You can separate most work into two buckets: well-defined and ambiguous .

• Well defined work is the kind of recognizable work where the client has clarity around both the problem and solution.


• Ambiguous work on the other hand is where either the problem or solution are not fully formed. 

So what do most entrepreneurs do? They imitate the externals. They perpetuate the rituals.

The thinking behind building network effects is less about emotion and more about the math for customers around getting value — utility. Giving the customer more value out of your product by getting your other customers to put value in it. Customers are not even usually aware that they are doing mental math around the value they are getting from ne... See more

So to the question of right relationship, I think my heart's yearning is to bless that is to acknowledge that yearning, that desire for a different relationship that is not supported by our modern suburban arrangements but also to caution that sometimes in our quest to go back, we actually re-entrench, or reinforce and reinscribe the modern. It’s t... See more

It’s curious to want to call an advert ‘objectifying’, because of course it is: its function is to promote an object. Yet this nonetheless feels like the right word, not only in reference to the object of the ad’s intentions, but the kind of gaze that is filming it. The camera, the eye, is fixated on the phone’s ‘thing-ness’: not what it can do, bu... See more

Illegibility comes from complexity without clarity. I believe that the legibility of the source is one of the most important properties of the web. It’s the main thing that keeps the door open to independent, unmediated contributions to the network. If you can write markup, you don’t need Medium or Twitter or Instagram (though they’re nice to have)... See more

(S)pecialization doesn’t lend itself well to novelty and surprise.

Fandom, on the other hand, pins you in your body, because it disallows you from pretending you are “nowhere” in relation to your subject. Fandom admits care, attachment, and dedication. For Fisher, as for me, fan-love might take up the traditional tools of intellectual critique—say, exposition and analysis of a text—but the writer herself is always... See more

Data embedding is the idea that by holding more and more of your clients’/users’ data, the harder you are to remove, and that gives you some defensibility.