Tech and Society

For several years now, I've been developing a growing discomfort with a philosophy of relating to technology I call  Waldenponding  (after Thoreau's Walden Pond experiment on which  Walden  is based). The crude caricature is "smash your smart phone and go live in a log cabin to reclaim your attention and your life from being hacked by evil social

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“The ultimate question that I have: how can we create cities that are big enough to give people economic opportunity, but small enough to give people love and others in their lives that touch their hearts?”

The hard problem is earning the right to hold people’s memory. The best way to preserve agency and fight technological fascism is by making the alternative so culturally compelling that people choose it because it serves them better and is more fun.

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

The dream isn’t just to show all of ourselves unfiltered to the world. It’s to find a character that we feel comfortable being, that we deeply resonate with, and if we’re lucky, some part of the world might too.

If there’s one thing that work taught me, it’s that technology only becomes meaningful when culture adopts it.