aron
@aronshelton
Designing and navigating various contextual arrangements with an enigmatic sense of hope. #wayfinder
aron
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
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Seven thoughts on ritual:
Rituals are the feedback loops we construct to construct ourselves.
Rituals shape the medium of time.
Rituals orient us.
Rituals are protocols.
Ritual is a form of play.
Rituals take place in a world set apart.
Rituals make meaning.
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, loot boxes, compulsion loops, gang gang yes yes yes ice cream so good. You’re caught in a feedback loop with the algorithm, and you are the squishiest part of that loop. Ritual technology operates on a different timescale. Underneath the fast twitch of compulsion loops is the slow thrum of ritual. Elder feedback systems. An antidote to algorithmic engagement addiction?
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.
Taste Community and Synchronistic Encounters
When you encounter a piece of life-changing information (no matter how large the change part is), you are simultaneously discovering and creating ‘yourself,’ becoming incrementally more complete.
Hyperstition is a positive feedback circuit including culture as a component. It can be defined as the experimental (techno-)science of self-fulfilling prophecies. Superstitions are merely false beliefs, but hyperstitions — by their very existence as ideas — function causally to bring about their own reality.
Cultivating Hyperstitions
Literacy as Deviance
The document argues that literacy is a deviation from our natural cognitive abilities, and as technology progresses, the need for traditional literacy skills diminishes.
nysgs.orgprovocations and Animating Questions
How are we to prepare the young, whom we already scarcely know, for a future we cannot imagine, from a past that has been swept away?
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
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