You might also hope that the important details will be obvious when you run into them, but not so. Such details aren’t automatically visible, even when you’re directly running up against them. Things can just seem messy and noisy instead.
Notice that we’re not defining technology as a solution to a problem, but rather a path to an end. Though many technologists see their work as “problem-solving”, problems are in the eye of the beholder; one first has to make decisions about what constitutes a problem before making decisions to solve it in a particular way. That decision-making... See more
This idea a kind of like this bet, that we're living in a moment where, for better for worse, there's a lot more remote collaboration. People want to do interaction or collaboration through software more and more that needs to happen somewhere. The canvas is probably the place where that's going to happen. My bet was these apps, there's just going... See more
You can't make a movie and say, "It was all a big accident." No, it has to be a conspiracy, people plotting together, because a story is about intention. A story is not about spontaneous order or complex human institutions which are the product of human action but not of human design. No, a story is about evil people plotting together. So you hear... See more
Disruptive innovations don’t compete against incumbents, they compete with nonconsumption. They start where there is no competition, at the low-end of a market, or in a completely new market. What they offer is not better. It is different. It shifts the basis of competition.
My first recommendation would be fiction. Reading fiction is important to understand the cross-sectional variation in humanity, to understand how difficult generalizations can be, to just get a sense of how different social pieces fit together, and to get a sense of different historical eras – and plus, reading fiction is often just plain flat-out... See more
Especially on the web, we are used to a a kind of a document metaphor that, the web is just built for, which is a kind of a vertically scrolling infinite page. Infinite canvases are essentially like a different document format. This idea of that there are two dimensions, or almost three. You know, you can move left, you can move right, you can move... See more
So this raises the question: How long can it possibly be “early days”? How long do we need to wait before someone comes up with an actual application of blockchain technologies that isn’t a transparent attempt to retroactively justify a technology that is inefficient in every sense of the word? How much pollution must we justify pumping into our... See more