with all your life’s strength: that page will teach you to write.
9/1/2022, 10:15 AM
Later on, I would find that this floundering was sense-making hard at work. Researching to figure out what you are researching… is still research. There is a certain amount of looking around and orienting yourself you need to do before you know what direction to head
9/1/2022, 10:15 AM
What Is the Metaverse?
2
The web isn’t how systems are typically architected. So we can’t take it for granted that we’ll end up with a small-m metaverse – a distributed network of interconnected metaverses, sharing identity and an economy but otherwise independently immersive. If that’s what we want, we’ll have to work for it.
8/30/2022, 8:24 PM
But “immersion” doesn’t have to mean entering cyberspace. You can get lo-fi immersion if these qualities get across:
a persistent world – this exists even when you aren’t there.
place – a sense that I am somewhere other than the chair I’m sitting in right now.
shared objects – everyone here is seeing and interacting with the same things.
8/30/2022, 8:24 PM
Social Attention: A Modest Prototype in Shared Presence
3
There’s no reason that Social Attention shouldn’t a one-liner to add to any website, or part of the browser itself. Maybe it should be part of a suite of social tools to make the web a well-lit, neighbourly place – with, naturally, good privacy-preserving fences.
8/30/2022, 8:24 PM
What I’d like more of is a social web that sits between these two extremes, something with a small town feel. So you can see people are around, and you can give directions and a friendly nod, but there’s no need to stop and chat, and it’s not in your face. It’s what I’ve talked about before as social peripheral vision (that post is about why it should be build into the OS).
8/30/2022, 8:24 PM
And yes, I know that Medium and Amazon Kindle share text highlights, but that happens only once it has been highlighted – I want something that lets you see life on the other side of the screen. Especially because it becomes suddenly more useful when you’re coordinating with someone else in a different channel. And, yes, of course there are more fully transparent systems like live cursors or annotations… but this is a blog and not a chatroom. I want the patina of fingerprints, the quiet and comfortable background hum of a library.
8/30/2022, 8:24 PM
Multiplayer Docs, Webcam Fashion, Noisy Icons: Three Ideas
1
The icons on my home screen should appear “noisy” somehow if they’re currently full of my friends. Getting notifications only when I’m direct-mentioned is such a crude mechanism: I want to know where the action is!
8/30/2022, 8:24 PM
Tell It Slant by Camille T. Dungy
4
To attend to the world carefully is to attend to the world more slowly, more painstakingly, and without waste. Atwood’s little poem, like the others I’ve shared, changes the way we come to understand the world. That’s one of the most important things a poem can do.
8/30/2022, 8:24 PM
We think we have an idea of where we are going. We had no idea where we were going.
8/30/2022, 8:24 PM
Create a pattern, reward that pattern, and disrupt that pattern—but rather than leaving the poem in that state of disruption, return to the pattern.
8/30/2022, 8:24 PM
Like the best speculative fiction, good poems weird the truth, rearrange it, re-present it, cause us to re-envision the past, to rememory (to borrow Toni Morrison’s word) our own history. How do they do this? For one thing, they subvert our expectations and also reward them. These poems give us what we want, but they also give us what we don’t yet know we need. The transition from one to the next can be uncomfortable because it is simultaneously obvious and surprising.
8/30/2022, 8:24 PM
Innerring - CS Lewis Society of California
10
The quest of the Inner Ring will break your hearts unless you break it. But if you break it, a surprising result will follow. If in your working hours you make the work your end, you will presently find yourself all unawares inside the only circle in your profession that really matters. You will be one of the sound craftsmen, and other sound craftsmen will know it. This group of craftsmen will by no means coincide with the Inner Ring or the Important People or the People in the Know. It will not shape that professional policy or work up that professional influence which fights for the profession as a whole against the public: nor will it lead to those periodic scandals and crises which the Inner Ring produces. But it will do those things which that profession exists to do and will in the long run be responsible for all the respect which that profession in fact enjoys and which the speeches and advertisements cannot maintain.
8/23/2022, 9:30 AM
But your genuine Inner Ring exists for exclusion. There’d be no fun if there were no outsiders. The invisible line would have no meaning unless most people were on the wrong side of it. Exclusion is no accident; it is the essence.
8/23/2022, 9:30 AM
Once the first novelty is worn off, the members of this circle will be no more interesting than your old friends. Why should they be? You were not looking for virtue or kindness or loyalty or humour or learning or wit or any of the things that can really be enjoyed. You merely wanted to be “in.” And that is a pleasure that cannot last. As soon as your new associates have been staled to you by custom, you will be looking for another Ring. The rainbow’s end will still be ahead of you. The old ring will now be only the drab background for your endeavor to enter the new one.
8/23/2022, 9:30 AM
If you want to be made free of a certain circle for some wholesome reason—if, say, you want to join a musical society because you really like music—then there is a possibility of satisfaction. You may find yourself playing in a quartet and you may enjoy it. But if all you want is to be in the know, your pleasure will be short lived. The circle cannot have from within the charm it had from outside. By the very act of admitting you it has lost its magic.
8/23/2022, 9:30 AM
The desire to be inside the invisible line illustrates this rule. As long as you are governed by that desire you will never get what you want. You are trying to peel an onion: if you succeed there will be nothing left. Until you conquer the fear of being an outsider, an outsider you will remain.
8/23/2022, 9:30 AM
And you will be drawn in, if you are drawn in, not by desire for gain or ease, but simply because at that moment, when the cup was so near your lips, you cannot bear to be thrust back again into the cold outer world. It would be so terrible to see the other man’s face—that genial, confidential, delightfully sophisticated face—turn suddenly cold and contemptuous, to know that you had been tried for the Inner Ring and rejected. And then, if you are drawn in, next week it will be something a little further from the rules, and next year something further still, but all in the jolliest, friendliest spirit. It may end in a crash, a scandal, and penal servitude; it may end in millions, a peerage and giving the prizes at your old school. But you will be a scoundrel.
8/23/2022, 9:30 AM
I must not assume that you have ever first neglected, and finally shaken off, friends whom you really loved and who might have lasted you a lifetime, in order to court the friendship of those who appeared to you more important, more esoteric. I must not ask whether you have derived actual pleasure from the loneliness and humiliation of the outsiders after you, yourself were in: whether you have talked to fellow members of the Ring in the presence of outsiders simply in order that the outsiders might envy; whether the means whereby, in your days of probation, you propitiated the Inner Ring, were always wholly admirable. I will ask only one question—and it is, of course, a rhetorical question which expects no answer. IN the whole of your life as you now remember it, has the desire to be on the right side of that invisible line ever prompted you to any act or word on which, in the cold small hours of a wakeful night, you can look back with satisfaction? If so, your case is more fortunate than most.
8/23/2022, 9:30 AM
Poor man—it is not large, lighted rooms, or champagne, or even scandals about peers and Cabinet Ministers that he wants: it is the sacred little attic or studio, the heads bent together, the fog of tobacco smoke, and the delicious knowledge that we—we four or five all huddled beside this stove—are the people who know.
8/23/2022, 9:30 AM
you will find the Rings—what Tolstoy calls the second or unwritten systems.
8/23/2022, 9:30 AM
There are no formal admissions or expulsions. People think they are in it after they have in fact been pushed out of it, or before they have been allowed in: this provides great amusement for those who are really inside. It has no fixed name. The only certain rule is that the insiders and outsiders call it by different names. From inside it may be designated, in simple cases, by mere enumeration: it may be called “You and Tony and me.” When it is very secure and comparatively stable in membership it calls itself “we.” When it has to be expanded to meet a particular emergency it calls itself “all the sensible people at this place.” From outside, if you have dispaired of getting into it, you call it “That gang” or “they” or “So-and-so and his set” or “The Caucus” or “The Inner Ring.” If you are a candidate for admission you probably don’t call it anything. To discuss it with the other outsiders would make you feel outside yourself. And to mention talking to the man who is inside, and who may help you if this present conversation goes well, would be madness.
8/23/2022, 9:30 AM
The Internet Would Like You to Fill Out This Form
7
People will give you
their opinions for free. And the engine to transmute opinions into data is the
web form, so the people building your web site of necessity reach for one of
those. And since computers can reproduce the same pages over and over, the
forms reproduce as well, millions and billions of times, and people learn that
they can fill them out and that their reviews themselves will be reviewed
(thumbs up, thumbs down), forms upon forms.
8/23/2022, 9:30 AM
What a weird human thing to do. Like hobos leaving chalk markings.
Nice lady lives here. Don’t buy this shampoo. Avoid this book if you want a
happy ending. Beware mean dog. Who are we helping when we fill out that
box? Mankind? Our peers? Our children? Are we just whiny babies seeking to
assert some fabricated dominance, or does reviewing a product online make us
part of some greater human fellowship, communicating our humanity to whatever
stranger may follow along the same path?
8/23/2022, 9:30 AM
And each review is a
testament to the human desire to be heard. In particular, to be heard at a
slightly louder volume than the branding and back-of-book promotional copy of a
given item. To register delight or disgust. So they fill out the form.
8/23/2022, 9:30 AM
Amazon without the reviews would be just a big store. With the
reviews it becomes a bizarre document of human opinion. There is a drama to
reviewing, and a prioritization. First, Amazon lets you choose a star rating.
You can select gold-colored stars, one to five, a completely arbitrary number
that happens to correspond to the fingers of the hand. By doing this and
choosing a star you have given that company an incomparable gift: You’ve
expressed an opinion, presumably as a rational consumer, and you’ve done it in
such a way that your thought can be converted to an integer.
8/23/2022, 9:30 AM
The more ease, the more likely it is that people will tweet their
thoughts, or submit their purchases (or tweet their purchases). There are
college programs in user experience, forums and conferences on making buttons
irresistibly clickable. Once you make one text box you can have a million
people fill it in (or a billion). Collectively we’ve made a web that is
hell-bent on making more of itself, on getting people to fill in the box. Every
tweet is its own little document, and every one could carry some advertising.
So making it incredibly easy to tweet is one of the major movers of Twitter.
8/23/2022, 9:30 AM
The forms must cry out to be filled. There are traditionally two
ways to enter text in a form: the <input> element, which is typically a
single line, good for capturing your name, your street address, and the like,
and the <textarea>, which is longer and multi-lined. The <textarea>
is where the action is, where most of our blog posts are composed, the recipient
of love letters and angry comments about the president.
8/23/2022, 9:30 AM
Forms are everywhere. They are the part of the web where the money
gets made, where the content becomes “user-generated.” Without forms the web is
merely a publishing medium—a set of linked-together pages created by interested
parties. With them, the web becomes the white-hot center of public discourse
and the world’s largest bazaar.
8/23/2022, 9:30 AM
Olia Lialina. A Vernacular Web. Indigenous and Barbarians.
2
Also new amateur pages don't appear at such amounts as ten years ago because the WWW of today is a developed and highly regulated space. You wouldn't get on the web just to tell the world, "Welcome to my home page." The web has diversified, the conditions have changed and there's no need for this sort of old fashioned behavior.
8/15/2022, 7:38 PM
To be blunt it was bright, rich, personal, slow and under construction. It was a web of sudden connections and personal links. Pages were built on the edge of tomorrow, full of hope for a faster connection and a more powerful computer. One could say it was the web of the indigenous...or the barbarians. In any case, it was a web of amateurs soon to be washed
away by dot.com ambitions, professional authoring tools and guidelines
designed by usability experts.
usability guidelines are good, but also can cause a standardization effect. how do we get both? personal but also an accessible and powerful foundation
8/15/2022, 7:38 PM
Olia Lialina. A Vernacular Web. Under Construction
2
New ways to show the project was constantly updated appeared as well: current news on the first page, a "Last Updated" notice, or the ridiculous -- but still very popular -- solution that creates a magical effect of actuality and telepresence: put a clock on the web site showing the current time.
8/15/2022, 7:38 PM
Ordinary people came with their tools and used the chance to build their own roads and junctions. Work was everywhere and everywhere there was something that wasn't ready, links were leading to nowhere or to pages that didn't quite exist and there were signs on the pages that warned of broken connections and the lack of navigation.
8/15/2022, 7:38 PM
Olia Lialina. A Vernacular Web. Free Colections of Web Elements
3
Free collections are the soul of the vernacular web. Lots of people were building their pages with free graphics and lots of people were making collections. The many-to-many principle really worked. Making your own site and building collections was a parallel process for a lot of people. The early web was more about spirit than skills. To distribute was no less important than to create.
8/15/2022, 7:38 PM
The same is true for so called "bullets", the small images used to replace the standard html list elements. It was a historical feature of the amateur web to prefer expression over structure. Early web makers were inspired by the possibility of using images and gladly substituted dull lists with spectacular graphics.
8/15/2022, 7:38 PM
For example "back" and "forward" buttons are part of the design set for non-professionals who ignored the corresponding buttons on the browser. Indeed, how could you delegate such an important navigational issue to the browser, an application that had a new version released every six months!
8/15/2022, 7:38 PM
Olia Lialina. A Vernacular Web. Links
3
In the end both cures delivered the same: a link to an address new to the user; an unknown topic, a surprise, an action, a deep web.
8/15/2022, 7:38 PM
Since the late 90's linking wasn't that hip any more. Search engines, portals and catalogues took over the linking responsibilities making searches faster and less surprising. In the quest for order and hierarchy the web changed completely. Sites with no external links at all became the norm and now constitute the facade of the mainstream web. Users jump back and forth between search engines.
Links -- the once typical means of conveyance -- have lost their infrastructural importance.
8/15/2022, 7:38 PM
On some pages links were gates to additional information, on others to unrelated information. The way you looked for information was time consuming but rewarding. By following the links you could find much more than you were looking for.
8/15/2022, 7:38 PM
Understanding Is Rare
2
In recent years I've gradually been overtaken by the idea that I can be most useful by being clear. This is the driving force behind many of my choices. For instance, I’ve always wanted to write in a colloquial voice—there’s something about making language unnecessarily obscure that feels wrong to me. And I’ve always disliked credentialism because it promotes the idea that certain people’s opinions should be valued because of their background, when opinions should only be valued if they’re good. And I’ve always valued reach because I’m obsessed with distribution. I guess what I want most is to be a good tool or vessel for the few things I do understand and believe in. Something about that feels both urgent and meaningful.
8/10/2022, 9:13 AM
Here's what I've come to see as the guiding light of my life: simple ideas, explained very clearly. You only really need, like, one or two compelling ideas that you deeply understand. And then you have to be able to make other people understand them, which is the hard part. You have to distill, and in a way distillation is harder than creation. Simplicity is only achieved after extensive labor because you have to understand something inside and out to be able to identify the most essential components.
8/10/2022, 9:13 AM
If You Have Writer's Block, Maybe You Should Stop Lying
1
Or, to put it another way, it should feel like work rather than labor. This criterion was proposed by art critic Dave Hickey, who, after writing about and working among many of the great visual artists of our time, said in an interview, of creative work, “I think that if you don’t like it and it’s not easy, you shouldn’t be doing it … I mean it’s work, but it’s not labor.”
8/10/2022, 9:13 AM
An Interview With Dave Hickey - Believer Magazine
5
With the artists, I don’t teach, I coach. I can’t tell them how to make art. I tell them to make more art. I tell them to get up early and stay up late. I tell them not to quit. I tell them if somebody else is already making their work. My job is to be current with the discourse and not be an asshole. That’s all I wanted in a professor.
8/10/2022, 9:13 AM
And I think that most artists and writers—most of the ones that I know—are o-kay. They like to go into their studios, they like to see their friends, they like to chase girls or boys or whatever they chase. They were OK when they were a nobody, and now they’re OK when they’re somebody.
8/10/2022, 9:13 AM
DH: Right, you were happy to be there, and if the art world today shrunk down to the size and scale of the jazz world, I would be happier now. Things would be freer and a lot less tedious.
SH: I suppose the schools have something to do with the change—the craziness that you have to get an MFA to be an artist.
DH: Thirty-five thousand MFAs a semester, 90 percent of whom never make another work of art.
8/10/2022, 9:13 AM
DH: Well, let me put it like this. I think that if you don’t like it and it’s not easy, you shouldn’t be doing it. You know what I mean?
SH: If it’s not easy you shouldn’t be doing it?
DH: I mean it’s work, but it’s not labor. You have professional obligations like any adult, but it’s fun to solve problems. It’s fun to sit there by yourself with no one telling you what to do. It’s fun to nuance things that no one will notice except in their lizard brains. I enjoy doing it, and it’s easy for me, but there are a lot of people out there who are working too hard at it.
8/10/2022, 9:13 AM
The problems arise when we try to domesticate the practice, to pretend that it’s a normal human activity and that “everybody’s creative.” They’re not. Honestly, I never sit down to write anything without thinking, This is a weird thing to be doing! Why am I sitting here writing? Why am I looking at the Ellsworth Kelly on my wall? I don’t know. It feels funny to do these things, but it feels funnier not to, so I write and look.
8/10/2022, 9:13 AM
The Psychology of Apple Packaging
1
‘The Apple Marketing Philosophy’…stressed three points: The first was empathy, an intimate connection with the feelings of the customer: “We will truly understand their needs better than any other company.” The second was focus: “In order to do a good job of those things that we decide to do, we must eliminate all of the unimportant opportunities.” The third and equally important principle, awkwardly named, was impute. It emphasized that people form an opinion about a company or product based on the signals that it conveys. “People DO judge a book by its cover,” he wrote. “We may have the best product, the highest quality, the most useful software etc.; if we present them in a slipshod manner, they will be perceived as slipshod; if we present them in a creative, professional manner, we will impute the desired qualities.”
8/7/2022, 7:33 AM
Visions
2
Plots animated by kindness: not saccharine or dull, but soaring and magnetic. Stories about kindness that draw potent chemicals into your blood just as surely as the thrillers do! That make your heart thrum, pull your cheeks tight. That tell you about the world, and what’s possible in it.
8/7/2022, 7:33 AM
I hate it, because of course it troubles every intuition I have about what it means to be an artist — the very idea of authorship! There’s something especially cynical about the specific execution here, too. I can easily imagine another version of this project that uses interesting track titles and generative album art, so that groping around for the hidden “prime” might feel more like piecing together a puzzle, less like leafing through junk mail.
8/7/2022, 7:33 AM
J. R. Carpenter || a Handmade Web
9
Reading the web on an iPhone, iPad, or similar device, readers do not have the option of viewing the page source. The iPad provides consumers with access to materials created by others, but cannot easily be used as a tool in the handcrafting of new materials.
8/7/2022, 7:33 AM
In February 2015, Matthew Rothberg created a website called Unindexed which continuously searched Google for itself. It survived for 22 days before being indexed, at which point it was permanently deleted. Rothberg has since shared the source code on GitHub, so you too can create a website which self-destructs the moment Google indexes it.
8/7/2022, 7:33 AM
I evoke the term 'handmade web' in order to draw attention both to the manual labour involved in the composition of web pages, and the functioning of the web page itself as a 'manual', a 'handbook', a set of instructions required for a computer program to run.
8/7/2022, 7:33 AM
The booming size of today's mainstream social networks and the constant level of noise we have to deal with has inspired a sudden return to a time when the internet was quieter, safer, and more intimate… We're nostalgic for the close-knit, DIY nature of the early web, where everything was smaller...
8/7/2022, 7:33 AM
These are not artifacts of a dead web but rather, signposts on a map of a living web pointing to a web as it once was, a web in progress, a web in the making.
I evoke the term 'handmade web' in order to advocate for an ongoing active engagement with the making of web pages and of web policies.
8/7/2022, 7:33 AM
If a radio from a museum collection is reactivated to play broadcast channels of the present, it changes its status: it is not a historical object anymore but actively generates sensual and informational presence." Similarly, when viewing old web pages in modern browsers we are confronted with a temporal paradox. Layer upon layer of dated web-design aesthetics overlap and peel like wallpaper, revealing earlier versions beneath. Pages optimised for lower resolutions now take less than a third of the screen. Ghosts of browsers past mingle with occasional page errors, dead links, and missing images. Sound files play automatically. Warnings abound, issued from earlier eras, addressed to readers who are not us.
8/7/2022, 7:33 AM
I evoke the term 'handmade web' in order to make a correlation between handmade web pages and handmade print materials, such as zines, pamphlets, and artists books.
8/7/2022, 7:33 AM
bright, rich, personal, slow and under construction. It was a web of sudden connections and personal links. Pages were built on the edge of tomorrow, full of hope for a faster connection and a more powerful computer... it was a web of amateurs soon to be washed away by dot.com ambitions, professional authoring tools and guidelines designed by usability experts.
8/7/2022, 7:33 AM
I evoke the term 'handmade web' to refer to web pages coded by hand rather than by software; web pages made and maintained by individuals rather than by businesses or corporations; web pages which are provisional, temporary, or one-of-a-kind; web pages which challenge conventions of reading, writing, design, ownership, privacy, security, or identity.
8/7/2022, 7:33 AM
Joan Didion: Why I Write
3
Grammar is a piano I play by ear, since I seem to have been out of school the year the rules were mentioned. All I know about grammar is its infinite power. To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object photographed.
7/30/2022, 9:50 PM
I’m not a schizophrenic, nor do I take hallucinogens, but certain images do shimmer for me. Look hard enough, and you can’t miss the shimmer. It’s there. You can’t think too much about these pictures that shimmer. You just lie low and let them develop. You stay quiet. You don’t talk to many people and you keep your nervous system from shorting out and you try to locate the cat in the shimmer, the grammar in the picture.
7/30/2022, 9:50 PM
Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear. Why did the oil refineries around Carquinez Strait seem sinister to me in the summer of 1956? Why have the night lights in the Bevatron burned in my mind for twenty years? What is going on in these pictures in my mind?
7/30/2022, 9:50 PM
The Fourth State of Matter
7
In a few hours the world will resume itself, but for now we’re in a pocket of silence. We’re in the plasmapause, a place of equilibrium, where the forces of the earth meet the forces of the sun. I imagine it as a place of stillness, where the particles of dust stop spinning and hang motionless in deep space.
7/25/2022, 9:55 AM
I get his coat and follow him out into the cold November night. There are stars and stars and stars. The sky is full of dead men, drifting in the blackness like helium balloons. My mother floats past in a hospital gown, trailing tubes. I go back inside where the heat is.
7/25/2022, 9:55 AM
“I think we should brace ourselves in case something bad has happened,” I say to Mary. She nods. “Just in case. It won’t hurt to be braced.” I realize that I don’t know what “braced” means. You hear it all the time but that doesn’t mean it makes sense. Whiskey is supposed to be bracing but what it is is awful. I want either tea or beer, no whiskey. Mary nods again and heads into the kitchen.
7/25/2022, 9:55 AM
This is the kind of conversation we mostly have around the office, but today he’s caught me at a weak moment, tucking my heart back inside my chest. I decide to be cavalier.
7/25/2022, 9:55 AM
In retraining her I’ve somehow retrained myself, bustling cheerfully down to the basement, arms drenched in urine, the task of doing load after load of laundry strangely satisfying. She is Pavlov and I am her dog.
7/25/2022, 9:55 AM
I can take almost anything at this point. For instance, that my vanished husband is neither here nor there; he’s reduced himself to a troubled voice on the telephone three or four times a day.Or that the dog at the bottom of the stairs keeps having mild strokes, which cause her to tilt her head inquisitively and also to fall over.
7/25/2022, 9:55 AM
In the porch light the trees shiver, the squirrels turn over in their sleep. The Milky Way is a long smear on the sky, like something erased on a blackboard. Over the neighbor’s house, Mars flashes white, then red, then white again. Jupiter is hidden among the anonymous blinks and glitterings. It has a moon with sulfur-spewing volcanoes and a beautiful name: Io. I learned it at work, from the group of men who surround me there. Space physicists, guys who spend days on end with their heads poked through the fabric of the sky, listening to the sounds of the universe. Guys whose own lives are ticking like alarm clocks getting ready to go off, although none of us are aware of it yet.
7/25/2022, 9:55 AM
Callings
2
If you opt for satisfaction: realize that while the plot’s shape will likely only be revealed in retrospect, defining your game’s guiding principles might be a good place to start. In my case: “I solemnly swear I will not be boring.”
7/25/2022, 9:55 AM
This is why optimizing for satisfaction is almost always the most meaning-making and longest-lasting option. In my book, big things are only worth committing to if the answer to the question “would you do this thing even if no one was watching?” is an immediate and unequivocal yes.
7/25/2022, 9:55 AM
Hunter S. Thompson's Letter on Finding Your Purpose and Living a Meaningful Life
2
So if you now number yourself among the disenchanted, then you have no choice but to accept things as they are, or to seriously seek something else. But beware of looking for goals: look for a way of life. Decide how you want to live and then see what you can do to make a living WITHIN that way of life
7/25/2022, 9:55 AM
The goal is absolutely secondary: it is the functioning toward the goal which is important. And it seems almost ridiculous to say that a man MUST function in a pattern of his own choosing; for to let another man define your own goals is to give up one of the most meaningful aspects of life— the definitive act of will which makes a man an individual.
7/25/2022, 9:55 AM
Going Doorless
2
This kind of 'doorless' app allows you to 'show up and start using it'. It has no 'app store', in the same way there is no 'article store' or 'podcast store'. You can send it in a way that the recipient sees what you shared, and then they can interact directly without other steps—as shareable as the other content we send to one another.
7/25/2022, 9:55 AM
Some apps require you to create an account to get started; one hopes they can be trusted with your data. With native apps, sometimes a link points directly to specific content inside the app, but an unlucky recipient might still find themselves figuring out where to go in order to find what was actually shared. What if instead of these complex steps, apps behaved more like the content we already share? What if they were as simple to pass around as articles, videos, or animated GIFs?
7/25/2022, 9:55 AM
The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction
10
In it, as in all fiction, there is room enough to keep
even Man where he belongs, in his place in the scheme of things; there is
time enough to gather plenty of wild oats and sow them too, and sing to
little Oom, and listen to Ool’s joke, and watch newts, and still the story
isn’t over. Still there are seeds to be gathered, and room in the bag of stars.
7/25/2022, 9:55 AM
If, however, one avoids the linear, progressive, Time’s-(killing)-arrow
mode of the Techno-Heroic, and redefines technology and science as primarily
cultural carrier bag rather than weapon of domination, one pleasant
side effect is that science fiction can be seen as a far less rigid, narrow
field, not necessarily Promethean or apocalyptic at all, and in fact less a
mythological genre than a realistic one.
7/25/2022, 9:55 AM
full of beginnings without ends, of initiations, of
losses, of transformations and translations, and far more tricks than conflicts,
far fewer triumphs than snares and delusions; full of space ships that
get stuck, missions that fail, and people who don’t understand. I said it
was hard to make a gripping tale of how we wrested the wild oats from
their husks, I didn’t say it was impossible. Who ever said writing a novel
was easy?
7/25/2022, 9:55 AM
Finally, it’s clear that the Hero does not look well in this bag. He needs
a stage or a pedestal or a pinnacle. You put him in a bag and he looks like
a rabbit, like a potato.
That is why I like novels: instead of heroes they have people in them.
7/25/2022, 9:55 AM
would go so far as to say that the natural,
proper, fitting shape of the novel might be that of a sack, a bag. A book
holds words. Words hold things. They bear meanings. A novel is a medicine
bundle, holding things in a particular, powerful relation to one another and
to us.
7/25/2022, 9:55 AM
I am an aging, angry woman laying mightily about me with my handbag,
fighting hoodlums off. However I don’t, nor does anybody else, consider
myself heroic for doing so. It’s just one of those damned things you have
to do in order to be able to go on gathering wild oats and telling stories.
7/25/2022, 9:55 AM
If it is a human thing to do to put something you want, because it’s
useful, edible, or beautiful, into a bag, or a basket, or a bit of rolled bark
or leaf, or a net woven of your own hair, or what have you, and then take
it home with you, home being another, larger kind of pouch or bag, a container
for people, and then later on you take it out and eat it or share it or
store it up for winter in a solider container or put it in the medicine bundle
or the shrine or the museum, the holy place, the area that contains what
is sacred, and then next day you probably do much the same again — if to
do that is human, if that’s what it takes, then I am a human being after all.
Fully, freely, gladly, for the first time.
7/25/2022, 9:55 AM
This theory not only explains large areas of theoretical obscurity and
avoids large areas of theoretical nonsense (inhabited largely by tigers, foxes,
and other highly territorial mammals); it also grounds me, personally, in
human culture in a way I never felt grounded before. So long as culture
was explained as originating from and elaborating upon the use of long,
hard objects for sticking, bashing, and killing, I never thought that I had,
or wanted, any particular share in it.
7/25/2022, 9:55 AM
I’m
not telling that story. We’ve heard it, we’ve all heard about all the sticks
and spears and swords, the things to bash and poke and hit with, the long,
hard things, but we have not heard about the thing to put things in, the
container for the thing contained. That is a new story. That is news.
7/25/2022, 9:55 AM
The first cultural device was probably a recipient.... Many theorizers feel that
the earliest cultural inventions must have been a container to hold gathered
products and some kind of sling or net carrier.
7/25/2022, 9:55 AM
From Tech Critique to Ways of Living — The New Atlantis
17
The SCT tends only to gesture in the direction of a model of human flourishing, evokes it mainly by implication, whereas Yuk Hui’s Daoist model gives an explicit and quite beautiful account. And the fact that cosmotechnics, as I noted earlier, can be generally described but only locally instantiated makes room for a great deal of creative adaptation.
7/18/2022, 8:12 PM
The particular tone of the sage’s skepticism is ironic, and the sage is in some essential sense an ironist, but his irony is always directed primarily toward himself. Indeed, this is precisely why people should seek him out to govern them: His primary qualification for office is the gently humorous attitude he takes toward himself, which then extends outward toward our technological “enframing” of the world
7/18/2022, 8:12 PM
It is not information, but relation. This too is cosmotechnics.
7/18/2022, 8:12 PM
The key concepts are wuwei (“inaction,” or “acting without action”) and ziran (“spontaneously so,” “self-deriving,” or “natural”). In verse 2 of the Tao Te Ching we are told,
7/18/2022, 8:12 PM
Further, “Thinking rooted in the earthy virtue of place is the motor of cosmotechnics. However, for me, this discourse on locality doesn’t mean a refusal of change and of progress, or any kind of homecoming or return to traditionalism; rather, it aims at a re-appropriation of technology from the perspective of the local and a new understanding of history.” What is required, then, is not a cosmopolitanism that unifies and regulates but rather a cosmopolitanism of difference.
