When you try to make something that solves everything, you obsess over questions of power: how to make something that is omnipotent and everlasting. But when you make something that does one thing well, the questions are much more personal: does it solve my problem? and for how long? and who for? and where will it push the space around it? I want... See more

The dream was that communities would get very form-fit tools for their particular needs, rather than trying to adapt generic software to solve them.

Malleable software does not imply everybody creating all of their own tools from scratch. That would be a waste of time, since many off-the-shelf tools are already pretty close to serving our needs, with only minor tweaks needed.

A more sensible approach is to start out using existing software tools built by other people or companies, but to have... See more