aron
@aronshelton
aron
@aronshelton
Calm Tech and
We don't necessarily need to constantly interact with people “around” us on the web. The sensation of being in the quiet companionship of someone else, like reading next to them in a cafe, is what we're missing. The sense of ambiently sharing space – of being co-present – while engaged in other activities is a staple of shared public spaces that we're still figuring out how to design in the digital realm.
Our current “multiplayer” experiences draw too much attention to the multiplayer-ness. The other people around you demand attention. They move. They flash. They point to exactly what they're focused on, drawing you away from your own focal point. We are missing out on a fuzzier, softer sense of the shared web.
TLDR is internet-speak for “Too long, didn’t read.” It’s one of the consequences of too much to choose from, combined with a lazy quest for convenience. It’s a checklist mindset. And all we get after we finish a checklist is a bunch of checked boxes, not real understanding.
Again, we’re early in this evolution, but if I had to bet, I would put money on the internet growing from here via an ecosystem of small apps, maybe even personalized apps fed by our AI models, over the emergence of new huge centralized platforms. Of course, that creates the opportunity for centralization to emerge at the discovery layer.
It’s
... See morePart of the magic of an actual book is that the reader ends up understanding. It seeps in, the aha’s are found, not highlighted.
Despite the presumption that we're each in our own algorithmic bubbles, served up bespoke content — when something strikes a nerve, our networked lives ensure the signal travels instantaneously. It reaches all. Sometimes: the good. Often: the bad. And most likely of all: the ugly.
Be an IDIOT! Though he doesn’t mean it like you should just be stupid. In fact the pejorative use of the word idiot is actually a fairly new thing in human history. Back in Ancient Greece for example the equivalent of the word we now use as idiot… really just meant someone who was a common person who didn’t really participate in public affairs or a
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