Sarah Drinkwater

Stack Overflow’s commitment to purity has served it well. But if other platforms with a different — non-diabolical — culture offer what Stack Overflow does, then why stick to a place that is no longer the rare commodity it used to be?

Stack Overflow has enduring popularity, at least in software. Why is it that a resource like it — a centralized, global resource to ask questions — is not as common in other industries?

In America, our culture has become anticipation.

At some point, there was a switch, in which we became an edging culture. One rooted in “pre-”.

With AI, I suspect we’ll be able to play with the compression of anticipation with software objects well. Teasing an idea on Twitter, seeing it’s response, putting that prompt in AI to generate just enough code for the resemblance of the thing → and that reaching consumer hands much faster.

Perhaps anticipation culture is the wedded partner of instant-gratification culture. It’s the only thing that allows us to microdose the gratification of the object before we actually have it. Constantly watching trailers, or runway shows, sneak peaks, etc

I find this all lines up incredibly well to VC culture. The discussion is 90% weighted on the raise

The anticipation is lost as its material reality fails to hold any long term attention. Even if it was the exact promise. We simply love the build up. The image of the thing.

The “pre-”, other than consuming behind the scenes content of an artist’s process, is all mental. As I participate as a dancer in the audience, I can only (if I care to) construct fiction of the worked anticipation of the overall performance. But 90%+ of the audience only cares about the anticipation of the next drop or track. The loop is built in.

To bring it all the way back to the tweet that launched this post. Anticipation is exhausting. It is built around uncertainty, and the quelling of said uncertainty by the fragments of the objects chosen to be presented.