What is our purpose on this planet? Do we have a responsibility to one another? Who even are we?Answering those questions alone is asking a lot of a person. The easier option is to choose from the platter of social-strata-acceptable possibilities we’re presented with for education, occupation, geographical location, personality, etc, and call it a day.

if you spend all your time constantly sketching (probably quickly outdated) pictures of your thinking on the bigger questions we’ve all been tasked with answering, you neglect the actual doing that would reveal answers with richer hues

incredible opportunities are unlocked by constructing a digitally consumable caricature of yourself that makes you legible to literally anyone in the world. It’s probably the most far-ranging bat signal possible to find people who think and feel similarly to you.

There’s simply so much friction in the process of turning belief into action online — meaning that most of the time all you actually get from internet attention is internalized impossible-to-attain expectations for yourself and an extremely confused ego.

If you care about personally choosing the shape, scale, and direction of your impact on the world, you might find that playing off-the-shelf games turns out to be a remarkably risky bet. There’s just no money/time-back guarantee that any of the off-the-shelf options will continue to fit you as your desires evolve. And maybe that’s ok — but continually reinventing yourself is a tiring and time-consuming task that too often leads you away from the real “calling”-finding-and-defining work.

In my book, big things are only worth committing to if the answer to the question “would you do this thing even if no one was watching?” is an immediate and unequivocal yes

In software development, technical debt (also known as design debt[1] or code debt) is the implied cost of additional rework caused by choosing an easy (limited) solution now instead of using a better approach that would take longer.[2] Analogous with monetary debt,[3] if technical debt is not repaid, it can accumulate "interest", making it harder to implement changes. Unaddressed technical debt increases software entropy and cost of further rework.

Common causes of technical debt include: Ongoing development, long series of project enhancements over time renders old solutions sub-optimal.

Parallel development on multiple branches accrues technical debt because of the work required to merge the changes into a single source base. The more changes done in isolation, the more debt.

“Taste is the ability to infuse a product with emotion. In a taste-based industry, its products are stripped down to their very core: how it makes its users feel. We see this phenomenon happen in books, music, movies, games and increasingly tech products

Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it

Film geeks don’t have a whole lot of tangible things to show for their passion and commitment to film. They just watch movies all the time. What they do have to show is a high regard for their own opinion. They’ve learned to break down a movie. They understand what they like and don’t like about a film. And they feel that they’re right. It’s not open to discussion. When I got involved in the movie industry I was shocked at how little faith or trust people have in their own opinions. They read a script and they like it – then they hand it to three of their friends to see what they think about it. I couldn’t believe it.

Rick Rubin on trusting your own taste: “You can’t second-guess your own taste for what someone else is going to like…Do what’s personal to you, take it as far you can go and people will resonate with it if they are supposed to resonate with it.”

I never had an arts education. I can barely draw straight lines. What I do have is a love for words, the history and delightful orgy of words, and a constant sense of discomfort about how things are hardly ever the way they should be.

I’m thinking now about how school encourages students to bullshit. I have friends who are literature teachers who constantly get frustrated by how their smart students give them stupid but vaguely plausible answers – I remember what it was like to be such a student. The student isn’t interested in being honest about his feelings – he just wants to be done with his homework and go on to play.

I think all writing — and criticism is very much included in this — is a form of autobiography, and I thought that I wanted to lean into it a little bit, and talk about what these shows meant to me.

Complex systems can evolve from simple systems only if there are stable intermediate forms. (Donella Meadows, 2008. Thinking in Systems)

So, to survive, you might say a design has to discover an evolutionary path from the familiar to the new, from the present to the future, through a series of steps into the adjacent possible.

The principle holds for infrastructure too. The internet started with the adjacent possible: coopting telephones.The internet didn’t have to deploy expensive new hardware, or lay down new cables to get off the ground. It was conformable to existing infrastructure. It worked with the way the world was already, exapting whatever was available, like dinosaurs exapting feathers for flight. (Exapt Existing Infrastructure)

What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness. Those moments when another human being was there, in front of me, suffering, and I responded . . . sensibly. Reservedly. Mildly. Or, to look at it from the other end of the telescope: Who, in your life, do you remember most fondly, with the most undeniable feelings of warmth? Those who were kindest to you, I bet.

