provocations

How to avoid cynicism:

Act in ways opposite to your instinct. If you hate something, find out more about it. Again ask 'What is this?', 'Who made this?', 'Who is this for?' Genuinely. Never stop doing this"

-via @being_on_line

Expanded supply creates expanded demand, which in turn feeds even more supply. Over time, people learn. They discover more about what's aesthetically possible and more about what they like. Exposure changes tastes.

Virginia Postrel, The Substance of Style

People assume that generative AI will lead to a tsunami of garbage content. I think the opposite problem is more interesting: what if you were drowning in amazing content? What if you’re so inspired and overwhelmed by awe that it’s stressful and addicting and life disorienting?

1. What are the words you do not have yet? [Or, “for what do you not have words, yet?”]

2. What do you need to say? [List as many things as necessary]

3. “What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence?”  [List as many as necessary today. Then write a new list tomorrow.

“The change before the change suggests that perhaps indescribability is, in itself, an evolutionary condition, a built-in extra budget of possibility for unfamiliar formations. I suspect it is, and this indescribability offers the challenge of how to communicate this unseen, submerged process. One is to accentuate the lateness of responding to "eme

Do ideas really occur in chains, or is the lineal structure imposed on them by scholars and philosophers? How is the world of logic, which eschews “circular argument” related to a world in which circular trains of causation are the rule rather than the expectation? (G. Bateson, 2002, p.18)

So true:

“I think the pressures are always the same—the only difference is the amount of money that’s involved. I mean, it’s a lot of pressure to produce something for $25 dollars when you really need $25. It doesn’t matter if the pressure is for $2,500 or $25,000—it’s the same pressure.”

- Frank Stella.

“It's so hard to forget pain, but it's even harder to remember sweetness. We have no scar to show for happiness. We learn so little from peace.”

— Chuck Palahniuk, Diary

We did not remain foragers after inventing agriculture. We did not remain farmers having invented industrial machines. We should not remain laborers having invented digital technologies.

-Albert Wenger, World after Capital

“It’s so hard to forget pain, but it’s even harder to remember sweetness. We have no scar to show for happiness. We learn so little from peace.”

–Chuck Palahniuk