Sam Liebeskind

Ultimately, Agreements are a collective wish we make about how we might be in the same space together. That space could be a classroom, a sports team, a club, a conference, committees or boards, an organizing group. They reflect what we need to participate while feeling joyful, trusted, and brave.

But they also can be flimsy as hell.

Global mega-platforms under capitalism are structurally incapable of handling the business of civilization: of governance, of providing genuinely public infrastructure, of making knife-edge decisions about the balance of liberties and securities. It’s not what they do or what they want to do, and in many cases it’s in opposition to their actual... See more

Perfectionism has nothing to do with getting it right. It has nothing to do with fixing things. It has nothing to do with standards. Perfectionism is a refusal to let yourself move ahead. It is a loop—an obsessive, debilitating closed system that causes you to get stuck in the details of what you are writing or painting or making and to lose sight

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If a single status game becomes dominant, it breeds violence. Social fragmentation is a release valve.

When a platform is designed to suppress your reach while amplifying extremists, staying isn’t pragmatic. It’s masochistic.

This all fundamentally misunderstands the nature of power on these platforms. Success on social media is about building community. And you can’t build community if someone else has all the control over how that community works.

But he saw AI (a term that he had ambiguous feelings about) as a particular variant of a much broader phenomenon: “complex information processing.” Human beings have quite limited internal ability to process information, and confront an unpredictable and complex world. Hence, they rely on a variety of external arrangements that do much of their... See more