When young, we’re anxious — understandably — to find out if we’ve got what it takes. Can we succeed? Can we build a viable life for ourselves? But you — in particular you, of this generation — may have noticed a certain cyclical quality to ambition. You do well in high-school, in hopes of getting into a good college, so you can do well in the good college, in the hopes of getting a good job, so you can do well in the good job so you can . . . And this is actually O.K. If we’re going to become kinder, that process has to include taking ourselves seriously — as doers, as accomplishers, as dreamers. We have to do that, to be our best selves.

Do all the other things, the ambitious things — travel, get rich, get famous, innovate, lead, fall in love, make and lose fortunes, swim naked in wild jungle rivers (after first having it tested for monkey poop) – but as you do, to the extent that you can, err in the direction of kindness. Do those things that incline you toward the big questions, and avoid the things that would reduce you and make you trivial.

In fact, more people are technologists than ever before, insofar as a “technologist” can be defined as someone inventing, implementing or repurposing technology. In particular, the personal computer has allowed anyone to live in the unbounded wilderness of the internet as they please. Anyone can build highly specific corners of cyberspace and quickly invent digital tools, changing their own and others’ technological realities. “Technologist” is a common identity that many different people occupy, and anyone can occupy. Yet the public perceptions of a “technologist” still constitute a very narrow image.

A technologist makes reason out of the messiness of the world, leverages their understanding to envision a different reality, and builds a pathway to make their vision happen. All three of these endeavors—to try to understand the world, to imagine something different, and to build something that fulfills that vision—are deeply human.

Humans are continually distilling and organizing reality into representations and models—to varying degrees of accuracy and implicitness—that we can understand and navigate. Our intelligence involves making models of all aspects of our realities: models of the climate, models of each other’s minds, models of fluid dynamics.

We are an unprecedentedly self-augmenting species, with a fundamental drive to organize, imagine, construct and exercise our will in the world. And we can measure our technological success on the basis of how much they increase our humanity. What we need is a vision for that humanity, and to enact this vision. What do we, humans, want to become?

As a general public, we can collectively hold technologists to a higher ethical standard, as their work has important human consequences for us all. We must begin to think of them as doing deeply human work, intervening in our present realities and forging our futures. Choosing how best to model the world, impressing their will on it, and us. We must insist that they understand their role as augmenting and modifying humanity, and are responsible for the implications. Collective societal expectations are powerful; if we don’t, they won’t.

I care about people more than I care about positions or beliefs, which I tend to consider a subservient class of psychological phenomena. That is to say: I think people wear beliefs like clothes; they wear what they have grown to consider sensible or attractive; they wear what they feel flatters them; they wear what keeps them dry and warm in inclement winter. They believe their opinions, tastes, philosophies are who they are, but they are mistaken. (Aging is largely learning what one is not, it seems to me).

Criticism must serve some function to justify the pain it causes: it must, say, avert a disastrous course of action being deliberated by a group, or help thwart the rise of a barbarous politician. But this rarely occurs. Most criticism, even of the most erudite sort, is, as we all know, wasted breath: preached to one’s own choir, comically or indignantly cruel to those one doesn’t respect, unlikely to change the behavior of anyone not already in agreement.On the other hand! There persists the idea that culture arises out of the scrum of colliding perspectives, and that it is therefore a moral duty to remonstrate against stupidity, performative emoting, deceitful art, destructively banal fiction, and so on. If one doesn’t speak up, one cannot lament the triumph of moral and imaginative vacuity.

One must believe, of course, that there are abstractions worth protecting, and therefore abstractions worth hurting others for, in order to criticize; and the endless repetitiveness of cultural history seems to devalue such abstractions as surely as bad art and cliche devalue words.

