what's going on?

I don’t have any answers because I don’t think there are any. But I’m fond of Margaret Wheatley’s framing of creating “islands of sanity,” which a kind reader reminded me of in the lovely comments of my last post. These islands are crucially not places of retreat, but rather of contribution — hyperlocal, small in scale, yet deeply meaningful. To re... See more

This isn't about bad strategists or failed campaigns. This is systemic. The entire apparatus of

commercial strategy - how we think, how we work, what we optimise for - was built for a world that no

longer exists.We're practicing 20th-century strategy in a 21st-century reality. Using industrial logic to

navigate post-industrial complexity. Applying fra... See more

And there, I think, lies the crux of the friendship problem: We are so burned out by the process of staying afloat in a globalized, connected world that we simply don’t have the energy for the kinds of in-person, easy interactions that might actually give us some energy and lifeforce back .

Our lives are bereft of ways to see people in the low-effort, regular, and repeating ways our brains were designed to connect through.

We are so burned out by our data-heavy, screen-based, supposedly friction-free lives that we no longer have the time or energy to engage in the kind of small, unfabulous, mundane, place-based friendships or acquaintance-ships that have nourished and sustained humans for literal centuries.

This redistribution of friction might be the defining economic story of our time – not wealth creation, but the artful arrangement of inconvenience so that it pools wherever it’s least likely to bother anyone important. Which perhaps explains why so many of our problems feel simultaneously urgent and unsolvable: we keep trying to fix things within ... See more

The platforms may be new, but “the power structures remain stubbornly intact. And understanding how friction flows through them – who gets to avoid it and who gets crushed by it – tells us everything about how our economy actually works”.

It’s a bizarre, contradictory place to be. We’re addicted to cheap stuff and infuriated by the systems that produce it but resistant to reform. We’re hungry for local alternatives but disappointed that they are, well, what they are: not cheap, and not always quick, and not always precisely what we wanted. Like so many other good things, they’re uno... See more