7/18/2022, 8:12 PM
attempted to understand Chinese cosmotechnics through the dynamic relationship between two major categories of traditional Chinese thought: “dao,” or the ethereal life force that circulates all things (commonly referred to as the way), and “qi,” which means tool or utensil. Together, dao and qi — the soul and the machine, so to speak — constitute an inseparable unity.
7/18/2022, 8:12 PM
an excellent butcher who explains to a duke what he calls the Dao, or “way,” of butchering. The reason he is a good butcher, he says, it not his mastery of a skill, or his reliance on superior tools. He is a good butcher because he understands the Dao: Through experience he has come to rely on his intuition to thrust the knife precisely where it does not cut through tendons or bones, and so his knife always stays sharp. The duke replies: “Now I know how to live.” Hui explains that “it is thus the question of ‘living,’ rather than that of technics, that is at the center of the story.”
7/18/2022, 8:12 PM
“cosmotechnics”? “It is the unification of the cosmos and the moral through technical activities, whether craft-making or art-making.” That is, a cosmotechnics is the point at which a way of life is realized through making.
7/18/2022, 8:12 PM
This is what Heidegger means when he speaks of the technological “enframing” or “positionality” — the German word is Gestell — of human life. It gradually turns us all into “standing-reserve,” as when we speak with equal facility of “natural resources” and “human resources.”
7/18/2022, 8:12 PM
We treat even human capabilities as though they were only means for technological procedures, as when a worker becomes nothing but an instrument for production. Leaders and planners, along with the rest of us, are mere human resources to be arranged, rearranged, and disposed of. Each and every thing that presents itself technologically thereby loses its distinctive independence and form. We push aside, obscure, or simply cannot see, other possibilities.
7/18/2022, 8:12 PM
Heidegger’s strangely compelling exposition — which asks what the essence of technology is — but a few points require our attention here. First, because “technology itself is a contrivance,” an “instrumentum,” we are led to think instrumentally about it. It is a contrivance for mastery, and we therefore naturally think in terms of how we can master it.
7/18/2022, 8:12 PM
thanks largely to totalizing technology’s formation of a world in which, to borrow a phrase from Marx and Engels, “all that is solid melts into air,” the strategic model of conduct is replaced by the situational. Instead of being systematic planners, we become agile improvisers: If the job market is bad for your college major, you turn a side hustle into a business. But because you know that your business may get disrupted by the tech industry, you don’t bother thinking long-term; your current gig might disappear at any time, but another will surely present itself, which you will assess upon its arrival.
7/18/2022, 8:12 PM
Your actions within the traditional conduct of life proceed from social and familial circumstances, from what is thus handed down to you. In such a world it is reasonable for family names to be associated with trades, trades that will be passed down from father to son: Smith, Carpenter, Miller. But the rise of the various forces that we call “modernity” led to the emergence of the strategic conduct of life: a life with a plan, with certain goals — to get into law school, to become a cosmetologist, to get a corner office.
7/18/2022, 8:12 PM
whatever the specifics, the effect has been not just a great increase in readily available computing power but also the placement of that computing power within smaller and smaller containers.
7/18/2022, 8:12 PM
I’m sorry, am I depressing you? Perhaps so. A quick scan of my emotional faculties suggests that I am depressing myself.
7/18/2022, 8:12 PM
But the number of people who are even open to following this logic is vanishingly small. For all its cogency, the SCT is utterly powerless to slow our technosocial momentum, much less to alter its direction. Since Postman and the rest made that critique, the social order has rushed ever faster toward a complete and uncritical embrace of the prescriptive, manipulatory technologies deceitfully presented to us as Liberation and Empowerment. So what next?
7/18/2022, 8:12 PM
The basic argument of the SCT goes like this. We live in a technopoly, a society in which powerful technologies come to dominate the people they are supposed to serve, and reshape us in their image. These technologies, therefore, might be called prescriptive (to use Franklin’s term) or manipulatory (to use Illich’s). For example, social networks promise to forge connections — but they also encourage mob rule. Facial-recognition software helps to identify suspects — and to keep tabs on whole populations. Collectively, these technologies constitute the device paradigm (Borgmann), which in turn produces a culture of compliance (Franklin).
7/18/2022, 8:12 PM
I Moved to NYC
1
The people are friendlier. Strangers talk to me everywhere I go: in the subway, at the gym, in the elevator. In SF, people have more boundaries, or they’re respectful of the boundaries they imagine you have. Corollary: In NYC, you don’t end up feeling like you’re distracting someone from their phone (as you sometimes do in SF).
7/15/2022, 7:05 PM
Completely Embodied: Talking With K-Ming Chang
6
The other thing I look for is community and finding people whom you feel an affinity for. My thought is always, what can I do to make this workshop as generative as possible and to steer it away from anything that would prevent someone from writing? That’s what people need. Space to create a possible idea, and to run with it. The thing that makes it worth it is when people tell me, “I have new pieces from your workshop.” That’s it, that’s all I care about. Just make new things! Lead with your own self!
7/15/2022, 7:05 PM
I give myself arbitrary word counts or tasks just so I sit with the page. If I interact with the writing in any way it helps me feel like I’m alive. It keeps me in touch with some deeper aspect of myself. It’s almost like prayer, like for one moment I am situated and aware of myself and the things that are coursing through my life. I love the idea that writing is a practice because it doesn’t have any expectation of anything complete or coherent; you’re just practicing. I love the movie Grandmaster by Wong Kar-wai, and in it, the character of Ip Man is just doing his exercises every day to practice and keep himself in touch with his body. He’s not fighting anyone or trying to get anything.
7/15/2022, 7:05 PM
In everything I write, someone is always eating something that isn’t meant to be eaten. I am interested in the idea of how the body processes things. Eating is literally the way in which the body processes, the idea of metabolizing something through your body—whether it is historical trauma or literal food. I’m also fascinated with the idea of appetite and hunger because I wanted to explore what it means to want something, especially as a woman, when desire can be seen as scary, monstrous, disgusting, or shameful.
7/15/2022, 7:05 PM
“I wrote it to give myself a grandfather who would love me as a girl.” When I read that I was so moved. I had never considered myself as an audience for my book, because what I love about writing and storytelling is the performative aspect, the idea that the work is for someone else. I never thought of a younger me reading this. But in a way, Bestiary is me giving my younger self a community and a kind of love that she didn’t find.
7/15/2022, 7:05 PM
I don’t need to read about another European couple on the fritz, uncomfortably drinking wine in Paris. Ironically, for me, that kind of story is like being introduced to an exotic way of life. They’re eating cheese and they’re not lactose intolerant. They’re being passive aggressive in that very specific way. But at least I try to see its craft, whereas I think when some people encounter work from writers of color, they think they see an exotic culture and it stops being about the writing. I think this is because they don’t see themselves as being a part of a cultural context.
7/15/2022, 7:05 PM
I got to a point with my poetry where I wasn’t surprising myself anymore and could feel myself wanting to become increasingly narrative. I found myself writing ten-page poems, and well, that was a chapter. What I love about prose is because I have such little expectations for myself, to a certain point I didn’t care if I crashed and burned and as a result I was able to enjoy myself a lot more. And, I was surprising myself constantly. You know that saying that you should always feel like a beginner no matter what you do? I loved writing prose because I felt like a total amateur.
7/15/2022, 7:05 PM
June Huh, High School Dropout, Wins the Fields Medal | Quanta Magazine
7
This approach doesn’t just apply to Huh’s mathematical work. In 2013, he decided he wanted to learn to cook. As a total beginner, he adopted the strategy of making the same dish — a simple pasta in oil — every day until it was perfect. For six months, that’s exactly what he did. (To date, according to Kim, that’s the only dish he knows how to cook.)
7/11/2022, 7:14 PM
So slow, in fact, that at first Wang thought they were wasting a lot of time on easy problems they already understood. But then he realized that Huh was learning even seemingly simple concepts in a much deeper way — and in precisely the way that would later prove useful.
7/11/2022, 7:14 PM
Huh discovered that this kind of mathematics could give him what poetry could not: the ability to search for beauty outside himself, to try to grasp something external, objective and true, in a way that opened him up more than writing ever had. “You don’t think about your small self,” he said. “There’s no place for ego.” He found that unlike when he was a poet, he was never motivated by the desire for recognition. He just wanted to do math.
7/11/2022, 7:14 PM
He found the writing process too focused on the self — and for him, that exploration was often painful and depressing. Moreover, as he later realized, “I wanted to be someone who writes great poetry,” he said. “I didn’t want to write great poetry.” Now he sees that version of himself as almost a complete stranger.
7/11/2022, 7:14 PM
“Which means I didn’t do any work,” Huh said. “So that’s kind of a problem.” (He’s since made peace with this constraint, though. “I used to try to resist … but I finally learned to give up to those temptations.” As a consequence, “I became better and better at ignoring deadlines.”)
7/11/2022, 7:14 PM
On any given day, Huh does about three hours of focused work. He might think about a math problem, or prepare to lecture a classroom of students, or schedule doctor’s appointments for his two sons. “Then I’m exhausted,” he said. “Doing something that’s valuable, meaningful, creative” — or a task that he doesn’t particularly want to do, like scheduling those appointments — “takes away a lot of your energy.”
7/11/2022, 7:14 PM
That poetic detour has since proved crucial to his mathematical breakthroughs. His artistry, according to his colleagues, is evident in the way he uncovers those just-right objects at the center of his work, and in the way he seeks a deeper significance in everything he does. “Mathematicians are a lot like artists in that really we’re looking for beauty,” said Federico Ardila-Mantilla, a mathematician at San Francisco State University and one of Huh’s collaborators. “But I think in his case, it’s really pronounced. And I just really like his taste. He makes beautiful things.”
7/11/2022, 7:14 PM
🌻 Audience of One
9
I want to, as Joan Didion describes in “Why I Write,” train a mind for noticing “physical facts,” for conjuring “images that shimmer around the edges.” I want to develop Susan Sontag’s “vocabulary of forms”: to find the precise language for every extraneous emotion, every ineffable vibe; I want to learn to sin and write in purple prose.
7/11/2022, 7:14 PM
This struggle, ultimately, is the struggle not to sell out your own mind. I think about Obama, Drake, and every other public figure derided for succumbing to the hivemind, to design by committee, to the tyranny of the majority. The more you expose your work to the world, the more you are vulnerable to its petty infringements and unsolicited opinions, which threaten to destroy the very originality that awarded it popularity in the first place.
7/11/2022, 7:14 PM
“I write only to please myself.”
7/11/2022, 7:14 PM
The exhibition could use more secrecy. The secret is a useful metaphor for art in that art's content is always something that resists articulation and remains unstated.” Although art can have political causes and political effects, its primary impact is much more localized to each viewer, and thus hard to predict. Meaning emerges not universally from the artist’s intent, but from the multiplicity of affective and reflective encounters that result.
7/11/2022, 7:14 PM
ow much time should we spend producing great writing, and how much trying to prove it to the world? Or like a Substack writer recently told me about the pain of self-promotion, “I don’t like having to sell myself like a bar of soap, but here I am.”
7/11/2022, 7:14 PM
“You can,” he replied. “I think reading literature makes one much more attentive. I go from ‘writing op-eds about who is good and who is bad’ to ‘writing vignettes about what's amusing, unusual, or thematically resonant’ in my head. It's like, ‘What genre do I want my internal monologue to be in?’ and most of us are default-choosing ‘enraged op-ed.’”
7/11/2022, 7:14 PM
My prose has tightened, the excess trimmed. Information efficiency is paramount. I write like the 12 dollar desk salad, the bar that packs 20 grams of protein and plastic into one 200-calorie brick. But good writing, like a good meal, needs fat. It should indulge readers, is meant to be chewed and enjoyed, affording a generous escape from the prosaic and mundane.
7/11/2022, 7:14 PM
My intern at Substack proposed a research project the other day, and I told him, “That’s intellectually interesting, but what’s the business case?” I hated myself a bit for saying it, but the thing I fear most these days is shouting into the void: If I create something and no one’s around to hear it, did it really make a sound?
7/11/2022, 7:14 PM
They were slower to smile and quicker to criticize. Many of them began to talk about the world in a transactional, economized way. Their universes started to look like giant balance sheets, their appetite for adventure waned and they viewed unfamiliar situations through the cautious lens of cost/benefit analysis.
7/11/2022, 7:14 PM
(In)complete Understanding
1
There was a really intriguing interview on KCRW's Life Examined podcast with Alain de Botton where he said, "...if someone makes you feel like anything that goes through your mind is something they may be interested in... however outlandish and strange, if your partner is curious about that, they see it as part of their role as partner to be curious about your mind and to be open, I think this is the most attractive quality.... I don't think anyone who is on the receiving end of that openness will ever leave their partner... there is literally nothing more guaranteed to make a relationship last."
7/6/2022, 9:27 AM
Specifying Spring '83
16
Ten million boards gives us a maximum disk space requirement of 22.17 gigabytes, easily stored on a commodity hard drive or a cheap-enough cloud volume. A capable computer could even hold that in RAM. Turns out, when you don’t store every user’s entire history, plus a record of every advertisement they’ve ever seen, your database can stay pretty slim!
the limit on history is interesting and feels like a missed opportunity. in a world where storage is so cheap, we should be able to keep our own histories! thinking about sousveillance vs. surveillance and [personal panopticons](https://twitter.com/andy_matuschak/status/1427680566049067009)
7/2/2022, 7:49 PM
And one of the interesting things about Spring ‘83 is that when you operate a server, you get a universe for free.
7/2/2022, 7:49 PM
Protocols aren’t only for using; they are for implementing. That’s part of their value in the world. They support negotations between devices, yes — and also conversations, even games, between people. This has been forgotten as protocols have gotten more complicated, but when I read the early RFCs, I get it so clearly: protocol as puzzle, argument, joke!
7/2/2022, 7:49 PM
Fine, okay, I get it! And yet: the last thing I want to do is start an internet business, even a cute, “sustainable” one. Databases terrify me. I’m offline for long stretches of the year. How is this possibly going to work?
7/2/2022, 7:49 PM
In a self-certifying system, content carries its own durable provenance, allowing a network of servers to share it between them, and if one or two or a hundred are malefactors bent on deception, who cares? They can’t fool us.
7/2/2022, 7:49 PM
This is a “pull-only” protocol. As a user, you don’t see anything you didn’t specifically ask to see; no notifications, no recommendations, no unsolicited messages.
7/2/2022, 7:49 PM
You might update your board twice an hour or twice a month; you might amend one sentence or reboot the whole thing. Publishing a new version is instantaneous, as easy as tapping a button. You don’t have to manage a server to publish a board; you don’t even have to establish an account on a server.
reminds me of locket but web-based and with full user agency to create what they want. their own little pocket of the internet. Love the no account part and think that's super important..
7/2/2022, 7:49 PM
Spring ‘83 is a protocol for the transmission and display of something I am calling a “board”, which is an HTML fragment, limited to 2217 bytes, unable to execute JavaScript or load external resources, but otherwise unrestricted
7/2/2022, 7:49 PM
conjuring of the deep opportunities and excitements of this global machine. I’ll say it again. There are so many ways people might relate to one another online, so many ways exchange and conviviality might be organized.
7/2/2022, 7:49 PM
For me, the recent resurgence of the email newsletter feels not much like a renaissance, and more like a massing of exhausted refugees in the last reliable shelter.
7/2/2022, 7:49 PM
Furthermore, email’s crusty underpinnings, though they are precisely what make it so sturdy, really pinch at a moment when the web’s expressive power is waxing strong.
7/2/2022, 7:49 PM
For my part, I believe presentation is fused to content; I believe presentation is a form of content; so RSS cannot be the end of the story.
7/2/2022, 7:49 PM
RSS is too stark. I follow a lot of RSS feeds, and I appreciate them, and I almost want to leave it at that; nothing’s more boring than re-litigating RSS. I will just observe that there is something about this technology that has seemed, over the years, to scold rather than invite; enclose rather than expand; and strip away rather than layer upon.
7/2/2022, 7:49 PM
This means I’m uninterested in the projects that accept Twitter’s design as sensible and try to implement it “better”. (I’m thinking of Mastodon, Scuttlebutt, and Bluesky.) A decentralized or federated timeline is still a timeline, and for me, the timeline is the problem.
7/2/2022, 7:49 PM
I want to follow people who are interesting to me, in a way that’s simple, expressive, and predictable.
I want this to work, furthermore, whether those people are sharing a random thought every day, a blog post every week, or an art project every two years.
And I want it to work, of course, across media, so I can follow writers, musicians, programmers, theorists, troublemakers …
7/2/2022, 7:49 PM
What do you want from the internet, anyway?
7/2/2022, 7:49 PM
Local Based Software (Where “Local” Means Your Neighbourhood) - Speed of Light by Jason Brennan
2
I’m kind of obsessed with Animal Crossing for the Switch, in particular the concept that Tom Nook gives you a little island phone. The device acts as the game’s UI / menu system and it’s a compelling conceit. But I like thinking about it literally, a world where this one character (and his two doofus nephews) made a whole damn smartphone and a handful of apps that everyone on your island (of like, 15 inhabitants) uses. It’s extremely local and it was presumably custom made. I absolutely love this concept.
6/24/2022, 7:16 PM
It’s homogenous. But maybe it would be better if each place had its own, homegrown software. You have to live here to get it, and it takes on the character, the grain, the terroir of its neighbourhood. (and maybe every location makes their own custom emoji sets? typography? sticker packs? design language?)
6/24/2022, 7:16 PM
Identity and Its Discontents
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You have to understand that I have great faith in the collective unconscious. I think our individual windows into the world are whirlpools on the surface of a great body of water. I think women’s bodies can predict the future. I get why people turn to nihilism but I think they should turn to Buddhism. Read some Terrence McKenna. Get in touch with nature. I mean it seems like the only path to suffering marginally less, and sometimes much less.
6/24/2022, 7:16 PM
Be an Asker
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People who are indirect often end up being dishonest just because they’re so uncomfortable with the prospect of saying no. Examples: buying something you don’t want, ghosting someone after a third date, lying when you are definitely not planning to hang out with someone again. Obviously, it’s good to be tactful, but I think most people would benefit from being significantly more direct.
6/20/2022, 8:11 AM
e. It’s amazing to me how many people find roundabout ways to lightly hint at what they want when they probably could’ve saved themselves hours and hours by just asking directly. You may think your hints are super obvious, but most people are not paying as much attention to you as you think they are. If you really, really want to know what the answer is, just ask.
6/20/2022, 8:11 AM
Truly difficult: being honest about your needs in important relationships (friendships, partners, etc). I think like 85% of people just absolutely can’t do this, so if you can, kudos to you.
6/20/2022, 8:11 AM
Eventually I realized I was being silly and now I come in with very specific instructions. But I think this kind of scenario is perfect for practicing because obviously this trained professional wants to give you a haircut you don’t hate.
6/20/2022, 8:11 AM
However, they’re not coming at it from a needy place—they’re genuinely super chill and are fine with hearing a no; they’re also good at making people feel like it’s safe to say no to them
6/20/2022, 8:11 AM
I think a lot of people who don’t ask for what they want explicitly end up resenting themselves and resenting the world.
6/20/2022, 8:11 AM
But those are the exceptions, since most of the time you are not going to be penalized for asking. You penalize yourself: that’s why you don’t ask. But if you’re able to stop punishing yourself for asserting your needs, something very important changes. You become capable of advocating for yourself.
6/20/2022, 8:11 AM
When I was a kid and she was trying to change a flight reservation or persuade someone to do something she would spend literal hours on the phone—she’d just keep calling back until she found someone who would do it. At the time I found that super embarrassing, as kids do. But looking back, I see that I internalized something important: how to ask for what you want.
6/20/2022, 8:11 AM
Why Kindness Works
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Not to fake it for success in a Dale Carnegie way, but to choose to focus on the good people doing good things - while also considering yourself as one of those good people, and making sure you’re feeling good and doing things you’re proud of.
6/16/2022, 8:01 PM
Live a Life Worth Living
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Similarly, when your time comes, I will be there waiting for you, so that you, too, will be given what was lost to you. I promise. But in the meantime, live, my darling babies. Live a life worth living. Live thoroughly and completely, thoughtfully, gratefully, courageously, and wisely. Live!
6/12/2022, 7:27 PM
Even long after you have chosen to stop playing, I will still come to you in those extraordinary and ordinary moments in life when you live with a complete passion and commitment.
6/12/2022, 7:27 PM
We are here to feel the complex range of emotions that come with being human. And from those experiences, our souls expand and grow and learn and change, and we understand a little more about what it really means to be human. I call it the evolution of the soul.
6/12/2022, 7:27 PM
What Is “Silkpunk”?
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Finally, the “-punk” suffix in this case is functional. The silkpunk novels are about rebellion, resistance, re-appropriation and rejuvenation of tradition, and defiance of authority, key “punk” aesthetic pillars.
6/12/2022, 7:27 PM
The engineers are celebrated as great artists who transform the existing language and evolve it toward ever more beautiful forms.
6/12/2022, 7:27 PM
In creating the silkpunk aesthetic, I was influenced by the ideas of W. Brian Arthur, who articulates a vision of technology as language. The task of the engineer is much like that of a poet in that the engineer must creatively combine existing components to solve novel problems, thereby devising artifacts that are new expressions in the technical language.
6/12/2022, 7:27 PM
You Haven’t Texted Since Saturday
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but more often than not this interviewer found himself struck by the ease with which she could toss off a casually elaborate metaphor in the moment or the speed at which she could turn a thought or idea into a better version of itself. Her mind is ever open but always, it seems, at work.
6/12/2022, 7:27 PM
My Recent Divorce, and/or Dior Homme Intense
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It curls into a new resolution, a small cloudy pearl, its giant mass seemingly collected inwards, as in the formation of a quiet star. That’s what I hope the better memories of these years will do—fold and gather, losing all of their heat but not all of their light. Some of them will, some of them won’t.
6/12/2022, 7:27 PM
In the end, Dior Homme Intense winds down beautifully—while it’s quite large and stately in the opening stages, it falls, after a period of hours, like an elegant melancholic onto a therapist’s sofa, into a prettily crumpled little package.
6/12/2022, 7:27 PM
One is: he is always seeking the brighter side of life, and, in that seeking, brightens what is near, never settling for misery that doesn’t need to be there, chasing ugly and transient clouds from the otherwise clear skies of himself and those around him. Another is: in his desire for pleasantness, he turns away from the darkness that has to be faced in the creation of anything good and true.
6/12/2022, 7:27 PM
But that’s kind of irrelevant: the substance of the marriage was a being we created together, a mutually created person, which I, with a few words, had sentenced to exile.
6/12/2022, 7:27 PM
Our first conversation unmemorable for the words themselves, but highly memorable for their cadence, composing a seeming invitation to an infinite field of play, a new country whose charter we’d just begun drawing up.
6/12/2022, 7:27 PM
The desert house, whose doorframes we’d recently finished together, was tranquil and clean and she was civil and kind and we filled out the necessary papers and went to the notary and we were super super adult about it.
6/12/2022, 7:27 PM
It is always the moment just before death but sometimes it especially feels that way.
6/12/2022, 7:27 PM
with a giddy smile on my face, or tears in my eyes, or a look of fixed tight fury, depending on which second you caught me in.
6/12/2022, 7:27 PM
I’d chosen a sensible Civic for the task, but the Enterprise misplaced it, giving me a big red Dodge Challenger in replacement. It filled with the scent of Dior Homme Intense and went vroom vroom.
6/12/2022, 7:27 PM
The root must grow for three years in the dirt, and then age in the sun for another two, before it takes on the painstakingly produced newness that is its trademark. If, on some crazy intuition, Victoria and I had planted some iris on the day we’d met, it would have been almost, but not quite, ready for use by the time our relationship ended.
6/12/2022, 7:27 PM
It’s the pale core of spring earth, the slender butter of morning, the lightest air breathed from the mouth of a slightly musty hallway.
6/12/2022, 7:27 PM
But, clearly, this is not true—our identity is distributed in the people around us, our routines and possessions, as much as it is held in a bone cage perched upon the spine.
6/12/2022, 7:27 PM
By the next day, after I wandered around the neighborhood to make sure I hadn’t just parked it somewhere weird, I’d decided that we should, in fact, call off the marriage, which she’d predicted I would.
6/12/2022, 7:27 PM
felt every emotion I was capable of experiencing, in an emulsion which hung about my skin.
6/12/2022, 7:27 PM
A Startup Wants to Rescue You From Browser Tab Hell
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Miller describes Arc as a kind of lightweight online operating system where apps are simply URLs. His company’s larger goal is to tilt the basic computing experience away from app stores and back to a more open experience. “The center of gravity is moving back to the web,” he says.
6/6/2022, 7:08 PM
Rhizome Proposal
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easy for people to switch between platform providers as one can switch between internet providers today.
hm but this isn't easy today
6/6/2022, 7:08 PM
With a universal API, each composition between each tool increases the total possible compositions and workflows by n∗(n−1)n * (n-1)n∗(n−1), all without developers needing to write the transformations between each one.
what are the negatives of explosion of combinations
6/6/2022, 7:08 PM
we get modular interoperable local-first software
Local-first software
By centralizing data storage on servers, cloud apps also take away ownership and agency from users. If a service shuts...
Updated 6/1/2022
2 which we can stack to a global scale.
who maintains? who has authority for changes, how to deal wqith paradox of choice?
6/6/2022, 7:08 PM
functionality of these apps without much difficult
mmm there's something to be said about making it work _well_ at scale
6/6/2022, 7:08 PM
Quit Your Job
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Quitting your job, in the full sense I have described here, is a bit like quitting that agricultural life to return to a life of adventure on the wild frontier. It is a much less certain existence and a more violent one. But the combination of leisurely surplus, mortal intensity, and demand for novel virtue is where you will find life at its healthiest and highest. It is where we will find the most important destinies.
6/6/2022, 7:08 PM
There is a surplus wealth endowed in the universe to those with the virtue to win it. This is not just resources won in competition, but more importantly also the random providence that falls on you simply for thriving in novel ways.
6/6/2022, 7:08 PM
Looking around us, we see a world filled with beautiful creatures. Everything that has flourished has done so by fulfilling some niche in its ecosystem, embodying some novel virtue, and striving hard to bring its vision of life into the world. Where a beautiful status quo is corrupted or overcome, it is often for some internal lack, or by something that has developed new virtues that will enable even grander beauty after the disruption. The preponderant beauty of the things that survive implies a justice to the logic of survival and thus providence for the virtuous.
6/6/2022, 7:08 PM
The other reason is that to actually accomplish at your full potential, you have to start doubling down on particular bets long before you know that you can follow through. You won’t see the whole path when you begin. You will have no way of knowing whether it exists, or whether what you are pursuing is even possible. If you have more certainty than that, you aren’t aiming high enough. You have to bet your life on faith that the universe will provide if your vision is good enough.
6/6/2022, 7:08 PM
Haul yourself back out and take your appointed sentence of years of hard leisure while you search for inspiring purposes that are truly worth your life and for the skills and secret knowledge you will need to fulfill them. You will find them only in the strange and unjustifiable curiosities you have when you’ve been freely following informed instinct for months.
6/6/2022, 7:08 PM
No one can or should be the lone overman who defines all value for himself. We need to cooperate with and defer to each other to make society possible. But even if we individually can only bite off a small piece of the overall purpose structure of our society to manage ourselves, we need to actually do that far more than we do now. For any given question of ends, someone, somewhere, must be taking responsibility. Someone must make that leap of faith to define ends for the rest of us to work towards. No one else is going to do it. Why not you?
6/6/2022, 7:08 PM
Life necessarily involves these fatal leaps of faith—bets which you have no certain way of knowing will work out but which define your whole existence and require your intense effort. The squirrel has no way of knowing or checking that his instinct to bury the nuts will lead him to new life in the spring; he can only trust that God has given him what he needs. Any low-risk bet comes likewise with low returns. The highest returns of life and glory come from taking hard bets on your best visions of the future and being able to make them work through dedicated struggle.
6/6/2022, 7:08 PM
To make such bets you must be indifferent at some level to whether you end up a king or a monk, or even dead. The indeterminate hedge-trader with his logarithmic utility function assigns infinite negative utility to ruin. The man of action serenely regards ruin as the most likely possible outcome, mitigates it where he can, and leaps anyway. He rejects the comfortable half-existence of drifting with the indeterminate human tide and manifests his bold vision into the world.
6/6/2022, 7:08 PM
True ascent beyond the kept life comes only from taking bold, determinate leaps of faith on real constructive projects.
6/6/2022, 7:08 PM
You don’t actually need the money; in reality, the money needs you to give it a worthy purpose, but everyone gets this backward. And if you don’t need to work very hard at managing the money, that’s just because your job is protected by the union. What is capitalism but the overgrown trade union of the idle rich?
6/6/2022, 7:08 PM
This is, after all, the point of quitting your job and exploring: to find the new lands of opportunity in which you will build an empire.
6/6/2022, 7:08 PM
If you have the resources to spend some time exploring, if you are on to interesting threads of novelty that few other people have, and if you have the spirit to tighten your belt, throw out your map, and explore off-road, then your real job is to do so. It is a grave sin to neglect that kind of cosmic duty. But many more people have the means and privilege to quit their tracked careers than ever realize it and act on it. You need far less than you think to live in monk mode and pursue this kind of exploration. What this means in practice is that at some point far before you are or feel ready, you need to quit your job.
6/6/2022, 7:08 PM
This is a key part of what it means to be a responsible elite. You use your privilege and your personal judgment to explore and solve problems that no one else can.
6/6/2022, 7:08 PM
Value is very legible within a clear plan to reach a clear objective. But you cannot pursue interesting novelty—things that no one else is doing or which you have never seen before, or the little threads of nagging curiosity or doubt—by chasing along known direct value gradients. But that’s where the treasure is. That’s how you will find the place where you need to build. To get the biggest and most interesting payoffs, you have to start by chasing merely interesting novelty in an open-ended way.
6/6/2022, 7:08 PM
The reason any of this is worth sharing is because it’s my example of what you might call “active unemployment,” or if you prefer the traditional term, “leisure.” The Romans called it “otium.”
6/6/2022, 7:08 PM
I debated with my collaborators over the next year or so. Is this what we really wanted to do with our lives? Or should we get safer hobbies like drunken rock climbing? If we were in, we should be in with our whole lives and deaths, and with all our resources, because this stuff can’t be pursued by anything less than the whole person. We were in.
6/6/2022, 7:08 PM
Becoming a Magician
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a helpful strategy for becoming a magician: Surround yourself with people who look like magicians to you. Then imagine yourself as one, older and wiser, in great detail. Imagine yourself as the person you would be afraid to say you want to be out loud to others (because it seems so ridiculously impossible right now). Write it down in great clarity and detail, then forget it. And let the part of your subconscious mind that still remembers lead you to becoming the things you want, and maybe, years later, check if it did.
