Tashi Duncan is exactly what we have been missing from our screens; a selfish, messy, calculated woman who wields her intelligence and sensuality as weapons. She’s a cheater, a woman unable to see beyond her own needs, who refuses to lie even when she could save someone the heartbreak of the truth — “unlikeable” by all standards. When her golden retriever malewife of a partner Art tells her he loves her, she simply looks over and purrs “I know” in response. It is coolly dismissive and self-assured in a way that we do not usually get to see Black women behave onscreen.

Tashi Duncan is too formidable a character to be pushed around, least of all by white stans who don’t know what it means to strive beyond the approval of men. The story underneath all the tennis is about Tashi’s heartbreak, the mourning over the loss of her career and the identity it gave her and how she forges ahead anyway.

in every charged moment we see between Patrick and Art, Guadagnino makes it clear that the center of their connection is Tashi. Even the now infamous churros scene revolves almost entirely around Tashi. Patrick says that he likes seeing Art riled up, that he enjoys seeing him willing to connive and fight for something — even if that thing is his girlfriend. Even their lust for one another is moderated by her, unleashed by her. They would have stayed perfectly content meandering in suggestion if she had not forced them to confront their attraction for one another tongue-first in that bedroom scene.

Tashi Duncan is a woman so in control of herself that even in her greatest moment of heartbreak — sitting alone under a tree with an injury that has ruined her chance at doing the only thing she knows how to do — does not allow herself to break. Zendaya’s portrayal of her is glorious here. You watch the hurt, pain, grief, anger, and then finally resolute determination pass over her face as she makes her choice. She will not mope. That moment makes the woman we meet years later, who tells her husband that her love is absolutely conditional on his success as a player.

Tashi Duncan is utterly unique, a manifestation of a particular kind of female rage that makes her hard to forget or even fully hate. It’s what makes the boys so obsessed with her.

Companionship content is long-form content that can be consumed passively — allowing the consumer to be incompletely attentive, and providing a sense of relaxation, comfort, and community.

Interestingly, each individual “unit” of music is short-form (e.g. a 3-5 minute song), but how we consume it tends to be long-form and passive (i.e. via curated stations, lengthy playlists, or algorithms that adapt to our taste).

If you’re rewatching a show or movie, it’s likely to be companionship content. (Life-like conversational sitcoms can be consumed this way too.) As streaming matures, platforms are growing their passive-watch library.

content isn’t always prescriptively passive, rather it’s rooted in how consumers engage it.

That said, some content lends better to being companionship content: Long-form over short. Conversational over action. Simple plot versus complex.

Short-form video requires more attention & action in a few ways: Context switching, i.e. wrapping your head around a new piece of context every 30 seconds, especially if they’re on unrelated topics with different styles Judgment & decision-making, i.e. contemplating whether to keep watching or swipe to the next video effectively the entire time you’re watching a video Multi-sensory attention, i.e. default full-screen and requires visual and audio focus, especially since videos are so short that you can easily lose context Interactive components, e.g. liking, saving, bookmarking,

With how performative, edited, and algorithmically over-optimized it is, TikTok feels sub-human. TikTok has quickly become one of the most goal-seeking places on earth. I could easily describe TikTok as a global focus group for commercials. It’s the product personification of a means to an end, and the end is attention.

even TikTok creators are adapting the historically rigid format to appeal to more companionship-esque emotions and improve retention.

When we search for a YouTube video to watch, we often want the best companion for the next hour and not the most entertaining content.

While short-form content edits are meant to be spectacular and attention-grabbing, long-form content tends to be more subtle in its emotional journey Long-form engagement with any single character or narrative or genre lets you develop stronger understanding, affinity, and parasocial bonds Talk-based content (e.g. talk shows, podcasts, comedy, vlogs, life-like sitcoms) especially evokes a feeling of companionship and is less energy-draining The trends around loneliness and the acceleration of remote work has and will continue to make companionship content even more desirable As we move into new technology frontiers, we might unlock novel types of companionship content itself, but I’d expect this to take 5-10 years at least

TikTok is where you connect with an audience, YouTube is where you consolidate it.5 Long-form content also earns creators more, with YouTube a standout in revenue sharing.

