Collections

I post this quote from Peter Block's book "Community" every year. It doesn't get much attention because it's not built for social media: it's thick. B

“Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born." — Anaïs

New Media is opinionated about the internet’s infinite scale. It chooses to reject or play with the internet’s scale, opting to be handmade, limited q

The ‘tetrad’ or ‘laws of media:’ enhances: awareness of inclusive, structural process obsolesces: dominance of logical method reverses into: techno

The ‘laws of media’ can’t tell you everything about any medium, but it does give us something remarkable: predictability. We know that anything we can

What I call temporal curiosity is the practice of actively directing our curiosity across time – past, present, future – to gain a deeper understandin

“It’s not just you prompting the LLM, but also the LLM as a prompt reversibly triggers your imagination and creativity… Again, the role of the LLM her

Manifestos Are Magic Spells

A Sapphirepunk Manifesto

“Beauty is the mystery of life. It’s not in the eye, it’s in the mind—and it’s because of awareness of perfection in the mind. As a matter of fact, I

when people think about education, they think more about what I would say is a softer component of diffusing knowledge. I have something very hard and

I always try to find the first-order terms or the second-order terms of everything. When I’m observing a system or a thing, I have a tangle of a web o

a Note is something to consider, a Post is something to inhabit. - visakan veerasamy

“Once you see the boundaries of your environment, they are no longer the boundaries of your environment" - Marshall McLuhan

Before you’ve noticed important details they are, of course, basically invisible. It’s hard to put your attention on them because you don’t even know

In the generative era, the Remix is the KPI. The work is not the singular piece that touches a million people, but the one that begets a million der

In the generative era, the Remix is the KPI. The work is not the singular piece that touches a million people, but the one that begets a million der

In a long-context world, maybe the organizations that benefit from AI will not be the ones with the most powerful models, but rather the ones with the

The most valuable resource isn't algorithms, compute, or even just data. It's context.

Part of what restricts us seeing things is that we have an expectation about what we will see, and we are actually perceptually restricted by that exp

If prestige thinking is less essential than we claimed, and if machines can now produce a lot of its outputs cheaply, then what’s coming is not necess

In ‘How Movies Were Edited 60 Years Ago,’ an editor manually cut film splicing, taping, and rewinding at a near biblical pace. Each move carried signi

Why should what you produce, rather than what you consume, be the most important thing about you? Why shouldn’t the fact that you race boats or watch

consumption choices force you to develop the habit of self-examination. And when you think about more complex life choices — what kind of personality

design is the embodiment of values. Design is the ultimate commitment to or compromise of one’s values. And this is how we go about the world. We make

When Times New Roman appears in a book, document, or advertisement, it connotes apathy. It says, “I submitted to the typeface of least resistance.” Ti

What are the words you do not have yet? [Or, “for what do you not have words, yet?”] What do you need to say? [List as many things as necessary] “What

“Vibes are like the sun: we know that they exist, but we can't ever look at them directly. Concepts like community, mentorship, love, happiness, cultu

I like the idea that mastery is simply a very intimate understanding of all the possible mistakes one could make. Daniel Dennett had a great riff on t

The Mom Test: How to Talk to Customers & Learn If Your Business Is a Good Idea When Everyone Is Lying to You

if project management is the meta of doing work, then managing your psychology is the meta of project management. A moderately-good process maintained

At a certain point we’re gonna have to build up some machinery, inside our guts, to help us deal with this. Because the technology is just gonna get b

You’re doomscrolling because you’re looking for something to transform you but you can’t stay with one thing for long enough to be transformed by it.

A book is, we know, an unrivaled technology for living more life. The contemporary internet-abetted image, on the other hand, is a highly potent yet f

Narrating and listening foster each other. The narrative community is a community of careful listeners. A particular kind of attention is inherent to

Narrating and listening foster each other. The narrative community is a community of careful listeners. A particular kind of attention is inherent to

well-arranged words rearrange reality.

