Glen Cassidy
@glencassidy
Creative. Strategist. Always building.
Glen Cassidy
glencassidy.com
Question your answers
Paul Venuto • feed updates
On AI
It seems odd to look at achievement through this lens, not as the thing the newspapers tell us it is, but – very often – as a species of mental illness. Those who put up the skyscrapers, write the bestselling books, perform on stage, or make partner may, in fact, be the unwell ones. Whereas the characters who – without agony – can bear an ordinary... See more
The School of Life • Overcoming the Need to Be Exceptional
Digital serendipity: be careful what you don't wish for
theguardian.com
In his book, Where Good Ideas Come From, Steven Johnson proposes several ingredients for serendipity. They are almost all impossible to replicate on a machine: sleep, coffee, a creative walk, a hot bath, a broken treadmill, chaos and an open system are among them. Yet Johnson still describes the web as "the greatest serendipity engine in the history of culture", because it allows us to traverse Wikipedia – from an article about fountain pens to one about monarch butterflies via links to chocolate-chip cookies and the chancellor's real name. That is not, I would argue, serendipitously discovering something about insects; it's discovering something about insects via a path laid out by the people who edit the articles. It's not making conclusions, drawing parallels or creating something new.
The directed nature of how we use the web is therefore in contrast to, say, taking a hot bath: we can collect information along the way, but the process of serendipity happens elsewhere.
We are not guiding people down a path; we are planting memories in a probabilistic field. Every exposure is a chance to create or refresh one of those memory structures. Most will fail, a few will stick, and the ones that stick will determine market share.