Can You Imagine? A Library of Possibilities for Reimagining the Web
Notes from the inaugural book of Sublime.
Minsuk Kang 강민석 and
Can You Imagine? A Library of Possibilities for Reimagining the Web
Like Borges’s library, we are tasked with sifting through the internet’s “divine disorder” to find what is worthy of our attention. The question, now, is how to sculpt a better Library of Babel – a better information infrastructure – that lends itself to the advancement of knowledge and wisdom conducive to human flourishing.
So much genius and money has gone into a metaphor that assumes the zenith of humans desire to be status and likes and influence and conven- ience and efficiency. Humans want all those things. But we also want to be inspired. To be delighted. To express our deepest desires. To seek truth. To be moved. To create. To be challenged.
Animating Questions
aron • 3 cards
Offline we exist by default; online we have to post our way into selfhood.
The incentives we bake into the products we build dictate which human desires we magnify. As we imagine new ways to create, distribute, monetize, and share
information, we’re also revealing what kind of people we aspire to be.
My wife is a painter, and I’ve been paying a lot of attention to her journey these past few years, because she has never put her work online. She might never, because, to put it online is to ask people to have a reaction. To put it online is to say there’s an opinion beyond her own that matters. To her, that’d be a real sacrifice to do that. Becaus... See more
A skeptical New York Times review of the World’s Fair television demonstration wrote that “[t]he problem with television is that people must sit and keep their eyes glued on a screen; the average American family hasn’t time for it.” It was soon proven incorrect – though there were only a few hundred television sets in use in the United States by 19
... See moreMaking a living from your work comes so much later in the process of being an artist. The first layer of needs for an artist is to have something that naturally comes out of you. Second is having subject matters that inspires you. Third is having the willingness to keep doing it and to get better at it. Fourth is maybe that you have enough positive... See more
When you become who your audience expects at the expense of who you are, the affection you receive is not intended for you but for the character you're playing.