YouTube paid out $16 billion to creators in 2022 (which is 55% of its annual $30 billion in revenue) and the other four social networks paid out about $1 billion each from their respective creator funds. In total, that yields $20 billion.”

Mr. Beast, YouTube’s top creator, says YouTube is now the final destination, not “traditional” hollywood stardom which is the dream of generations past. Creators also want to funnel audiences to apps & community platforms where they can own user relationships, rely less on algorithms, engage more directly and deeply with followers, and enable follower-to-follower engagement too

Interestingly of course, an increasing amount of short-form video, including formats like clips and edits, seems to be made from what originally was long-form content.8 And in return, these recycled short-form videos can drive tremendous traffic to long-form formats and platforms.

90% of people use a second screen while watching TV. We generally talk about “second screen” experiences in the context of multiple devices, but you can have complementary apps and content running on the same device — you can have the “second screen” on the same screen.

YouTube itself also cites a trend of people putting YouTube on their real TV screens: “There are more Americans gathering around the living room TV to watch YouTube than any other platform. Why? Put simply, people want choices and variety … It’s a one stop shop for video viewing. Think about something historically associated with linear TV: Sports. Now, with [our NFL partnership], people can not only watch the games, but watch post-game highlights and commentary in one place.”

If I were to build an on-demand streaming product or any kind of content product for that matter, I’d build for the companionship use case — not only because I think it has a higher ceiling of consumer attention, but also because it can support more authentic, natural, human engagement.

All the creators that are ‘made’ on TikTok are looking for a place to go to consolidate the attention they’ve amassed. TikTok is commercials. YouTube is TV. (Though yes, they’re both trying to become each other).

certainly AI and all the new creator tools enabled by it will help people mix and match and remix long and short formats all day, blurring the historically strict distinctions between them. It’ll take some time before we see a new physical product + content combo thrive, and meanwhile the iPhone and its comps will be competing hard to stay the default device.

The new default seems to be that we’re not lonely as long as we’re streaming. We can view this entirely in a negative light and talk about how much the internet and media is contributing to the loneliness epidemic. Or we could think about how to create media for good. Companionship content can be less the quick dopamine-hit-delivering clips and more of this, and perhaps even truly social.

Long-form wants to become the conversational third space for consumers too. The “comments” sections of TikTok, YouTube and all broadcast platforms are improving, but they still have a long way to go before they become even more community-oriented.

I’m not an “AI-head” but I am more curious about what it’s going to enable in long-form content than all the short-form clips it’s going to help generate and illustrate, etc.

The foreground tends to be utilities or low-cognitive / audio effort (text or silent video). Tiktok is a foreground app for now, YouTube is both (and I’d say trending towards being background).

Missed context - Because you’re not a full-time employee (even if you’re working 5 days a week) you may not be included on all-hands emails, announcements and so on and so you always have to work hard to gain the full context of a client. Tightly scripting a performance doesn’t leave room for new contexts to emerge during the performance. Instead there should always be room for new context to emerge and get integrated into the performance in real-time. Missed feedback - It’s not uncommon as a consultant to be the most proficient powerpoint user in the org (or at least your portion of the org). This has benefits but it also has the unintended consequence of making everything you touch look “finished”. And finished work gets very different feedback from people than raw materials and thinking. So sometimes it’s important to un-design and un-polish your work, to invite people onto the stage to co-create the performance - this way you ensure that you get the appropriate feedback.

“thinking on your feet” is about the balance between deflecting decisions for further analysis and providing the answer there and then.

learning to provide an answer that you believe in but leaves room for revision later is key. The real game that’s being played here is not one of being right or wrong - it’s the executive asking two questions at once - firstly “how much do you know?” and secondly “can you improv?” to understand how useful you’re going to be in the theatre of work.

There’s a fine line between reacting to a situation in the room and bullshitting. As a consultant this is especially hard to avoid. Your default mode of operating is the liminal space between industries, businesses and markets. A few times a year I’m forced to learn something new from scratch. This forces us to work in spaces where we’re often the least knowledgeable about a specific business (even if we are experts in the industry… And sometimes we’re experts at a discipline but neither knowledgeable about the business or the industry).