6/6/2022, 7:08 PM
You can’t keep your gaze tightly fixed on the outcome you want because it will lock your mind onto the strategies you currently have for meeting them, which by definition probably don’t work (otherwise you would have succeeded already and you wouldn’t need to use the strategy).
6/6/2022, 7:08 PM
Magicians or their work often seem to have a subconscious glow that I am drawn to, particularly if they use a type of magic that I recognise is on my critical path and thus something I’m currently seeking. Concrete steps I take to find them include asking my most interesting friends to introduce me to their most interesting friends, going down similar rabbit holes with the bibliographies of books that excite me, and generally living in ‘explore’ mode at various points in life, while recognising that not every avenue will lead to a jackpot.
6/6/2022, 7:08 PM
The way to extraordinary growth and changes often involves a fundamental ontological or ‘lens’ shift in how you see the world. Magicians are wearing not just better, but fundamentally differently shaped lenses to the rest of us. And regardless of your skills and experience, it is likely that you are a magician to someone else.
6/6/2022, 7:08 PM
The ‘describe the version of you that seems impossible right now’ trick I described above is largely an attempt to bypass that part of my brain that dismisses the work of magicians as crazy and starts allowing it to make the necessary shifts required to become the kind of magician I am envisioning.
6/6/2022, 7:08 PM
One of my heuristics for growth is to seek out the magicians, and find the magic. Often without noticing, your progress in aspects of life or all of it unconsciously becomes linear.
6/6/2022, 7:08 PM
The feeling I get, as a very good bodypainter looking at Sanatan’s work, is that I am looking at magic. And that, in fact, is my definition of magic – competence so much more advanced than yours with such alien mental models that you cannot predict the outcomes of the model at all.
6/6/2022, 7:08 PM
You could say that my model of ‘how to succeed at a bodypainting competition’ was technically sufficient, and the thing I needed to work on was merely fine-tuning all the pieces until I ranked higher than everyone else one year.
6/6/2022, 7:08 PM
I need to imagine a version of myself who, by definition, I cannot understand. If I understood her she wouldn’t be magical.
6/6/2022, 7:08 PM
But what I realised was that while that vision had been compelling up until that point (24 or 25), in the literal sense of having compelled me forward through life, my fantasies had changed and expanded in the intervening time. If I read that description at 24 as something to aim towards I would have felt bored. Feeling free, loved, cared for, and able to express myself artistically? Sure, that was great. But I felt then (and feel now) that that is a solid baseline for my current adult life – that I would in fact find it surprising if I went for longer than, say, three months without any one of those needs being met. So the challenge now is to write a new version of this fantasy that describes the version of myself that currently feels impossible, and then simply orient myself towards that until it becomes true.
6/6/2022, 7:08 PM
The description was about five or six handwritten pages long, and at the time, it was a manifestation of desperate longing to be somewhere other than where I was, someone who felt free and cared for. At the time I saw that description as basically an impossibility; my life could never be so amazing in reality.
6/6/2022, 7:08 PM
We All Have “Main-Character Energy” Now
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Main-character moments are composed with an audience in mind; they’re vicarious spectacles. Thorpe offered examples like “listening to music and just dancing and not caring what people think” and “running down the street in the city and everyone’s looking at you,” a little bit like the protagonist in “Frances Ha.” (If not everyone is looking, then how can you be the main character?) But Thorpe insists that making oneself the center of the scene doesn’t mean discounting the experiences of everyone else. “You can coexist with other people who are also having their main-character moments,” she said. Newly thrown back together in public, we can assist one another as mutual supporting characters in our fantasies of being the leads.
6/2/2022, 11:12 PM
The term can be used appreciatively, acknowledging a form of self-care—putting yourself first—or as an accusation, a calling out of narcissism: a person dressing too extravagantly for a casual event, for example, is trying to be the main character. Main-character moments are those in which you feel ineffably in charge, as if the world were there for your personal satisfaction. As a TikToker put it recently, “Why does only buying the groceries I need for 2-3 days make me feel like the main character in an Italian summer memoir[?]” In the video, a woman carries a tote bag full of basil down a sunlit sidewalk, to a soundtrack from the lambent Italian-summer film “Call Me By Your Name.” “TikTok and social media has made it more attainable for you to write your own story,” Yasmine Sahid, a twenty-four-year-old actor and TikTok creator who began making her own main-character videos last August, told me. “You can kind of cast yourself in these mini-movies.”
6/2/2022, 11:12 PM
Right Click Save - Articles - NFTs and the Risk of Perpetual Colonialism
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In their book Design: Building on Country (2021), Page and Memmott discuss some of the principles underscoring culturally appropriate design with Australian Indigenous communities. They highlight how, in many Indigenous cultures, the actual product created is often not as important as the process involved in creating it, which at its core should always be collaborative.
5/31/2022, 6:42 PM
Decentralization acquires a very different meaning when viewed through the lens of relationality, a core aspect of First Nations peoples’ world views.¹ While from the Western perspective, we tend to see decentralization as a “breakaway” from ruling institutions, it is still very much human-centred, rooted in the understanding that human needs and wishes drive decision-making. Relational cultures, on the other hand, approach life on the basis of relationships between humans and everything else, including the environment and all things within it, living or not, as well as the cultural capital derived from them — stories, rituals, customs, and beliefs. In these cultures, decentralization operates at an existential level, with humans no longer in a central position of superiority but constituting just another element within a broader cosmos.
5/31/2022, 6:42 PM
Power spheres mutating overtime — from the Crown, to the bourgeoisie, to the primacy of the (white) individual celebrated by the Enlightenment, to the early entrepreneurs of the Industrial Revolution, to the establishment of capitalist liberal democracies — have all subscribed to a need to expand in order to dominate, to source raw and cultural material regardless of its impact on people and the environment, and to impose new cultural practices and threaten risk of extinction (and, later, socio-economic ostracism) in order to drive submission and compliance. This is a point elegantly expressed by Jonathan Crary in his book 24/7 (2013), which discusses the perpetual drive of market forces to secure relentless participation, consumption, and control. For Crary, this ideology fabricates pseudo-deficiencies for which new technologies are offered as the essential solutions.
5/31/2022, 6:42 PM
Under these narratives, new technologies are sold as tools of emancipation, if only people can accept them — an approach reminiscent of colonial missions which, in the past, crossed the seas with the self-declared goals of rescuing natives who would otherwise live obliviously in darkness, eternally.
5/31/2022, 6:42 PM
It is no coincidence that proponents of new technologies are often referred to as “tech evangelists.” The uncritical optimism that characterizes much of the current discourse on Web3, the non-negotiable adherence to its principles, and the assumption about the inevitability not only of the technology, but also of the context and world view in which they operate, often veer into dogmatism.
5/31/2022, 6:42 PM
The Web3 Decentralization Debate Is Focused on the Wrong Question
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For example, a credit union could function as a data steward for member data, and exchange only particular insights with a startup building a tool for loan refinancing or with a public sector agency aiming to improve financial policy, keeping the underlying data private while adding value to the ecosystem and rerouting benefits to members. Such a steward could further interoperate with a network of other credit unions for better leverage and benefits. A similar structure could be used for needs as diverse as Covid-19 contact tracing or tracking carbon emissions, unlocking massive public benefits while still protecting individual and community decisionmaking.
5/31/2022, 6:42 PM
Most data are relational (e.g., emails between people, genetic data partially shared by families, social graph data), so private property conceptions fail. If any individual can block transactions, data becomes unusable; if any can authorize transactions, a race to the bottom results as each data holder tries to sell out ahead of others.
5/31/2022, 6:42 PM
Unlike distributed redundancy, subsidiarity often increases efficiency by leveraging trust, rather than reducing efficiency to eliminate the need for trust. Take something like community mesh networks, through which communities bootstrap decentralized wireless networks through shared nodes and antennae, installed locally. Creative economic incentive design is crucial for the sustainability of such networks, but these incentives are embedded in social relationships, rather than acting as a replacement for them. Similar principles underlie recent, blockchain-based alternatives, which we welcome.
5/31/2022, 6:42 PM
In sharp contrast to these principles, the type of decentralization that we believe is desirable, subsidiarity, focuses on:Keeping data as close as possible to the social context of creation.A plurality of solutions linked and integrated through coordinated mechanisms of federation and interoperability.Leveraging and extending relationships of online and offline trust and institutions.
5/31/2022, 6:42 PM
Theoretically, redundancy aims for security against attack. Yet, as we have seen play out in both recent supply chain challenges and the concentration of most Bitcoin mining into a small number of mining pools, market efficiency tends to concentrate activity in hyperscale centers, often highly brittle to shocks and disruptions (e.g., local Covid lockdown policy) or located in jurisdictions (e.g., China and Russia) that may be vulnerable to geopolitical risks. Effective and secure redundancy requires deliberately compensating for this tendency, choosing diverse “hedges” against risk rather than simply the lowest-cost providers. But achieving such hedging requires tracking locality and network relationships that these purely financial systems ignore.
5/31/2022, 6:42 PM
Subsidiarity is the architecture and type of decentralization that makes composable local control possible. But the dominant trajectory of Web3 is unlikely to deliver, and may even run contrary to, subsidiarity.
5/31/2022, 6:42 PM
Our view of decentralization is about coordination. It emphasizes solving problems through the federation of “local” units, clustered around the social contexts most relevant to the decision at hand. This is not a new idea: US federalism, with local, state, and national governments, essentially pulls from this principle of subsidiarity, as does the setup of open source code repositories and wiki-like structures for information aggregation. The key is that these local units are composable—modular and interoperable with each other, essentially “stackable” to a more global scale—to enable decentralized systems to efficiently solve problems that may at first blush seem to require centralization for coordination. We call this model composable local control.
5/31/2022, 6:42 PM
We believe decentralization’s value is in genuinely empowering people to act decisively within their social contexts, while providing mechanisms of necessary coordination across contexts. This is in contrast to the current technical landscape, where decisionmaking agency over information, computation, moderation, and so on is increasingly in the hands of authorities “distant” from the relevant groups—for example, platform content moderation processes try to be cross-community and cross-cultural, and largely fail at both. In this situation, decisions are removed from the context of application and made by people with little direct interest in the matters, who are then unable to take advantage of rich distributed information.
5/31/2022, 6:42 PM
The Paradox of Control
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If we no longer saw the world as a point of aggression, but as a point of resonance that we approach, not with an aim of appropriating, dominating, and controlling it but with an attitude of listening and responding, an attitude oriented toward self-efficacious adaptive transformation, toward mutually responsive reachability, modernity’s escalatory game would become meaningless and, more importantly, would be deprived of the psychological energy that drives it. A different world would become possible.”
5/31/2022, 6:42 PM
In one of his Sabbath poems, Wendell Berry reminded us that “we live the given life, not the planned.” I can’t think of a more pithy way of putting the matter. By the “given life,” of course, Berry does not mean what is implied by the phrase “that’s a given,” something, that is, which is taken for granted. Rather, Berry means the gifted life, the life that is given to us. We are presented with a choice, then: we can receive the world as a gift, which does not preclude our acting upon it and creatively transforming it, or we can think of it merely as raw material subject to our managing, planning, predicting, and controlling.
5/31/2022, 6:42 PM
It’s worth noting, I think, that Rosa’s examples tend to focus on how you and I might deploy digital technologies to bring more of the world ostensibly under our control. What he might also have explored at greater depth is the degree to which we are not the master’s of these systems of control, indeed, that very often they open up pathways for others to control us. I don’t mean this in some weird conspiratorial sort of way. I mean simply that the same technologies we deploy to parameterize our experience can be used to finely calibrate the worker at the workplace as if she were just another part of the machinery or, alternatively, to exclude someone from health insurance coverage based on the their health parameters.
5/31/2022, 6:42 PM
igital technology has especially abetted the parameterization of human experience with every new sensor and data-gathering device, rendering ever more aspects of our own experience as points of aggression.
5/31/2022, 6:42 PM
“An attitude aimed at taking hold of a segment of the world, mastering it, and making it controllable is incompatible with an orientation toward resonance. Such an attitude destroys any experience of resonance by paralyzing its intrinsic dynamism.”
5/31/2022, 6:42 PM
suggest that accommodation cannot be earned, demanded, or compelled, but rather is rooted in an attitude of approachability to which the subject-as-recipient can contribute insofar as he or she must be receptive to God’s gift or grace.” “In sociological terms,” he adds, “this means that resonance always has the character of a gift.”
5/31/2022, 6:42 PM
Similarly, if an object or a person were altogether subject to our control or manipulation, the experience of resonance would also fail to materialize. They would not call to us or be able to creatively respond to us. Indeed, Rosa argues, as we’ve seen, that whatever is wholly within our control we experience as inert and mute. As a result, the farther we extend the imperative to control the world, the more the world will fail to resonate, the more it falls silent, leaving us alienated from it, and to the degree that we come to know ourselves through our relation to a responsive other, then also from ourselves.
5/31/2022, 6:42 PM
As Illich might say, it is a willingness to be surprised by the encounter and to receive ourselves back as a gift of the other. Indeed, Rosa even draws our attention, as Illich does so often, to the gaze. “Our eyes,” Rosa writes, “are windows of resonance. To look into someone’s eyes and to feel them looking back is to resonate with them.”
5/31/2022, 6:42 PM
What Rosa calls resonance is a way of relating to the world such that we are open to being affected by it, can respond to its “call,” and then both transform and be transformed by it—adaptive transformation as opposed to mere appropriation. “The basic mode of vibrant human existence,” Rosa explains, “consists not in exerting control over things but in resonating with them, making them respond to us—thus experiencing self-efficacy—and responding to them in turn.”
5/31/2022, 6:42 PM
Perhaps the most valuable part of the book, in my view, commences at this point in the argument when Rosa describes the alternative of relating to the world as a point of aggression to be mastered, managed, and controlled. This alternative mode of relation Rosa calls resonance.
5/31/2022, 6:42 PM
This structural imperative is coupled with the cultural assumption that “our life will be better if we manage to bring more world within our reach: this is the mantra of modern life, unspoken but relentlessly reiterated and reified in our actions and behavior.”
5/31/2022, 6:42 PM
From here, Rosa lays out what he identifies as the four dimensions of controllability: making the world visible, knowable, expanding our knowledge of itmaking the world physically reachable or accessiblemaking the world manageablemaking the world useful
5/31/2022, 6:42 PM
“this escalatory perspective has gradually turned from a promise into a threat.” “What generates this will to escalation,” he explains, “is not the promise of improvement in our quality of life, but the unbridled threat that we will lose what we have already attained.” “The game of escalation,” Rosa argues, “is perpetuated not by a lust for more, but by the fear of having less and less. Whenever and wherever we stop to take a break, we lose ground against a highly dynamic environment, with which we are always in competition.”
5/31/2022, 6:42 PM
better.” A bit further on, Rosa adds, “More and more, for the average late modern subject of the ‘developed’ western world, everyday life revolves around and amounts to nothing more than tackling an ever-growing to-do list. The entries on this list constitute the points of aggression that we encounter as the world … all matters to be settled, attended to, mastered, completed, resolved, gotten out of the way.”
5/31/2022, 6:42 PM
“The driving cultural force of that form of life we call ‘modern,’” Rosa writes, “is the idea, the hope and the desire, that we can make the modern world controllable.” “Yet,” he quickly adds, “it is only in encountering the uncontrollable that we really experience the world. Only then do we feel touched, moved, alive. A world that is fully known, in which everything has been planned and mastered, would be a dead world.”
5/31/2022, 6:42 PM
Being able to access the internet on a transatlantic flight, a key element of the routine, hardly amounts to a just society conducive to human flourishing. And, naturally, many among us might feel as if they are always spinning their wheels and getting nowhere because existing social structures are stacked against them, often deliberately so.
5/31/2022, 6:42 PM
“It’s convenience, and the way convenience is currently created by tech companies and accepted by most of us,” Horgan argued, “that is key to why we’ve ended up living in a world we all chose, but that nobody seems to want.”
5/31/2022, 6:42 PM
⚡️ Towards Ineffective Altruism
5
Seventh-generation decision making, for example, is an indigenous principle that is enshrined in the Constitution of the Iroquois Nation. It mandates Iroquois leaders to consider the effects of their actions over seven generations, encompassing hundreds of years. Seven generations is a long time, but it is also a finite amount of time. Although this framework prioritizes long-term thinking, it doesn’t bring the weight of infinity to bear on the present. And unlike longtermism, the seventh-generation principle doesn’t pretend to be scientific. It doesn’t rely on unfalsifiable guesses about a future we can’t even imagine to assign expected values to different political decisions; rather, it makes thinking about the future a moral imperative.
5/27/2022, 4:49 PM
How can we depart from a society where those who have the privilege to choose to care about others can, and move towards a society where everyone has the power to care about others and must?
5/27/2022, 4:49 PM
Ineffective altruism eschews metrics, because “What does doing good look like?” should be a continuously-posed question rather than an optimization problem. As an ideology of allocating resources, it is recognized as explicitly political, rather than cloaking itself in the discourse of science and rationality. It allows us to get outside of the concept of altruism entirely — a concept that feels limiting in its focus on the actions of the individual — and instead consider a paradigm of collective, democratic mutual aid. Most importantly, ineffective altruism allows us to ask harder questions than effective altruism does: questions about who and what we value.
5/27/2022, 4:49 PM
Besides the moral hazards of advocating these positions, these ideologies provide an overly simplistic formula for doing good: 1) define “good” as a measurable metric, 2) find the most effective means of impacting that metric, and 3) pour capital into scaling those means up.
5/27/2022, 4:49 PM
These bureaucrats, donors, research institutes, and companies are by no means an ideological monolith, nor do they necessarily represent the beliefs of the average effective altruist. However, this web of entities has one key feature — intellectual, institutional, and financial capital. A relatively small cadre of longtermist academics housed within and legitimized by influential institutions can advance ideas that guide how governments and venture capitalists think about and shape the future.
5/27/2022, 4:49 PM
Idea Machines
4
To those who say, “Well, wouldn’t it be better if the person with good ideas had been the one to get fabulously wealthy instead?” – sure, but in the same way that a founder wants to focus on building their company, not being an investor, sometimes “idea operator” types aren’t the same people who have eight-to-ten-figure startup outcomes. In this world, both sides get to excel at doing the things they want, while also benefiting from each others’ skills and interests.
5/24/2022, 8:26 AM
Tools for thought still suffers from insufficient funding (perhaps best encapsulated by Dynamicland’s history). It has a community, talent, and philosophy attached to it, but until it finds an idea machine, it will be unable to realize its full potential.
5/24/2022, 8:26 AM
An Idea Machine is adept at attracting newcomers and pushing them towards outcomes. If someone says “I’m interested in effective altruism, where do I start?”, there are many clear entry points with concrete ways to think about one’s career, how to spend one’s income, and how to get involved in EA’s community. One can imagine a robust “menu” of action items for a prospective EA, from tithing their salary (low-touch) to working for, or starting, an organization that tackles one of its cause areas (high-touch).
5/24/2022, 8:26 AM
Although I’m not an EA, I think effective altruism is a useful blueprint for understanding a growing number of influential subcultures in tech right now, from progress studies to It’s Time to Build to crypto public goods funding. EA is the strongest example of what I think of as an Idea Machine: a network of operators, thinkers, and funders, centered around an ideology, that’s designed to turn ideas into outcomes.
5/24/2022, 8:26 AM
The Case for American Seriousness
2
We do not need aging institutions to pave the way for American dynamism. But we need American will. And this will comes from ordinary, extraordinary people—the builder class—who’ve chosen to stop whining on Twitter. Who’ve chosen to turn off the news and to believe that this country is not only capable, but unquestionably and undeniably serious.
5/19/2022, 11:49 PM
When you see that kind of seriousness in a founder, the common response is to laugh or mock it. Who is he to believe he can colonize Mars? Who are they to think people will hop in cars with strangers? But investors like myself run toward such serious people because this rare quality—a potent combination of capability and will—inspires others to reach beyond what seems conceivable.
5/19/2022, 11:49 PM
What Is the Alexander Technique?
1
Awareness has a shape, size and ‘boundary’ of variable permeability. It can be compressed, expanded and its contents can be made more or less vivid.
5/16/2022, 9:12 AM
Awareness Is a User Interface
1
Awareness Gives You Agency and the Freedom to Choose
5/16/2022, 9:12 AM
Disengaging Your Parking Brake
1
You may assert a gentle intention of “I want to stop doing this” if you want, but be careful to keep this non-judgemental, because judgement will incline you towards trying not to do the thing, which is what you want to avoid.
What you’re aiming for is to ‘decline to give consent’ to your urge to fix — the Alexander Technique skill of inhibition — while maintaining a clear intention that you want to stop doing the thing.
5/16/2022, 9:12 AM
How to Dance Without Trying to Dance
2
The trick, the way out of the trap, is merely to notice that The Tryer is trying to involve itself. Just notice it and then don’t do anything about it. Leave the ‘the problem’ unsolved.
5/16/2022, 9:12 AM
Put another way, it doesn’t realise that it itself is the problem and, without seeing what’s going on, it tries to shut itself up by yelling more and more loudly at itself. This is the experience you have inside your head when you ‘overthink’ and what happens when people ‘choke’ in a sports context. It’s a vicious thinking trap that goes like this:
5/16/2022, 9:12 AM
Fuck Your Miracle Year
2
This is the sad truth. The double-edged sword of the internet is cutting us much, much deeper than we realize. It makes Dwarkesh and countless others like him (myself included) waste their time writing about geniuses and how we can best foster innovation (a very safe, pre-approved topic—who doesn’t want to be innovative?), which as I said before is essentially just virtue signaling for nerds. It makes it so, so difficult for us to do something for ourselves (for love, for curiosity, for beauty, for pain) and ourselves only, not for college applications or resumes or followers (and this is the real reason why ideas are getting harder to find).
5/16/2022, 9:12 AM
Look, no one talked about how we can engineer miracle years when miracle years were actually still happening. This modern obsession with progress is just a sign of our decadence, of our creative exhaustion and inability to innovate in any meaningful way. Einstein wasn’t reading fucking blog posts about geniuses and he definitely wasn’t writing them. He was thinking.
5/16/2022, 9:12 AM
Thoughts on Envy + April Recommendations
3
I occasionally do things that don’t make sense with absolutely no plan and putting it that way makes me sound reckless and dumb but it’s also so fulfilling. I pursue what I want in an experimental and dogged way because I believe there is something about intense desire that is more important than almost anything else; it doesn’t mean you’ll get the thing, but it points you to an important truth about yourself. I remember hearing an author I liked describe herself as “perpetually seeking” and it made me feel so seen because I have always been a seeker—always will be—and for so many years what I needed most was for someone to tell me that was okay.
5/11/2022, 6:40 PM
Other people also teach us how to accept ourselves. I decided to start writing more simply because I read that anecdote about how Murakami lay in a baseball field one day shortly after selling his jazz bar and was like “It would be cool to be an author” and became an author. It was so affirming to realize someone I admired so much could make decisions the way I do—without much planning or evidence—and have it work out
5/11/2022, 6:40 PM
We flourish when we use our feelings as a source of inspiration instead of letting them fester.
5/11/2022, 6:40 PM
The Amazonification of the American Workforce
6
“A lot of companies, and Amazon would be one of them historically, have kind of accepted eye-watering levels of turnover as just Newtonian physics — an act of God,” Joseph Fuller, a professor at Harvard Business School and the co-director of the school’s Managing the Future of Work initiative, told Recode.
5/11/2022, 6:40 PM
On his worst days, Walter misses his previous warehouse jobs. He jokingly refers to those facilities as “free-range” warehouses.
“Here, I’m like a veal calf,” he said.
5/11/2022, 6:40 PM
Despite the comparatively higher risk of injury than some other warehouse jobs, Amazon can still attract employees because of the wages and benefits it offers. In more than nine years covering Amazon, this reporter has interviewed many workers who are content with working at Amazon for the time being. Some are worried about injury or feel their work is like a dead end, but for many, it’s better than the alternatives.
5/11/2022, 6:40 PM
“It would be nice if Amazon and other companies were a tad more empathetic,” he told Recode, “but we should be so lucky to have other Amazons in how successful they’ve been and how much they’ve grown. Amazon is the embodiment of the American success story,” he said.
5/11/2022, 6:40 PM
“I fought in Iraq and Afghanistan and being deployed was better than [the anxiety of] working for Amazon,” said Ted Johnson, a military veteran who told Recode in the summer of 2021 that his delivery business handled more than 2 million Amazon deliveries before he had to shut it down when Amazon did not renew his contract and offered no explanation.
5/11/2022, 6:40 PM
Eventually, labor historians say, Amazon’s warehouse environment began resembling a blend of at least two different manufacturing approaches pioneered in the early 20th century. One is Taylorism, a dehumanizing system for factory work invented by the mechanical engineer Frederick Taylor. Taylorism, or “scientific management,” broke complex manufacturing down into limited, repetitive tasks; managers were the experts responsible for coming up with the best way to accomplish those tasks, and workers were treated like simpletons. “Amazon is an example of a company which is ultra-Taylorized,” said Nelson Lichtenstein, director of the Center for the Study of Work, Labor, and Democracy at the University of California Santa Barbara.
5/11/2022, 6:40 PM
Internet Studio Gardens
3
There might even be different seasons of play: periods of divergent planting and nurturing followed by collective harvesting and pruning. Many independent visits to one’s own corner might culminate in synchronous sessions where everyone can explore and see all that has been developed in the time since.
5/9/2022, 12:50 PM
just permeable enough to be discovered by those curious enough to add their own drawings and words
5/9/2022, 12:50 PM
want a calmer internet space; where I can share unformed thoughts and gift them time and space to develop. Places where they might drift over to peers in adjacent spaces for the chance – but not the obligation – to respond or otherwise reflect upon, completing the loop at the speed of a lazy river instead of a light circuit.
5/9/2022, 12:50 PM
Ocean Vuong Is Still Learning
15
You bring in other voices, like your cousin Sara’s, and braid them through your work. Is part of this courage you’re describing about giving part of the page away to others?The more I write, the more I realize that writing is predominantly a curatorial work and it’s about listening rather than making. “Poet” in Greek is a maker, but I think a maker at their best is a maker of space rather than a maker of objects. And so I think, for me, it’s about: How do I create space? That’s the harder work. And I think any architect will tell you that you’re sculpting space, you’re sculpting light. That’s much harder ’cause anyone can fill a page with themselves or their expressions, but how do you collaborate with the material world, with the cultural world?
5/9/2022, 12:50 PM
To me, it’s abstracted toward grief. That’s why poems are so great, because they’re seeded in the mode of mythology. And so you can argue that these are myths of the experience of losing one’s mother
5/9/2022, 12:50 PM
Every poet could probably tell you something different, but for me there’s two general modes. One is the poem of the premise, and the other is the poem of the line. The line is similar to a jazz riff. You have a good line and then you try to build on that. It’s much more playful, it’s much more exploratory. The poem “Almost Human” is like that. I started with this line: “I come from a people of sculptors whose masterpiece was rubble.” And I was, like, “Wow, how do I use that line?”A premise poem is like the “Sara” poem. I’m gonna retort and explore this statement. And I knew that I wanted to find common ground with her. That was my goal, similar to an essay or even a chapter in a novel. It’s, like, where are we gonna end up at the end of this chapter? Is there gonna be a divorce? How do we engineer that?
5/9/2022, 12:50 PM
Once I sit down to write, chances are it’s gonna be something I’m gonna publish. I’m not a diary keeper, I don’t really write for myself. This is my job. I treat it seriously. How can I turn this into something meaningful for others? And you don’t know that answer, but you gotta just raise the standard for yourself all the time, and hope that it translates. How can this be useful in the translation to the public? ’Cause that’s what writing is: communication. If I’m communicating to myself, I would just talk to myself. I do that a lot, too. I just iron out my ideas by talking them out. And so my diary is in the air, if you will.
5/9/2022, 12:50 PM
A book of poems . . . thirty, thirty-five poems, right? That’s thirty, thirty-five ideas. A novel, maybe one or two ideas expanded through plot and time and character. But when it comes to poems, you can’t really repeat [the premise] over and over. You gotta find completely different angles. And then you gotta find different registers, tones, styles, modes, forms.
5/9/2022, 12:50 PM
Yeah. Because no one cares. And also, if you’re reading, it’s almost like kryptonite in that space. It’s, like, no one wants to go to a Popeyes to have anything to do with work. They go there to get Popeyes and go on their way. It’s very transient. When you are static in that space, you realize that you almost become invisible. The location absorbs you, which is a wonderful way to work
5/9/2022, 12:50 PM
Just go out there and play. As we grow older, we just cherish that. I don’t remember moments of reading as much as I remember moments of embodying the world and space. In a way, she really helped me think of that. And the poem negotiates, and earns, her position. I wanted to earn a shared experience with her, earn my agreement with her rather than just say, you know, you’re right or wrong
5/9/2022, 12:50 PM
When I’m stuck at a poem, usually it’s on a phrase. And I would stop writing and lift that phrase, almost treat it like a haiku and then solve it. I’ll take it on a walk, I’ll repeat it over and over and try to solve the logic in the image. A lot of my writing is just solving it verbally. It’s faster. Why write a sentence over and over when you can say it hundreds of times within a few minutes. It’s just much more efficient.
5/9/2022, 12:50 PM
I don’t know if it’s good or “successful,” but I feel like I didn’t compromise anything
5/9/2022, 12:50 PM
It’s a found poem: you take these pieces and put them together. I wanted to do something that only the poem could do. Only the poem could show us that. We hear these phrases all the time, we might even say some of these phrases, but they’re diluted in the larger context, and they come at us sporadically through the day, through the media, different voices say them. We don’t notice them. But then, when we take out all the other context and just stack them together, it becomes brutal in its truths.
5/9/2022, 12:50 PM
I start every day with two empty hands. Writing something, even writing something well, teaches you really nothing about how to write the next thing. You’re always starting over.
5/9/2022, 12:50 PM
Cause in the Vietnamese context—and it might be similar to Chinese—words are like spells. If you talk about death, death visits you, so you don’t talk about death at the dinner table. There’s a lot of taboo around speech and how it brings forth the darkness. And so, for my aunt, it was totally foreign to her, you know? That’s what I wanted to create. I wanted to create a foreign experience of something very familiar.
5/9/2022, 12:50 PM
I don’t think of it as correcting their work as they hand it in but as offering them tools to create the next version. It’s, like, what you’ve done is what you’ve done. It’s there, it’s “finished,” and you have it. We’re gonna build the blueprint for the next draft. And so I just go all in. It doesn’t really undo what they’ve done. You have what you have. Here’s the future—if you want it.
