A core component of making great decisions is understanding the rationale behind previous decisions. If we don’t understand how we got “here,” we run the risk of making things much worse.

Much has been written about the usual evolution of general-interest online communities. Less attention has been paid to the dynamics of more specialized, expert-led forums — and the unique if ultimately destructive role of expertise. Over the past 25 years, I participated in dozens of such groups. The forums ranged from 200 to 200,000 members, have been hosted on a variety of platforms, and have dealt with topics ranging from electronic circuit design, to emergency preparedness, to collectible antiques. In almost every instance, they followed the same trajectory — so today, I’d like to put forward a general lifecycle model for expert-led communities.

Thanks to Garrett Baker, David Udell, Alex Gray, Paul Colognese, Akash Wasil, Jacques Thibodeau, Michael Ivanitskiy, Zach Stein-Perlman, and Anish Up…

Author: Markus Strasser

A metameme is a collection of interconnected, mutual dependent, non-arbitrary memes. “Metameme” is thus an overarching term for groups of other memes that helps us understanding the relation of one meme to another. (With “meme”, I’m not referring to the illustrated jokes kids pass around on social media these days, but rather the original idea […]

The struggle for distinction

For a book proposal I am currently working on (German, no proposal isn’t done yet because I keep reworking stuff, my agent hates me) I am thinking a lot about late stage capitalism and technologies, about how the kinda terminal economic system shapes the technologies it brings forward etc. And there are of course a […]

Latest technology advancements have made data processing accessible, cheap and fast for everyone. We believe combining engineering practices with the scientific method will extract the most utility from these advancements. So this manifesto proposes a principled methodology for unifying science and technology by valuing: - **Minimal Viable Products** over prototypes...

I’ve spent 26 days reading 26 years of messages from the Self mail conference archive. Here is what I’ve learned. Please note, that everything is highly subjective and may be even wrong…

First published in Nature magazine, November 1999.

It sounds like the stuff of science fiction: seven keys, held by individuals from all over the world, that together control security at the core of the web. The reality, discovers James Ball, is rather closer to The Office than The Matrix

How to keep an external brain using ideas from 1945 and technology from 2023.

30 Maps to Rethink the World

We use stories to make sense of the world. What that means is that when events occur that don’t fit neatly into a narrative, we can’t make sense of them. As a consequence, these sorts o…

I recently heard a phrase I love: Mental liquidity.

Far too many companies that should be focused on the advancement of humanity by providing valuable services have been deterred from this important mission. Take the example of Silicon Valley which served as a bastion of technological innovation but has been led astray by activism. Vague subjective concepts like

Compact Magazine, a radical American journal

I sometimes see people refer to neural networks as just “another tool in your machine learning toolbox”. They have some pros and cons, they…

The Convivial Society: Vol. 4, No. 3

Aboriginals believe in … [a] “dreamtime”, more real than reality itself. Whatever happens in the dreamtime establishes the values, symbols, and laws of Aboriginal society. … [It] is also often used to refer to an individual’s or group’s set of beliefs or spirituality. … It is a complex network of knowledge, faith, and practices that derive from stories of creation.

I. Allen Ginsberg’s famous poem on Moloch:What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination? Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and u…

“Wat Schopenhauer meant by this?”

In a scorching, searching guide to saving our souls from the digital apocalypse, James Poulos shows how the swarm of programs and devices unleashed by our leaders has transformed our lives and defied our dreams, throwing the future into terrifying doubt. Rising above the din of the discourse, he reveals how the first g