How we create | linus.coffee

These projects, Victor says, are just “nibbles around the edges” of his larger obsession: how the media in which we choose to represent our ideas shape (and too often, limit) what ideas we can have. “We have these things called computers, and we’re basically just using them as really fast paper emulators,” he says. “With the invention of the printi... See more

And this also brings us to the why now and and why is this hard if this is the fully generalized form of digital documents, why didn't software start this way? I think a big part of it is just that it's hard. We talked about how it's hard to write a text editor, but what if you now need to write a text editor and image editor, a video editor and au... See more

Now that we have abstracted technique away from the artistic process, can we build interfaces between the creators of ideas and the machines of technique in a way that allows the creators to “make it new”? That’s what we really want from creativity: something that didn’t exist and couldn’t have existed, before.

To begin, it’s important to see that mediums can be designed, not just inherited. What’s more: it is possible to design new mediums which embody specific ideas . Inventors have long drawn on this unintuitive insightSee e.g. Douglas Engelbart’s 1962 “Augmenting Human Intellect” for a classic primary source or Michael Nielsen’s 2016 “Thought as a Tec... See more

• 26:34 - A “big source of inspiration for me [Mark] has been the world of analog tools. We’ve been thinking about how to build good digital tools for maybe 50 years or so. We have a couple thousand years of explicit and implicit study of how to create analog work environments.” Eg: personal libraries, studies, workshops, artist studios. How can we... See more