Hyperstition is a positive feedback circuit including culture as a component. It can be defined as the experimental (techno-)science of self-fulfillin

“leverage points.” These are places within a complex system (a corporation, an economy, a living body, a city, an ecosystem) where a small shift in on

Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System

For decades, technology has required standardized solutions to complex human problems. In order to scale software, you had to build for the average us

1. Embracing ‘Anti-Scale’According to John their maximum audience is capped at 200,000.“If we have 10 million subscribers we've pivoted. Something's g

Communities are not resources to be optimised and they're not user bases to be migrated. They're the accumulated residue of people choosing, over and

to make the thing is to make its impact, its memory, the product of its extended use, its legacy, and its language. "Good Design", such that it might

capital demands design address the hyper-specific moment of The Now; the site of consumption, of transaction. Thats all it cares for; where it eats. B

We need a new definition of scale that is not about the production volumes of a material but the proliferation and exchange of knowledge. From scaling

pastagang

Capturable curiosity emerges when there is a mix of immediate relevance (the search is about something directly impacting the searcher) and civic enga

www.simonstalenhag.se

The text actually moves back and forth between all of these. Few novels pay less attention to the rules of fiction than Zen and the Art of Motorcycle

surprise may be a better proxy for creativity than quality. A polished output is not necessarily creative, but a surprising one might be. Yet even sur

“Communication is not what has been said. It is what it is possible to say— and that is guarded by the implicit messages inherent in the relationships

Tech communities, like any community, are messy. If you’re fortunate to land on one that’s inclusive and welcoming then there are exciting things comi

The club model teaches us something: organizations that endure don’t try to include everyone. They’re clear about their identity, even as that identit

We believe that a healthy ecosystem competes on innovative features, not critical mass. The social web should be centered around people, not platforms

It was only because I showed up and I paid attention," he said. "I looked for places to go. I looked for communities to join. I looked for ways to bec

Curation leads to expertise. Through curation, you better understand yourself, history, and unlikely connections across fields. Increasingly, we will

we’ve always been influenced in what we find beautiful or valuable or important, of course, but what’s new is the speed at which one is inundated with

You can use algorithms to surface new things. But algorithms are not nearly as good as human curators yet. Whatever pattern matching is going on insid

**THE CLUB AS A LIFESTYLE PLATFORM: IT’S BIGGER THAN BRAT **Bushwick circa 2022 onward is one of the most meme’d lifestyles, identities and ‘vibes’ th

Most AI backlash is economic anxiety coated in a veneer of social justice. Alfalfa farming consumes 19 times the water that data centers do; there’s n

“Diffusion lag” reflects a lack of product-market fit. Even AI optimists are still hitting practical roadblocks. That’s why detailed case studies are

Here are some things I’ve asked chatgpt recently: “why is Toblerone so popular at airport duty-free stores?” “give me a recipe for a chickpea tagine

“I found a piece you wrote in the footnote of a book that I admire.” In other words, it took effort for us to find each other. And much like an ineffi

Communities = Human Search Engines?

LLMs have three new capabilities that change the nature of search: Intuitive leaps: LLMs can answer poorly written questions with spooky-accurate ans

Unlike vertical search aggregators, boutique search engines feel less like the Yellow Pages and more like texting your friends to ask for a recommenda

We all know we’re overstimulated and want to stop, but we can’t. We use app blockers, throw our phones away, and build rigid routines. But none of it

humans don’t have fixed identities. we’re constantly testing. trying different versions of ourselves. seeing what gets rewarded. adjusting based on fe

I feel like there’s something so soulless about our culture—something deeply, deeply missing in people’s experience of life, a kind of superficiality.

Letter to Arc Members 2025

Dreamer – your home for personal intelligence // flurries of latent creativity

Influencers (by definition and per contract) are paid to recommend; curators earn trust by choosing. Different economic incentives yield different res

Music is infinitely accessible and practically free. What we've actually lost is the curator. Someone we can trust to show us the beautiful imperfecti

There is an observation that has stayed with me. People no longer want the thing. They want the signalling mechanism around the thing. This applies to

None of them would survive on the reference alone. What separates them is the argument each is making about who they are for, what their audience need

interactive experiences for mindfulness and self-therapy to increase present-moment awareness and awaken creativity

I have always tried to take lots of notes, typically as snapshots of my mental state. What I’m thinking about, what my priorities are, where my attent

