the inconvenience of convenience

I think there are things in life that you want to telescope and compress and accelerate and streamline and make more efficient. And there are things where the value is precisely in the inefficiency, in the time spent, in the pain endured, in the effort you have to invest. And I don’t think we’re going to differentiate between those things. Because ... See more

Flatness, like scalability, is efficient. The same culture flows through the same pipes to the same net-average consumer. But since when did efficiency become the sole metric by which we judge art? Filterworld represents the idea that the messiness of culture can be optimized and that only what is optimized for shareability is worthwhile. I disagre... See more

Making work easier. This is the problem. So obsessed with getting to the answer, completing the project, producing a result which are all valid things, but not where the richness of the human experience lies.

In what ways did your dad change, other than having a jet?

Actually, having a jet is a really big deal. If I were queen of the world, I would pass a law against private jets, because they enable you to get around a certain reality. You don’t have to go through an airport terminal, you don’t have to interact, you don’t have to be patient, you don’t ... See more

Today’s cult of convenience fails to acknowledge that difficulty is a constitutive feature of human experience. Convenience is all destination and no journey. But climbing a mountain is different from taking the tram to the top, even if you end up at the same place. We are becoming people who care mainly or only about outcomes. We ar

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But we err in presuming convenience is always good, for it has a complex relationship with other ideals that we hold dear. Though understood and promoted as an instrument of liberation, convenience has a dark side. With its promise of smooth, effortless efficiency, it threatens to erase the sort of struggles and challenges that help give

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