📣 Request for examples 📣 Mini apps and bits of software you’ve built just for yourself and/or friends and family. Things that don’t scale, aren’t meant for others to use, & valuable just for your specific, snowflake use case. Ideally custom built, but could be jerry-rigged

"Futurism tells us more about the present than the future" --@mattwridley nails it

Chatting with @camwiese today about his New World's Fair (which hopes to paint an optimistic, definite vision of the future), I noticed how these projects so often turn to *retro*futurism in art direction. What would a now-rooted, forward-facing hopepunk aesthetic look like?

It’s crazy to me that every optimist talks about “going to the stars” as the A+ perfect future scenario The universe supports qualia, experience, the only natural resource that inherently matters. We can shape that resource how we wish. What matters is what it’s like to be alive

Not a criticism of the demo! more a comment on the shortcomings of text as an interface. I want to be able to take some text and squish it to get a summary; smash two together to get some AI-inferred conclusions or list of disagreements. Text today is very opaque to most software

Another essay I've been procrastinating on: clocks and calendars are tools imposed by rulers (consider what "to rule" really means) to measure, manage and control the world. it's a way of colonizing time, which is in many ways even more insidious than colonizing space

Mirrors and clocks transformed society, but they’re so old that nobody questions them. Clocks created a culture of anxiety. Mirrors created a culture of narcissism.

You only get to be early and right about a lot of things by trying a lot of things. Early.

What if scholars & fans aided by computational algorithms, could knit together the books of the world into a single networked literature? If a reader could generate a social graph of an idea, or timeline of a concept, or a networked map of influence for anything in the library.

I wish surfing the web felt more like taking a stroll around the internet. Snapping a photo here, collecting a bouquet of interesting things there, maybe slipping a postcard under a friend’s door...