aron
@aronshelton
Designing and navigating various contextual arrangements with an enigmatic sense of hope. #wayfinder
aron
Strange Loops
mirror.xyz
The landscape of information online is time-independent yet observer-relative. My interaction with content is shaped by my unique digital context – my online habits, frequented sites, and chosen links. This reminds me, in an unscientific manner, of Einstein’s relativity, where time and space are relative to the observer's position. The meaning and significance of online information change based on the viewer and their vantage point. No wonder the internet feels like a vast, contentious discussion space, with everything existing in all states and variances simultaneously. In real life, things change over time, but perhaps in the physics of the internet, it's all about the relational dynamics of data, defined by its current network of relationships and connections.
When I post online, I add basic metrics to track views. But I never know the contexts or the viewers. Suddenly, this information exists in multiple states of interpretation and misunderstanding, yet in a seemingly timeless way. It appears in various timelines and communities, creating different contexts and associations by proximity alone. This makes me think of information entanglement, where separate pieces of content, or even fragments, once removed from their original context, become intrinsically linked in the minds of others, existing all at once in myriad forms. The data becomes the medium. Like a quantum particle, understood only in layman's terms, it exists in multiple states of interpretation, misunderstanding, and relevance simultaneously, collapsing into a specific state only upon interaction (viewing, sharing, commenting, etc.).
Ultimately, the efficiency DAOs aspire to may not be defined as an economic function but as a matter of “better,” situated governance: one supported by deeper practical knowledge within an infinite game.
gnosisguild.mirror.xyz • A Prehistory of DAOs
The math is simple: more people are consuming more of everything than ever before, but there are very few hits of real scale. That means that many of us spend our time in niches, not in the center.
Variety and the long tail
We enjoy media by ourselves, but we also *use* media to communicate. Am I being spoken to by the piece of media, OR is the media speaking for me? In this era, the latter is increasingly more relevant because of the ability to share the extra context around the media (the fandom). It’s not that the piece of media has to have a particularly salient... See more
Media Saturation & Having Media Speak For Us
Like physics, futures studies are also intrinsically embracing uncertainty as it is emphatically underlined by Amara’s three laws of futures (Amara, 1981): (1) the future is not predetermined, (2) the future is not predictable, and (3) the future outcomes can be influenced by our choices in the present. […]
Patrick Tanguay • Expanding the Futures Cone’s Concept of the Futures and the Pasts ⊗ Reading as Counter-Practice ⊗ A Bot that Watched 70,000 Hours of Minecraft Videos
No matter how many people come over for dinner, you’re only going to be able to engage with a few.
And no matter how big the crowd in the arena, the musicians can only see the faces of a few hundred.
An investor can only be engaged and smart about a very small number of companies.
And it doesn’t matter how many students are in the class, the teacher
... See moreSeth Godin • The natural size
Velocity and possibility
seths.blog
The art of project management includes the dance between velocity and possibility.
If you describe the outcome with specificity and remove as many variables as possible, you’ll get the work done with more speed, higher reliability and less cost.
That velocity, though, might encourage us to recognize that all sorts of options are available. There are countless chances to make the project better and to find new opportunities.
Exploring the possibilities in moments of high velocity almost certainly ensures that costs will increase, reliability will be impacted and you’ll miss deadlines.
That’s because possibility is the art of being willing to be wrong. It’s exploration. It’s far easier to explore on foot than it is on a high-speed train.
The best time to explore is before you scale your investments, your commitments and the size of the team.
We seek both velocity and possibility, but not at the same time.
It doesn’t matter how much we summarize, at some point, effort is required. More summaries won’t automatically lead to more understanding.