innovation culture

all our models that justify transport investment assume that travel time is always a disutility. In other words, the more time you spend in transit, the worse off you are. If you come along with fancy ideas suggesting that people may sometimes prefer slower to faster, it fucks up our whole model.”

So this is what’s happened to the world:... See more

In Part III, they continue to work through the ideas of philosophers Martin Heidegger and René Girard, exploring the metaphysics of both technology and desire. “For both thinkers, salvation doesn’t come from technology itself but from a transcendent outside,” they posit. They then cite Nick Land, the father of accelerationism, whose ideas have... See more

Every young person (and plenty of non-young people), trying to strike gold and solve problems, is architecting themselves after a dominant personality of our field.

These archetypes equally modeled themselves off of someone else that inspired them. Steve was obsessed with Edwin Land, the founder of Polaroid. He would even take the “intersection of... See more

The combo of intellectual grandiosity and intense competitiveness was a perfect fit for me. It’s still hard to find today, in fact - many people have copied the ‘hardcore’ working culture and the ‘this is the Marines’ vibe, but few have the intellectual atmosphere, the sense of being involved in a rich set of ideas . This is hard to LARP - your... See more

When you expand a technology, you expand it towards both ends. The divine and the profane. With AI we receive breakthrough medical research AND waifu porn bots. With crypto we receive community owned infrastructure and endless memecoin rugs.

Repairing this ethic is a task that defies any straightforward approach. Solving it is not a matter of devising elegant theories or highly specified plans, but instead observing what stirs within when you encounter a piece of architecture.

First is the observation I’ve made throughout: that people are building companies based on ideas from the 1950s and 1960s.

This is a very real thing. Earlier this week, I met with Tyler Hayes at Atom Limbs to see the robotic prosthetic he and his team are building. After he slipped the cuff on my arm and as we were waiting for the system to boot... See more