5/9/2022, 12:50 PM
It’s also hard because, being a writer, everything is amplified. The selfhood is amplified. It’s literally replicated on the book, right? There’s “Ocean Vuong” on every copy. And I have to be vigilant of how that affects the ego. If you believe in your hype too much, you actually start to lose sight of people. And when you lose sight of people you lose your capacity for compassion and understanding and clarity and thinking and capaciousness in thought. So I have to be vigilant.
5/9/2022, 12:50 PM
And I think there’s a lot of talk about language as a writer, but I do believe that to be a good writer you have to be interested in people, and being interested in people means having compassion for the human condition. And I think that’s one of the things that losing my mother really taught me and solidified for me. I can be really upset or having a bad day with somebody, a co-worker or a peer or something. And I look at them and I say, “Oh, you’re gonna lose your mother.”
5/9/2022, 12:50 PM
Mermaids by Nancy Nguyen
2
What about the spirits of sea creatures, how swimming through the ghost of a blue whale is like listening to a familiar song too far away to decipher
5/9/2022, 12:50 PM
On a camping date, we told ghost stories, and her laughter rang through the trees.
5/9/2022, 12:50 PM
The Agony of Eros: Dating
4
But I think it’s only when we’re able to communicate the precise observation, the actual feeling, that we can make real progress.But it’s hard, it’s so hard, because we’re not taught how to ask hard questions of both ourselves and others.
5/6/2022, 6:39 PM
Some of that disconnect was due to compatibility, but some of it was due to my own bad communication. It takes so much practice to get good articulating the deep sentiment behind the shallow one.
5/6/2022, 6:39 PM
When I was in my late teens or early 20s I would sometimes be in the early stages of dating someone and feel like there was a glass wall between us, I just didn’t really get them, I didn’t know what they wanted from me, and it was so hard for me to have any clarity about who they really are. But I would be like, well, objectively this person is hot and smart and cool. So why wouldn’t I want to date them? Answer: because you can’t really talk to them, dumbass.
5/6/2022, 6:39 PM
The real thing people should be actively looking for is strong emotional connection, as in: to what degree can I share who I am with this person, do they get it, how interested are they in who I am, my feelings and thoughts, can we accommodate each other’s preferences, are we good at talking
5/6/2022, 6:39 PM
Launched to Crickets in 2013. On Track for $1M ARR for 2022. AMA!
3
It's never taken any outside investment, and the only investment I made in it was my time. It's been profitable since day 1. I try to stay focused on the long game and sustainability, and avoid a lot of "growth hacks" (like I could have focused the social stuff on more traditional methods of followers and activity feeds and digital addiction) in favor of creating opinionated software that is good for the users. It's a tough balance to walk in the consumer market.
5/6/2022, 6:39 PM
It's a good market though, small enough that it doesn't really get big VC plays often (and they tend to chase unreasonable expectations that never pan out so they fold). The ski resorts are kinda like Disney World now a days, wanting to own the whole experience and getting very expensive, but they're very behind tech-wise and fortunately skiers like to go to more than one resort so Slopes as a "works everywhere" app has a strong advantage.
5/6/2022, 6:39 PM
It's an ... interesting ... market to be in. The natural cycle of the winter season means my revenue is just a few months of huge spikes
5/6/2022, 6:39 PM
The Mid-Twenties
3
Even as I go into my mid-twenties and late twenties, through the roaring 20s to the bustling 30s and the partying 60s and beyond, I want to keep finding this energy in old passions and new curiosities. I want to keep channeling that energy, letting it drive me into adventures and communities, and of course having fun with it all the way. If we are mindful of it, we can bring a little bit of our child selves, the crazy, reckless, foolish, silly pieces of our youth, with us til the very end. And I think he’s a pretty fun guy to keep around for a while.
5/1/2022, 8:15 AM
I decided to ditch chasing in favor of feeling—following the energy in the given moment, having a constant pulse on what got me excited and having it be enough to just feel passionate for my current situation.
5/1/2022, 8:15 AM
In college, I was always focused on the “right” path for success. I obsessed over getting the right look, the right steps, the right itemized list of experience, the right passions and the right introductions and the right overall impression of a “professional” up-and-coming engineer. Life was one big plan for me, and I planned the hell out of being in the right places at the right times to get what I wanted.
5/1/2022, 8:15 AM
Communication on All Levels
3
That’s love, right? So many roads of thought lead to you. Having them makes me feel less lonely.
5/1/2022, 8:15 AM
When I try to talk to you, when I ask for more explanations, I’m being utopian. Because I’m expressing my faith in the possibility that we could understand each other completely.
5/1/2022, 8:15 AM
I spent so many years refusing to dig deeper because I was afraid I would freak someone out, afraid they would be scared away by my honesty. When I think back on that it makes me want to cry. Because I’ve lost so much time. Here’s what I know: I’ve never regretting asking, never regretted knowing more. Asking only accelerates the already-present ground truth of the relationship—either you two will be able to accept each other, or you won’t and it was always doomed. You might think that presenting the truth in a pretty way will change the outcome, but it won’t.
5/1/2022, 8:15 AM
The Sun Magazine | Les Calanques | by Melissa Febos | Issue 537
13
I can still hear it perfectly in my mind, like the voice of the past calling to remind me that it is past.
4/9/2022, 7:37 PM
Sometimes our best efforts at self-preservation look like a kind of violence.
4/9/2022, 7:37 PM
We are like cicadas, I want to tell her. When we rise from the ground, we shed our old bodies, but we don’t forget them. We call to the thing we need until it answers. Sometimes the one who answers us is a surprise. If we are lucky, we don’t die. We get to live for a while inside that new life.
4/9/2022, 7:37 PM
In the moments after waking, when I blink in the quiet, as the tide of dreams recedes, I sense her here, like a language I can no longer speak but have not entirely forgotten. She follows me up those hills in the thin morning light and watches as I stretch my body. Together we stare out at the cliffs, and I think of that ancient time when the sea was cut off from the ocean, how low it sank, the way the rivers carved canyons to replenish it. Such beauty often requires a kind of devastation. Maybe the saddest landscapes are always the most beautiful.
4/9/2022, 7:37 PM
When we finally hugged goodbye, his wiry arms wrapped so fiercely around my body that it scared me a little. He let me go so fast it was almost a push, then walked away without looking back.
4/9/2022, 7:37 PM
Sometimes I loved my fellow junkies more than I did any other people in the world. Despite the detachment of addiction, their wounds were so close to the surface. Maybe loving them was a way of loving myself when that seemed most impossible. Or maybe it was that we addicts could see in one another what no one else could. Ahmed and I couldn’t heal each other. We had no solutions. But we had found some comfort together, and that isn’t a small thing to those who would rather die than spend a whole life as they are.
4/9/2022, 7:37 PM
“No, thank you,” I always said. “I’m meeting a friend.” As they walked away, I sometimes felt a painful twinge, as if I was standing on a dark street looking up at a bright window, imagining the warmth of the lives inside.
4/9/2022, 7:37 PM
When people expose their innocence like that, I almost have to look away. I can’t bear to see all that sweetness, which immediately throws into relief all the ways it has been compromised.
4/9/2022, 7:37 PM
Extremity holds an allure for me that will likely never wane. I have learned to resist it in so many ways, but I am still learning. While a part of me despairs at the cautious person I’m becoming, another part rejoices. I am finally under the care of someone who is careful with me
4/9/2022, 7:37 PM
My mouth watered, and my eyes marveled, but the picturesque scenery felt doused in loneliness. Foreign beauty is of no comfort to the homesick.
4/9/2022, 7:37 PM
I immediately located my bag, wedged against the wall. I prodded my misery, too, to see if it was still there, and it was, transmitting its hopeless report like a TV left on overnight
4/9/2022, 7:37 PM
It is a particularly crushing disappointment to realize, again, that your problem is yourself. The chasm of despair that I’d felt in New York was still with me, in me. Maybe, I thought, it was me. I considered the terrible possibility that what tormented me, what I loathed in myself, was the truest part of me — the singed and poisonous center that could never be scraped out.
4/9/2022, 7:37 PM
imagining their thrumming as a ring of light that surrounds the building, each insect body a bright ember.
4/9/2022, 7:37 PM
Why Do We Turn to Poetry at the Important Moments in Our Lives? - Garrison Institute
4
Stanley Kunitz used to say that poetry is aware that we are both living and dying at the same time. We think, “Oh, my God. I’m alive.” And, “Oh, my God. One day I won’t be.” We experience the mystery of living on a planet, circling a star—the full catastrophe of living is so mysterious and unknowable. We’re hurdling through space, stuck to this planet by gravity. We’re not who we think we are. We don’t know what’s happening. So we make these songs to sing to each other. We make these sounds that both reassure us and urge us on, they help us sleep and help us wake up.
4/6/2022, 8:28 AM
Yes, like a talisman. It’s like a stone that you put in your pocket or hold in your hand. We have talked about this a lot, Marie, that writing or reading a really good poem at a particular time can transform you
4/6/2022, 8:28 AM
The poems that we turn to over and over again are deeply felt and well made. When you pick them up, they don’t rattle. And it’s interesting that with these kinds of poems, you usually don’t feel the personality of the poet taking over.
4/6/2022, 8:28 AM
Robert Frost line, “A poem is a momentary stay against confusion.” Not only has someone stood where we’ve stood, but they’ve somehow created a structure that can hold order and disorder in equipoise. They can hold what Rainer Maria Rilke calls the unsayable nature of every moment and also create a structure that can give a kind of order, sound, and sense to it.
4/6/2022, 8:28 AM
Skyhooks
1
If an architect believes for a moment that there are hooks in the sky to hang his creations from, he may be able to conceive of structures that he would otherwise not dare to think about. Once the design starts to take shape, he may then begin to see ways in which the essence of it can still be achieved without the need for sky-hooks at all. Maybe this will work for us, too.
4/6/2022, 8:28 AM
Live the Questions: Rilke on Embracing Uncertainty and Doubt as a Stabilizing Force
2
Your doubt may become a good quality if you train it. It must become knowing, it must become critical. Ask it, whenever it wants to spoil something for you, why something is ugly, demand proofs from it, test it, and you will find it perplexed and embarrassed perhaps, or perhaps rebellious. But don’t give in, insist on arguments and act this way, watchful and consistent, every single time, and the day will arrive when from a destroyer it will become one of your best workers — perhaps the cleverest of all that are building at your life.
3/31/2022, 2:50 AM
I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.
3/31/2022, 2:50 AM
Postcapitalist Desire
2
Fisher was interested — and had always been interested — in the ways that radical political messages could be smuggled into collective consciousness through popular culture. He was also intrigued by the ways that pop culture could not only entice us with its infectious euphoria but also push past capitalism’s co-option of the pleasure principle into something deeper, something altogether unconscious, and bring it kicking and screaming to the surface.
3/31/2022, 2:04 AM
The point was, instead, “to get out through your head”, through the application of a “psychedelic reason”, “auto-effect[ing] your brain into a state of ecstasy”.
3/31/2022, 2:04 AM
What Google Search Isn’t Showing You
4
The search engine’s stated mission is to “show you sites you perhaps weren’t aware of.” Its results, based on its own custom algorithm and data gathering, prioritize text-based Web sites that lack ads, mobile support, encryption, and other features that qualify as good S.E.O
3/25/2022, 7:49 PM
Decades of search-engine optimization have resulted in content that is formulated not to inform readers but to rank prominently on Google pages. That might be one reason that my toaster results felt so redundant: each site is attempting to solve the same algorithmic equation.
3/25/2022, 7:49 PM
Better information could be found on social media, discussion boards, and small-scale personal blogs, but Google Search was deprioritizing those platforms in favor of corporate Web sites, which could afford the money and effort it takes to optimize for Google’s search algorithm. “The authentic Web” seemed hidden, Brereton said. “The algorithms tell us what to read.”
3/25/2022, 7:49 PM
Brereton’s post–which ended “Google is dead. Long live Google + ‘site:reddit.com’ ”
3/25/2022, 7:49 PM
Dear Bear: I Got Everything I Wanted, but I'm Still Unhappy
3
I think you need to find something you love that cracks your life open and makes everything feel possible again. I see that there’s a part of you that wants to be in control—that worries about getting everything just right. But there’s also a part of you that’s always seeking. I love the seeker in you. I can tell that even when you’re trying to squash it into oblivion you love it too. Seeking is beginning of everything, I think. I can’t tell you what to do—no one can. But I know you’ll find it because you keep searching.
3/24/2022, 9:06 AM
Here’s what I know: if you’re spending your time on something you love, the passage of time is exciting because it brings you closer. If you’re spending your time on something you don’t believe in, you feel like you’re bringing robbed.
3/24/2022, 9:06 AM
There’s a Shirley Jackson line that goes “Somewhere, deep inside you, hidden by all sorts of fears and worries and petty little thoughts, is a clean pure being made of radiant colors.”
3/24/2022, 9:06 AM
'Askers' vs. 'Guessers'
1
This is a classic case of Ask Culture meets Guess Culture. In some families, you grow up with the expectation that it's OK to ask for anything at all, but you gotta realize you might get no for an answer. This is Ask Culture.
In Guess Culture, you avoid putting a request into words unless you're pretty sure the answer will be yes. Guess Culture depends on a tight net of shared expectations. A key skill is putting out delicate feelers. If you do this with enough subtlety, you won't even have to make the request directly; you'll get an offer. Even then, the offer may be genuine or pro forma; it takes yet more skill and delicacy to discern whether you should accept.
3/22/2022, 10:49 PM
Magic Beans
6
To explore what an NFT is, I tried to imagine what the opposite of an NFT might be, while still remaining a digital object. An anti-NFT. If an NFT is socially promiscuous and vacuous, an anti-NFT ought to be a non-promiscuous and substantial digital social object.
3/22/2022, 10:49 PM
Creative works are social objects in the fullest sense — they exist in a nexus of social, cultural, and legal links to other people and things, and they are only valuable to the extent they can fully participate in their whole context. Rights regimes restrict known rights, but also create rights if they are well designed, driving generativity.
3/22/2022, 10:49 PM
Over a decade ago, when Web2 was new, we all talked a lot about “social objects.” In 2007, an early social networking entrepreneur Jyri Engeström popularized the basic notion of social objects, Hugh MacLeod wrote a thing about them, and I did too, in 2009. For a while there was talk of “object-centered sociality” and in consulting gigs I talked of “high-frequency social objects” (ie things like YouTube videos and early memes). NFTs clearly belong in that tradition. They are digital social objects. Except they are a lot wilder. They don’t live within particular platforms or walled gardens, and aren’t attached to a particular company’s technology or even a specific open standard.
3/22/2022, 10:49 PM
The point of this legal science-fiction thought experiment is that copyright works in the somewhat promiscuous way it actually does because it’s a pragmatic way to enable creative collaboration. Every creative industry has various conventional mechanisms and practices allowing rights to works to be bought and sold, assigned, shared, used as security for financing and so on. Rights that are stripped of this social-legal character are much less valuable.
3/22/2022, 10:49 PM
Hell, you aren’t even buying even an unstable pointer to a JPEG. Including something like a URL to the JPEG or an IPFS content identifier2 is simply a matter of artistic courtesy. Technically an NFT is simply a token representing an object. It is not required to point to it. The object need not even exist.
3/22/2022, 10:49 PM
Or to put it in less financial terms, a creative work is a creature of context, and it can’t really achieve a full expression of itself unless it can fully interact with its context. The job of an NFT is to create and embody this context.
3/22/2022, 10:49 PM
On Worry
7
So: when someone gives a bit of writing advice (“Don’t worry, WORK,” or “Show don’t tell,” or “Always be escalating”) we should think, “Yes, I’ll try this, to some extent, until it feels wrong. I will remember to always assess that advice per actual conditions, i.e., this particular story, and in light of my particular inclinations and talent.”
3/20/2022, 8:04 PM
So, here’s a thought: “craft” might just consist in cobbling together an approach that allows us efficient access to our sub-conscious mind, i.e., an approach that works for us, and therefore doesn’t need to be justified or defended. If we state one “truth” about writing (“Don’t worry, work”) and then state its opposite (“Don’t work, worry”) our approach is going to consist in some accommodation of those two truths — or, like, a mixing of those two approaches, a turning of the dial to find the right setting for us.
3/20/2022, 8:04 PM
“All I have to do is show up every day and do what feels right. and, even if I am, in fact, messing the story up in that moment, that, too, is part of the long, heroic journey called ‘writing this story.’ Even if I am writing by exactly the wrong method, the process will eventually tell me this. All I have to do is: bring my energy to the process, every day.”
3/20/2022, 8:04 PM
If you accept (even partially) this idea that our real power as writers is located in the split-second decisions we make, and in the way these accumulate in a story over many passes through it, then you’ll see that the beauty of a piece of writing doesn’t depend on what we have decided about it in advance, but in the accumulating quality of those split-second decisions (i.e., how in touch we are with our good instincts) and our willingness to go through it again and again.
3/20/2022, 8:04 PM
The mantra becomes, “We’ll figure it out, by trusting the process.”
3/20/2022, 8:04 PM
So: we admit a fear (and that feels good, and honest) and then resolve to face that fear. Facing that fear is exactly equal to craft. And this then clears the way for some specific, technical work. Our worry is no longer psychological or abstract
3/20/2022, 8:04 PM
There was a pause and then Stuart said, “Well, how about we don’t shoot it that way?”This is a profound notion: if we turn to our fears with all our creative energy, there is less chance they will come true. That is: worry can be a form of esthetic preparation.
3/20/2022, 8:04 PM
Bohemians
1
A falling star is brief, but isn’t one nonetheless glad to have seen it?
3/20/2022, 8:04 PM
A Future for SQL on the Web
2
I’m excited to announce absurd-sql which makes this possible. absurd-sql is a filesystem backend for sql.js that allows SQLite to read/write from IndexedDB in small blocks, just like it would a disk. I ported my app to use and you can try it here.
3/17/2022, 9:09 AM
The end result is absurd-sql, and it’s a persistent backend for SQLite on the web. That means it doesn’t have to load the whole db into memory, and writes persist. In this post I will explain the absurdities of the web’s storage APIs (mainly IndexedDB), show how SQLite provides a 10x perf improvement, explain all the cool tricks that make it work, and explain the locking/transactional semantics that make it robust.
3/17/2022, 9:09 AM
Managing UI State With a Reactive Relational Database
30
outline of an approach where user interfaces are expressed as queries, those queries are executed by a fast, performant incremental maintenance system, and that incremental maintenance gives us detailed data provenance throughout the system.
Together, those ideas seem like they could make app development radically simpler and more accessible, possibly so simple that it could be done “at the speed of thought” by users who aren’t skilled in app development.
3/17/2022, 9:09 AM
Imagine a browser-style developer console that allows you to click on a UI element and see what component it was generated from. In a system with end-to-end provenance, we could identify how this element came to be in a much deeper way, answering questions not just questions like “what component template generated this element?” but “what query results caused that component to be included?” and even “what event caused those query results to look this way?“.
3/17/2022, 9:09 AM
Many systems for incremental maintenance work by tracking data provenance: they remember where a particular computation got its inputs, so that it knows when that computation needs to be re-run.
3/17/2022, 9:09 AM
Taken to the extreme, we’ve ended up with a strange model of an interactive app, as a sort of full-stack query. Users take actions that are added to an unordered set of events, and then the DOM minimally updates in response. The entire computation in between is handled by a single relational query.
3/17/2022, 9:09 AM
Our prototype stores all state, including ephemeral UI state that would normally live exclusively in the main object graph, in the database, so any change to the layout of that ephemeral state forced a migration
3/17/2022, 9:09 AM
In principle, declarative queries should be a step towards good app performance by default. The application developer can model the data conceptually, and it is up to the database to find an efficient way to implement the read and write access patterns of the application. In practice, our results have been mixed.
3/17/2022, 9:09 AM
This did lead to another observation, though: in this model, we can decouple restarting the app from resetting the state.
3/17/2022, 9:09 AM
In most apps, closing a window is a destructive operation, but we found ourselves delighted to restart the app and find ourselves looking at the same playlist that we were looking at before. It made closing or otherwise “losing” the window feel much safer to us as end-users.
persistence by default means you're always safe to close and not lose state
3/17/2022, 9:09 AM
We found it nice to treat all data, whether ephemeral “UI data” or persistent “app data”, in a uniform way, and to think of persistence as a lightweight property of some data, rather than a foundational part of the data model.
3/17/2022, 9:09 AM
We’ve taken a different approach of modeling this as a problem of shared state: both our application and Spotify are reading/writing from the same SQLite database.
When the user performs an action, we write that action to the database as an event, which is then synced by a background daemon using the imperative Spotify APIs.
Conversely, when something happens in Spotify, we write an event to our local database, and the app updates reactively as it would with an app-created write. Overall, we think shared state is a better abstraction than message passing for many instances of integrations with external services.
this needs to handle reconciling conflicts. shared state across multiple clients
3/17/2022, 9:09 AM
Many users who are familiar with standard UNIX tools and conventions speak wistfully of “plain text” data formats, despite its disadvantages. We feel that plain text is an unfortunate way to store data in general, but recognize what these users long for: a source of truth that is legible outside of the application, possibly in ways that the application developer never anticipated.
3/17/2022, 9:09 AM
Unfortunately,
verb-based APIs create an unfortunate n-to-n problem
: every app needs to know how to call the APIs of every other app. In contrast, data-based interoperability can use the shared data directly: once an app knows how to read a data format, it can read that data regardless of which app produced it.
3/17/2022, 9:09 AM
This kind of editing doesn’t need to be done manually by a human using a generic UI; it could also be done programmatically by a script or an alternate UI view. We’ve effectively created a data-centric scripting API for interacting with the application, without the original application needing to explicitly work to expose an API. We think this points towards fascinating possibilities for interoperability.
3/17/2022, 9:09 AM
Data-centric design encourages interoperabilityOne quality we found particularly intriguing in our prototype was the ability to control the app from the outside, using the database as an intermediary.
3/17/2022, 9:09 AM
the sources are the base tables, the sinks are the DOM templates, and the two are connected by a tree of queries. All dependencies are known by the system at runtime.
3/17/2022, 9:09 AM
The Riffle model produces a highly structured app. Each component contains:
local relational state
reactive queries that transform data
a view template for rendering DOM nodes and registering event handlers
3/17/2022, 9:09 AM
It’s unusual to send user input through the database before showing it on the screen, but there’s a major advantage to this approach. If we can consistently achieve this performance budget and refresh our reactive queries synchronously, the application becomes easier to reason about, because it always shows a single consistent state at any point in time
3/17/2022, 9:09 AM
Finally, UI state is persistent by default. It’s often convenient for end-users to have state like sort order or scroll position persisted, but it takes active work for app developers to add these kinds of features. In Riffle, persistence comes for free, although ephemeral state is still easily achievable by setting up component keys accordingly.
3/17/2022, 9:09 AM
A typical React solution might be to introduce some local component state with the useState hook. But the idiomatic Riffle solution is to avoid React state, and instead to store the UI state in the database.
3/17/2022, 9:09 AM
Our prototype is implemented as a reactive layer over the SQLite embedded relational database. The reactive layer runs in the UI thread, and sends queries to a SQLite database running locally on-device. For rendering, we use React, which interacts with Riffle via custom hooks.
3/17/2022, 9:09 AM
This would make it easy to decide to persist some UI state, like the currently active tab in an app. UI state could even be shared among clients—in real-time collaborative applications, it's often useful to share cursor position, live per-character text contents, and other state that was traditionally relegated to local UI state.
3/17/2022, 9:09 AM
With a fast database close at hand, this split doesn’t need to exist. What if we instead combined both “UI state” and “app state” into a single state management system? This unified approach would help with managing a reactive query system—if queries need to react to UI state, then the database needs to somehow be aware of that UI state. Such a system could also present a unified system model to a developer, e.g. allow them to view the entire state of a UI in a debugger.
3/17/2022, 9:09 AM
Low latency is a critical property for reactive systems. A small spreadsheet typically updates instantaneously, meaning that the user never needs to worry about stale data; a few seconds of delay when propagating a change would be a different experience altogether. The goal of a UI state management system should be to converge all queries to their new result within a single frame after a write;
3/17/2022, 9:09 AM
The developer can register reactive queries, where the system guarantees that they will be updated in response to changing data
3/17/2022, 9:09 AM
This limits the scope of reactivity: the UI is guaranteed to show the latest local state, but not the latest state of the overall system.
3/17/2022, 9:09 AM
However, database queries are often not included in the core reactive loop. When a query to a backend database requires an expensive network request, it’s impractical to keep a query constantly updated in real-time; instead, database reads and writes are modeled as side effects which must interact with the reactive system.
3/17/2022, 9:09 AM
However, we’ve observed that the primary use of database queries is to manage peristence: that is, storing and retrieving data from disk.
We imagine a more expansive role for the relational database, where even data that would normally be kept in an in-memory data structure would be logically maintained “in the database”
3/17/2022, 9:09 AM
In data-centric apps, much of the complexity of building and modifying the app comes from managing and propagating state.
3/17/2022, 9:09 AM
apps as queries
3/17/2022, 9:09 AM
We’re exploring a new way to manage data in apps by storing all app state—including the state of the UI—in a single reactive database.
Instead of imperatively fetching data from the database, the user writes reactive queries that update with fresh results whenever their dependencies change.
3/17/2022, 9:09 AM
I Was Wrong. CRDTs Are the Future
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CRDTs would let us remake Wave, but simpler and better. And they would let us write software that treats users as digital citizens, not a digital serfs. And that matters.
3/17/2022, 9:09 AM
Philosophically, if I modify a google doc my computer is asking Google for permission to edit the file. (You can tell because if google’s servers say no, I lose my changes.) In comparison, if I git push to github, I’m only notifying github about the change to my code. My repository is mine. I own all the bits, and all the hardware that houses them. This is how I want all my software to work. Thanks to people like Martin, we now know how to make good CRDTs
3/17/2022, 9:09 AM
I increasingly don’t care for the world of centralized software.
Software interacts with my data, on my computers. Its about time my software reflected that relationship. I want my laptop and my phone to share my files over my wifi. Not by uploading all my data to servers in another country. Especially if those servers are financed by advertisers bidding for my eyeballs.
3/17/2022, 9:09 AM
OT’s one advantage is that it fits well in centralized software - which is most software today. But distributed algorithms work great in centralized software too. (Eg look at Github). And I think a really high quality CRDT running in wasm would be faster than an OT implementation in JS. And even if you only care about centralized systems, remember - Google runs into scaling problems with Google Docs because of OT’s limitations.
3/17/2022, 9:09 AM
Since then, researchers have been busy trying to make OT work better. The most promising work uses CRDTs (Conflict-Free Replicated data types). CRDTs approach the problem slightly differently to allow realtime editing without needing a central source of truth.
3/17/2022, 9:09 AM
Its not perfect though. We wanted Wave to replace email. Email is federated. An email thread can span multiple companies and it all just works. And unlike facebook messenger, emails are only be sent to the companies that are CC’ed. If I email my coworker, my email doesn’t leave the building. For Wave to replace email, we needed the same functionality
3/17/2022, 9:09 AM
The big problem with OT is that dependancy on a centralized server.
3/17/2022, 9:09 AM
At its heart, OT is a glorified for() loop with some helper functions to update character offsets. In practice, this works great. OT is simple and understandable.
3/17/2022, 9:09 AM
Home Is Where the Bits Flow
6
The challenge of our generation is to create an internet that helps us care for each other, not fight on the streets. The internet that informs with facts not fake news. The internet that is a bicycle, not a railroad for the mind.
3/17/2022, 9:09 AM
The internet has space for a million flowers to bloom. We can create anything. If this electric place is to be our sometimes home, we aught to decorate. But how? How do we fill our strange rectangles of glass with interactions that nurture and care for us?
3/17/2022, 9:09 AM
If we treated the physical like we do the virtual, corporate America would own the footpaths and the roads we walk on. In every country and every city, they would own the ground and own sky. Generously paid for by personalised ads streamed from the first moment, while the roads twist and wind until we lose ourselves. Don’t like it? Leave. You’re free to be disconnected. But you’ll be alone. After all, all your friends are lost in here too. Don’t like it? This is not a democracy. There is no election. You do not pick the algorithm. You aren’t a citizen and you aren’t the customer. You deliver the product - your attention. Sold to the highest bidder. Somebody has to pay for all these servers and it isn’t you.
3/17/2022, 9:09 AM
Change my perspective click by click until we all become Portland, burning from the inside out. Each of us quietly gaslit into the closest prison for our minds. Neighbours brought to violence by a million insidious suggestions, whispered one refresh at a time. Make no mistake; a film is created in the editing room. So too your digital life.
3/17/2022, 9:09 AM
But we’re in the dark and we’re fumbling. We’re children too soon given the tools of war, and we don’t know which end explodes. When I was young society believed Doom was going to make us violent. We were wrong. It was social media that hurt us - tween girls given new ways to bully each other into insecurity. The Like button was invented to share positivity. There’s the bomb, weaponised by our neuroticism.
3/17/2022, 9:09 AM
We aren’t purely physical beings.
Most of our day exists outside our body. Our minds slip out through our eyes, out into our screens. We become a different kind of organism, living in a weird symbiosis with reddit and whatsapp and gmail.
3/17/2022, 9:09 AM
The Tools of Generative Art, From Flash to Neural Networks
5
Many artistic processes can be described as algorithmic. Artists follow sequences or steps in the production of their own work. Often what makes one artist’s practice more interesting than another’s is spontaneity, a willingness to challenge their own system. Sometimes, it is computerized tools that make this leap possible.
3/17/2022, 9:09 AM
Sougwen Chung, Anna Ridler, and Helena Sarin are some of the artists who train GANs on their own drawings and paintings—bodies of visual information that are distinctly theirs, unlike large public data sets. Sarin has also used visuals generated by AI as the basis for works made with various analog processes, from glass fusing and pottery to monotypes and screen-printing. By combining these physical art-making methods with cutting-edge digital techniques, Sarin has developed her own language that is warmer and more physically engaging than push-button GAN images.
3/17/2022, 9:09 AM
The figures in Klingemann’s work are pale and gaunt, resembling those in old photos of asylum patients or medical catalogues documenting human deformities. The faces enter the world only briefly, but they all have the look of old souls carrying the weight of a troubled past. This haunted aesthetic is Klingemann’s hallmark; he has always avoided the tendency to make digital art with a polished and shiny aesthetic. GANs trained on photos tend to introduce bizarre quirks as they struggle to produce something like the input images, and Klingemann relishes the results. They are quite different from generative art that uses iterative commands to draw vector-based shapes to the screen.