Living in an immigrant, multilingual family will open your eyes to all the ways humans can misunderstand each other. My story isn’t unique, but I grew up unable to communicate in my family’s “default language.” I was forbidden from speaking Korean as a child. My parents were fluent in spoken and written English, but their accents often left them feeling unwelcome in America. They didn’t want that for me, and so I grew up with perfect, unaccented English. I could understand Korean and, as a small child, could speak some. But eventually, I lost that ability.

I became the family Chewbacca. Family would speak to me in Korean, I’d reply back in English — and vice versa. Later, I started learning Japanese because that’s what public school offered and my grandparents were fluent. Eventually, my family became adept at speaking a pidgin of English, Korean, and Japanese.

This arrangement was less than ideal but workable. That is until both of my parents were diagnosed with incurable, degenerative neurological diseases. My father had Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s disease. My mom had bulbar amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and frontotemporal dementia (FTD). Their English, a language they studied for decades, evaporated.

It made everything twice as complicated. I shared caretaking duties with non-English speaking relatives. Doctor visits — both here and in Korea — had to be bilingual, which often meant appointments were longer, more stressful, expensive, and full of misunderstandings. Oftentimes, I’d want to connect with my stepmom or aunt, both to coordinate care and vent about things only we could understand. None of us could go beyond “I’m sad,” “I come Monday, you go Tuesday,” or “I’m sorry.” We struggled alone, together.

You need much less to “survive” in another language. That’s where Google Translate excels. It’s handy when you’re traveling and need basic help, like directions or ordering food. But life is lived in moments more complicated than simple transactions with strangers. When I decided to pull off my mom’s oxygen mask — the only machine keeping her alive — I used my crappy pidgin to tell my family it was time to say goodbye. I could’ve never pulled out Google Translate for that. We all grieved once my mom passed, peacefully, in her living room. My limited Korean just meant I couldn’t partake in much of the communal comfort. Would I have really tapped a pin in such a heavy moment to understand what my aunt was wailing when I knew the why?

For high-context languages like Japanese and Korean, you also have to be able to translate what isn’t said — like tone and relationships between speakers — to really understand what’s being conveyed. If a Korean person asks you your age, they’re not being rude. It literally determines how they should speak to you. In Japanese, the word daijoubu can mean “That’s okay,” “Are you okay?” “I’m fine,” “Yes,” “No, thank you,” “Everything’s going to be okay,” and “Don’t worry” depending on how it’s said.

often these days I find myself in the position of defending someone I think is annoying from someone I know is dangerous.

Upon arriving at the facility, Bruce handed in his smartphone and passed through metal detectors. He was in awe of the semiconductor production line: Overhead rails carried wafers from one station to another while workers in white protective suits kept the machinery running. “It really just felt like I was touring some kind of living thing that was greater than humans; that was bigger than us,” Bruce recalled.

TSMC made attempts to bridge some of the cultural differences. After the American trainees asked to contact families and to listen to music at work, TSMC loosened the firewall on T phones to allow all staff access to Instagram, YouTube, and Spotify. Some Taiwanese workers attended a class on U.S. culture, where they learned that Americans responded better to encouragement rather than criticism, according to an engineer who attended the session.

Several former American employees said they were not against working longer hours, but only if the tasks were meaningful. “I’d ask my manager ‘What’s your top priority,’ he’d always say ‘Everything is a priority,’” said another ex-TSMC engineer. “So, so, so, many times I would work overtime getting stuff done only to find out it wasn’t needed.”

Training in Taiwan, which typically lasted one to two years, wasn’t all miserable, the Americans said. On the weekends, the trainees traveled across the island, marveling at the country’s highly efficient public transport network. Bruce spent his weekends hiking and frequenting nightclubs. He chatted with the families that run night-market food stalls, and entertained strangers who requested selfies with foreigners.

For the Taiwanese, many of whom planned for extended stays in Phoenix, that meant relocating entire families — toddlers and dogs included — to a foreign country. Many regarded it as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to explore the world, practice English, and send their children to American schools. Younger families planned pregnancies so they could give birth to American citizens. “If we are going to have children, of course we will have them here,” a Taiwanese engineer told Rest of World. “As an American citizen, they will have more options than others.”

