Sixian

These examples suggest that a grand narrative produces a slipstream capable of sustaining cohesion in large societies if it satisfies the following conditions:

1. It produces benefits today 


2. It promises an afterlife where heaven >> hell 


3. There is a consolation prize even if we don’t get to heaven

We’re building edgeless environments of divergency. Things are added in chaos, then if successful, they expanded further and further out until they collapse and rearrange. This is probably why responsive design feels so relevant, maddening, and divisive: its patterns mimic the larger patterns of technology itself.

"I think people hunger to do something useful with their time in our age of uselessness, time uselessly spent, but also something ennobling with their time. This can’t quite be quantified. There’s no utilitarian value to it the way that there is with usefulness. But I deeply believe that people want to be good, that, more than that, we want to be... See more

In every industry there’s typically some kind of received wisdom that sounds like good rational advice but simply doesn’t hold up when faced with reality. The trick is to look for advice that is “not even wrong” - advice that is correct in a certain sense but fundamentally unhelpful when applied to reality.

Part 1: Strong Opinions

1. Data CaptureIn general, however, you want to try and design your product to collect data automatically to:

• Be the place the data is generated, if you can, like Waze does.


• Reduce cycle time and thereby put distance between you and potential competitors.


• Reduce marginal cost of data by avoiding the expenses and operational complexity of collecting

... See more

You could say that our current technological arrangement has spread out too far, and it is starting to look and feel wrong. Fortunately, we can treat this over-expansion just like everything else I’ve mentioned. We can draw a line, and create a point of reassembly for what we’ve made. We can think about how to shift, move, and resize the pieces so... See more

Over the hours of walking, I found myself thinking again about time—and especially about its relationship to the human scale. You can’t walk a mile as fast as you can scroll one. But when moving yourself physically through space, you are also much more aware of how fast and how far you walk (your body certainly remembers to remind you). I suppose... See more