3/17/2022, 9:09 AM
Reas was interested in the phenomenon of emergence, a process in which a collective entity, such as a flock of birds or a school of fish, begins to exhibit properties that its individual members do not. His work MicroImage (2002) is an animation built from repetitions of relatively simple parts and commands. From thousands of dots, each programmed to react simply to its surroundings, a more complex system takes shape. The result is a gorgeous procedural animation that feels like a living, breathing, pen-and-ink drawing.
3/17/2022, 9:09 AM
Flash helped create a new breed of artist/developer, unschooled in traditional computer science and unafraid to dive in and experiment by sharing code and learning by doing. Many contemporary generative artists cite Davis’s site praystation.com as the inspiration for their interest in creative coding.
3/17/2022, 9:09 AM
The Universe May Stop Expanding in Five Billion Years
1
but because it was too ordinary
to even dare remember,
because we’ll someday ache
for any regular sunday in june
where the sun was a sure
thing and breath tasted like warm
grass and there was not a single
indication the cosmos would one
day shut like your eyes, tight
with pleasure.
3/17/2022, 9:09 AM
Epistemological Pluralism and the Revaluation of the Concrete
6
If computers are reallythe tools we use to write, to design, to play with ideas and shapes and images, they should not beaddressed with the language of desktop calculators. Moving out of the impasse also would requirethe reconstruction of our cultural assumptions about hard logic as the "law" of thought. Addressingthis question brings us full circle to where we began, with the assertion that epistemologicalpluralism is a necessary condition for a more inclusive computer culture
3/17/2022, 9:09 AM
The development of a new computer culture would require more than technological progress andmore than environments where there is permission to work with highly personal approaches. Itwould require a new and softer construction of the technological, with a new set of intellectual andemotional values more like those we apply to harpsichords than hammers
3/17/2022, 9:09 AM
Bricolage is a way to organize work. It is not a stage in a progression to a superiorform. Indeed, there is a culture of adult programming virtuosos, the hacker culture, that wouldrecognize many elements of the bricolage style as their own. And interviews with graduate studentsin computer science turned up highly skilled bricoleurs, most of them aware that their style was"countercultural."
3/17/2022, 9:09 AM
With a structured programming style, one usually does not feel comfortable with a construct until itis thoroughly black-boxed, with both its inner workings and all traces of the perhaps messy processof its construction hidden from view. Many programmers feel a sense of power when they useblack-boxed programs, perhaps because of the thought that others might take them up exactly asfrozen.But black-boxing makes other programmers nervous rather than exultant.
3/17/2022, 9:09 AM
s a carrier forpluralistic ideas, the computer holds the promise of catalyzing change, not only within computationbut in our culture at large.
3/17/2022, 9:09 AM
The computer standsbetwixt and between the world of formal systems and physical things; it has the ability to make theabstract concrete. In the simplest case, an object moving on a computer screen might be defined bythe most formal of rules and so be like a construct in pure mathematics; but at the same time it isvisible, almost tangible, and allows a sense of direct manipulation that only the enculturedmathematician can feel in traditional formal systems
3/17/2022, 9:09 AM
An App Can Be a Home-Cooked Meal
8
What is this feeling? Independence? Security? Sovereignty?
Is it simply … the feeling of being home?
3/2/2022, 11:39 PM
This feels natural; anyone who has ever, like … eaten a meal … of any kind … recognizes that cooking is totally tangled up with domesticity and curiosity, health and love.
3/2/2022, 11:39 PM
But let’s substitute a different phrase: “learn to cook.” People don’t only learn to cook so they can become chefs. Some do! But many more people learn to cook so they can eat better, or more affordably. Or because they want to carry on a tradition. Sometimes they learn just because they’re bored! Or even because — get this — they love spending time with the person who’s teaching them.
3/2/2022, 11:39 PM
I am the programming equivalent of a home cook.
3/2/2022, 11:39 PM
This app is Entirely Itself — not a framework, not a sample app.
3/2/2022, 11:39 PM
Our actual world isn’t totally broken. I do not take for granted, not for one millisecond, the open source components and sample code that made this project possible. In the 21st century, as long as you’re operating within the bounds of the state of the art, programming can feel delightfully Lego-like. All you have to do is rake your fingers through the bin.
3/2/2022, 11:39 PM
In a better world, I would have built this in a day using some kind of modern, flexible HyperCard for iOS, exporting a sturdy, standalone app that did exactly what I wanted and nothing else.
In our actual world, I built it in about a week, and roughly half of that time was spent wrestling with different flavors of code-signing and identity provisioning and I don’t even know what. I waved some incense and threw some stones and the gods of Xcode allowed me to pass.
3/2/2022, 11:39 PM
I distributed the app to my family using TestFlight, and in TestFlight it shall remain forever: a cozy, eternal beta.
3/2/2022, 11:39 PM
The Baked Data Architectural Pattern
1
Baked Data: bundling a read-only copy of your data alongside the code for your application, as part of the same deployment
2/23/2022, 6:06 PM
The Rise of Technocracy and the COVID-19 Pandemic in Taiwan: Courts, Human Rights, and the Protection of Vulnerable Populations
1
A technocratic approach, where decisions are made by medical and public health experts, tends to focus on the collective right to health and life as opposed to individual right to privacy and liberty
2/18/2022, 6:51 AM
Paradigm Shifts for The decentralized Web
11
And if we really want free options, we could even imagine paying with our personal data, giving selected parts away in exchange for ads. That’s of course how social media are implicitly supported now, but the main difference will be that we decide which data can be used for advertising purposes and which cannot. This proves once more that, at its core, decentralization starts with us taking back control of our data, as a source for a new generation of innovative Web applications
2/7/2022, 1:05 PM
temporally different way of interacting with data. In traditional Web applications, the procedure is typically “send query—wait for execution to complete—act on all results”. In a decentralized setting, we know that data collection will take time, so applications should be prepared to do more useful things instead of just waiting. The procedure becomes “send query—act on each incoming result”, processing every piece of incoming data a streaming way. In general, completeness should never be assumed, given that the Web is an open world.
2/7/2022, 1:05 PM
it implies a complex, cross-API query engine. I envision that multiple implementations of such a query library would compete, and eventually replace the API-specific client-side libraries that are symptomatic of tight coupling between clients, services, and their underlying data. A possible direction to realize this in a scalable way is to split monolithic Web APIs into API features, which can be reused across data pods.
2/7/2022, 1:05 PM
Therefore, I believe that decentralized Web applications should exclusively use declarative queries to view and update data on our pods, so their expression of the intended data operation remains constant—even if interfaces are different. Rather than directly interacting with pod interfaces, queries are processed by a client-side library, which translates these queries into concrete HTTP requests against one or multiple data pods. This means that, rather than a horizontal interface orientation or a vertical interface that directly accesses the Web API, decentralized Web applications need a vertical interface orientation with an internal horizontal separation.
2/7/2022, 1:05 PM
The current generation of Web applications communicates with servers through a highly specific sequence of steps that are hard-coded into the application logic. These steps contain specific requests to a Web API, a (typically custom) interface exposed by the server. This approach results in a highly specific contract between a client and a server—which is problematic on a decentralized Web, where data can actually reside in different data pods with possibly different interfaces. It is unrealistic to hope that all data pods will have the same Web API (be it Linked Data Platform, SPARQL, or GraphQL). Not only would this require a standardization effort without precedent, such a standard could never cover all cases. Given that we aim for competition on the data market as well, different kinds of data pods are expected to provide different kinds of interfaces with varying expressivity. On top of this, on a decentralized Web, the data needed by applications will be scattered across multiple data pods. So even if all pods had the same interface, apps would still need to route requests to the right pods and combine their data.
2/7/2022, 1:05 PM
Indeed, we can regard a fully decentralized approach as a way to realize platform neutrality, where applications and storage solutions become interchangeable, just like websites and Internet providers.
how do we get there and unify on an interface to get data and create a world where people are incentivized not to make data silos?
2/7/2022, 1:05 PM
Importantly, this disentanglement of data and services creates separate markets for data and applications. Each of those to markets comes with its own competitive forces that stimulate creativity and innovation at a higher rate, since the ability to provide a service no longer depends on collecting data.
What sorts of different incentives will arise for data providers vs. app providers?
2/7/2022, 1:05 PM
Any change in one view is directly reflected in another because they share the same storage.
2/7/2022, 1:05 PM
decentralized Web applications decouple data and applications: you enter data only once—in your own data pod. Instead of maintaining credentials with each app, you log in through your data pod and give apps permission to read or write specific parts of your data. The Web’s ecosystem thereby evolves from bundled data+service packages into applications as interchangeable views, wherein each Web app provides consistent visualizations, interactions, and processing over your personal data pod. Furthermore, those apps let you interact with any other data pods you have access to, such as those of your friends. Applications ask rather than store, and they are able to reuse data create by other apps, avoiding vendor lock-in.
2/7/2022, 1:05 PM
In fact, these platforms have become inseparable from their data: we use “Facebook” to refer to both the application and the data that drives that application. The result is that nearly every Web app today tries to ask you for more and more data again and again, leading to dangling data on duplicate and inconsistent profiles we can no longer manage. And of course, this comes with significant privacy concerns.
2/7/2022, 1:05 PM
In a fully decentralized social network, every single part of an interaction—which would now be stored in its entirety on Facebook—could reside in different data pods. Consider this social media post, where an author states his professional opinion on an online news article. Literally each single piece of data can be in another data pod:
2/7/2022, 1:05 PM
Ruben Verborgh’s Homepage
1
As a computer scientist, I investigate how decentralized knowledge graphs on the Web can lead us into the post-Big Data era, where companies realize that data harvesting as a business model is a dead end. The future consists of lots of small data that is linked. People will be in control of where they store their data and with whom they share it,
2/7/2022, 1:05 PM
The Anatomy of a Poet
5
I am making art, I am making poetry, because I want to write things that make people feel, that make their chest full, that undoes the Flattening we’ve been forced to accept as inevitable. The truth is, I could never publish the type of things I write here in a real magazine; no one would pay me for it, because it doesn’t fit into “genre.” Because it prioritizes feeling over form. Because there is no logic to the words on this page, and I never know the truth until I’ve written it down. And yet this work, this poetry, sustains me. May we make art that feels true even if people cringe. May bad poems be louder than silence.
2/7/2022, 1:05 PM
To me writing is contemplatively physical: I am pacing, I am humming, I tap my fingers on cool wood, and I put pen to page. Every sentence is a poem when you breathe deep enough. If my chest is full, my work is done.
2/7/2022, 1:05 PM
The violence done is so innocuous, what’s left is just an unsettling feeling, like the remnants of an invisible hand on one’s throat.” This hand on my throat––that bastardized my earnestness, turned my softness into lead––was invisible, was another’s, and was my own.
2/7/2022, 1:05 PM
Audre Lorde defined poetry not as a genre, but an emotional sensation. “I speak here of poetry as a revelatory distillation of experience,” she writes, “not the sterile word play that, too often, the white fathers distorted the word ‘poetry’ to mean in order to cover a desperate wish for imagination without insight.”
2/7/2022, 1:05 PM
These divisions sometimes prove useful, but are more often used as a distraction, a byproduct of what I like to call The Flattening. Under capitalism, the mechanism that birthed genre and continues to uphold it as a marketing tool, we are encouraged to undergo a flattening of every aspect of our lives: to make flat the body, to drive dull the senses, to lay still the spirit, to wipe blank the mind. Genre is a flattening of literary expression, yes, but it is also a diminishment of the vastness of language: to Aristotle, and to many others in the West, if language does not fit into these arbitrary categories, then it has no right to exist at all.
2/7/2022, 1:05 PM
The Most Important Scarce Resource Is Legitimacy
1
What's going on here is a pattern of a similar type to what we saw with the not-yet-issued Bitcoin and Ethereum coin rewards: the coins were ultimately owned not by a cryptographic key, but by some kind of social contract.
2/7/2022, 8:38 AM
Why You Can’t Resist Wordle
4
After childhood, we rarely have to think about how a single letter change can cause a vast difference in a word’s meaning, or about just how many possibilities exist within five letters. Games like Wordle bring back a little bit of the wonder.
2/7/2022, 8:38 AM
Stephen Stallings, a music supervisor in New York who started a TikTok account to document his Wordle plays, described it as an “Internet version of water cooler talk.”
2/7/2022, 8:38 AM
Nguyen wrote that the game is “a triumph of social graphic design.” He told me, “I can’t take in a chess-game description at a glance, but I can glance down a feed and see a bunch of my friends’ grids and know what happened.”
2/7/2022, 8:38 AM
Nguyen described this as a process of “agency expansion.” Thus a Wordle grid serves as a record of the player’s agency, tracking the conditions she faced and the decisions she made as she played the game.
2/7/2022, 8:38 AM
What May Have Been
2
The Left should exploit these tensions and fissures, building a revolutionary popular culture that isn’t just an exclusive club or echo chamber or menagerie of haunting victories but is focused on “the relation between culture and questions of hegemony . . . the class struggle in and over culture.”13 Doing so in the here and now might be one way to wean ourselves off pre-Recession nostalgia, to exit a neoliberal culture of recursion, and to challenge capitalist realism and futurelessness. There is no true refuge in the past, nor is a better world waiting for us — we have to make it.
2/7/2022, 8:38 AM
But it doesn’t have to be this way. By engaging in radical nostalgia, “one crafted from memories of collective resistance, community organization, civil rights, and local politics,”11 we can begin to reclaim the lost futures that haunt us. Still, no matter how firmly we cling to social movements and revolutions of yesteryear, radical nostalgia alone cannot form the basis of serious societal transformation
2/7/2022, 8:38 AM
Paradigm Shifts for the Decentralized Web
8
The flexible access control can be used in any way imaginable: even individual likes or comments could only be visible to certain people, groups, or applications—and you can change those permissions at any time. All this is what it means to be truly in control of you data.
1/23/2022, 12:53 AM
The flexible access control can be used in any way imaginable: even individual likes or comments could only be visible to certain people, groups, or applications—and you can change those permissions at any time. All this is what it means to be truly in control of you data.
1/5/2022, 12:40 AM
Other than with centralized platforms, trust is not derived from a single party. For instance, if I claim my post has 124 likes, then we believe this because Facebook says so (and frankly, we have no objective reason to doubt that). In a decentralized scenario, I could prove that by linking to the individual likes that are stored on other servers, which form a provenance trail. And if those links break for any reason (for instance, if people retract their like), I can still prove they once liked it, if my app made a copy of their digitally signed like on my post. This mechanism can replace networks that are largely based on authority
1/23/2022, 12:53 AM
However, we want the convenience of the single stream without the central control that currently comes with that. We want to continue enjoying the same types of services that nowadays are only available on centralized platforms. So the important question is: can applications on top of decentralized data behave the same way as centralized apps?
1/23/2022, 12:53 AM
This idea brings us back to the original vision for the Web, where anyone has their own website or blog and publishes their thoughts on there, rather than in a single stream controlled by one company
1/23/2022, 12:53 AM
End users become data controllers. This is the most well-known decentralization aspect: we store our data in places of our choice, which improves privacy and control. Apps become views. As apps become decoupled from data, they start acting as interchangeable views rather than the single gateway to that data. Interfaces become queries. Data will be distributed across highly diverse interfaces, so sustainable apps need declarative contracts instead of custom data requests
1/23/2022, 12:53 AM
Ultimately, decentralization is about choice: we will choose where we store our data, who we give access to which parts of that data, which services we want on top of it, and how we pay for those. Nowadays, we are instead forced to accept package deals we cannot customize
1/23/2022, 12:53 AM
Most Web applications today follow the adage “your data for my services”. They motivate this deal from both a technical perspective (how could we provide services without your data?) and a business perspective (how could we earn money without your data?). Decentralizing the Web means that people gain the ability to store their data wherever they want, while still getting the services they need. This requires major changes in the way we develop applications, as we migrate from a closed back-end database to the open Web as our data source.
1/23/2022, 12:53 AM
Interview: James Medlock
2
It's hard not to find the whole thing really funny, people just getting fuming mad at a friendly pseudonymous guy with a Karl Polanyi avatar talking about how great taxes and welfare are. I don't think that style will ever really crowd out being mad on the internet, but I do recommend it, tends to be a better way of convincing people of things in my experience.
1/5/2022, 12:22 AM
In a democracy I don't think you'll ever necessarily reach a pure end point, but I think it's really good and important to have a flexible utopian vision that provides a guide for incremental progress.
1/5/2022, 12:22 AM
Nextdoor Is Quietly Replacing the Small-Town Paper
2
“What it’s not good at giving you,” Abernathy continued, “is what historically the best local newspapers have done — which is to give you the information on not just what’s happening in the moment but issues that are bubbling just below the surface that are going to affect the quality of your life and of future generations. Issues around education, the environment, health, infrastructure, economic development, politics, and even the part that is what some economists call the qualitative capital of a community, its cultural history.”
1/5/2022, 12:22 AM
If Nextdoor at its best is a neighborly town square, Nextdoor at its worst is more like an inconsistently moderated online comment section in which the ignorant loudmouths are people you’re also forced to encounter in real life.
1/5/2022, 12:22 AM
Scissor Labels
2
However, soon after I published the piece, I noticed more and more founders and investors on Twitter announcing their own new spatial software apps. The term itself received more attention than any of the ideas in the piece, and notably, many of the spatial products being announced were not what I considered spatial software at all, despite my inclusion of clear definitions and descriptions in the original essay. The term took on a life of its own and became the object of mimetic competition between many participants in the Startup Twitter timeline.
people hijacking your term into a different meaning
1/5/2022, 12:22 AM
On tech Twitter, we see people peddling narratives like the future of communities, the creator economy, tools for thought, and the no-code "movement." Oftentimes, these people are simply performing land grabs of their own, hoping to claim more and more territory within the narrative they deem powerful.
controlling the narrative is controlling the trend and the masses behind it
1/5/2022, 12:22 AM
“Fable”
8
So they stopped thinking. At night, they stopped dreaming. From their heads, they carved out the parts that had made dreams and fed them to wild animals. Scattered their dream-stuff on the ground, to be pecked at, gnawed at, chewed up. Waking, sleeping without dreams, working. Like this, they passed many days. Years.
1/5/2022, 12:22 AM
And they moved even deeper into the forest. They wanted to be far from everything else. They didn’t want to see other people anymore. Wanted to find another forest, another village, another once upon a time, where they’d be safe from potions, and spells, and anything else. Dragons. Werewolves. Curses. A place without magic. Wherever that might be.
1/5/2022, 12:22 AM
Once upon a time, there was an angry guy, who hated the story he was in. All right? He was angry, O.K.? Once upon a time, there was a guy who wasn’t allowed to start a story with “once upon a time.” Because it wasn’t once upon a time. It was a specific time. And he wasn’t a blacksmith—he was just a regular guy who lived in the forest.
1/5/2022, 12:22 AM
Sympathy, mixed with something else. Something like, I admire you, but don’t touch me or I might catch your plague of misfortune. Sympathy, as in, I sympathize, my heart goes outward to you— outward to you, as in, You over there, stay over there, don’t come any closer. I will admire you from a distance.
1/5/2022, 12:22 AM
As it turned out, the man did have a talent for blacksmithing. Not a great talent. He would not make swords for knights and princes. But he had something. And people noticed. They started to bring him stuff to smith, and he could smith the heck out of that stuff. He hammered stuff and flattened other stuff and made stuff, stuck stuff in the fire, and stuff. What had started out as a thing on the side turned into a little bit of a cottage industry.
1/5/2022, 12:22 AM
Fortune was smiling, though, and they made it to thirty-five weeks. The mages still had concerns. They looked into their crystal balls or whatever. Behind closed doors, they talked in hushed tones. They nodded their sage heads sagely, stroked their beards, gave the lawyer-blacksmith grim and ponderous looks. Ugh, the mages were really kind of awful about the whole thing.
1/5/2022, 12:22 AM
No, he said sheepishly. Deep down in his heart, what he dreamed of was not to be a lawyer, or a hero, but a blacksmith. A silly dream, he knew, so he had never told anyone. He waited for her to laugh, but she didn’t. She said that it was a lovely thing to dream of.But, having said this, the man was already talking himself out of it. Blacksmithing was old-fashioned and hardly anyone actually made a living at it anymore. He would, of course, keep his job as a lawyer. Would always provide for her. And the candlemaker’s daughter said, I know you will.
1/5/2022, 12:22 AM
Together they shared a quiet existence that was defined by well-managed expectations. Perhaps not the stuff of legends. Not quite deserving of “once upon a time.” But it was comfortable and honest.
1/5/2022, 12:22 AM
My Fellow Americans
3
Of course you’ve seen them and clicked on them, what further evidence do you need of the separation between you and us, us the makers of the advertisements and the getters of your vote, you the lookers, just look at those limited pixels and know how little we care about or actually trust you
1/5/2022, 12:22 AM
I pause for breath. I reach for the next line. There are so many I can choose from, the jigsaw puzzle of my rhetoric, apply it to any question possible, enough sound bytes in different arrangements to make it sound truthful, fresh. I have always been able to do this, we all have, each of my peers jabbing their jigsaw pieces against one another, none of it makes any sense if you pull back and think about it, or hear it enough times, the embed TV guys know. I, I say, I, I, I, I…
1/5/2022, 12:22 AM
And I will sit in the cabin and read books or think of things, read the papers and only sometimes Twitter, scoff from the sidelines because only so many among us can affect the world
1/5/2022, 12:22 AM
The Kingdom That Failed
1
I decided to give this story the title “The Kingdom That Failed” because I happened to read an article in the evening paper that day about an African kingdom that had failed. “To see a splendid kingdom fade away,” it said, “is far sadder than seeing a second-rate republic collapse.”
1/5/2022, 12:22 AM
When Tailwinds Vanish
1
What Instagram did to body image, wallstreetbets and Twitter are doing to bank account image.
1/5/2022, 12:22 AM
Live Updates: Suspect in Atlanta Shootings That Left Eight Dead Might Have Frequented Spas, Authorities Say
2
week
1/5/2022, 12:22 AM
Get every story for
1/5/2022, 12:22 AM
A Beginner’s Guide to DAOs
2
Another issue is that by having the membership be so open, it is possible that it could lead to lower quality and higher noise within the DAO but these can be addressed through DAO screening processes or minimum token holding amounts to at least make sure the participant has skin in the game and is incentivized to see the DAO succeed.
1/5/2022, 12:22 AM
One of the main benefits of a DAO is that they are more transparent than traditional companies since all actions and funding in the DAO are viewable by anyone. This significantly reduces the risk of corruption and censorship.
1/5/2022, 12:22 AM
A Beginner's Guide to NFTs
7
Another point of friction with NFTs is that holders will need to self-custody them. However this complexity can be abstracted away with user friendly wallets that make it easy to onboard and support features such as a PIN, biometrics, and social account recovery.
1/5/2022, 12:22 AM
One concern with making in-game items tradable is that the ability to trade items can negatively affect the gameplay as people are focused on extracting value from the system or only the players that are willing to pay a lot of money for items can enjoy the game. Diablo III had an auction house where users could trade in-game items for in-game currency and cash. It was shut down because of how it affected the game. It was no longer fun and rewarding since players would just buy the best loot. In Diablo III, having the best loot was essentially the goal of the game so having an auction house severely affected gameplay whereas other games are not set up this way. It’s important for game developers to find a balance on what should be freely traded for their game (e.g. skins rather than weapons, game time itself can be traded, etc).
1/5/2022, 12:22 AM
Decentralized marketplaces can significantly reduce transaction fees due to the improved efficiency of starting up and operating a marketplace. Marketplaces can also improve overall user experience and increase interest in the game.
1/5/2022, 12:22 AM
A common skepticism is that someone can just take a screenshot of the image or get a digital file so it’s not really scarce. However, the same argument could apply to physical items as well. Anyone can take a photo of the Mona Lisa or create a replica of it, but it isn’t the real item from the artist. People are willing to pay a premium for the original work. Another interesting aspect of digital art or collectibles is that you can easily verify the item’s ownership history. Some digital items might be worth more depending on who owned it in the past.
1/5/2022, 12:22 AM
Programmable art is another interesting concept where a piece of artwork can incorporate on-chain data to dynamically update certain features or characteristics of the work. For example, one could create a piece of programmable art whose background changes if the price of ether goes above a certain dollar-value. There are countless creative possibilities.
1/5/2022, 12:22 AM
The same reason why cryptocurrency used in payments is more efficient than traditional payments, that it is borderless and significantly easier to transfer, applies to NFTs. For example, if you want to create tradable in-game items as a game developer, then you can instantly have them be tradable through protocols that allow for decentralized exchange of NFTs. You don’t have to create your own marketplace or go through the onboarding process of a centralized platform in order to have the items be tradable.
1/5/2022, 12:22 AM
NFTs are just digital abstractions used to represent assets that are one of a kind
1/5/2022, 12:22 AM
Personal Panopticons — Real Life
9
your data is everywhere, and nowhere, and you cannot escape it, or what it might yet do to you
1/3/2022, 8:15 PM
In this new context, privacy has become a matter of negotiating the terms of our heightened visibility to maintain a degree of autonomy over our self-presentation
1/3/2022, 8:15 PM
The Underground Man’s chief problem may be his unquestioning acceptance of an individualist framing of identity. It sunders him from any human-scaled networks of interdependence — i.e., communities — within which his individuality might have flourished. Instead he accepts his isolation and doubles down on its terms.
1/3/2022, 8:15 PM
This all suggests the broader possibility that the pervasive presence of surveillance helps produce people who are more at ease with it — people who no longer know what privacy is for, or what socio-moral milieu could give it value
1/3/2022, 8:15 PM
Ian Bogost, writing in the Atlantic, has described as full-blown “privacy nihilism,” which presumes an omnipresent regime of surveillance that we can no longer resist and may as well not bother to try. He points to experiences of what we might call the data uncanny — “someone shouts down the aisle to a companion to pick up some Red Bull; on the ride home, Instagram serves a sponsored post for the beverage” or “two friends are talking about recent trips to Japan, and soon after one gets hawked cheap flights there” — that have led users to erroneously conclude that their phones are listening in on their conversations.
1/3/2022, 8:15 PM
Rather it confronts the risk of emerging webs of manipulation and control that exert a softy deterministic influence over society. The Apple Watch (or the phone or the AI assistant or the Fitbit) is just one of many points at which these webs converge on individuals. Tech companies, who have much to gain from the normalization of ubiquitous surveillance, have presented their devices and apps as sources of connection, optimization, convenience, and pleasure. Individualized understandings of privacy have proved inadequate to both perceiving the risks and meeting them effectively.
1/3/2022, 8:15 PM
In no small measure, this derives from the widespread adoption of platforms engineered to reward self-disclosure with greater visibility, a system that depends on seeing the platforms as ubiquitous. The incentives work together with the inescapability they presuppose to produce subjects who more readily accept and participate in the broader surveillance regime, further entrenching the dynamics of networked privacy.
1/3/2022, 8:15 PM
Privacy, we might say, was the default setting of the experience of the self. Now, to the degree that social media is the dominant technology of the self, these older parameters of the private self are as likely to be experienced as privation and a failure to appear in social media feeds may be experienced as a social liability.
1/3/2022, 8:15 PM
cynical expert.” These individuals were better informed about privacy concerns than their peers but also tended to be more likely to share personal information
1/3/2022, 8:15 PM
The Left Hand of Darkness
1
thought experimenter. This is a common denominator of many science-fiction writers, but Le Guin is more ambitious in her choice of experiments than most of her peers, and more assiduous in tracking the consequences of those choices. In The Dispossessed the experiment is “What if a society evolved where nobody owned anything?” In The Left Hand of Darkness it is, “What if gender was not fixed but serially mutable?”
12/26/2021, 9:25 PM
On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
50
Because the sunset, like survival, exists only on the verge of its own disappearing. To be gorgeous, you must first be seen, but to be seen allows you to be hunted.
12/18/2021, 12:59 AM
Their presumed, reliable fraudulence is what makes their presence, to the mourners, necessary. Because grief, at its worst, is unreal. And it calls for a surreal response. The queens—in this way—are unicorns. Unicorns stamping in a graveyard.
12/17/2021, 5:27 AM
And maybe all names are illusions. How often do we name something after its briefest form? Rose bush, rain, butterfly, snapping turtle, firing squad, childhood, death, mother tongue, me, you.
12/16/2021, 12:14 PM
It was beauty, I learned, that we risked ourselves for.
12/16/2021, 12:14 PM
Before Lan’s illness, I found this act of malleability to be beautiful, that an object or person, once upturned, becomes more than its once-singular self. This agency for evolution,
12/16/2021, 12:14 PM
Remember: The rules, like streets, can only take you to known places. Underneath the grid is a field—it was always there—where to be lost is never to be wrong, but simply more.
12/16/2021, 12:14 PM
A person beside a person inside a life. That’s called parataxis. That’s called the future.
12/16/2021, 12:14 PM
The thing is, I don’t want my sadness to be othered from me just as I don’t want my happiness to be othered. They’re both mine. I made them, dammit. What if the elation I feel is not another “bipolar episode” but something I fought hard for?
12/14/2021, 4:13 AM
You killed that poem, we say. You’re a killer. You came in to that novel guns blazing. I am hammering this paragraph, I am banging them out, we say. I owned that workshop. I shut it down. I crushed them. We smashed the competition. I’m wrestling with the muse. The state, where people live, is a battleground state. The audience a target audience. “Good for you, man,” a man once said to me at a party, “you’re making a killing with poetry. You’re knockin’ ’em dead.”
12/14/2021, 4:13 AM
But why can’t the language for creativity be the language of regeneration?
12/14/2021, 4:13 AM
In a world myriad as ours, the gaze is a singular act: to look at something is to fill your whole life with it, if only briefly.
12/14/2021, 4:13 AM
kipuka. The piece of land that’s spared after a lava flow runs down the slope of a hill—an island formed from what survives the smallest apocalypse. Before the lava descended, scorching the moss along the hill, that piece of land was insignificant, just another scrap in an endless mass of green. Only by enduring does it earn its name.
12/14/2021, 4:13 AM
On the highway, the October trees blur by, branches raking purple sky. In between them, the lampposts of soundless towns hang in fog. We cross a bridge and a roadside gas station leaves a neon throb in my head.
12/14/2021, 4:13 AM
I’m broken in two, the message said. In two, it was the only thought I could keep, sitting in my seat, how losing a person could make more of us, the living, make us two.
12/14/2021, 4:13 AM
The children, the veal, they stand very still because tenderness depends on how little the world touches you. To stay tender, the weight of your life cannot lean on your bones.
