Charlie Gedeon
@charliegedeon
Reflecting on how learning and creativity are shaped by technology and our interactions with it. Co-founder of Pragmatics Studio, a small digital design studio in Montreal.
charliegedeon.comCharlie Gedeon
If you're small, you're in a position where it's to your advantage to be weird—you can have a point of view that the big tech companies never could. In the world of chairs—you're not going to build a cheaper chair than Ikea. Why not build something they couldn't—like a more interesting one?
(Not Boring) Software Inc. • No More Boring Apps | (Not Boring) Software
Anyhow, the older I get, the less impressed I become with originality. These days, I’m far more moved by authenticity. Attempts at originality can often feel forced and precious, but authenticity has quiet resonance that never fails to stir me.
Elizabeth Gilbert • Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear
People around you, constantly under the pull of their emotions, change their ideas by the day or by the hour, depending on their mood. You must never assume that what people say or do in a particular moment is a statement of their permanent desires.
Robert Greene • Mastery
"If we turn this wonderful technology we have for knowledge into a weapon for disinformation," he told me, "we are in deep trouble." Why? "Because we won't know what we know, and we won't know who to trust, and we won't know whether we're informed or misinformed. We may become either paranoid and hyper-sceptical, or just apathetic and unmoved. Both... See more
Tom Chatfield • Daniel Dennett: 'Why civilisation is more fragile than we realised'
At this moment in the 21st century, we see a new form of extractivism that is well underway: one that reaches into the furthest corners of the biosphere and the deepest layers of human cognitive and affective being. Many of the assumptions about human life made by machine learning systems are narrow, normative and laden with error. Yet they are ins... See more
Vladan Joler • Anatomy of an AI System
When you write about the subject, your task is to remember with crystal clarity how bored you were when you first tried to understand it.
Instead of a holistic and intersectional approach, entrenched in the ability to tap into collective support structures as a form of personal resilience, healing is depoliticised and rendered a singular and individual trauma chronically dependent on a capitalist and extractivist commercialisation of Indigenous knowledge (Yoga, Ayahuasca, herbal medi... See more
Leil Zahra Mortada • Solidarity between catastrophic singularity and disastrous individualism — Against Catastrophe
Your success as a designer depends equally on your relationships as it does on your design talent . The powerful people you need as allies will likely know little about design and you will have to teach and persuade them. Your amazing ideas and concepts can’t help the world if they are never built by your organization. Your ability to explain your ... See more
Scott Berkun • Design talent is a distraction
The truth is that one day you hate yourself, and the next day you can’t wait to use your gifts.
— Adam J. Kurtz