aron
@aronshelton
Designing and navigating various contextual arrangements with an enigmatic sense of hope. #wayfinder
aron
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
metalabels and
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.).
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 what you’re looking for. But after you see them they quickly become so integrated into your intuitive models of the world that they become essentially transparent. Do you remember the insights that
... See moreWe’re heading towards an era of greater decentralization on all fronts – geopolitics, finance, education, journalism, and energy are just a few examples – driven by technologies including, but not limited to, the internet. This newly decentralized era will require new infrastructure and organizing principles that can adapt to the chaos and
... See morePacky McCormick • Decentralization
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 morePacky McCormick • Decentralization
Good protocols, in short, manage to catalyze good enough outcomes with respect to a variety of contending criteria, via surprisingly limited and compact interventions.