12/14/2021, 4:13 AM
Some kind of quiet sharpened between us.
12/14/2021, 4:13 AM
is no accident, Ma, that the comma resembles a fetus—that curve of continuation. We were all once inside our mothers, saying, with our entire curved and silent selves, more, more, more. I want to insist that our being alive is beautiful enough to be worthy of replication.
12/12/2021, 1:43 AM
I read that beauty has historically demanded replication. We make more of anything we find aesthetically pleasing, whether it’s a vase, a painting, a chalice, a poem. We reproduce it in order to keep it, extend it through space and time. To gaze at what pleases—a fresco, a peach-red mountain range, a boy, the mole on his jaw—is, in itself, replication—the image prolonged in the eye, making more of it, making it last.
12/12/2021, 1:43 AM
Perhaps it was not a destination I sought, but merely a continuation. To stay close to Gramoz was to remain within the circumference of his one act of kindness, was to go back in time, to the lunch hour, that pizza heavy in my palm.
12/7/2021, 2:46 AM
the gallon of milk on its side, the liquid coming down in white strings like a tablecloth in a nightmare, a red eye winking.
12/7/2021, 2:46 AM
Do you ever wonder if sadness and happiness can be combined, to make a deep purple feeling, not good, not bad, but remarkable simply because you didn’t have to live on one side or the other?
12/7/2021, 2:46 AM
He loves me, he loves me not, we are taught to say, as we tear the flower away from its flowerness. To arrive at love, then, is to arrive through obliteration. Eviscerate me, we mean to say, and I’ll tell you the truth.
12/7/2021, 2:46 AM
said it so quiet the syllables never survived my mouth.
12/5/2021, 1:17 AM
How the sharper edges of his body—shoulders, elbows, chin, and nose—poked through the blackness, a body halfway in, or out of, a river’s surface.
12/5/2021, 1:17 AM
Sorry, for these men, was a passport to remain.
12/5/2021, 1:17 AM
In the nail salon, sorry is a tool one uses to pander until the word itself becomes currency. It no longer merely apologizes, but insists, reminds: I’m here, right here, beneath you. It is the lowering of oneself so that the client feels right, superior, and charitable.
12/5/2021, 1:17 AM
Because there are no salaries, health care, or contracts, the body being the only material to work with and work from. Having nothing, it becomes its own contract, a testimony of presence.
11/30/2021, 12:47 AM
Who will be lost in the story we tell ourselves? Who will be lost in ourselves? A story, after all, is a kind of swallowing. To open a mouth, in speech, is to leave only the bones, which remain untold. It is a beautiful country because you are still breathing.
11/13/2021, 4:22 PM
I took off our language and wore my English, like a mask, so that others would see my face, and therefore yours.
11/11/2021, 5:22 PM
Our mother tongue, then, is no mother at all—but an orphan. Our Vietnamese a time capsule, a mark of where your education ended, ashed. Ma, to speak in our mother tongue is to speak only partially in Vietnamese, but entirely in war.
11/11/2021, 5:22 PM
None of us spoke as we checked out, our words suddenly wrong everywhere, even in our mouths.
11/11/2021, 5:22 PM
“When we get this high up, the clouds turn into boulders—hard rocks—that’s what you’re feeling.” Your lips grazing my ear, your tone soothing, I examined the massive granite-colored mountains across the sky’s horizon. Yes, of course the plane shook. We were moving through rocks, our flight a supernatural perseverance of passage. Because to go back to that man took that kind of magic. The plane should rattle, it should nearly shatter. With the laws of the universe made new, I sat back and watched as we broke through one mountain after another.
11/11/2021, 5:22 PM
Whether we want to or not, we are traveling in a spiral, we are creating something new from what is gone.
11/11/2021, 5:22 PM
I’d drink it down, gulping, making sure you could see, both of us hoping the whiteness vanishing into me would make more of a yellow boy. I’m drinking light, I thought. I’m filling myself with light. The milk would erase all the dark inside me with a flood of brightness.
11/11/2021, 5:22 PM
My forehead pressed to the seat in front of me, I kicked my shoes, gently at first, then faster. My sneakers erupted with silent flares: the world’s smallest ambulances, going nowhere.
11/11/2021, 5:22 PM
Outside, the leaves fell, fat and wet as dirty money, across the windows.
11/11/2021, 5:22 PM
mauve with early dark:
11/11/2021, 5:22 PM
I came to know, in those afternoons, that madness can sometimes lead to discovery, that the mind, fractured and short-wired, is not entirely wrong. The room filled and refilled with our voices as the snow fell from her head, the hardwood around my knees whitening as the past unfolded around us.
11/11/2021, 5:22 PM
To love something, then, is to name it after something so worthless it might be left untouched—and alive. A name, thin as air, can also be a shield. A Little Dog shield.
11/11/2021, 5:22 PM
But it was stillness, I realize now, that I sought, not of her body, which kept ticking as she slept, but of her mind. Only in this twitching quiet did her brain, wild and explosive during waking hours, cool itself into something like calm.
11/11/2021, 5:22 PM
You’re a mother, Ma. You’re also a monster. But so am I—which is why I can’t turn away from you. Which is why I have taken god’s loneliest creation and put you inside it. Look.
11/11/2021, 11:21 AM
To be a monster is to be a hybrid signal, a lighthouse: both shelter and warning at once.
11/11/2021, 11:21 AM
What do we mean when we say survivor? Maybe a survivor is the last one to come home, the final monarch that lands on a branch already weighted with ghosts.
11/11/2021, 11:21 AM
You once told me that the human eye is god’s loneliest creation. How so much of the world passes through the pupil and still it holds nothing. The eye, alone in its socket, doesn’t even know there’s another one, just like it, an inch away, just as hungry, as empty. Opening the front door to the first snowfall of my life, you whispered, “Look.”
11/11/2021, 11:21 AM
When does a war end? When can I say your name and have it mean only your name and not what you left behind?
11/11/2021, 11:21 AM
If we are lucky, the end of the sentence is where we might begin. If we are lucky, something is passed on, another alphabet written in the blood, sinew, and neuron; ancestors charging their kin with the silent propulsion to fly south, to turn toward the place in the narrative no one was meant to outlast.
11/11/2021, 11:21 AM
our breaths floating above us, the makeup drying on your face. Our hands empty except for our hands.
11/11/2021, 11:21 AM
To bake a cake in the eye of a storm; to feed yourself sugar on the cusp of danger.
11/11/2021, 11:21 AM
It only takes a single night of frost to kill off a generation. To live, then, is a matter of time, of timing.
11/11/2021, 11:21 AM
I am writing because they told me to never start a sentence with because. But I wasn’t trying to make a sentence—I was trying to break free. Because freedom, I am told, is nothing but the distance between the hunter and its prey.
11/11/2021, 11:21 AM
"Open Source" Is Broken
1
This is why I am very careful about how I make "useful" software and release it to the world without any solid way for me to get paid for my efforts. I simply do not want to be in a situation where my software that I develop as a passion project on the side is holding people's companies together. That's why I make software how and where I do. Like, no offense, but I really do not want to go unpaid for my efforts. The existing leech culture of "Open Source" being a pool of free labor makes it hard for me to want to have my side projects be actually useful like that unless you pay me.
12/17/2021, 5:41 AM
Tool: Screenshot
5
Susan Sontag has suggested that “photographs may be more memorable than moving images, because they are a neat slice of time. Television is a stream of under-selected images, each of which cancels its predecessor. A still photograph is a privileged moment, turned into a slim object that one can keep and look at again.” Anyone who’s ever opened an app with intention (to look something up, I swear), only to find herself lost at sea as soon as the scrolling begins, knows that every image on the internet “cancels its predecessor.” The screenshot is one modest way to stem the tide.
12/17/2021, 5:41 AM
Some of these moments aligned with the old adage that photographs make memories, but others seemed to mirror the photographer Garry Winogrand’s stated motivation: “I photograph to see what the world looks like in photographs.”
12/17/2021, 5:41 AM
Though taken haphazardly, these screenshots are far more revealing of my lived experience than any clichéd snapshot; they are the subconscious of my camera roll.
12/17/2021, 5:41 AM
From public-facing celebrity Notes app apologies to clandestine copies of images that were otherwise designed to disappear, screenshots are the candid camera of the internet. They can be used in service of truth and transparency, revealing ugly behavior online, but they can also be fun and familiar, reminders of conversations and memes not otherwise archived in memory.
12/17/2021, 5:41 AM
Even if my screenshots don’t make my boring pictures better, they make them mine. Screenshots are snapshots of interior life
12/17/2021, 5:41 AM
What if Links Weren't Meant to Be Prose?
1
Modeless markup
There’s another, radically simple approach to markup. Bare URLs, #hashtags, and @mentions are all identifiable within text as special forms. We could think of these approaches as “modeless markup”. There is no distinction between the edit-mode and view-mode text. The text is the same in both cases.
12/16/2021, 12:42 PM
Fools and Their Time Metaphors
4
The subjective quality of time—how it feels from the inside—is missing entirely. If the idea of a “subjective calendar” sounds too far-out, consider the alternative maps made by creative cartographers. They add new meaning by distorting conventional representations of geography. Why can’t our calendars follow suit?
12/14/2021, 4:43 AM
Some particularly desperate people would invent fake events and strategically place them throughout the day, making it difficult for would-be time thieves to find enough “empty” time. These protective mechanisms are band-aids. They’re what designers call desire paths or free-will ways: “paths and tracks made over time by the wishes and feet of walkers, especially those paths that run contrary to design or planning.”
12/14/2021, 4:43 AM
Digital calendars misrepresent the default state of your time. It’s far from empty. You’re working, thinking, talking, problem-solving, Being. Blankness shouldn’t be an invitation to interrupt. It’s yours, it’s sacred! But when someone sets up a meeting with you, the calendar app never makes them feel like they’re taking something away from you. The UX is additive, rather than reductive. We’re always “putting time on” calendars, never “taking it off.”
12/14/2021, 4:43 AM
These metaphors make it hard for us to think of time as something to protect, care for, or cultivate. Instead, we’re always throwing time around, squeezing it, grabbing it, killing it. We’re at a loss for time, and we never feel like there’s enough of it. Time-to-yourself is often the exception rather than the rule.
12/14/2021, 4:43 AM
A Spreadsheet Way of Knowledge
1
Spreadsheet models have become a form of expression, and the very act of creating them seem to yield a pleasure unrelated to their utility. Unusual models are duplicated and passed around; these templates are sometimes used by other modelers and sometimes only admired for their elegance.
12/13/2021, 7:48 PM
Making It
16
We carry personal computers in our pockets—nothing could be more decentralized than this!—but have surrendered control of our data, which is stored on centralized servers, far away from our pockets. The hackers won their fight against I.B.M.—only to lose it to Facebook and Google. And the spooks at the National Security Agency must be surprised to learn that gadgets were supposed to usher in the “de-institutionalization of society.”
12/13/2021, 7:48 PM
Bookchin’s critique of the counterculture’s turn to tools parallels Dennett’s critique of the aesthetes’ turn to education eighty years earlier. It didn’t make sense to speak of “convivial tools,” he argued, without taking a close look at the political and social structures in which they were embedded.
12/13/2021, 7:48 PM
Instead of deinstitutionalizing society, the radicals would have done better to advocate reinstitutionalizing it: pushing for political and legal reforms to secure the transparency and decentralization of power they associated with their favorite technology.
12/13/2021, 7:48 PM
For Jobs, who saw computers as “a bicycle for our minds,” it was of only secondary importance whether one could peek inside or program them.
12/13/2021, 7:48 PM
Whereas Stewart Brand wanted citizens to replace politics with savvy shopping, Illich wanted to “retool” society so that traditional politics, with its penchant for endless talk, becomes unnecessary.
12/13/2021, 7:48 PM
Hatch and Anderson alike invoke Marx and argue that the success of the maker movement shows that the means of production can be made affordable to workers even under capitalism. Now that money can be raised on sites such as Kickstarter, even large-scale investors have become unnecessary. But both overlook one key development: in a world where everyone is an entrepreneur, it’s hard work getting others excited about funding your project. Money goes to those who know how to attract attention.
12/13/2021, 7:48 PM
For Anderson, it’s the democratization of invention—anyone can become an app mogul these days—that defines the past two decades of Internet history. Owing to the maker movement, he thinks, the same thing might happen to manufacturing: “ ‘Three guys with laptops’ used to describe a Web startup. Now it describes a hardware company, too.” Every inventor can become an entrepreneur. Indeed, he anticipates a Web-like future for the maker movement: “ever-accelerating entrepreneurship and innovation with ever-dropping barriers to entry.”
12/13/2021, 7:48 PM
In contrast to jabbering, feckless politicians, hackers offer hope for the most hopeless endeavors. “I’d like to see the spirit of hackerdom improve peace in the Middle East,” the influential technology publisher and investor Tim O’Reilly proclaimed a couple of years ago.
12/13/2021, 7:48 PM
de-institutionalization of society” enabled by the personal computer,
12/13/2021, 7:48 PM
“With over half of the American workforce now managing information for a living, any apparent drone drudging away on mainstream information chores might be recruited, via some handy outlaw techniques or tool, into the holy disorder of hackerdom. A hacker takes nothing as given, everything as worth creatively fiddling with, and the variety which proceeds from that enricheth the adaptivity, resilience, and delight of us all.”
12/13/2021, 7:48 PM
In a later edition of the “Whole Earth Catalog,” Brand reminisced about its mid-seventies heyday, when it recommended two products: the Vermont Castings Defiant woodstove and the Apple personal computer. The odd juxtaposition made sense to Brand. “Both cost a few hundred dollars, both were made by and for revolutionaries who wanted to de-institutionalize society and empower the individual.”
12/13/2021, 7:48 PM
He distinguished the hackers from the planners, those rigid and unimaginative technocrats, noting that “when computers become available to everybody, the hackers take over.” For Brand, hackers were “a mobile new-found elite.” He seemed to have had a transcendental experience in that lab: “Those magnificent men with their flying machines, scouting a leading edge of technology which has an odd softness to it; outlaw country, where rules are not decree or routine so much as the starker demands of what’s possible.” Computers were the new drugs—without any of the side effects.
12/13/2021, 7:48 PM
Around Berkeley, it was Free Speech Movement, “power to the people.” Around Stanford, it was “Whole Earth Catalog,” Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs, people like that, and they were just power to people. They just wanted to power anybody who was interested, not “the people.” Well, it turns out there is no, probably, “the people.” So the political blind alley that Berkeley went down was interesting, we were all taking the same drugs, the same length of hair, but the stuff came out of the Stanford area, I think because it took a Buckminster Fuller access-to-tools angle on things.
12/13/2021, 7:48 PM
the Arts and Crafts movement no longer represented a radical alternative to the alienated labor of the factories. Instead, it provided yet another therapeutic escape from it, turning into a “revivifying hobby for the affluent.”
12/13/2021, 7:48 PM
“The employed craftsman can almost never use in his own home things similar to those he works on every day,” she observed, because those things were simply unaffordable. Economics, not aesthetics, explained the movement’s failures. “The modern man, who should be a craftsman, but who, in most cases, is compelled by force of circumstances to be a mill operative, has no freedom,” she wrote earlier. “He must make what his machine is geared to make.”
12/13/2021, 7:48 PM
The cause of the Arts and Crafts movement would be achieved, he maintained, only “when the philosopher goes to work and the working man becomes a philosopher.”
12/13/2021, 7:48 PM
The IRL Fetish
7
That is, we live in an augmented reality that exists at the intersection of materiality and information, physicality and digitality, bodies and technology, atoms and bits, the off and the online. It is wrong to say “IRL” to mean offline: Facebook is real life.
12/13/2021, 7:48 PM
If we can fix this false separation and view the digital and physical as enmeshed, we will understand that what we do while connected is inseparable from what we do when disconnected. That is, disconnection from the smartphone and social media isn’t really disconnection at all: The logic of social media follows us long after we log out. There was and is no offline; it is a lusted-after fetish object that some claim special ability to attain, and it has always been a phantom.
12/13/2021, 7:48 PM
For many, maintaining the fiction of the collective loss of the offline for everyone else is merely an attempt to construct their own personal time-outs as more special, as allowing them to rise above those social forces of distraction that have ensnared the masses. “I am real. I am the thoughtful human. You are the automaton.” I am reminded of a line from a recent essay by Sarah Nicole Prickett: that we are “so obsessed with the real that it’s unrealistic, atavistic, and just silly.” How have we come to make the error of collectively mourning the loss of that which is proliferating?
12/13/2021, 7:48 PM
We have started to congratulate ourselves for keeping our phones in our pockets and fetishizing the offline as something more real to be nostalgic for. While the offline is said to be increasingly difficult to access, it is simultaneously easily obtained — if, of course, you are the “right” type of person.
12/13/2021, 7:48 PM
Nothing has contributed more to our collective appreciation for being logged off and technologically disconnected than the very technologies of connection. The ease of digital distraction has made us appreciate solitude with a new intensity.
12/13/2021, 7:48 PM
Smartphones and their symbiotic social media give us a surfeit of options to tell the truth about who we are and what we are doing, and an audience for it all, reshaping norms around mass exhibitionism and voyeurism. Twitter lips and Instagram eyes: Social media is part of ourselves; the Facebook source code becomes our own code.
12/13/2021, 7:48 PM
While eating, defecating, or resting in our beds, we are rubbing on our glowing rectangles, seemingly lost within the infostream.
12/13/2021, 7:48 PM
Mindfulness Is Loaded With (Troubling) Metaphysical Assumptions
1
Thinking of myself as an individual in a particular context is what allows me to identify whether the source of these worries stems from my internal character traits or if I am simply responding to an external situation.
12/11/2021, 12:20 PM
One Small Step for the Web… | Inrupt
2
With the right values and a foundational corporate infrastructure, we will build beneficial systems that work for everyone
12/11/2021, 12:20 PM
In 2009, I said, “The web as I envisaged it we have not seen yet.” That was because people were using the web just for documents, not for the data of a big web-wide computer. Since then, we have seen a wave of open data, but not of read-write data. For example, much open government data is produced through a one-way pipeline, so we can only view it. With Solid, it becomes a read-write web where users can interact and innovate, collaborate and share.
12/11/2021, 12:20 PM
A Beginner’s Guide to DAOs
1
One of the main benefits of a DAO is that they are more transparent than traditional companies since all actions and funding in the DAO are viewable by anyone. This significantly reduces the risk of corruption and censorship.
12/11/2021, 12:20 PM
The Internet Is Rotting
16
We can build what the Germans used to call a giftschrank, a “poison cabinet” containing dangerous works that nonetheless should be preserved and accessible in certain circumstances
12/11/2021, 12:20 PM
Amberlink can run on some web servers to make it so that what’s at the end of a link can be captured when a webpage on an Amberlink-empowered server first includes that link. Then, when someone clicks on a link on an Amber-tuned site, there’s an opportunity to see what the site had captured at that link, should the original destination no longer be available.
12/11/2021, 12:20 PM
By making the storage and organization of information everyone’s responsibility and no one’s, the internet and web could grow, unprecedentedly expanding access, while making any and all of it fragile rather than robust in many instances in which we depend on it.
12/11/2021, 12:20 PM
Tools that could have made humanity’s knowledge production available to all instead have, for completely understandable reasons, militated toward an ever-changing “now,” where there’s no easy way to cite many sources for posterity, and those that are citable are all too mutable.
12/11/2021, 12:20 PM
The rise of the Kindle points out that even the concept of a link—a “uniform resource locator,” or URL—is under great stress. Since Kindle books don’t live on the World Wide Web, there’s no URL pointing to a particular page or passage of them. The same goes for content within any number of mobile apps, leaving people to trade screenshots—or, as The Atlantic’s Kaitlyn Tiffany put it, “the gremlins of the internet”—as a way of conveying content.
12/11/2021, 12:20 PM
Rereading an old Kindle favorite might then become reading a slightly (if momentously) tweaked version of that old book, with only a nagging feeling that it isn’t quite how one remembers it.
12/11/2021, 12:20 PM
Libraries in these scenarios are no longer custodians for the ages of anything, whether tangible or intangible, but rather poolers of funding to pay for fleeting access to knowledge elsewhere.
12/11/2021, 12:20 PM
But there’s a catch: These officially sanctioned digital manifestations of material have an asterisk next to their permanence. Whether it’s an individual or a library acquiring them, the purchaser is typically buying mere access to the material for a certain period of time, without the ability to transfer the work into the purchaser’s own chosen container. This is true of many commercially published scholarly journals, for which “subscription” no longer signifies a regular delivery of paper volumes that, if canceled, simply means no more are forthcoming. Instead, subscription is for ongoing access to the entire corpus of journals hosted by the publishers themselves. If the subscription arrangement is severed, the entire oeuvre becomes inaccessible.
12/11/2021, 12:20 PM
Of course, there’s a keenly related problem of permanency for much of what’s online. People communicate in ways that feel ephemeral and let their guard down commensurately, only to find that a Facebook comment can stick around forever. The upshot is the worst of both worlds: Some information sticks around when it shouldn’t, while other information vanishes when it should remain.
12/11/2021, 12:20 PM
Libraries exist, and they still have books in them, but they aren’t stewarding a huge percentage of the information that people are linking to, including within formal, legal documents. No one is. The flexibility of the web—the very feature that makes it work, that had it eclipse CompuServe and other centrally organized networks—diffuses responsibility for this core societal function.
12/11/2021, 12:20 PM
The first study, with Kendra Albert and Larry Lessig, focused on documents meant to endure indefinitely: links within scholarly papers, as found in the Harvard Law Review, and judicial opinions of the Supreme Court. We found that 50 percent of the links embedded in Court opinions since 1996, when the first hyperlink was used, no longer worked. And 75 percent of the links in the Harvard Law Review no longer worked.
12/11/2021, 12:20 PM
These buildings didn’t run themselves, and they weren’t mere warehouses. They were staffed with clergy and then librarians, who fostered a culture of preservation and its many elaborate practices, so precious documents would be both safeguarded and made accessible at scale—certainly physically, and, as important, through careful indexing, so an inquiring mind could be paired with whatever a library had that might slake that thirst. (As Jorge Luis Borges pointed out, a library without an index becomes paradoxically less informative as it grows.)
12/11/2021, 12:20 PM
The web, like the internet, is a collective hallucination, a set of independent efforts united by common technological protocols to appear as a seamless, magical whole.
12/11/2021, 12:20 PM
So the internet was a recipe for mortar, with an invitation for anyone, and everyone, to bring their own bricks. Tim Berners-Lee took up the invite and invented the protocols for the World Wide Web, an application to run on the internet. If your computer spoke “web” by running a browser, then it could speak with servers that also spoke web, naturally enough known as websites. Pages on sites could contain links to all sorts of things that would, by definition, be but a click away, and might in practice be found at servers anywhere else in the world, hosted by people or organizations not only not affiliated with the linking webpage, but entirely unaware of its existence.
12/11/2021, 12:20 PM
The internet’s distinct architecture arose from a distinct constraint and a distinct freedom: First, its academically minded designers didn’t have or expect to raise massive amounts of capital to build the network; and second, they didn’t want or expect to make money from their invention.
12/11/2021, 12:20 PM
Sixty years ago the futurist Arthur C. Clarke observed that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. The internet—how we both communicate with one another and together preserve the intellectual products of human civilization—fits Clarke’s observation well. In Steve Jobs’s words, “it just works,” as readily as clicking, tapping, or speaking. And every bit as much aligned with the vicissitudes of magic, when the internet doesn’t work, the reasons are typically so arcane that explanations for it are about as useful as trying to pick apart a failed spell.
12/11/2021, 12:20 PM
Code-First vs. Product-First
2
Conversely, when I see programmers not launching features quickly, the issue is often overengineering. Or when engineers do launch quickly but the quality is bad, then the issue is usually under-engineering or sloppy code.
12/11/2021, 12:20 PM
Programming is about building products that solve problems for users not about writing beautiful code for its own sake.
12/11/2021, 12:20 PM
Why Coda Thinks Documents Are the Internet's Next Big Platform
2
The rallying cry for Coda is that anyone can make a doc as powerful as an app. And I like to think that in this world of all-in-one documents, we're all going to take for granted that the new surface is all-in-one. And I think we're gonna take for granted that it has to have a fairly low floor and a very high ceiling.
12/11/2021, 12:20 PM
This is how we're going to create this next generation of entrepreneurs. And so I think for Coda, if David Pierce has a great idea for how journalists should work, I don't think you should have to hire developers to do it. I think you should be able to craft it and say, this is my way of doing it, put a price on it and people pay you for it. And you can build a business that way.
12/11/2021, 12:20 PM
Primordial Vision: 02021
1
Primordial Vision: 02021 is my intuitive imagination of future relationships amongst materials, regardless of their “alive-ness.” But more than that, I want to bring back a sense of magic. Before the 16th century, magic and science were very much the same. The “things” around us seemed to have some intrinsic nature that enchanted us precisely because we could not place it. Today, we linger in the vertigo from the naive illusion that we were close to knowing everything, which we briefly held a century or so ago. In a time when value has long decoupled from fact, we simultaneously suffer from being directionless, due to the lack of a guiding ethos, and having a dangerously singular direction, because of the technological determinism too many people in power hold.
12/11/2021, 12:20 PM
End-User Programming
11
Our finding here is that for a living system to work, the internal and external APIs need to be mostly the same.
We also noted that living systems produce a tension between hackabilty and the danger of user breakage. For example, the user can change a card’s background color just as easily as executing a command that would discard every card onscreen or even put the system into a crashed state or infinite loop. What to allow, how to surface errors, and how to recover are deep and challenging questions we did not explore in the course of this experiment.
12/11/2021, 12:20 PM
Many attempts at more accessible programming languages are weakly typed, under the hypothesis that types are unforgiving to newcomers. Our team’s instinct is the opposite: strong typing, with the right interface, can be friendlier for newcomers by making program components “snap” together like building blocks. If the blocks fit, the program will probably work. See the previously mentioned Scratch; Elm’s strong typing for eliminating runtime errors; and Hazel’s “typed holes” live programming environment.
12/11/2021, 12:20 PM
“A humane-interface principle is that the system itself should be built out of the same kind of pieces with which you are familiar from your everyday use of the system.” — The Humane Interface, chapter 5
12/11/2021, 12:20 PM
A third quality that we think is necessary for end-user programming is an in-place toolchain. The user should be able to edit their programs without installing additional tools or programs. Further, they should be able to use an interface and set of abstractions that is as close as possible to the ones they use for their regular daily work.
12/11/2021, 12:20 PM
But the “living systems” quality of end-user programming is broader than the fast feedback loops of live coding. It also includes the ability for the system to change itself from within, giving the end-user programmer a feeling of open-ended possibility and complete ownership over their tools.
12/11/2021, 12:20 PM
One way to do this is embodiment. This is where a tool makes the elements of a working program concrete, usually via visual representations onscreen, to the user.
12/11/2021, 12:20 PM
We suggest three qualities of tools that support end-user programming: embodiment, living systems, and in-place toolchains.
12/11/2021, 12:20 PM
There shouldn’t be a chasm that the user has to cross in order to customize the behavior of their software. Going from using to inspecting to modifying the system should be a gradual process where each of the steps is small enough to be easily discoverable. The user should not need to switch to “programmer mindset” but instead stay within the context of the application. They can stay close to their work and their ideas.
12/11/2021, 12:20 PM
And typically the people creating these relatively complex programs inside the spreadsheet environment are domain experts rather than professional software engineers.
12/11/2021, 12:20 PM
At Ink & Switch, we believe that software should be extensible in an easy, everyday manner. We believe users want to automate, customize, or even make their own tools without much ceremony.
12/11/2021, 12:20 PM
Desktop programs, web apps, and smartphone apps are to various degrees like appliances with a hermetic seal to keep users out of their interior. If there is not already a button for a given function, the only option for users is to petition the developer.
12/11/2021, 12:20 PM
Turing-Complete Governance
11
Public infrastructure on the Internet should be like public infrastructure in the physical world: in the ideal case, freely accessible and used by many. We shouldn’t settle for an online landscape of gated silos, difficult-to-use UIs, and huge barriers to participation.
12/11/2021, 12:20 PM
Jane Jacobs speaks of the importance of lively sidewalks to a city, where many people of all backgrounds mingle, keep a casual eye out for each other, and can meet naturally in public. Much of this, she insists, must be informal, to keep private life from being transgressed on by institutional structures. Interoperability and programmability means that we have an opportunity to stitch together human structures that look very different to past ones—informal, lively, casual yet strong.
12/11/2021, 12:20 PM
Now, innovations in community governance tooling and “organization legos” have made sorting and prioritizing proposals much more streamlined, and thus much less centralized. Modular, composable mechanisms for submitting and reviewing proposals have proliferated, such that the most important ones get the most attention. This large council DAO has, through experimentation, come to rely on a proposal prioritization algorithm, which enables members to have personalized proposal feeds that still allow data control and privacy.
12/11/2021, 12:20 PM
Token-based structures meet DeFi needs by allowing scalable ownership in low-trust contexts in which financial motives play a key role, and community over-financialization is low on the list of concerns. And even in those canonical DeFi spaces, there are still many organizational kinks to iron out, e.g. a lack of truly participatory decision-making.
12/11/2021, 12:20 PM
There’s also the question of those who are uninterested in governance power, and purely want to make money through the community, which can end up corrupting and over-financializing the spirit of the community, or even result in a hostile takeover.
12/11/2021, 12:20 PM
While there are all sorts of reasons for creating a DAO—e.g. they can be purely social (e.g. gating access to an exclusive community based on a token), or necessitated based on a low-trust adversarial environment—to view DAOs as defined decision-making communities opens up their conceptual potential as powerful instruments for enabling better governance.
12/11/2021, 12:20 PM
Today, collective action problems abound. Misaligned incentives between the individual and the group prevent us from making progress on anything from pollution, to pandemics, to building alliances and working towards the same mission.
12/11/2021, 12:20 PM
Composability comes from the fact that Ethereum is also a world computer with interoperable programs
12/11/2021, 12:20 PM
Smart contracts on Turing-Complete chains contain the promise of composable, arbitrarily programmable governance – what I call Turing-Complete governance.
12/11/2021, 12:20 PM
Arbitrary programmability comes from the fact that blockchains like Ethereum are Turing-Complete computers, which can run algorithms to perform any well-defined computational tasks.
12/11/2021, 12:20 PM
Let’s take decentralization as a constraint here; in certain contexts, we want to avoid having centralized power and few points of failure. Computation is that which makes it possible to do what we want while respecting the constraint of decentralization.
