provocations
provocative ideas, musings, and statements to mull on
sari and
provocations
I am not who you think I am; I am not who I think I am; I am who I think you think I am.
- Charles Horton Cooley
botharetrue.substack.com • i am who i think you think i am
The fork on your plate isn’t inevitable—it’s propaganda. Its design has been polished by centuries of iteration, yes, but also by centuries of forgetting. We stopped asking why a fork looks the way it does because it became too familiar to question. It’s not a tool anymore; it’s a dogma.
But supernormal isn’t about inevitability. It’s about normalization. When something becomes so ubiquitous, so embedded in daily life, it disappears from view. That’s not just true for objects—it’s true for the systems we live by. Markets, money, time.
“Asking for help with shame says: You have the power over me. Asking with condescension says: I have the power over you. But asking for help with gratitude says: We have the power to help each other.”
Amanda Palmer • The Art of Asking: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help
If we want to understand what AIs are going to look like, I think the proto AI that we have are corporations. Corporations are sort of these funny little beasts. They’re not small. I guess they’re not little beasts, but they’re strange. It takes special training to have humans be able to fit within them. They’re made out of humans mostly but... See more
Recode Staff • Full transcript: Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle on Recode Decode
sari and
if you’re really good at what you do, you have the freedom to be who you really are
Sam Zell • Am I Being Too Subtle?: Straight Talk From a Business Rebel
You can go out on the internet, and you can find your audience. And you can build a business, and create a product, and build wealth, and make people happy just uniquely expressing yourself through the internet.