weekly Go Flip Yourself

• about culture cycles

• about the danger of caring more about the past rather than the future [are you holding rights? or are you creating what’s next?]

• the battle between macro-culture and micro-culture — and while the former is declining, the latter might thrive

• “you can’t reduce things to formula”

• the difference between art and entertainment

• we need mind-expanding experiences

• there is a real danger in going full-passive consumption; which is bad for the culture

• “i spend more time reading than i do writing” => “any process you have in the world, your output depends on your input”

• fluid intelligence versus crystallized intelligence

• now being similar to 1800’s: back then, power went from the industrialists to the creative people

• you get luckier if you force yourself out of your comfort zone

• what Internet allowed is: direct contact with your audience, your people

• Internet ate the world; then broke; then some people rallied to fix it; then… we’re lost — disoriented

• what do we collectively even desire?

• at first, you just want to hang out and have fun; then you grow up and have less time for the group chat

• saying you want to change something, and actually changing it are two different jobs

• the New Internet needs a more honest relationship to money

• Are.na is deserving of its unofficial title as golden child of the New Internet

“Thank you for giving me the words to describe what I’m sensing so I can finally articulate it myself.”

When asked about his silence during meetings, Rockefeller often recited a poem:

A wise old owl lived in an oak,

The more he saw the less he spoke,

The less he spoke, the more he heard,

Why aren’t we all like that old bird?

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.