12/11/2021, 12:20 PM
Writing as Autonomy
4
I find that when I write from life and not theory, I am most able create something that feels unpolluted by all the ideas I’ve consumed, all the things I endlessly regurgitate that never provide any catharsis. I think creative autonomy is best understood as honesty without confessionalism. I don’t have to, like, name everybody I’ve ever slept with or tell you which drug I snorted last Thursday in order to write something that’s honest. I can follow the ordinary movements of the mind without exploiting my trauma for engagement. But I have to be honest. I have to say what I think is true about the muddled, morally ambivalent world, about the decisions I make that feel messy and uncontrolled, maybe arbitrary and maybe not.
12/11/2021, 12:20 PM
My desire to write is part of an enduring search for autonomy. By “autonomy” I mean the freedom to make work that I think is good on my own terms. The thing that holds me back is my need for certainty. This conflict is within all of us: longing for independence is always shadowed by the desire for guardrails, for safety, for the mind to be cordoned off and coddled.
12/11/2021, 12:20 PM
I think a lot of people are dismissive of their best thoughts. They can’t put their observations on paper because they’ve already censored them in their mind. They don’t have confidence that what they see is real, because to believe that it’s real requires them to believe that their understanding of the world is as valid as anyone else’s.
12/11/2021, 12:20 PM
Creativity is inherently anti-authoritarian. As in: to be successfully creative, you have to shed the part of yourself that desperately wants reassurance. It’s only then that you can escape cliche and escape paradigmatic thinking.
12/11/2021, 12:20 PM
Notes on Web3
2
A key characteristic — a key aesthetic—of most (all?) blockchains is immutability. They are ledgers, after all. But, these days, I am more interested in mutability; ephemerality! I like things that can change and grow, then vanish.
12/11/2021, 12:20 PM
Here, I’ll end with credit where due: Ethereum should inspire anyone interested in the future(s) of the internet, because it proves, powerfully, that new protocols are still possible. I do not think Web3 is a desirable or even tolerable path forward for this web right here, but I take its lesson well. “Code wins arguments”, and so do clubs, and cults; time remains to build all three
12/11/2021, 12:20 PM
Gonna Fly Now
5
NFTs are a way to record all of the "motley ties" that bind people to one another on the blockchain and make them usable by others, freely tradable. In a maximal vision of their potential, every obligation we might ever feel toward other people could be thereby codifed and traded, alienated and priced, rendered into "smart contracts" and made explicitly contingent on profit considerations. Perhaps the only thing more dehumanizing than the cash nexus is a programmable cash nexus.
12/11/2021, 12:20 PM
Owning a particular token can be made a prerequisite for permission to do things or use things: No reading an ebook without its token, for instance. No giving anything away without sending its original creator a royalty. No selling of anything to "the wrong sorts of people." No watching a pay-per-view stream unless every wallet in the room has the necessary tokens. And so on. As with "smart" functionality — which does much the same thing — it will be implemented in situations where it doesn't benefit the participants at all but serves outside interests. They will "communities" that people will be coerced into joining because they want to go to a concert or a basketball game and won't be able to get tickets otherwise.
12/11/2021, 12:20 PM
She concluded that "those who haven’t anything in them to tell them what they like and what they don’t" are the ones that go Nazi — i.e. people who need the market or a crowd or an algorithm to tell them what to do next — but along the way she also points specifically to those whose ambitions have been thwarted by the existence of an establishment.
12/11/2021, 12:20 PM
The redemption in unveiling the "brutal exploitation" underlying everything — what was expected to justify it — was that everyone could get in on it. Capitalism never actually delivers on this; instead it generates vast and dynamic inequalities and cadres of broken, used up, and disposable people. But it must continually renew the expectation that one day you will be the exploiter and not the exploited.
12/11/2021, 12:20 PM
It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom — Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.
12/11/2021, 12:20 PM
Reality Disappointment — Real Life
2
My father was watching TV, my mother was reading her iPad and I felt that sinking sense of banality that always emerges after a few days at home. It didn’t occur to me at the time that banality might be the true face of what I’d been seeking all along.
12/11/2021, 12:20 PM
My friends in Toronto were experiencing the same psychic irregularity as my friends in New York: random bursts of exhaustion, a desire to connect combined with a weird inability to absorb any good will. What should have been clear to me from the start was that normalcy was always a figment of pandemic imagination. After so much loss and disruption, to feel “normal” would have been much stranger than whatever it was we felt.
12/11/2021, 12:20 PM
Shadow of a Doubt — Real Life
3
Belling argues that patients are increasingly expected to be active participants in their own health. They must know enough to know when to call the doctor, and surrender this knowledge the moment they are through the door. For the hypochondriac, the doctor’s diagnosis is read alongside — in relation to — a panoply of other texts, both the information gleaned from internet sources and the story of their own body, sending them new information in the form of symptoms they forgot to mention. In the face of all this intertextuality, the closure offered by the doctor proves ever more difficult to accept.
12/11/2021, 12:20 PM
There is, perhaps, little more unsettling than being told that something is over, even as one continues to feel its ongoing effects. In the Northern Hemisphere, the promise of a “hot vax summer” quickly devolved into a recognition that “vibes are off.” More precisely, the vibes are uncertain. People are dancing and wearing cute outfits, but Miss Corona still lurks.
12/11/2021, 12:20 PM
If I had been able to take myself to the Emergency Department, I would have; instead I felt the absolute injustice of my lack of agency as I stared at the ceiling and prayed to a god I didn’t believe in.
12/11/2021, 12:20 PM
Who Goes Crypto?
6
In this way, as finance becomes personal finance, personal finance just becomes the personal. Your Dogecoin or Ethereum Classic is just who you are too. And if you think that’s dumb, because Dogecoin and Ethereum Classic have no point beyond being vehicles by which people trying to get rich though, that is exactly the point.
12/11/2021, 12:20 PM
“Every human domain and endeavor, along with humans themselves,” is being transmogrified into “a specific image of the economic,” Brown noted in Undoing the Demos. By becoming miniature venture capitalists and hedge funds, we fulfill the logical progressions towards being homo oeconomicuses in which, as Brown puts it, “all conduct is economic conduct; all spheres of existence are framed and measured by economic terms and metrics, even when those spheres are not directly monetized.”
12/11/2021, 12:20 PM
“Investing has become our language for all kinds of things. Including consumption. We talk about ‘I think I’m going to invest in a good pair of hiking boots’ instead of just saying ‘I’m going to ‘buy them,’” Brown elaborated to me over the phone. Words like “invest” aren’t being integrated into our life just because financial ideology is ubiquitous—our use of them reveals the moral value that we imbue onto finance.
12/11/2021, 12:20 PM
Even though they stand to potentially get screwed in markets, retail investors have realized that they’re screwed if they don’t invest either. “People my age and older look at Robinhood, crypto, etc. with some disdain. They complain about ‘the financialization of everything,” Mat Dryhurst, an artist, researcher and co-host of the technology and art-focused podcast Interdependence, told me. “But I’ll talk to the 20-year-old students that I teach at NYU, who grew up with Instagram, and they look at me like ‘where the fuck have you been?’”
12/11/2021, 12:20 PM
The rich have figured this out. In the past decade, according to Justin Farrell’s Billionaire Wilderness, the number of ultra-wealthy (people with at least a $30 million net worth) have grown rapidly at a rate of almost 10 percent a year with most of the new entrants minting their status through finance, investments, and banking work. According to 2017 analysis by the data firm Wealth-X a clear plurality (14.5 percent) of the ultra-rich attained their wealth in finance, banking, and investments. Meanwhile, the financial situation has more or less remained stagnant for most other people, while things keep getting more expensive.
12/11/2021, 12:20 PM
“The pandemic economy isn’t an anomaly but a heightened version of one possible future: a world where money is abundant but safe long-term investments are rare and where ‘getting rich quick’ is less an American pathology and more the best bet for a stable life.” The side hustles, as it turns out, haven’t been working.
12/11/2021, 12:20 PM
Weird Web3 Energy
6
I think my read of this whole thing right now is eldritch, rather than utopian. Complex distributed systems, like the web, markets, society, ecosystems, biology, are emergent. Emergence is powerful, resilient, unmoral, teleonomic.
12/11/2021, 12:20 PM
Each wave is powered by the introduction of a new low-cost input: coal and iron for the railway age, steel for the heavy engineering age, electricity, oil, and plastic for the mass production age, microchips for the ICT age.
12/11/2021, 12:20 PM
Another word for money is “currency”, as in “currents”, as in “river”. This term emphasizes something important about money: it has to flow to exist at all. Money is a protocol, a shared idea that has power to the extent that people participate in exchanging it.
12/11/2021, 12:20 PM
Websites became the boundary of trust, and apps followed the same model.
12/11/2021, 12:20 PM
Before the advent of the internet, apps ran on your computer and saved data to your computer. The internet flipped this around. Web software ran remotely on server computers, and saved data remotely to giant databases. Now our data was on someone else’s computer. This introduced a host of challenges for anything that required trust
12/11/2021, 12:20 PM
The landscape of tech is essentially feudal Each app builds a moat and walls to protect the hoard of data its peasants produce
12/11/2021, 12:20 PM
Solve for Happy
139
You are not your thoughts. Those thoughts exist to serve you.
12/3/2021, 9:46 PM
Most attempts to solve the Happiness Equation fail because we use illusions as inputs, unable to see the world for what it is,
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five ultimate truths.
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and stop trying to escape—and
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seven blind spots
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six grand illusions
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painkillers to reject, and, finally, there are truths to ponder and grasp.
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There are illusions to bust, blind spots to fix,
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But reaching uninterrupted happiness is not as easy as spending a night out with friends, attending a yoga class, or buying a new car.
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You find your guiding landmarks—you find The Truth.
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True joy is to be in harmony with life exactly as it is.
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Once you know the true nature of the market and that occasional losses—“ripples,” as I used to call them—are just part of how the game is played, you stop the localized suffering and focus on the bigger picture. While the life of a trader is rarely ever joyful, that ability to form a realistic expectation of the risk inherent in the market and to rise above the ripples when they occur is the skill you need to reach joy.
12/3/2021, 9:46 PM
If fun suspends your thoughts, and happiness arises when your brain agrees with the events of your life, then joy is when thoughts are no longer even needed because the analysis has ended, and the equation has permanently been solved.
12/3/2021, 9:46 PM
so should you expect work to be demanding, your manager to be annoying, and the money to run out at the end of the month. It’s just how things are—bumps on the road of life. No surprises.
12/3/2021, 9:46 PM
Annoying bumps on the road also arise when navigating a familiar path—they’re not pleasant, but they are predictable, so you pass them calmly with no stress.
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And that’s the case with joy. It emerges, first and foremost, from a deep understanding of the exact topology of life.
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This is similar to what you do when you solve your Happiness Equation, thinking through event by event as your life unfolds.
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The only way to appreciate the smell of a rose is to experience it. It’s the same with joy.
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They are like the artists and writers—and engineers—psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi writes about, who are so in harmony with the present moment that they enter a realm of timeless bliss he calls “flow”—only they flow with every tiny thing that life throws their way, whatever it is. They reach a state of uninterrupted happiness that I’ve come to call joy.1
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Those who reach joy are not only accepting of life as it actually is but are utterly immersed in it.
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For each event of our passing life, we solve the Happiness Equation correctly when we bust the illusions and fix the blind spots. But to stay happy regardless of the twists and turns of life, we should aim to reach an even higher state.
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But always remember: Fun and pleasure in any form are only ever a temporary state of escape—a state of unawareness.
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So set yourself a fun quota. I do!
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that you take regularly to stay healthy.
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Fun, then, can be less like a numbing painkiller and more like a happiness supplement
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An even wiser use for fun is when you actively schedule regular doses of healthy pleasures,
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Whenever you feel the thoughts in your head getting negative, enjoy a healthy pleasure—say a workout, music, or a massage—and that will always flick off the switch.
12/3/2021, 9:46 PM
A wise use for fun is as an emergency off switch to allow for momentary intervals of peace so that you can get the voice in your head to chill, meanwhile interjecting some reason into the endless stream of chatter.
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our Happiness Equation unresolved and ignore the core issues that make us unhappy. Fun, then, despite its short jolts of elation, truly becomes an inhibitor to genuine happiness.
12/3/2021, 9:46 PM
By resorting to fun as an escape, we leave our Happiness Equation unresolved and ignore the core issues that make us unhappy.
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When that cycle becomes too much to bear, some resort to desperate measures and chemically numb their brain using real drugs or alcohol in a final attempt to find silence inside their head.
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As soon as the immediate pleasure fades, however, the negative thoughts rush back in and reestablish the suffering. So we keep coming back for more.
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With no thoughts, we return to our default, childlike, state: happiness!
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And so fun is useful, but some people seek it in desperation, to escape, because they’re afraid of their difficult thoughts. In that sense, the fun they chase is like a painkiller, to blunt the suffering.
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serotonin, oxytocin,
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We can miss the distinction between happiness and fun. We swap out true happiness for weapons of mass distraction: partying, drinking, eating, excessive shopping, or compulsive sex.
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Often what feels like happiness actually isn’t! We can miss the distinction between happiness and fun. We swap out true happiness for weapons of mass distraction: partying, drinking, eating, excessive shopping, or compulsive sex.
12/3/2021, 9:46 PM
The original design of the human brain included features that ensured the survival of our species. Those same features have turned into blind spots that delude the way our brain operates today. Distracted, our brain rarely ever tells us the truth, and that constantly ruins our Happiness Equation.
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That’s all well and good until you realize how often this leads to unhappiness.
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Humanity’s original survival programming lingers today. When we assess an event, our brains tend to err on the side of caution. We tend to consider the worst-case scenario so that we prepare for it, and we tend to morph the truth so that our limited brainpower can process it swiftly and efficiently. That’s all well and good until you realize how often this leads to unhappiness.
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our most basic instinct: survival.
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When we’re caught up in an illusion, there’s no point trying to solve the Happiness Equation. Life becomes so confusing that we don’t even bother.
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Most of us are constantly stressed by time’s illusive nature. We run out of it, waste it, and feel it ticking faster every day, eating away at our stressful lives while unable to slow it down or stop it. The relentless pace overwhelms us.
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It’s when things go wrong, or become challenging, that uninformed behavior is no longer sufficient.
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Think positive thoughts and agree with the events of life and you’ll reach the state of happiness. • Rise above the clutter of thought, grasp life for what it truly is, and you’ll perpetually live in a state of joy.
9/28/2021, 8:40 PM
Suspend your thoughts by having fun and you’ll find yourself in the state of escape.
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Think negative thoughts and you’ll end up in the state of suffering (unhappiness).
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Allow your thoughts to be affected by illusions and you’ll be stuck in the state of confusion.
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Happiness depends entirely on how we control every thought.
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Happiness starts with a conscious choice.
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I choose not to suffer.
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The interesting thing is, just as we have the ability to engage in our suffering at will, we also have the ability to debug our pain systems if we put our minds to it.
9/28/2021, 8:40 PM
Anticipating awful things in the future or ruminating about awful moments from the past is not the useful, instructive, and unavoidable experience of everyday pain. This prolonged extension of pain is a serious bug in our system
9/28/2021, 8:40 PM
All the thinking in the world, until converted into action, has no impact on the reality of our lives. It does not change the events in any way. The only impact it has is inside us, in the form of needless suffering and sadness.
9/28/2021, 8:40 PM
the misery we feel then is not the product of the world around us—the event is already over while we continue to suffer. It’s the work of our own brains.
9/28/2021, 8:40 PM
But that’s not the case with suffering. When we let it, emotional pain, even the most trivial kind, has the capacity to linger or resurface again and again, while our imaginations endlessly replay the reason for the pain. When we choose to let that happen, that’s when we overwrite our default for happiness and reset the preference for needless suffering.
9/28/2021, 8:40 PM
everyday emotional pain is similar in that it also serves a survival function.
9/18/2021, 2:58 PM
The brain no longer feels the need to protect the injured area, so it suppresses the signals, and good-bye pain. Which is why, barring a serious injury or a chronic condition, physical pain is generally not an impediment to happiness.
9/18/2021, 12:38 PM
But as it is, we hurt—we heal.
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As much as we hate it, pain and the discomforts of life are useful!
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In a similar fashion, most of the everyday discomforts of adult life are not only transient but also useful.
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We tell our brain exactly what to do and it complies. Fully!
9/18/2021, 12:38 PM
When a rude person apologizes, the apology doesn’t erase the event, but it does make you feel better, simply because the gesture changes the way you think about what happened. It brings the emotional world inside you and the world of events outside you into better alignment and balances out your Happiness Equation. You start to agree with the world. The way life is becomes more the way you want it to be, so you feel happy again—or at least no longer unhappy.
9/18/2021, 12:38 PM
If events remain as they are, but changing the way we think about them changes our experience of them, could we become happy simply by changing our thoughts? Of course!
9/18/2021, 12:38 PM
airbags, seat belts, and all the other safety features Saab was known for had deployed exactly as planned, and Nibal walked out of the crash without a scratch. I lost my car, but so what? My beloved wife was spared! Now consider this: if Nibal had parked the car somewhere and then it was smashed, I would have been devastated. The results would have been the same—wrecked car and safe Nibal—but my experience of it would have been very different. The event itself was irrelevant. It was the way I looked at it that mattered.
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So a slight change in the way we think can have a drastic impact on our happiness.
9/18/2021, 12:38 PM
It’s the thought, not the actual event, that’s making you unhappy.
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When a rude person offends you, he can’t really make you unhappy, unless you turn the event into a thought, then allow it to linger in your brain, and then allow it to distress you.
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Once the thought goes, the suffering disappears!
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Your friend still was rude, but you didn’t feel as bad anymore.
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try the Ironic Process Theory, in which you end up making yourself think about something by trying not to think about it.” Keep telling yourself, Don’t think about ice cream. Don’t think about ice cream. . . . until you find yourself thinking of nothing but ice cream.
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blast some music and sing along.
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Engage your brain in another thought
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Now apply the Blank Brain Test: Without changing anything in the real world, remove the thought—even if for just an instant.
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Let it linger in the same way we often do when we let thoughts like that ruin our day.
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Recall a time when you felt unhappy,
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Blank Brain Test.
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it’s not the event that make us unhappy; it’s the way we think about it that does.
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When you expect sunshine on your wedding day, an unexpected rain represents a cosmic betrayal. Your unhappiness at that betrayal might linger forever, waiting to be relived anytime you feel blue or hostile toward your spouse. “I should have known! It rained on our wedding day!”
9/18/2021, 12:38 PM
Unhappiness happens when your reality does not match your hopes and expectations.
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Happiness happens when life seems to be going your way. You feel happy when life behaves the way you want it to.
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your list consisted almost entirely of ordinary moments in life—a smile on your child’s face, the smell of warm coffee first thing in the morning, the kinds of things that happen every day.
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I work on my list at least once a week, adding new things.
9/18/2021, 1:30 AM
the very act of creating your Happy List makes for a very happy experience,
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When you’re done, at least for the first pass, go back and highlight a few items that, if you were forced to set priorities, would be at the top of the list of things that make you happiest.
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Write as many as you can think of.
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You can include the obvious stuff, like scratching your dog under her chin or watching a beautiful sunset, and simple things like talking to your friends or eating scrambled eggs.
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“I feel happy when ______________.”
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I started by simply documenting every instance when I felt happy. I called it my Happy List.
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Solve for Happy.
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And what’s the easiest way to spend so many hours on one thing? Doing something that makes you happy! Wouldn’t that be better than spending a lifetime trying to reach success in hopes that it will eventually lead to happiness?
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they love what they do so much they become experts at it just because the activity itself makes them happy.
9/18/2021, 1:30 AM
those who achieve the highest levels of success often have one thing in common, one thing that differentiates them from the pack.
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While success doesn’t lead to happiness, happiness does contribute to success.
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Not only are wealth, power, and lots of toys not prerequisites for happiness; if anything, the chain of cause and effect actually works the other way. Andrew Oswald, Eugenio Proto, and Daniel Sgroi from the University of Warwick found that being happy made people roughly 12 percent more productive and, accordingly, more likely to get ahead.2
9/18/2021, 1:30 AM
But once your income reaches the average annual income per capita, which in the United States today is about $70,000, subjective well-being plateaus. It’s true that earning less can dampen your sense of well-being, but earning more is not necessarily going to make you any happier.1
9/18/2021, 1:30 AM
Success is not an essential prerequisite to happiness.
9/18/2021, 1:30 AM
Because the basic premise is flawed: success, wealth, power, and fame don’t lead to happiness. As a matter of fact:
9/18/2021, 1:30 AM
The era just before our own saw the Great Depression and two world wars in quick succession, during which even those at the top of the income ladder had to worry about the basics. As a result, hardship shaped the priorities of an entire generation, underscoring the idea that what mattered most in life was to never endure such hardships again. The “insurance policy” most widely adopted and passed along was called “success.”
9/18/2021, 1:30 AM
But I misunderstood. I thought she meant that I needed to defer happiness along the way. Or that happiness would be the result once I had achieved success.
9/18/2021, 1:30 AM
You may have received sound advice like the kind my mother gave me, that I should study and work hard, save and be willing to defer certain forms of gratification to achieve certain goals.
9/18/2021, 1:30 AM
But unlike our gadgets, we humans don’t have a reset button. Instead, we have the ability to unlearn and reverse the effects of what went wrong along our path.
9/18/2021, 1:30 AM
To reach happiness, you need to remove those rocks one by one, starting with some of your most fundamental beliefs.
9/18/2021, 1:30 AM
something simply there for you each morning when you open your eyes.
9/18/2021, 1:30 AM
Happiness is the absence of unhappiness.
9/18/2021, 1:30 AM
All you needed was no reason to be unhappy. Which is another way of saying:
9/18/2021, 1:30 AM
Summon up a time when nothing annoyed you, nothing worried you, nothing upset you. You were happy, calm, and relaxed. The point is, you didn’t need a reason to be happy.
9/18/2021, 1:30 AM
they live in the moment, perfectly happy.
9/18/2021, 1:30 AM
For human beings, simply put, the default state is happiness.
9/18/2021, 1:30 AM
We do the same thing when we struggle to find happiness “out there,” when, in fact, happiness is right where it’s always been: inside us, a basic design feature of our species.
9/18/2021, 1:30 AM
We think of it as a destination to reach, when in fact it’s where we all began.
9/18/2021, 1:30 AM
We’re just looking for it in the wrong places.
9/18/2021, 1:30 AM
and still long for the elusive goal of satisfaction, contentment, and peace—also known as happiness.
9/18/2021, 1:30 AM
Whatever we choose to do in life is ultimately an attempt to find this feeling and make it last.
9/18/2021, 1:30 AM
Happiness is that glorious feeling when everything seems right, when all of life’s twists and turns and jagged edges seem to fit together perfectly.
9/18/2021, 1:30 AM
When you know what you’re looking for, the quest becomes easy. It may take time to unlearn old habits, but as long as you stick to the path, you’ll get there.
9/18/2021, 1:30 AM
His request to me was “Papa, you should never stop working. Keep making a difference and rely on your heart more often. Your work here is not done.”
9/18/2021, 1:30 AM
his peaceful way of living—I
9/18/2021, 1:30 AM
In fact, I’m not even always happy. But I found a model that works—a model that had seen us through our grief, the model that Ali’s life helped generate through his example.
9/18/2021, 1:30 AM
“Ali, how do I handle losing you?” even though I knew his answer. He would just say, “Khalas ya papa”—It’s over, Dad—“I’ve already died. There is nothing you can do to change that, so make the best out of it.”
9/18/2021, 1:30 AM
There was so much love and positivity in the air, countless hugs and smiles, that by the end of the day, if you didn’t know the circumstances, you might have thought this was just a happy gathering of friends—a wedding maybe, or a graduation. Even in these distressing circumstances, Ali’s positive energy filled our home.
9/18/2021, 1:30 AM
They wept in our arms, but when we talked, and when they came to understand our view of these events, which was informed by our happiness model, they stopped weeping. They walked around the house admiring the hundreds of photographs of Ali (always with a big smile) on every wall. They tried some of his favorite snacks set out on tables, or picked up an item of his as a souvenir, and remembered all the happy memories he’d given them.
9/18/2021, 1:30 AM
Even during the moments of our most intense grief over Ali’s passing, we were never angry or resentful of life. We didn’t feel cheated or depressed. We went through the most difficult event imaginable just as Ali would: in peace.
9/18/2021, 1:30 AM
“Why let an accident happen in the first place?” That’s when we commit to the moonshot: a self-driving car.
9/18/2021, 1:30 AM
Our approach at X is to begin by asking,
9/18/2021, 1:30 AM
When you’re seeking modest improvement in what exists, you start working with the same tools and assumptions, the same mental framework on which the old technology is based. But when the challenge is to move ahead by a factor of ten, you start with a blank slate. When you commit to a moonshot, you fall in love with the problem, not the product. You commit to the mission before you even know that you have the ability to reach it. And you set audacious goals.
9/18/2021, 1:30 AM
I was able to enjoy the ride of the roller coaster itself.
9/18/2021, 1:30 AM
none of it could dim my happiness.
9/18/2021, 1:30 AM
an equation and a well-engineered, simple, and replicable model of happiness
9/18/2021, 1:30 AM
I began to see that throughout all my striving I’d been trying to solve the wrong problem. I’d set myself the challenge of multiplying material wealth, fun, and status so that, eventually, the product of all that effort would be . . . happiness. What I really needed to do instead was to skip the intermediate steps and simply solve for happiness itself.
9/16/2021, 9:34 PM
What I realized was that I would never get to happiness as long as I held on to the idea that as soon as I do this or get that or reach this benchmark I’ll become happy.
9/16/2021, 9:34 PM
it suddenly hit me that happiness shouldn’t be something you wait for and work for as if it needs to be earned. Furthermore, it shouldn’t depend on external conditions, much less circumstances as fickle and potentially fleeting as career success and rising net worth. My path till then had been full of progress and success, but every time I’d gained yardage on that field, it was as if they moved the goal posts back a little farther.
9/16/2021, 9:34 PM
“Eat frugally for a year and dress frugally for another, and you’ll find happiness forever.”
9/16/2021, 9:34 PM
Arabic proverb
9/16/2021, 9:34 PM
never paused to enjoy each day as it unfolded.
9/16/2021, 9:34 PM
fill the hole in my soul.
9/16/2021, 9:34 PM
strive, the more reasons you discover for striving.
9/16/2021, 9:34 PM
treadmill.” The more you get, the more you want. The more you
9/16/2021, 9:34 PM
“hedonic
9/16/2021, 9:34 PM
End-User Programming
1
Desktop programs, web apps, and smartphone apps are to various degrees like appliances with a hermetic seal to keep users out of their interior. If there is not already a button for a given function, the only option for users is to petition the developer.
11/7/2021, 1:48 PM
Reality Has a Surprising Amount of Detail
1
This problem is not easy to fix, but it’s not impossible either. I’ve mostly fixed it for myself. The direction for improvement is clear: seek detail you would not normally notice about the world. When you go for a walk, notice the unexpected detail in a flower or what the seams in the road imply about how the road was built. When you talk to someone who is smart but just seems so wrong, figure out what details seem important to them and why. In your work, notice how that meeting actually wouldn’t have accomplished much if Sarah hadn’t pointed out that one thing. As you learn, notice which details actually change how you think.
10/31/2021, 4:45 PM
How to Write a Wise Poem
1
Like the best speculative fiction, good poems weird the truth, rearrange it, re-present it, cause us to re-envision the past, to rememory (to borrow Toni Morrison’s word) our own history. How do they do this? For one thing, they subvert our expectations and also reward them. These poems give us what we want, but they also give us what we don’t yet know we need. The transition from one to the next can be uncomfortable because it is simultaneously obvious and surprising.
10/31/2021, 2:28 PM
Passages Saved From iOS
2
How do you balance between locating the meta and chasing boring fundamentals? The short answer to that is to do trial and error. If you can’t master a particular skill, drop back down to its component elements and practice each of them in isolation. If you don’t get good conversions in your content marketing, drop down to practice publishing at a regular cadence. If you can’t get a throw to work, break it down to arms, then legs, then body position, then into one complete motion.
10/24/2021, 1:54 PM
This seems like an obvious thing to say. But as with most such things, the second-order implications are more interesting than the first-order ones. For instance, because expertise is necessary to play the metagame, it is often useful to search for the meta in your domain as a north star for expertise. The way I remind myself of this is to say that I should ‘locate the meta’ whenever I’m at the bottom of a skill tree. Even if I can’t yet participate, searching for the metagame that experts play will usually give me hints as to what skills I must acquire in order to become good enough.
10/24/2021, 1:53 PM
Hotel Concierge — YOUNG ADULT FICTIONS
2
but because they cling to a rulebook (“milady”) instead of trusting instinct. They were never allowed to have instincts. For that matter they’ve never really wanted, never felt a desire that wasn’t assigned, which is why: open relationships, switched majors, medicated anxiety, and ambivalence, ambivalence, ambivalence.
10/22/2021, 12:28 PM
Whether or not those behaviors are good, the kid isn’t mature, he or she is well-trained, and if you keep claiming maturity then you are going to stunt development. Sorry: not having an adolescent rebellion means you didn’t complete adolescence. The result is neotenous adults who are not overly sensitive—as conservative media would claim—but rather overly dependent on external rules. Cards Against Humanity is so funny, right? You get to say bad words, but it’s only a game.
10/22/2021, 12:27 PM
Power in Strangeness | Hyphen Magazine
1
KMC: There were so many things. I was like, I'm going to write realism because that's what you have to do. This idea that in order to write magical realism or more fantastical things, you have to first master realism, whatever that means. And also, people always say: ground the reader, ground the reader, ground the reader. I was like, But I kind of want to do the opposite. I kind of want to really disorient the reader. I find life very disorienting. I was like, Let’s have that. Finding power in strangeness — that’s something that you can do in fantasy, in a lot of very non-realistic things. The thing that should make you feel really ashamed or want to hide is actually the thing that gives you the most pleasure. At heart, I'm just like, Superpowers for you all. I just want to give everyone a superpower and have them create their own cosmos.
10/21/2021, 11:46 PM
Is Self-Help Bad? - By Ava - Bookbear Express
3
I think it’s more about trying to find some semblance of coherence in all of the chaos: believing in individualism but also understanding that we are necessarily interdependent, affected by the systems and institutions that we live in. Still believing that a single person can perform a miracle that affects all the generations to come.
10/21/2021, 3:18 PM
But I still think contradiction is necessary, that all of us are holding ideas that conflict with each other and that’s just the fucking human condition. We try to have keep the stability and the excitement, to love ourselves and change ourselves, to be spiritually connected while maintaining ambition in the world, and we always fall short.
