Instead of trying to shape the map to look like the territory, they tried to make the territory look like the map.

I’ve recently been exploring the metaphor of work as trace – that it isn’t so much about what we put out into the world as how we put it out; that the thing we really ought to care about, the thing that ultimately matters, is the intention from which the work emerges. The rest is all mirror, representation, resemblance.

But McLuhan would say, try not to only think about the fact that we make the tools. Think about how much the tools make us as well.

A community space and possible future.

If the dynamic medium is to serve as the foundation for new modes of thought and communication, it must lift all people, not just those traditionally advantaged by technology. There is no product we can ship to achieve this goal.

Instead, we are building Dynamicland as a community space, where the people of Oak... See more

... While texts often build and maintain an internal and pre-set collection of references in the form of footnotes, prior foundational texts, or subtle cultural “calls” to “events or people or tropes of the time and place the text was written,” it’s a far more personal practice to form one’s own links in an inter-textual manner.

I’d like to think

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Social media is similar to sharecropping :

• We’re "renting" space on a platform we don’t own


• We’re paying for that space by becoming “the product” whose attention is sold to the highest ads bidder


• Our attention is also being usurped by the makers of the platform and what they’ve programmed their algorithm to show us, and


• Our data is being collect

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He also brings up its implications in the modern tech ecosystem. The Facebooks, Googles, and Amazons are like panoptic overseers that can force legibility even on the most impenetrable, messy datastreams through machine learning algorithms and hyper-scale pattern recognition. The trade-off here may not be conscription (not yet anyway), but there is... See more

Rather, gifting carries with it a collective intelligence that knows our participation in the gift is what sustains us. We don’t just benefit via increased social bonds and that warm fuzzy feeling of “doing good” – when we’re kind to each other and the world round us, we are literally increasing our chances of survival.

I mention that Silicon Valley has been stuck within a primary aesthetic of knowing . And that Snap breaks this aesthetic and pushes towards an overarching aesthetic of seeing.

Digital technologies, like wood or concrete, are simply another design material we seek to bend to our will. To manifest and hold these ideas and functions and interaction se... See more