Material-based software can also have gentler learning curves, because the user only needs to learn a small set of rules about how different metaphors in the software interact with each other rather than learning deep hierarchies of menus and terminologies. In the best case, users can continue to discover new capabilities and workflows long after the initial release of the software.

Take nonlinear video editing software, like Final Cut Pro and Premiere Pro, for example. Though they have their fair share of menu complexity, it’s pretty intuitive for anyone to understand the basic building blocks of video and audio clips sitting on a layered timeline. Here, the video and audio clips are composed of a software material that have their own laws of physics: they can grow and shrink to take up more or less time on the timeline. They can be moved around and layered in front of or behind other clips, but they can’t occupy the same space on the same “track” of the timeline. The timeline that runs left-to-right is a kind of “world” in which the materials of audio and video exist.

The game is that every time we create a new technology, we’re creating new possibilities, new choices that didn’t exist before. Those choices themselves—even the choice to do harm—are a good, they’re a plus.

We want an economy that’s growing in the second sense: unlimited betterment, unlimited increase in wisdom, and complexity, and choices. I don’t see any limit there. We don’t want an economy that’s just getting fatter and fatter, and bigger and bigger, in terms of its size. Can we imagine such a system? That’s hard, but I don’t think it’s impossible.

Social networking is much more than just a dominant discourse. We need to go beyond text and images and include its software, interfaces, and networks that depend on a technical infrastructure consisting of offices and their consultants and cleaners, cables and data centers, working in close concert with the movements and habits of the connected billions. Academic internet studies circles have shifted their attention from utopian promises, impulses, and critiques to “mapping” the network’s impact. From digital humanities to data science we see a shift in network-oriented inquiry from Whether and Why, What and Who, to (merely) How. From a sociality of causes to a sociality of net effects. A new generation of humanistic researchers is lured into the “big data” trap, and kept busy capturing user behavior whilst producing seductive eye candy for an image-hungry audience (and vice versa).

We need to politicize the New Electricity, the privately owned utilities of our century, before they disappear into the background.

What remains particularly unexplained is the apparent paradox between the hyper-individualized subject and the herd mentality of the social.

Before we enter the social media sphere, everyone first fills out a profile and choses a username and password in order to create an account. Minutes later, you’re part of the game and you start sharing, creating, playing, as if it has always been like that. The profile is the a priori part and the profiling and targeted advertising cannot operate without it. The platforms present themselves as self-evident. They just are—facilitating our feature-rich lives. Everyone that counts is there. It is through the gate of the profile that we become its subject.

We pull in updates, 24/7, in a real-time global economy of interdependencies, having been taught to read news feeds as interpersonal indicators of the planetary condition

Treating social media as ideology means observing how it binds together media, culture, and identity into an ever-growing cultural performance (and related “cultural studies”) of gender, lifestyle, fashion, brands, celebrity, and news from radio, television, magazines, and the web—all of this imbricated with the entrepreneurial values of venture capital and start-up culture, with their underside of declining livelihoods and growing inequality.

Software, or perhaps more precisely operating systems, offer us an imaginary relationship to our hardware: they do not represent transistors but rather desktops and recycling bins. Software produces users. Without operating system (OS) there would be no access to hardware; without OS no actions, no practices, and thus no user. Each OS, through its advertisements, interpellates a “user”: calls it and offers it a name or image with which to identify. We could say that social media performs the same function, and is even more powerful.

In the age of social media we seem to confess less what we think. It’s considered too risky, too private. We share what we do, and see, in a staged manner. Yes, we share judgments and opinions, but no thoughts. Our Self is too busy for that, always on the move, flexible, open, sporty, sexy, and always ready to connect and express.

Platforms are not stages; they bring together and synthesize (multimedia) data, yes, but what is lacking here is the (curatorial) element of human labor. That’s why there is no media in social media. The platforms operate because of their software, automated procedures, algorithms, and filters, not because of their large staff of editors and designers. Their lack of employees is what makes current debates in terms of racism, anti-Semitism, and jihadism so timely, as social media platforms are currently forced by politicians to employ editors who will have to do the all-too-human monitoring work (filtering out ancient ideologies that refuse to disappear).