Many experienced a culture shock. The bustling cities of Taiwan are densely packed and offer extensive public transport, ubiquitous street food, and 24-hour convenience stores every few blocks. In northern Phoenix, everyday life is impossible without a car, and East Asian faces are scarce

“Everything is so big in America,” said one engineer, recalling his first impression. He recounted his wife summarizing her impression of the U.S.: “Great mountains, great rivers, and great boredom.”

Having spent years under the company’s grueling management, they were used to long days, out-of-hours calls, and harsh treatment from their managers. In Taiwan, the pay and prestige were worth it, they told Rest of World — despite the challenges, many felt proud working for the island’s most prominent firm. It was the best job they could hope for.

Sometimes, the engineers said, staff would manipulate data from testing tools or wafers to please managers who had seemingly impossible expectations.

A former TSMC staffer who worked on the education program said managers were instructed not to yell at employees in public, or threaten to fire them without consulting human resources. “They would say, ‘Okay, okay, I get it. I’m not going to do that,’” the employee recalled to Rest of World. “But I think in the heat of the moment, they forgot, and they did do it.”

Chang-Tai Hsieh, an economics professor at the University of Chicago, told Rest of World that TSMC had found the U.S. a challenging environment to operate in because of the complicated regulatory process, strong construction unions, and a workforce less used to the long hours that are commonplace at TSMC in Taiwan.

Sitting in a room together, the engineers admitted that although they had made some progress in acclimating to life in the U.S., TSMC had yet to find a balance between the two work cultures. Some Taiwanese workers complained that management was being too accommodating in giving Americans less work, paying them high salaries, and letting them get off work early.

A Pivot To Video tends to arrive in stages, with each stage being more expensive and producing less interesting content as things progress. Usually it goes like this: The experimentation phase, the factory phase, and the bloat phase. A great editor I worked for during the second Pivot To Video, roughly 2013-2017, who, herself worked through the first, roughly 2003-2007, described it as a massive waste of resources that wastes more resources as it becomes clearer to everyone not directly involved how much of a waste of resources it is.

It’s a fundamental issue with video as a medium that online platforms haven’t fixed and, I suspect, never will because it makes user-generated content platforms feel more professional and consistent. Like TV. The cost to produce video content always balloons as you add more people, more tools, more structure to the workflow, pushing out smaller creators and teams. And even with the pandemic lowering the barrier of entry for making video online considerably, it’s still happening again. We’re in the bloat phase now.

MrBeast, the platform’s biggest star, is spending between $3-$5 million per video right now, up from around $200,000 a video just a few years ago. To put that absolutely outrageous number in perspective, a MrBeast video is roughly the same cost per video as any episode from the first five seasons of Game Of Thrones.

Guides last year were saying you had to capture viewers in the first three seconds. I’ve read a few guides from this year that are now saying hooking a TikTok user has to happen in the first 1.5 seconds. There’s an oft-quoted “shoeshine boy” theory of markets, usually attributed to Joe Kennedy in the late 1920s, who said that when the boy shining his shoes had stock tips, he knew the market was about to collapse. Well, here’s a similar rule for digital video: If you’re trying to optimize your video in microseconds, the video pivot is probably already over.

YouTube is laser-focused on capturing the world’s televisions. In fact, the platform’s CEO, Neal Mohan announced yesterday that the platform is adding even more features for YouTube’s TV app. And TikTok, if it’s not banned or whatever, is trying to use its massive inventory of short-form video content to prop up both a search engine and an e-commerce operation. And we haven’t even talked about Meta’s video products here. There is simply no incentive for these platforms to regress even though users seem to want them to.

Tastes are clearly changing. The Washington Post article pointed to Sam Sulek, a giant muscleman on YouTube who posts 30-minute workout vlogs with barely any editing as a possible direction this is all headed in. I tried watching one of his recent videos and I’m not even sure it has any cuts in it? It’s possible that’s what’s coming next, but it’s less certain if platforms will, or rather can, allow it. Time to find out if they know how to pivot.

