Ben Cuan

take action without feeling the need to explain yourself

as people age, they tend to find themselves consuming more and creating less. To put it bluntly: the easiest way to live a short unimportant life is to consume the world around you rather than contribute to it.

There’s this design heuristic that if people cut across the grass, you should pave the shortcut they make. This gives the path a lovely human fit. But sometimes you want to do the opposite. You want to design ways to get people to take a longer path, a longcut, so they can see or do things they’d miss otherwise.

But I have begun to come around on this: art—or at least good art—is defined by its non-instrumentality. Art is not useless, but it is use-agnostic, and that’s what makes it so useful after all.

We already have hacker houses, and hacker houses can last for months or even years, but they usually only fit around ten or twenty people. We already have conferences, and conferences fit thousands of people, but each conference only lasts a week. That is enough time to have serendipitous meetings, but not enough to have connections with true... See more