provocations
provocative ideas, musings, and statements to mull on
sari and
provocations
Not all questions seek answers, some seek journeys.
“the ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.”
A quote from The Utopia of Rules
Both True: “The customer is always right” and “The audience doesn’t know what they want”
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.
It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance.
Thomas Sowell, “A childish letter” for Jewish World Review (1998)
This is the paradox of our time: the very tools designed to free us from labor are trapping us in an endless cycle of escalating work. As our productivity increases, our standards and expectations rise even faster, creating a psychological Jevons Paradox that threatens to consume our humanity in the pursuit of ever-greater output. We become victims... See more
Tina He • Jevons Paradox: A personal perspective
One of the questions I ask my SF friends is what the entrepreneurial 20-year-olds are doing these days. Are they starting a billion-dollar company, or are they more interested in becoming a memelord who is trying to incite a movement on the Internet? I’m not sure we’re seeing a surge of exciting startup creation, but we sure are seeing a lot more... See more