nicolas cevallos

This is why the skill of simple awareness is important, as is the ability to tolerate ambiguity. Psychologists David Gard and Lawrence Leung define ambiguity tolerance as “the ability to hold in mind complex psychosocial information without rushing to judgment or a conclusion about its meaning”. They go on to delineate that “the process of... See more

Contrary to the deep stories of consumerism and Western heroic mythology, interacting with meaning is actually something much closer to the Japanese concept of wabi-sabi (difficult to succinctly encapsulate, but basically the idea that beauty depends on the imperfect, incomplete, impermanent, humble, and unconventional) vs. a compulsive cycle of... See more

What Friend misses is not knowledge (it has the Internet) but intimacy, in all its complex form, in its disagreements, its hiccups, its letdowns and its compromises. It has text but no texture.

As Merleau-Ponty writes in Phenomenology of Perception , “The body is our general medium for having a world.” To flatten these moments into language is already to lose something: the texture, the weight, the sensation of being in the world. Friend seems to forget that experience is not just textual, it is highly highly highly sensual.

But experience is much more. The philosophical discipline of phenomenology is helpful here, especially in the tradition of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who reminds us that perception precedes articulation, or, in other words, that we do not merely think our way through the world, we live it through our bodies. The body is the very condition of... See more

This is the promise, and perhaps the tyranny, of the language age: that all experience can be rendered as text. First we had text, then hypertext, and now megatext , if you will. That’s the world large language models operate in. Everything must be made legible to the machine. And legibility, here, is evidently linguistic.

There is an interesting implication in the design of the user experience. It assumes a text-first approach to “relationships”. I can understand how the designers came to that conclusion. Most young people predominantly communicate through text, and if we’re only communicating through text, we begin to understand human relationships in that same... See more

The creative recession is fueled both by diminishing demand for creative work as well as diminishing the margins that once made that work viable. The distance between creation and consumption has been compressed: discovery is automated, and the legacy hallmark of creatives, producing difference,

To see what’s really there in an enchanted world, you need to see beyond or through the surface. You need to discover what’s hidden, what’s concealed, by the merely material form, and that requires something more than sensory perception. It requires extrasensory perception. In this framing, the contemplative gaze is not just unlocking what lies... See more