If The Internet Was A Place

I don’t know if you’ve ever seen or been to the roof of Facebook. The roof is amazingly landscaped — it has native species of plants and these meandering walking paths — and in a way, it’s exactly what I’m talking about in the book. It’s the architecture of thinking, it’s put there to encourage innovation and conversation, but just for employees.  

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my social feeds seemed to finish their years-long transformation from a neighborhood populated with friends to a glossy condo development of brands.

in the last decade, technology has transformed from a tool that we use to a place where we live. If we’re setting out to change the character of technology in our lives, we’d be wise to learn from the character of places.

“We want to think of the internet as a physical place. It is not about making the virtual physical, but rather to argue that the virtual also exists physically.”

- Woon Tien Wei

In Paul Graham’s famous essay Cities and Ambition, there’s this idea that some cities are centers for some type of ambition, and when you come to one of those cities, you can feel the message the city is sending to you. For example, the message that you can feel in New York is “You should be richer,” while Berkeley’s is “You should live better,”... See more

I was walking the dog this morning and I was reflecting on how the things we build on the digital world seem to mirror what we build on the physical one. Big social media platforms are the metropolis: dense, busy, chaotic. They’re the place that never sleeps and there’s always something new going on. Something new to see, something new to do.... See more