These days hate has roughly the same role in popular culture that original sin has in traditional Christian theology. If you want to slap the worst imaginable label on an organization, you call it a hate group. If you want to push a category of discourse straight into the realm of the utterly unacceptable, you call it hate speech. If you’re speaking in public and you want to be sure that everyone in the crowd will beam approval at you, all you have to do is denounce hate.

At the far end of this sort of rhetoric, you get the meretricious slogan used by Hillary Clinton’s unsuccessful presidential campaign last year: LOVE TRUMPS HATE. I hope that none of my readers are under the illusion that Clinton’s partisans were primarily motivated by love, except in the sense of Clinton’s love for power and the Democrats’ love for the privileges and payouts they could expect from four more years of control of the White House; and of course Trump and the Republicans were head over heels in love with the same things. The fact that Clinton’s marketing flacks and focus groups thought that the slogan just quoted would have an impact on the election, though, shows just how pervasive the assumption I’m discussing has become in our culture.

what happens when people decide that some common human emotion is evil and harmful and wrong, and decide that the way to make a better world is to get rid of it?

The example I have in mind is the attitude, prevalent in the English-speaking world from the middle of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth, that sex was the root of all evil.

I know that comparing current attitudes toward hate with Victorian attitudes toward sex will inspire instant pushback from a good many of my readers. After all, sexual desire is natural and normal and healthy, while hate is evil and harmful and wrong, right? Here again, it’s easy to lose track of the fact that people a century and a quarter ago—most likely including your ancestors, dear reader, if they happened to live in the English-speaking world—saw things the other way around. To them, hate was an ordinary emotion that most people had under certain circumstances, but sexual desire was beyond the pale: beastly, horrid, filthy, and so on through an impressive litany of unpleasant adjectives.

Make something forbidden and you make it desirable. Take a normal human emotional state, one that everyone experiences, and make it forbidden, and you guarantee that the desire to violate the taboo will take on overwhelming power. That’s why, after spending their days subject to the pervasive tone policing of contemporary life, in which every utterance gets scrutinized for the least trace of anything that anyone anywhere could conceivably interpret as hateful, so many people in today’s world don internet aliases and go to online forums where they can blurt out absolutely anything

The opposite of one bad idea, after all, is usually another bad idea; the fact that dying of thirst is bad for you doesn’t make drowning good for you; whether we’re talking about sex or anything else, there’s a space somewhere between “not enough” and “too much,” between pathological repression and equally pathological expression, that’s considerably healthier than either of the extremes. I’m going to risk causing my more sensitive readers to clutch their smelling salts and faint on the nearest sofa, in true Victorian style, by suggesting that the same thing’s true of hate.

Hate is like sex; there are certain times, places, and contexts where it’s appropriate, but there are many, many others where it’s not. You can recognize its place in life without having to act it out on every occasion—and in fact, the more conscious you are of its place in life, the more completely you acknowledge it and give it its due, the less likely you are to get blindsided by it. That’s true of sex, and it’s true of hate: what you refuse to acknowledge controls you; what you acknowledge, you can learn to control.

the blind faith that goodness requires amputation is so unquestioned in our time.

Human beings are never going to be perfect, not if perfection means the amputation of some part of human experience, whether the limb that’s being hacked off is our sexual instincts, our aggressive instincts, or any other part of who and what we are.

We can accept our sexuality, whatever that happens to be, and weave it into the pattern of our individual lives and our relationships with other people in ways that uphold the values we cherish and yield as much joy and as little unnecessary pain for as many people as possible. That doesn’t mean always acting out our desires—in some cases, it can mean never acting them out at all

Emmy mainstays like “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” “Better Call Saul” and “Succession” have all ended their runs, and the newer Emmy parvenus, such as the comedies “Abbott Elementary” and “Jury Duty,” while excellent, harken back to an earlier, mass-market era of television that was dominated by sitcoms and hourlong procedurals.

This sort of audience divide, not between those who love a show and those who hate it but between those who love it in very different ways, has become a familiar schism in the past fifteen years, during the rise of—oh, God, that phrase again—Golden Age television. This is particularly true of the much lauded stream of cable “dark dramas,” whose protagonists shimmer between the repulsive and the magnetic. As anyone who has ever read the comments on a recap can tell you, there has always been a less ambivalent way of regarding an antihero: as a hero

a subset of viewers cheered for Walter White on “Breaking Bad,” growling threats at anyone who nagged him to stop selling meth. In a blog post about that brilliant series, I labelled these viewers “bad fans,” and the responses I got made me feel as if I’d poured a bucket of oil onto a flame war from the parapets of my snobby critical castle. Truthfully, my haters had a point: who wants to hear that they’re watching something wrong?