Imagine a person who is very lazy at work, yet whose customers are (along with everyone else concerned) quite satisfied. It could be a slow-talking rural shop proprietor from an old movie, or some kind of Taoist fisherman – perhaps a bit of a buffoon, but definitely deeply content. In order to be this way, he must be reasonably organized: stock must be ordered, and tackle squared away, in order to afford worry-free, deep-breathing laziness. Consider this imaginary person as a kind of ideal or archetype. Now consider that the universe might have this personality.

Gatekeepers could see themselves not only as talent hunters for their own organization, but also as managers of society’s collective supply of ambition. We could demand that they consider it a responsibility to waste as little of their applicants’ ambition as possible. That they strive to redirect and allocate that ambition wherever it is most needed.

In practice, there isn’t any single solution. Rejection is a facet of life, and everybody needs to figure out their own strategies to cope with it. The most I can offer is that it’s better when you’re aware of how it works. It isn’t enough to know, on an abstract level, that rejection is typically random and impersonal — but it helps.

You’re likely seen as a bright brain with a knack for solving problems, and what good are the liberal arts¹ and the humanities² in solving the world’s large, technically complex issues? You want your work to have impact and “matter” — something you know to require hard work, discipline, and things like “frameworks” and “mental models.” Tactical, practical, and efficient. But consider, for a second, your thinking. Where did your thoughts and beliefs come from? What about your conviction, your mission, your sense of purpose on this earth? These questions are why the liberal arts and the humanities, or subjects distinct from professional and technical subjects, exist.

The ecosystem that we inhabit as technologists was not built with humans in mind, it was built to run laps around other industries within the capitalist game, and it does this on the backs of the young people it exploits. In simpler terms: the status quo of technology was not designed to make you a happy, content, morally well-rounded young person. That, however, is precisely the purpose of examining the world through a liberal arts lens. Through this frame of view, we might think thoughts without action items, try opinions on for size, celebrate contradiction, and revel in the pursuit of understanding both each other and the world around us.

At their core, the liberal arts and the humanities serve as aggregated documentation on the human condition — the kind of documentation that is meant to be digested, discussed with others, and revisited from whichever angles serve you best along your journey.

It is difficult to advocate for the liberal arts by appealing to results or metrics. But our bias towards viewing these non-instrumental disciplines through a problem-solving lens is exactly why we need spaces that suggest other ways of seeing the world. While that lens grants impressive achievement, it might also leave you wondering why you were even chasing after the thing you achieved to begin with. Our goal is to show you that the problem-solving lens is one of many possible views you can have on the world. You can treat this view like a pair of glasses, one that ought to be regularly removed and replaced with a more reflective, contemplative, and critical lens.

our truly quirky dimensions are never really grasped by these recommendation algorithms. They have all the dullness of a Demographics 101 curriculum; they sketch our personalities with the crudity of crime-scene chalk-outlines. They’re not wrong about us; but they’re woefully incomplete.

The metaphor suggests precisely what to do: If you want to have wilder, curiouser thoughts, you have to avoid the industrial monocropping of big-tech feeds. You want an intellectual forest, overgrown with mushrooms and towering weeds and a massive dead log where a family of raccoons has taken up residence.

For me, it’s meant slowly — over the last few years — building up a big, rangy collection of RSS feeds, that let me check up on hundreds of electic blogs and publications and people. (I use Feedly.) I’ve also started using Fraidycat, a niftily quixotic feed-reader that lets you sort sources into buckets by “how often should I check this source”, which is a cool heuristic; some people/sites you want to check every day, and others, twice a year.

Other times I spend an hour or two simply prospecting — I pick a subject almost at random, then check to see if there’s a hobbyist or interest-group discussion-board devoted to it. (There usually is, running on free warez like phpBB). Then I’ll just trawl through the forum, to find out what does this community care about?