("JP")

Legibility is a concept from James Scott’s seminal work, Seeing Like a State . It’s not a book that lends itself well to one-sentence summaries, but my attempt is “we assume that only what we can measure is real and everything that is real can be measured.”

The book is titled Seeing Like a State , because the idea of legibility as I’m using it here... See more

Karsten Harries, professor of philosophy at Yale University states:

“Like language architecture is on one hand a product of human activity while on the other it helps to create the environment which gives shape to man’s activities. To build is to help decide how man is to dwell on the earth or indeed whether he is to dwell on it at all."

What’s missing from our map? Everything else. The forest has been made legible to lumber production. In the process, the entire ecological web of trees, shrubs, birds, bugs, moss, soil microbiota are stripped away. They didn’t fit into our map.

By the second generation of planting, there is a noticeable decline in forest health. Within one century:... See more

You see — if software is to have soul, it must feel more like the world around it. Which is the biggest clue of all that feeling is what’s missing from today’s software. Because the value of the tools, objects, and artworks that we as humans have surrounded ourselves with for thousands of years goes so far beyond their functionality. In many ways,

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Bruce Hornsby did not start piano until he was 17 years old, yet he remains one of the most important pianists of the 21st century, as he established a sound that is his own. It is a clever blending of the Americana side of jazz that you hear in some of Keith Jarrett's work, a big influence on him, as well as that pure cinematic western landscape... See more

The work of building a great community goes much farther beyond simply moderating a Slack group. A great community needs regular events and meetups. They need ways for leaders to step up and invent their own traditions, create their own events, and run their own sub-groups. Leading a community requires making it easy for members to become... See more

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.

"If stories are linked with regularly repeated spatial practices, they become mutually supportive, and when a story becomes sedimented into the landscape, the story and the place dialectically help to construct and reproduce each other. Places help to recall stories that are associated with them, and places only exist (as named locales) by virtue... See more