Social media is the lens for a lot of the show’s biggest bits and even plotlines. It is, just as in life, omnipresent, and so, even as the show spotlights the inherent ridiculousness of the extremely online, it also understands the way social media is a deranging accelerant of everyday problems, and thus a medium of everyday life.

These are all just a bunch of funny jokes about people who are too online, celebrities whose shallow fame exists only by way of the apps, and a contemporary American culture hypnotized by the blue light of screens.

In her book The Drama of Celebrity, the scholar Sharon Marcus argues that celebrity, as we know it, is a cultural phenomenon with three distinct authors. There’s the celebrity, who expresses themself through whatever art or product they make; there are the journalists who write about and photograph and criticize and otherwise construct the celebrity’s public image; and then there’s the public, who contribute devotion and imagination, and money, and love and hate.

There was a time when Marilyn Monroe emerged as an illusion, a trick of the light produced between herself, her studio’s massive press apparatus, and an adoring and vampiric public. Today, anyone can be an illusion like this, if at smaller scale.

The show by no means wants to redeem the industry, but, this season especially, it’s become invested in exposing the lazy nihilism that can come along with seeing the worst in people. If you run into a craven, soulless industry hack in the morning, you ran into a craven, soulless industry hack; if you run into them all day, you are the craven, soulless industry hack.

The Other Two is about identity. It’s a flimsy, fungible thing, and it’s a trap. It’s a point of pride and a point of embarrassment. There’s the real you that we all struggle to find and to express truthfully; there’s the version of yourself that you perform for the public; there’s the version of you that others create in and against their own image.

Unfortunately, I have never experienced anything I'd call leadership from anyone that has called themselves a member of "the leadership team". From my friends, yes. From some serious thinkers, yeah. From "leadership", not even close. Instead, society presents us with an endless parade of people parroting nonsense ranging from the insanely over-excited ("Get shit done! Woo!") to the utterly soulless ("Continuous Improvement Playback & Strategy"). Shut the fuck up! All we do is land the output of APIs in a warehouse, guys. You sound insane.

These people are running some horrific version of leadership that consists entirely of them turning up and repeating the same tired cliches on a loop. Reduce silos. Be more Agile. We must go forward, not backwards. Can you imagine how fucked in the head you'd have to be to imagine you can hold a four hour unrehearsed session and that you expect it to be so good that you demand everyone be there for it?

I don't think leadership roles should really exist in many domains, as I've indicated earlier. Leadership should naturally flow between team members based on the task being performed, competence of each member, and psychodynamic energy (read again: vibes) on any given day.

There's complaining for fun, and then there's complaining. I'm going to be 30 this year and it is dawning on me that I don't have time to waste on these people. While writing this, I reached out to my manager and let him know I'm looking for new work, which I promised to do when I took the job (they can hate me as much as they want as long I have fulfilled all my personal promises).

Ah, to believe that people surface real issues at retros in dysfunctional organizations.

Collective harmony and hierarchy are strongly idealised across East Asia. Communication is thus implicit and indirect. Conflict aversion and emotional suppression make it harder to learn what someone else really thinks. So what’s the solution?Alcohol reduces people’s inhibitions. This promotes social bonding and information-sharing. As argued in Edward Slingerland’s book “Drunk”, it benefits businesses! But this exact same cognitive shift also elevates risks of sexual abuse. Women may prefer to leave early. By doing so, they miss out on homosocial boozing and schmoozing.

The term "meme" was coined by biologist Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene,[1] to illustrate the principle that he later called "Universal Darwinism".

He gave as examples, tunes, catchphrases, fashions, and technologies. Like genes, memes are selfish replicators and have causal efficacy; in other words, their properties influence their chances of being copied and passed on.

Just as genes can work together to form co-adapted gene complexes, so groups of memes acting together form co-adapted meme complexes or memeplexes.

