weekly Go Flip Yourself

written in 1996!

The important waves of technological change are those that fundamentally alter the place of technology in our lives. What matters is not technology itself, but its relationship to us.

Seek friction.

In my past experiences publishing, I sought public success assuming it would lead to feelings of private satisfaction. It’s only now, observing this expectation clearly for the first time, that I can see how misguided this was.

In this experiment I took the agency and time to define success. It wasn't an open-ended search for approval. The goal was to express an idea, its full context, and for them to be seen and understood. That has happened, adding up to maybe the most enjoyable publishing experience of my writing life to date. Those 250 collectors satisfied my entire Maslow’s hierarchy of writerly needs with their support.

which is exactly my own experience; and why/ how I came to work on Objet:

Early on, I used to be pretty dumb about stuff shocks. I hate moving, and each time I moved, I’d swear that I’d never collect so much crap again. But each time, as I unpacked my life and settled into a new place, stuff would creep back in.  Somewhere along the way — perhaps it was the 5th or 6th move — I got more sophisticated in thinking about my stuff, and started managing the isolation/interdependence tradeoff more carefully.

can’t agree more with that solution:

Instead, I believe you have to think about individual lifestyle elements down to things like knives and shoes. You have to put more thinking into every act of ownership. This thinking doesn’t just add value inside your head. It adds value outside your head, to the stuff itself. Your stuff gets smarter. More information — the output of thinking — gets embodied by it.

nailed down:

It isn’t the quantity of stuff in your life that matters. What matters is how smart the stuff is and whether it is smart in service of your needs.

That can explain why things always seem bad and why things always seem like they’re getting worse. Which is exactly what we see in the data: every year, people say that humans just aren’t as kind as they used to be, and every year they rate human kindness exactly the same as they did last year.

If I’m right, people’s colorful theories of the End Times come second. What comes first is the conviction that the world’s problems are brand-spanking-new. And that conviction is stunningly consistent across time.

“Happiness is all gone,” says the Prophecy of Neferty, an Egyptian papyrus from roughly 4000 years ago. “Kindness has vanished and rudeness has descended upon everyone,” agrees Dialogue of a Man with His Spirit, written at around the same time. “It is not like last year […] There is no person free from wrong, and everyone alike is doing it,” says the appropriately-named Complaints of Khakheperraseneb from several hundred years later. And some unknown amount of time after that, the Admonitions of Ipuwer reports that actually things just started going to hell. “All is ruin! Indeed, laughter is perished and no longer made.” Worst of all: “Everyone’s hair has fallen out.”

You are what you wear. It felt that way, back then. What you wore was intimately tied to your sense of self. What are clothes if not outward reflections of internal projections?

Focus moves from fashion to function.