"Disregard the Words"

In a 2010 essay, Chris Dixon wrote, "The next big thing will start out looking like a toy." Provocative. What he meant was that new technologies are often dismissed as toys because they undershoot user needs, and that that ones that make it out of toy phase and into the zeitgeist do so because they ride external forces.

In truth, genuinely ‘new things’ are almost always unresolved, unrefined and uncertain. They aren’t optimized, their true purpose is unclear, their features are underdeveloped and their propositions haven’t yet crystallized. New technologies are often exciting, they can present new possibilities, novel ideas can emerge and new conversations can for... See more

Words are a lossy medium for describing rich, multidimensional ideas.

Reaching wide audiences requires all-terrain language, and the urgency of the present moment, amplified by chronological feeds, doesn’t allow for much stylistic variety. Efficiency is key — compressing as much information as possible to the least amount of words is the ideal of all communication.

While I do agree that many areas of interaction, like... See more

Sometimes I think of it in this way: if the words already exist to describe something new then maybe it is not truly that novel after all.