Ian Vanagas

I should be able to scroll through the history of my browsing as an enormous branching graph that I can annotate, travel around, share with others, and version.

The group chat doesn’t have the same feeling of presence or provide an environment to interact with that in-person hangouts do.

Many people think of onboarding only when a member first joins a community, but onboarding happens every time a member re-enters a community space. Communities should always be onboarding. Onboarding is the process of providing members with the context necessary to function in the community. It is needed because context changes constantly.

Information bankruptcy is a common problem for communities to have. When there is too much information to absorb, members often give up on absorbing any of it at all. It’s a play off of email bankruptcy, where someone ignores or deletes all emails beyond a certain date.

You should be able to easily see connections between all of the web pages you have open at once, any subset of them, and explore them / navigate through them visually.

An accurate definition of “influencer” is: a virtuoso of a particular internet platform; someone who has learned to use its mechanisms to achieve their own objectives, rather than the other way around.

The more I examined these efforts at sedentarization, the more I came to see them as a state’s attempt to make a society legible, to arrange the population in ways that simplified the classic state functions of taxation, conscription, and prevention of rebellion. Having begun to think in these terms, I began to see legibility as a central problem... See more

Travis Kalanick started Uber as a hack to split a few private cars with his friends. Thefacebook.com was just a student directory written in PHP. Even Elon Musk started SpaceX with the goal of merely increasing NASA’s budget by pulling a PR stunt.