aron
@aronshelton
Designing and navigating various contextual arrangements with an enigmatic sense of hope. #wayfinder
aron
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 most artfully curated contexts.
You Exist In The Long Context
A Future In Sync and
Love this from Yancey Strickler:
An artist is a self-employed self-expressor.
A creator is a self-employed commercial expressor.
“We only count what we know to count, and that's strongly determined by where we stand and who we are.
I often hear people say that qualitative research isn't generalizable, by which they mean that they use "sample" that do not have the features necessary to make valid inferences about a known population.
Forget for a minute that most survey samples aren't truly random, that confidence intervals are often not included, and so on.
We're all operating with the kind of bias that makes it hard to find hay in the haystack. We're biased towards things that are already legible to us. Statistical methods make a virtue of that.
Qualitative research helps us to de-center our concepts, to expand our understanding of the frameworks and schema that operate in lesser examined corners of life.
Even numbers aren't simply a sequence of digits, but a continuum of rationality and irrationality, with the latter making up the grand majority.
Going Further is about changing your stance in ways that challenge our sense of what counts.”
Adam Talkington
Head of Ethnography at Further&Further
The vast interconnection enabled by digital platforms has ended up creating more of a sense of sameness than diversity. Users are subtly guided toward the same subsets of topics, urged on by recommendations that are designed not to serve their interests but to create profitable attention fodder to sell to advertisers. Instagram doesn’t care that... See more
Welcome to Filterworld｜Dirt
The most iconic brands and creators that will be created over the next 10 years won’t be cookie-cutter, they’ll be community-based. The result will be more unique experiences.
Greg Isenberg • The Fast-Foodification of Everything
Part of the magic of an actual book is that the reader ends up understanding. It seeps in, the aha’s are found, not highlighted.
Seth Godin • The Cliffs Notes paradox
provocations and design
The fork on your plate isn’t inevitable—it’s propaganda. Its design has been polished by centuries of iteration, yes, but also by centuries of forgetting. We stopped asking why a fork looks the way it does because it became too familiar to question. It’s not a tool anymore; it’s a dogma.
But supernormal isn’t about inevitability. It’s about normalization. When something becomes so ubiquitous, so embedded in daily life, it disappears from view. That’s not just true for objects—it’s true for the systems we live by. Markets, money, time.