We must start at the beginning: what is technology? Indeed, how deeply do we understand what we make? The increasing power and consequence of technology seems to obscure its definition. Technology is like a cloud; it envelopes and surrounds us, but we can’t quite apprehend it because its omnipresence obscures our vision. We know it familiarly, thus... See more
I’ve been fascinated with how the Internet can be used to form beautiful ephemeral moments of connection with the most unexpected kinds of people. This doc outlines an inquiry into how we create the conditions for those moments, how to cultivate and sustainably grow the intimate tiny internets we explore that protect us from the wide, scary,... See more
Payments and identity are attractors for wealth, power, centralization, and all the problems that come along with those things.Aggregators emerged at the intersection of these attractors, and broke the evolutionary loop of technology, leveraging network effects to fend off componentization and freeze the evolutionary landscape in place.Now into... See more
Why put "expandable explanations" in your writing?1. The reader can get the background information they need – just-in-time, not just-in-case – all without: a) you re-explaining the basics for every article, or b) your reader breaking the flow of reading by clicking a link to yet another article.2. So your reader can tailor your article to their... See more
With so much of our socializing, organizing, and life administration routed through screens and networks, we face the contradictory risks of things disappearing or things staying findable forever. Nothing on our computers stays the same for very long. Software updates, websites disappear, and newspapers edit their copy and hope to get away with it.... 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
For an intelligent species, building a Dyson Sphere is a technological leap on a par with the discovery of fire for our ancestors. The transition from a planetary species to an interstellar species. It would usher in an age of exploration and expansion on a scale we can barely imagine.
Even collecting 1% of the sun's energy is an unbelievable change in our species' energy budget. We could create the infrastructure to beam basically unlimited amounts of energy around the solar system for all sorts of projects — colonies on other worlds, terraforming planets, constructing more mega structures, or even traveling to other stars. It... See more