When you try to make something that solves everything, you obsess over questions of power: how to make something that is omnipotent and everlasting. B

A Design Reset

My wife is a painter, and I’ve been paying a lot of attention to her journey these past few years, because she has never put her work online. She migh

Making a living from your work comes so much later in the process of being an artist. The first layer of needs for an artist is to have something that

A digital garden is a framework for speculation around how online space can be designed from the imagination of gardens. Here, the values of gardens,

I don’t have to care about algorithms if I have people who care about me. And I get people to care about me by first demonstrating that I care about t

"Every product in the world, the quality at the end of the day is simply a reflection of how much the people who created it gave a shit about the prod

we have a world where friction gets automated out of experiences, aestheticized in curated lifestyles, and dumped onto underfunded infrastructure and

Long-tail users of user-centered design are not given the degree of control necessary to adapt the design object or tool to their unique needs, and de

The vast interconnection enabled by digital platforms has ended up creating more of a sense of sameness than diversity. Users are subtly guided toward

Be Good-Argument-Driven, Not Data-Driven

From My Data to Our Data: A Proposal to Equitably Distribute Wealth in a Digital Economy

Technology increasingly robs us of the mystical in our lives. Not everything needs to be fast and available and convenient. I love ideas and products

We need ritual technology. Technology designed for ritual use.Why? Most of the software we use daily is designed to engagement-max. Social media feeds

Buckminster Fuller’s Manifesto for the Genius of Generalists

“The best moments in reading are when you come across something—a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things—that you’d thought special, particula

Create ownership in everything. Revenue shares in projects. Equity in micro-companies. Stakes in outcomes. The Old Game keeps you permanently renting

When individual entry is impossible, collective entry becomes optimal. When traditional financing fails, alternative structures win. The groups doing

How to build a movement: Say 1 thing 1,000 different ways for many years.

This quote from Elias Canetti, I think really solves what we're discussing: “A crowd exists as long as it has an unattainable goal. The image is acqui

Any altruistic system is inherently unstable, because it is open to abuse by selfish individuals, ready to exploit it.

all jokes aside there are so many things an ai first social network can do better but one thing that i keep coming back to is moving away from “likes”

Humans aren’t meant to excavate their inner feelings until they find their “true self.” We become ourselves in relation, not through introspection.

This line from David Foster Wallace still haunts me:“The next suitable person you’re in light conversation with, you stop suddenly in the middle of th

Astronaut Scott Kelly on intelligence: “The smartest person in the room, I’ve learned, is usually the person who knows how to tap into the intelligenc

I think that a fairly reliable mark of high intelligence is the capacity to recognize the signal within the noise of someone's 'wrong' take. Pseudo-i

the best relationships consist of a series of unbreachable private understandings

convinced that adults have totally forgotten how to have fun in conversation. every conversation is either "checklist catch up on life events" or "gr

What is love? Ask 19 geniuses. Get 19 answers. • Plato: It's remembering a soul. • Freud: It's desire in disguise. • Buddha: It's letting go. • Nietz

“People think that intimacy is about sex. Intimacy is about truth. When you realize you can tell someone your truth, when you can show yourself to the

This project is inspired by the transformative power of intimate gatherings. Most of my transformation has happened in intimate group settings where m

“we maxed out intelligence but minimized wisdom”

Knowledge of the world isn’t the same as experiencing the world. Why does online connection so often seem to lack aliveness , as compared to encount

it's weird that at a given age, 45 say, someone can't just write down the compressed/compiled topline notes on everything they've learned about life,

Productive Fees : Valuable Protocols / Extractive Fees : Valuable Companies

We have tried to relate to the world around us through only the left side of our brain, and we are clearly failing. If we are to re-establish a viable

When metaphor invades decolonization, it kills the verypossibility of decolonization; it recenters whiteness, it resettles theory, it extends innocenc

From indigenous cultures — who’ve tended to operate on a paradigm of cooperative collectivism that’s deeply entwined with their relationship to nature

Indigenous people did not despise wage labour primarily because of the effort that it entailed. Rather, they thought the work demanded by capitalists

