what's going on?

Maybe the true challenge of our time isn’t deciding whether to have children, but rediscovering how to live together, creating networks of care that support us through life’s inevitable vulnerabilities.

“We are told we are saving time through the products of the appistocracy and yet we have no time. They’ve hollowed out the malls, stores and other public spaces – even ourselves, as we spend more time alone. Call it the hollowgarchy.”

Ten years ago, the industry’s identity was largely defined by thousands of young millennials who wanted to “change the world,” and the handful of large technology companies attempting to attract that talent. Discussions of material abundance, of connecting humanity, and of every sci-fi moonshot on our path to Star Trekkian utopia were not only comm... See more

Our social and political divides aren’t just about income brackets or political parties, but about fundamentally different lived realities operating in parallel. A divide that is harder to measure; it must be experienced.

"Think of yourself in a concert hall listening to the strains of the sweetest music when you suddenly remember that you forgot to lock your car. You are anxious about the car, you cannot walk out of the hall and you cannot enjoy the music. There you have a perfect image of life as it is lived by most human beings."

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

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 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