This is, as I see it, the core characteristic of the Anthropocene: the human psyche has become one of the most powerful forces we know of, but we’re still terribly clumsy novices with it. We can start out with a desire to sell more cotton, and before you know it, an ecosystem has vanished and we’ve got skyrocketing rates of esophageal cancer.

Books you read are sending you input. Your friends modeling behaviors for you. Newspapers. Tools. People you follow on Twitter. The architecture of a Gothic church beaming serenity into you—that is input too.

At the same time, you are also sending output to other nodes. Now, I am sending these ideas into my pocket notebook, which will send them to m... See more

Meanwhile, some of the most serious people I know do their serious thing gratis and make their loot somewhere else. My dad, whose photographs sit at the top of every Experimental History post, quit his job at the newspaper and went to work as a postal carrier instead. Why? As he puts it: “I could afford better lenses delivering mail than I could ta... See more