Yatú: Head of Fiction is Norm. Head of Reality is me.  (USB club job titles the co-founders gave themselves)

A History of Future Cities by Daniel Brook

Barcelona’s Superblocks: Putting People at the Centre | CityChangers.org

A trend is a fad whose demand is not satisfied. A fad is a trend whose demand is satisfied too quickly. The lesson? If you experience success, do not

This is silly simplified but people who work in “Brand” are typically valued for their taste and ability to forecast and predict trends. They see the

One of the surprising and counter-cultural truths about modern-day marketing, which I suspect drives many efficiency-minded people practically insane,

creating conditions for collective intelligence to thrive.

I, Pencil by Leonard E. Read - Foundation for Economic Education

the desire to connect things together

The Future of NFTs: A Visual Exploration into the REAL use cases

The greatest lie told to the public is that people make apps to sell data. Data has no value—you can buy a complete data set on the entire US populati

As a Service / Are.na

Luxury Media

Better futures with the Wide Awakes

So why try to predict the future at all if it’s so difficult, so nearly impossible? Because making predictions is one way to give warning when we see

I think of it as the difference between order and a different kind of order. Because there’s nothing chaotic in diversity. There’s nothing chaotic in

To meet these challenges and increase the impact of foresight work, we need to rethink our approach from the very beginning of a project.

At the Institute for the Future we believe that the value of futures thinking is not in predicting the future (something no one can do), but in imagin

Cayce Pollard as the positive archetype for how to navigate volatility. So by intensely tuning oneself in to subjective responses to things, you can c

The purpose is to scout the path and shift the discourse.

honestly i'm so good at consuming content LMAO. like how do I make it my job to literally just read, watch, and listen to stuff??

Eating seasonally is about being present – weaving yourself into the earth you inhabit.

No longer deeply out of tune, but in our natural rhythms. The story of a world in synchronicity.

In a dialogue with fellow scholars Thijs Lijster and Robin Celikates, Rosa imagines resonance as a descendant of Emile Durkheim’s notion of “collectiv

In a model, agents are interchangeable. Consumer A and Consumer B have different preference curves, yes, but they respond to the same incentive struct

We were going to create a brand to serve people, not advertise to them.

Productive Fees : Valuable Protocols / Extractive Fees : Valuable Companies

One thing that might surprise you about dominance is how companies get it. You might think it comes from rapacious win-at-all costs business practices

There’s this cool idea in software that you “ship your org chart” called Conway’s law: “Organizations, who design systems, are constrained to produce

What really broke down in Google’s original vision is the incentive system they were building towards. There is a very specific subset of information

PEOPLE IN SYSTEMS DO NOT DO WHAT THE SYSTEM SAYS THEY ARE DOING. University professors chase grants, not student enlightenment. VCs nurture personal b

Towards a Practice of Token Engineering

In recent years, neuroimaging has provided evidence to suggest that imagining the future relies on much of the same neural machinery as remembering th

There is indirect evidence to support this idea. For instance, individuals tend to act in a way that is consistent with or constrained by how they hav

Particularly relevant to the idea of episodic simulation is the process of forming “implementation intentions” (Gollwitzer, 1999) which involve imagin

The distinctive feature of imagination, therefore, rests on its capacity of creating new mental images by combining and modifying stored perceptual in

Digital Object ApplicationsFor the first time in human history, blockchains empower any digital object to enjoy the properties of verifiable scarcity,

By yielding a generational wealth creation opportunity that was a strange hybrid of a lottery jackpot and self-made fortune, crypto created an ideolog

For example, it was 30 years after the invention of film that someone first tried telling stories with it — before that, film was mainly used as a dem

Just a moment...

How do you explain the web to people who have never used it? You make it as simple and as accessible as possible.

The Relationship-Centred City

I conclude that there are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and th

Architecture without philosophy would become engineering. Architecture without aesthetics is engineering.

John Pawson - Homepage

Put another way, will humans will always want to do things like scroll Instagram, but perhaps won't ever want to open TurboTax/Docusign/Concur/Foursqu

A futuristic and unrealistic concept interface: the computer waits on the human instead of the human waiting on the computer.