10/21/2021, 3:17 PM
I’m also very interested in the idea they expressed that most self-help tells you how to be a better person, but better on the axes of being more productive or more happy (like, a better girlboss), not actually a good person. I would like to see more writing on how to be a good person that is not rationalist-adjacent thinking, that talks about “goodness” in terms of beauty and emotions.
10/21/2021, 3:16 PM
How to Get Useful Answers to Your Questions
5
This really expands the set of people I can learn from – instead of finding someone who can easily give a clear explanation, I just need to find someone who has the information I want and then ask them specific questions until I’ve learned what I want to know. And I’ve found that most people really do want to be helpful, so they’re very happy to answer questions.
10/21/2021, 11:24 AM
If this happens in a real-time conversation sometimes I’ll literally say something like “wait, that’s surprising to me, let me think for a minute” and try to incorporate the new data and come up with another question.
10/21/2021, 11:23 AM
Usually I’ll interrupt by asking a more specific question, because usually if someone has gone off on a long irrelevant explanation it’s because I asked an overly vague question to start with.
10/21/2021, 11:23 AM
Stating your understanding is a kind of yes/no question – “this is my understanding of how X works, is that right or wrong?”. Often the answer is going to be “right in some ways and wrong in others”, but even so it makes the job of the answerer a lot easier.
10/21/2021, 11:23 AM
I also find that yes/no questions get me answers faster because they’re relatively easy to answer quickly.
10/21/2021, 11:22 AM
Confidently Uncertain
1
So copy Jeff Bezos. You want to be socially confident - confident in yourself, confident in who you are - but you want to be appropriately uncertain about the world. So don’t kid yourself into thinking your code is bug free when you have historical evidence to the contrary. It shouldn’t hurt your ego to acknowledge uncertainty.
10/19/2021, 9:10 AM
Continuations by Albert Wenger : Crypto Tokens and the Coming Age of Protocol...
4
HTTP as the underlying protocol of the web allows for decentralized publishing. Anyone can operate a web server and publish their own content. And anybody with a web browser can access that content (subject to governments and ISPs imposing limitations). But as a stateless protocol, HTTP needs a data layer for any application functionality, which until recently was provided by companies such as Google (search), Facebook and Twitter (social), Amazon and eBay (commerce). Because we didn’t know how to maintain state in a decentralized fashion it was the data layer that was driving the centralization of the web that we have observed.
10/17/2021, 4:59 PM
More generally, the evolution of these protocols will be governed by the decision of those who have adopted it to adopt a future version. This has the potential to provide a much more democratic process for changing protocols over time then the historic committee process.
10/17/2021, 4:59 PM
Because the protocol is public (by definition) if a creator tries to retain too many tokens there is an incentive for everyone else to replicate the protocol with a new token none of which is retained.
10/17/2021, 4:58 PM
I can’t emphasize enough how radical a change this is to the past. Historically the only way to make money from a protocol was to create software that implemented it and then try to sell this software (or more recently to host it). Since the creation of this software (e.g. web server/browser) is a separate act many of the researchers who have created some of the most successful protocols in use today have had little direct financial gain. With tokens, however, the creators of a protocol can “monetize” it directly and will in fact benefit more as others build businesses on top of that protocol.
10/17/2021, 4:56 PM
Tenth of December
15
They were sorry, they were saying with their bodies, they were accepting each other back, and that feeling, that feeling of being accepted back again and again, of someone’s affection for you expanding to encompass whatever new flawed thing had just manifested in you, that was the deepest, dearest thing he’d ever—
10/14/2021, 9:47 PM
Sometimes in life one felt a feeling of wanting to quit. Then everyone would see. Everyone would see that teasing wasn’t nice. Sometimes with all the teasing his days were subtenable.
10/14/2021, 9:47 PM
Every step was a victory. He had to remember that. With every step he was fleeing father and father. Farther from father. Stepfarther. What a victory he was wresting. From the jaws of the feet.
10/14/2021, 9:47 PM
Bright, bright, blue and cold. Crunch went the snow as he crossed the soccer field.
10/14/2021, 9:47 PM
It was like either: (A) I was a terrible guy who was knowingly doing this rotten thing over and over, or (B) it wasn’t so rotten, really, just normal, and the way to confirm it was normal was to keep doing it, over and over.
10/11/2021, 3:48 PM
Have been sleepwalking through life, future reader. Can see that now. Scratch-Off win was like wake-up call. In rush to graduate college, win Pam, get job, make babies, move ahead in job, forgot former feeling of special destiny I used to have when tiny, sitting in cedar-smelling bedroom closet, looking up at blowing trees through high windows, feeling I would someday do something great.
9/28/2021, 8:40 PM
Growing up in paucity, won’t they become too cautious? Not that they are growing up in paucity. Still, there are things we want but cannot have. If kids raised too cautious, due to paucity, will not world chew them up and spit out?
9/28/2021, 8:40 PM
No one laughed, all just made that sound that is like laugh placeholder, so Anders wouldn’t feel bad, as his mother has recently passed away.
9/28/2021, 8:40 PM
When will I have sufficient leisure/wealth to sit on hay-bale watching moon rise, while in luxurious mansion family sleeps? At that time, will have chance to reflect deeply on meaning of life etc., etc.
9/28/2021, 8:40 PM
Night was falling. Birds were singing. Birds were, it occurred to me to say, enacting a frantic celebration of day’s end. They were manifesting as the earth’s bright-colored nerve endings, the sun’s descent urging them into activity, filling them individually with life nectar, the life nectar then being passed into the world, out of each beak, in the form of that bird’s distinctive song, which was, in turn, an accident of beak shape, throat shape, breast configuration, brain chemistry: some birds blessed in voice, others cursed; some squawking, others rapturous.
9/18/2021, 1:30 AM
I guess I was sad that love was not real? Or not all that real, anyway? I guess I was sad that love could feel so real and the next minute be gone,
9/18/2021, 1:30 AM
It was that impossible thing: happiness that does not wilt to reveal the thin shoots of some new desire rising from within it.
9/18/2021, 1:30 AM
Which maybe that’s what love was: liking someone how he was and doing things to help him get even better.
9/18/2021, 1:30 AM
He was just a kid. There was nothing he could do. In his chest he felt the lush release of pressure that always resulted when he submitted to a directive.
9/14/2021, 10:40 PM
To do good, you just have to decide to do good. You have to be brave. You have to stand up for what’s right.
9/14/2021, 10:40 PM
How Will You Measure Your Life?
114
Work becomes how we identify ourselves. We take our smartphones with us everywhere, checking for news constantly—as if not being connected all the time would mean we’re going to miss out on something really important. We expect the people who are closest to us to accept that our schedule is simply too demanding to make much time for them. After all, they want to see us succeed, too, right?
9/30/2021, 3:40 PM
Third, the owner of the capital demands that any business that he invests in must become very big, very fast.
9/30/2021, 3:40 PM
capital suddenly realizes that he should have invested several years earlier in the next growth business, so that when the core business stalled, the next engine of growth and profit would already be taking over as the engine for growth and profit. Instead, the engine just isn’t there.
9/30/2021, 3:40 PM
the next step, tomorrow arrives. The original core business has become mature and stops growing. The owner of the
9/30/2021, 3:40 PM
The first step is that because the probability is so high that the initial plan isn’t viable, the investor needs to invest in the next wave of growth even while the original business is strong and growing—to give the new initiative the time to figure out a viable strategy.
9/30/2021, 3:40 PM
Once a profitable and viable way forward has been discovered—success now depends on scaling out this model.
9/30/2021, 3:40 PM
once a viable strategy has been found, investors need to change what they seek—they should become impatient for growth and patient for profit.
9/30/2021, 3:40 PM
capital that seeks growth before profits is bad capital.
9/30/2021, 3:40 PM
in the initial stages of a new business, good money from investors needs to be patient for growth but impatient for profit.
9/30/2021, 3:40 PM
successful companies don’t succeed because they have the right strategy at the beginning; but rather, because they have money left over after the original strategy fails, so that they can pivot and try another approach. Most of those that fail, in contrast, spend all their money on their original strategy—which is usually wrong.
9/30/2021, 3:40 PM
93 percent of all companies that ultimately become successful had to abandon their original strategy—because the original plan proved not to be viable.
9/30/2021, 3:40 PM
the time when it is most important to invest in building strong families and close friendships is when it appears, at the surface, as if it’s not necessary.
9/30/2021, 3:40 PM
The relationships you have with family and close friends are going to be the most important sources of happiness in your life.
9/30/2021, 3:40 PM
high-achievers focus a great deal on becoming the person they want to be at work—and far too little on the person they want to be at home.
9/30/2021, 3:40 PM
Because if the decisions you make about where you invest your blood, sweat, and tears are not consistent with the person you aspire to be, you’ll never become that person.
9/30/2021, 3:40 PM
How do you make sure that you’re implementing the strategy you truly want to implement? Watch where your resources flow—the resource allocation process.
9/30/2021, 3:40 PM
With every moment of your time, every decision about how you spend your energy and your money, you are making a statement about what really matters to you. You can talk all you want about having a clear purpose and strategy for your life, but ultimately this means nothing if you are not investing the resources you have in a way that is consistent with your strategy.
9/30/2021, 3:40 PM
is created through hundreds of everyday decisions about how you spend your time, energy, and money.
9/30/2021, 3:40 PM
A strategy—whether
9/30/2021, 3:40 PM
Though they may believe that their family is deeply important to them, they actually allocate fewer and fewer resources to the things they would say matter most.
9/30/2021, 3:40 PM
they used them to finance a high-flying lifestyle for themselves and their families: better cars, better houses, and better vacations. The problem is, lifestyle demands can quickly lock in place the personal resource allocation process.
9/30/2021, 3:40 PM
They prioritized things that gave them immediate returns—such as a promotion, a raise, or a bonus—rather than the things that require long-term work, the things that you won’t see a return on for decades, like raising good children.
9/30/2021, 3:40 PM
The danger for high-achieving people is that they’ll unconsciously allocate their resources to activities that yield the most immediate, tangible accomplishments.
9/30/2021, 3:40 PM
With so many people and projects wanting your time and attention, you can feel like you are not in charge of your own destiny. Sometimes that’s good: opportunities that you never anticipated emerge. But other times, those opportunities can take you far off course,
9/30/2021, 3:40 PM
But it’s a messy process. People ask for your time and energy every day, and even if you are focused on what’s important to you, it’s still difficult to know which are the right choices.
9/30/2021, 3:40 PM
As is true in companies, your resources are not decided and deployed in a single meeting or when you review your calendar for the week ahead. It is a continuous process—and you have, in your brain, a filter for making choices about what to prioritize.
9/30/2021, 3:40 PM
we have resources—which include personal time, energy, talent, and wealth—and we are using them to try to grow several “businesses” in our personal lives. These include having a rewarding relationship with our spouse or significant other; raising great children; succeeding in our careers; contributing to our church or community; and so on. Unfortunately, however, our resources are limited and these businesses are competing for them. It’s exactly the same problem that a corporation has. How should we devote our resources to each of these pursuits?
9/30/2021, 3:40 PM
As you’re living your life from day to day, how do you make sure you’re heading in the right direction? Watch where your resources flow. If they’re not supporting the strategy you’ve decided upon, then you’re not implementing that strategy at all.
9/30/2021, 3:40 PM
You can talk all you want about having a strategy for your life, understanding motivation, and balancing aspirations with unanticipated opportunities. But ultimately, this means nothing if you do not align those with where you actually expend your time, money, and energy.
9/30/2021, 3:40 PM
and you risk waking up one day, years later, looking into the mirror, asking yourself: “What am I doing with my life?”
9/30/2021, 3:40 PM
Change can often be difficult, and it will probably seem easier to just stick with what you are already doing.
9/30/2021, 3:40 PM
Only then does a deliberate strategy make sense.
9/30/2021, 3:40 PM
your strategy until you find what it is that both satisfies the hygiene factors and gives you all the motivators.
9/30/2021, 3:40 PM
be prepared to experiment with different opportunities, ready to pivot, and continue to adjust
9/30/2021, 3:40 PM
expecting to have a clear vision of where your life will take you is just wasting time. Even worse, it may actually close your mind to unexpected opportunities.
9/30/2021, 3:40 PM
although it is hard to get it right at first, success doesn’t rely on this. Instead, it hinges on continuing to experiment until you do find an approach that works. Only a lucky few companies start off with the strategy that ultimately leads to success.
9/30/2021, 3:40 PM
Every time you consider a career move, keep thinking about the most important assumptions that have to prove true, and how you can swiftly and inexpensively test if they are valid.
9/30/2021, 3:40 PM
ask yourself what assumptions have to prove true for you to be happy in the choice you are contemplating.
9/30/2021, 3:40 PM
Before you take a job, carefully list what things others are going to need to do or to deliver in order for you to successfully achieve what you hope to do. Ask yourself: “What are the assumptions that have to prove true in order for me to be able to succeed in this assignment?”
9/30/2021, 3:40 PM
This type of planning can help you consider job opportunities, too. We all want to be successful and happy in our careers. But it’s all too easy to get too far down a path before you’ve realized that choices aren’t working out as you hoped. This tool can help you avoid doing just that.
9/30/2021, 3:40 PM
this approach of “What assumptions must prove true?” offers a simple way to keep strategy from going far off-course. It causes teams to focus on what truly matters to get the numbers to materialize.
9/30/2021, 3:40 PM
find ways to quickly, and with as little expense as possible, test the validity of the most important assumptions.
9/30/2021, 3:40 PM
while the bottom of the list should be those that are least important and most certain.
9/30/2021, 3:40 PM
ask the project teams to compile a list of all the assumptions that have been made in those initial projections. Then ask them: “Which of these assumptions need to prove true in order for us to realistically expect that these numbers will materialize?” The assumptions on this list should be rank-ordered by importance and uncertainty. At the top of the list should be the assumptions that are most important and least certain,
9/30/2021, 3:40 PM
There is a much better way to figure out what is going to work and what isn’t. It involves reordering the typical steps involved in planning a new project.
9/30/2021, 3:40 PM
it turned out that Disney did have around 11 million visitors in that first year. But, on average, they stayed only one day versus the three days they stayed in the other parks. What happened? In the other parks, Disney had built forty-five rides. This kept people happily occupied for three days. But Disneyland Paris opened its doors with only fifteen rides. You could do everything in just one day.
9/30/2021, 3:40 PM
the time they have learned which assumptions were right and which were wrong, it’s too late to do anything about it.
9/30/2021, 3:40 PM
“discovery-driven planning,” but it might be easier to think about it as “What has to prove true for this to work?”
9/30/2021, 3:40 PM
Strategy almost always emerges from a combination of deliberate and unanticipated opportunities. What’s important is to get out there and try stuff until you learn where your talents, interests, and priorities begin to pay off. When you find out what really works for you, then it’s time to flip from an emergent strategy to a deliberate one.
9/30/2021, 3:40 PM
experiment in life. As you learn from each experience, adjust.
9/30/2021, 3:40 PM
you need to be emergent.
9/30/2021, 3:40 PM
But if you haven’t reached the point of finding a career that does this for you, then,
9/30/2021, 3:40 PM
If you have found an outlet in your career that provides both the requisite hygiene factors and motivators, then a deliberate approach makes sense.
9/30/2021, 3:40 PM
In our lives and in our careers, whether we are aware of it or not, we are constantly navigating a path by deciding between our deliberate strategies and the unanticipated alternatives that emerge. Each approach is vying for our minds and our hearts, making its best case to become our actual strategy. Neither is inherently better or worse; rather, which you should choose depends on where you are on the journey. Understanding this—that strategy is made up of these two disparate elements, and that your circumstances dictate which approach is best—will better enable you to sort through the choices that your career will constantly present.
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Starting as early as high school, they think that to be successful they need to have a concrete vision of exactly what it is they want to do with their lives.
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Walton the brilliant strategy of opening his large stores only in small towns—thereby preempting competition from other discount retailers.
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Rather, it is a continuous, diverse, and unruly process.
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strategy is not a discrete analytical event—something
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When the company’s leaders made a clear decision to pursue the new direction, the emergent strategy became the new deliberate strategy.
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When strategy forms in this way, it is known as emergent strategy.
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The second source of options is unanticipated—usually
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options for your strategy spring from two very different sources. The first source is anticipated opportunities—the
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You actually have to find a career that both motivates you and satisfies the hygiene factors.
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you need to ask yourself a different set of questions than most of us are used to asking. Is this work meaningful to me? Is this job going to give me a chance to develop? Am I going to learn new things? Will I have an opportunity for recognition and achievement? Am I going to be given responsibility? These are the things that will truly motivate you. Once you get this right, the more measurable aspects of your job will fade in importance.
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Better salaries. A more prestigious title. A nicer office.
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For many of us, one of the easiest mistakes to make is to focus on trying to over-satisfy the tangible trappings of professional success in the mistaken belief that those things will make us happy.
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beyond a certain point, hygiene factors such as money, status, compensation, and job security are much more a by-product of being happy with a job rather than the cause of it. Realizing this frees us to focus on the things that really matter.
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easy for us to lose our sense of the difference between what brings money and what causes happiness.
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the reverse is true, too—financial rewards can be present without the motivators.
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This, in turn, can mean they get paid well; careers that are filled with motivators are often correlated with financial rewards.
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People who truly love what they do and who think their work is meaningful have a distinct advantage when they arrive at work every day. They throw their best effort into their jobs, and it makes them very good at what they do.
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In order to really find happiness, you need to continue looking for opportunities that you believe are meaningful, in which you will be able to learn new things, to succeed, and be given more and more responsibility to shoulder. There’s an old saying: find a job that you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.
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You are in a position where you have eight or ten hours every day from every person who works for you. You have the opportunity to frame each person’s work so that, at the end of every day, your employees will go home feeling like Diana felt on her good day: living a life filled with motivators.
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if you want to help other people, be a manager.
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the feelings of accomplishment and of learning, of being a key player on a team that is achieving something meaningful.
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The truth was that having the house wasn’t what really motivated them. It was the building of it, and how they felt about their own contribution, that they found satisfying. I had thought the destination was what was important, but it turned out it was the journey.
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money is the root cause of professional unhappiness. It’s not. The problems start occurring when it becomes the priority over all else, when hygiene factors are satisfied but the quest remains only to make more money.
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had chosen careers using hygiene factors as the primary criteria; income was often the most important of these.
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How is it that people who seem to have the world at their feet end up making deliberate choices that leave them feeling unfulfilled?
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Motivation factors include challenging work, recognition, responsibility, and personal growth. Feelings that you are making a meaningful contribution to work arise from intrinsic conditions of the work itself. Motivation is much less about external prodding or stimulation, and much more about what’s inside of you, and inside of your work.
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the factors that will cause us to love our jobs? These are what Herzberg’s research calls motivators.
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these alone won’t do anything to make you love your job—they will just stop you from hating it.
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The opposite of job dissatisfaction isn’t job satisfaction, but rather an absence of job dissatisfaction.
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if you instantly improve the hygiene factors of your job, you’re not going to suddenly love it. At best, you just won’t hate it anymore.
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Compensation is a hygiene factor. You need to get it right. But all you can aspire to is that employees will not be mad at each other and the company because of compensation.
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things like status, compensation, job security, work conditions, company policies, and supervisory practices.
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elements of work that, if not done right, will cause us to be dissatisfied. These are called hygiene factors.
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Instead, satisfaction and dissatisfaction are separate, independent measures. This means, for example, that it’s possible to love your job and hate it at the same time.
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job satisfaction is one big continuous spectrum—starting
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But incentives are not the same as motivation. True motivation is getting people to do something because they want to do it. This type of motivation continues, in good times and in bad.
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It acknowledges
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or motivation theory—that
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two-factor theory,
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How, then, do we explain what is motivating them if it’s not money?
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And a lot of people who work in the military get a deep sense of satisfaction from their work.
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they are not doing it for financial compensation.
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military
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They earn a fraction of what they would if they were in the private sector. Yet it’s rare to hear of managers of nonprofits complaining about getting their staff motivated.
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The problem with principal-agent, or incentives, theory is that there are powerful anomalies that it cannot explain. For example, some of the hardest-working people on the planet are employed in nonprofits and charitable organizations.
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Even parents can default to thinking that external rewards are the most effective way to motivate the behavior they want from their children—for
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has been widely used as an argument for skyrocketing compensation under the guise of “aligning incentives.”
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to align the interests of executives with the interests of shareholders.
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When we find ourselves stuck in unhappy careers—and even unhappy lives—it is often the result of a fundamental misunderstanding of what really motivates us.
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All of these factors—priorities, balancing plans with opportunities, and allocating your resources—combine to create your strategy.
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In your life, there are going to be constant demands for your time and attention. How are you going to decide which of those demands gets resources? The trap many people fall into is to allocate their time to whoever screams loudest, and their talent to whatever offers them the fastest reward. That’s a dangerous way to build a strategy.
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most in our jobs often does not align with what will really make us happy. Even worse, we don’t notice that gap until it’s too late.
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what’s most important to you in your career? The problem is that what we think matters
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to wake up every morning thinking how lucky you are to be doing what you’re doing.
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Too many of us who start down the path of compromise will never make it back. Considering the fact that you’ll likely spend more of your waking hours at your job than in any other part of your life, it’s a compromise that will always eat away at you.
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for many of us, as the years go by, we allow our dreams to be peeled away. We pick our jobs for the wrong reasons and then we settle for them. We begin to accept that it’s not realistic to do something we truly love for a living.
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The only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do.
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why theory can be so valuable: it can explain what will happen, even before you experience it.
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often think that the best way to predict the future is by collecting as much data as possible before making a decision. But this is like driving a car looking only at the rearview mirror—because data is only available about the past.
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People
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101 Essays That Will Change the Way You Think
3
Accomplishing goals is not success. How much you expand in the process is.
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we’re constantly measuring our present moments by how “finished” they are, how good the story sounds, how someone else would judge the elevator speech.
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when you choose what you want for the future, you’re actually just recreating a solution or an ideal of the past. When things don’t work out the way you want them to, you think you’ve failed only because you didn’t re-create something you perceived as desirable. In reality, you likely created something better, but foreign, and your brain misinterpreted it as “bad” because of that.
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紅樓夢（上）
1
到「儂今葬花人笑癡，他年葬儂知是誰」，「一朝春盡紅顏老，花落人亡兩不知」等句，不覺慟倒山坡之上，懷裏兜的落花撒了一地。試想林黛玉的花顏月貌，將來亦到無可尋覓之時，寧不心碎腸斷！既黛玉終歸無可尋覓之時，推之於他人，如寶釵、香菱、襲人等，亦可到無可尋覓之時矣。寶釵等終歸無可尋覓之時，則自己又安在哉？且自身尚不知何在何往，則斯處、斯園、斯花、斯柳，又不知當屬誰姓矣！——因此一而二，二而三，反覆推求了去，真不知此時此際欲為何等蠢物，杳無所知，逃大造，出塵網，使可解釋這段悲傷。正是：花影不離身左右，鳥聲只在耳東西。
9/30/2021, 3:40 PM
Bestiary
13
The sheets were so thin they let light into our dreams.
8/17/2021, 5:18 AM
We stopped being able to taste after we landed. We weren’t fluent in the flavors here. Our tongues receded, beached in the back of our throats, whaling, amputated at the name. We walked until our feet were fish-floppy. We walked like those oxen: to death.
8/10/2021, 11:15 PM
In a past life, our city was a landfill. In the summers, the air smelled as if it had passed through our bowels, hot and sour and slurred. My brother and I debated if the stink was spoiled plums or our farts or our father expiring from the country. Before I was born, the city bulldozed over buttocks of garbage for the roads to be built. The landfill lived just below us, digesting itself, flexing its belly. The soil was too soft to stand on and every year the houses kneeled deeper in their dung. In the backyard, my brother and I dug down to find what was dying.
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I was too afraid of backfire, so I only pretended to pull the trigger, making the gunshot sound with my mouth. Duck Uncle pretended to believe me, said I’d killed so many. But I’d aimed at nothing, the bullet unspent as our silence, the ducks just make-believe.
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We didn’t blame our mother for her lies: We loved them into littler truths.
8/10/2021, 11:15 PM
I remembered watching families in restaurants fighting to pay a bill, and maybe that was what Meng and Jiang were fighting over: a bill they were too proud to let the other take. To say a daughter is a debt they could afford to pay.
7/31/2021, 3:15 AM
I’m on a diet, she joked. A diet called life.
7/31/2021, 12:15 AM
She summarized her life in slashes, everything a choice: Leave/Stay. Mother/Daughter. Love/Live.
7/25/2021, 7:08 PM
We are all looking at it now, the gold and the photo, our eyes alternating between the glow and its shadow, the payment and the cost.
7/25/2021, 7:08 PM
She turns to the kitchen window and watches the mosquitos fatten into moons, light salting all the lines on her face.
7/25/2021, 7:08 PM
You think burial is about finalizing what’s died. But burial is beginning: To grow anything, you must first dig a grave for its seed. Be ready to name what’s born.
7/21/2021, 9:38 PM
In wartime, land is measured by the bones it can bury. A house is worth only the bomb that banishes it. Gold can be spent in any country, any year, any afterlife. The sun shits it out every morning. Even Ma misreads the slogans on the back of American coins: IN GOLD WE TRUST. That’s why she thinks we’re compatible with this country. She still believes we can buy its trust.
7/21/2021, 9:38 PM
I see the way you wear your hands without worry, but someday they’ll bury something. Someday this story will open like a switchblade. Your hands will plot their own holes, and when they do, I won’t come and rescue you.
7/21/2021, 9:38 PM
Practicing Mindfulness
16
“Mindfulness is simply being aware of what is happening right now without wishing it were different; enjoying the pleasant without holding on when it changes (which it will); being with the unpleasant without fearing it will always be this way (which it won’t).”
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Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction program.
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Jon Kabat-Zinn
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observing experiences and situations as if it’s your first time. Remain open to new possibilities
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BEGINNER’S MIND.
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Pay attention to whatever arises and make space for the uncomfortable moments.
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exclude any thought, emotion, or experience.
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do not
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›ALLOWING EVERYTHING TO BELONG.
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remaining balanced, especially when presented with difficult or uncomfortable circumstances.
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labeling something (a feeling, a thought, etc.) as good or bad, right or wrong, positive or negative.
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›LETTING GO OF JUDGMENT.
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to clearly see what you are experiencing in the present moment.
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recognition of the experience you are having.
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›BEING FULLY PRESENT.
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being present with clarity, wisdom, and kindness.
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Invisible Planets
22
the dragon-horse spirit closes his wings like a dewdrop falling from the heavens. When you sing, the world will listen; when you are quiet, you’ll hear the song of all creation.
7/21/2021, 9:38 PM
Now it is a deep canyon whose craggy walls are formed from an amalgam of bricks, steel, concrete, and trees, the product of mixing the inorganic with the organic, decay with life, reality with dream, the steel-and-glass metropolis with ancient myths.
7/21/2021, 9:38 PM
Finally, across thousands of miles, he came here to become a new legend to be passed down through the ages. Tradition and modernity, myth and technology, the East and the West—which is his old country, which the new?
7/21/2021, 9:38 PM
You made me understand that living with an awareness of the closeness of death is nothing to be afraid of.
7/21/2021, 9:38 PM
No matter how heavily it rained outside, the little bears of the village always lived together happily. Maybe everything else in the world was fake; maybe only the world of the little bears was real.
7/21/2021, 9:38 PM
But now, with Ah Fu, everyone was out and about, doing things. No one had imagined that Ah Fu could be put to all these uses. No one had thought that men and women in their seventies and eighties could still be so creative and imaginative.
7/21/2021, 9:38 PM
Of course, such a plan had its risks: privacy and security, misuse of telepresence by criminals, malfunctions and accidents, just for starters. But since the technological change was already here, it was best to face the consequences and guide them to desirable ends.
7/21/2021, 9:38 PM
The world in the game is so different from the world around me, she thought. In the game, a person just died. They didn’t get sick, and they didn’t sit in a wheelchair.
7/21/2021, 9:38 PM
Pretending that the fake is real only makes the real seem fake.
7/21/2021, 9:38 PM
Every ghost used to be alive. Their fake mechanical bodies host real souls. But I’m fake throughout, inside and outside. From the day I was born, made, I was fake. Every ghost has stories of when they were alive, but I don’t. Every ghost had a father, a mother, a family, memories of their love, but I don’t have any of that.
7/21/2021, 9:38 PM
Sin is like wine. The more it is hidden from sunlight, the more it ferments, growing more potent.
6/12/2021, 10:37 AM
Because the rent is cheap, every kind of migrant can be found here, struggling to fulfill their Shenzhen dream: the high-tech, high-salaried, high-resolution, high-life, high-Shenzhen.
6/12/2021, 10:37 AM
I look to the left and then to the right. I’m frightened. I have no way to pick. Mocking laughter. I lunge and grab both fists and force the fingers open. Both are empty, both are lies.
6/6/2021, 10:06 PM
The people below throng like a nest of ants controlled by an invisible hand, divide into a few groups, are stuffed into the different squares: time flies past the laborer, the poor, the “third world”; time crawls for the rich, the idle, the “developed world”; time stays still for those in charge, the idols, the gods …
6/6/2021, 10:06 PM
stare at her bright eyes, like a pair of fireflies, in the darkness. “Come and look at the fish in the waterways with me. Maybe they’re the only creatures in this world who live real lives.”
6/6/2021, 10:06 PM
A man is such a strange animal: fear and desire are expressed by the same organ. For the former, he loses control of the organ and it lets out urine; for the latter, he loses control of the organ and it fills with blood.
6/6/2021, 10:06 PM
I seem to have also become a robot musician. I strain to play my foolish song of seduction, but she sees through me with no effort. I have nothing in my chest but a mechanical heart made of iron.
6/6/2021, 10:06 PM
“You’re often anxious because you hate the feeling of the seconds slipping away from you.
6/6/2021, 10:06 PM
“Swim, swim, swim. Before you know it, life is over.” I repeat the same words I said ten years ago. “Just like us,” she says. “This is the hidden meaning of life,” I say. “At least we still can choose how to live.”
6/6/2021, 10:06 PM
The ancient city at night is filled with the spirit of consumerism, but we can’t find anywhere we want to go.
6/6/2021, 10:06 PM
Now I’m back. I have a car, a house—everything a man should have, including erectile dysfunction and insomnia. If happiness and time are the two axes of a graph, then I’m afraid the curve of my life has already passed the apex and is on its inexorable way down to the bottom.
6/6/2021, 10:06 PM
“Living is so … like a dream.”
6/6/2021, 8:06 PM
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