Exploring the internet together should be like exploring a vast old library with your friends. Wandering down different shelves, skimming the pages that catch your eye, and occasionally one of you hollers in a whispering voice, "come check this out!"

We’re moving out of the era of platforms owning people and into an era of people owning platforms—an era in which creators will rightfully demand more ownership, and more say over their relationships with their communities.

look at how the word “ community ” itself has been warped in recent years into a cynical marketing cliché to rival “storyteller” — annexed as the torched rhetorical territory of people who live to “move product” above all else.

The co-opting of “community” into a sales strategy is insidious, not only because it reduces likeminded groups of people t... See more

I find for myself that my first thought is never my best thought. My first thought is always someone else’s; it’s always what I’ve already heard about the subject, always the conventional wisdom. It’s only by concentrating, sticking to the question, being patient, letting all the parts of my mind come into play, that I arrive at an original idea. B... See more

There’s a tremendous friction that arises when you don’t allow yourself to do what you really want to do with your life. You make a lot of halfway decisions to negotiate your competing priorities: what you want, and what you want to want.

Georgia O’Keefe says “To see takes time.” And in her career, she returned to the same subjects over and over in new mediums, during new seasons, and at different points of her life, finding new details and entire worlds emerge in the same subjects.

I grew up with painted billboards and now they are digital. I prefer the painted billboards they were works of art. Digital just isn’t the same.

Do something that won’t compute. Following this maxim may mean I will soon become obsolete, outpaced by those who calculate their utils and control their time and carefully calibrate their existence. But I’ve grown contented with that fate. I wish to live and die as I am: wholly, honestly, and messily; constantly awed by life’s imperfection; wastin... See more

Playful software often conjures up video games, but I don't mean that. Where I see the lack of play is in consumer software: design tools, social networks, dating apps, messengers. Borrowing from Brian Upton's The Aesthetics of Play , I'm talking about play that isn't segregated from ordinary life, “[play that's] embedded within ordinary life; some... See more