Ben Cuan

Programming is magic:

You speak in an arcane tongue, incomprehensible to outsiders.

You manipulate forces infinitely greater than you.

A daemon comes along and ruins everything.

"Be regular and orderly in your life so that you may be violent and original in your work." - Gustave Flaubert

Also, much like a small homestead on a hundred acres, websites were closed ecosystems and isolated. There were no social networks or marketplace platforms to tap as a firehose channel for building an audience, and there was no real mechanism for ‘going viral’.

You had to grow your traffic the old fashioned way – by asking your digital neighbors for... See more

obsessionally attached, non self-aware mind-wandering with no interrupt mechanisms (Ctrl-Z for you programmers), is bad.

can't shake the feeling that the only real way to prevent people from getting sucked into the digital slop vortex is to make the physical world more beautiful, nourishing, convivial, kind