Criticisms of memetics include claims that memes do not exist, that the analogy with genes is false, that the units cannot be specified, that culture does not evolve through imitation, and that the sources of variation are intelligently designed rather than random.

classics scholar Craig Williams writes that Romans didn’t use terms like “just friends” or “more than friends” to refer to spouses because “the implicit devaluation of friendly as opposed to romantic or married love would have struck most Romans as perverse.” At that time, he asks, “what could be more than friendship?”

It seems like you almost have to say, "Look, you can't have rules about these general patterns of masculine and feminine without dishonoring those who don't fit those binaries." I think that's completely wrong. I think in the real world, we're perfectly capable of saying, "Yeah, this is the norm. This is how things usually are. There are some people who's not like that, and we can equally respect each other."

And I'll tell you that my gay friends, but also my trans friends, they're not asking me to be less masculine. They're asking me to respect them for who they are. And they'll do the same in return to me. And so in the real world, we don't live in these zero-sum games and we don't — and we refuse this admonition that we can't think two thoughts at once.

Taken at face value, the phrase tool for thought doesn't have the word 'computer' or 'digital' anywhere in it. It suggests nothing about software systems or interfaces. It's simply meant to refer to tools that help humans think thoughts; potentially new, different, and better kinds of thoughts than we currently think.

Most of the examples I listed above are cultural practices and techniques. They are primary ways of doing; specific ways of thinking and acting that result in greater cognitive abilities. Ones that people pass down from generation to generation through culture. Every one of these also pre-dates digital computers by at least a few hundred years, if not thousands or tens of thousands. Given that framing, it's time to return to the question of how computation, software objects, and note-taking apps fit into this narrative.

If you look around at the commonly cited “major thinkers” in this space, you get a list of computer programmers: Kenneth Iverson, J.C.R. Licklider, Vannevar Bush, Alan Kay, Bob Taylor, Douglas Englebart, Seymour Papert, Bret Victor, and Howard Rheingold, among others.

This is relevant because it means these men share a lot of the same beliefs, values, and context. They know the same sorts of people, learned the same historical stories in school and were taught to see the world in particular kinds of ways. Most of them worked together, or are at most one personal connection away from the next. Tools for thought is a community scene as much as it's a concept. This gives tools for thought a distinctly computer-oriented, male, American, middle-class flavour. The term has always been used in relation to a dream that is deeply intertwined with digital machines, white-collar knowledge work, and bold American optimism.

Englebart was specifically concerned with our ability to deal with complex problems, rather than simply “amplifying intelligence.” Being able to win a chess match is perceived as intelligent, but it isn't helping us tackle systemic racism or inequality. Englebart argued we should instead focus on “augmenting human intellect” in ways that help us find solutions to wicked problems. While he painted visions of how computers could facilitate this, he also pointed to organisational structures, system dynamics, and effective training as part of this puzzle.

There is a rich literature of research and insight into how we might expand human thought that sometimes feels entirely detached from the history we just covered. Cognitive scientists and philosophers have been tackling questions about the relationship between cognition, our tools, and our physical environments for centuries. Well before microprocessors and hypertext showed up. Oddly, they're rarely cited by the computer scientists. This alternate intellectual lineage is still asking the question “how can we develop better tools for thinking?” But they don't presume the answer revolves around computers.

Proponents of embodied cognition argue that our perceptions, concepts, and cognitive processes are shaped by the physical structures of our body and the sensory experiences it provides, and that cognition cannot be fully understood without considering the bodily basis of our experiences.

Philosopher Andy Clark has spent his career exploring how external tools transform and expand human cognition. His 2003 book Natural-born Cyborgs argues humans have “always been cyborgs.” Not in the sense of embedding wires into our flesh, but in the sense we enter “into deep and complex relationships with nonbiological constructs, props, and aids”. Our ability to think with external objects is precisely what makes us intelligent. Clark argues “the mind” isn't simply a set of functions within the brain, but a process that happens between our bodies and the physical environment. Intelligence emerges at the intersection of humans and tools. He expanded on this idea in a follow-on book called Supersizing the Mind. It became known as the extended mind hypothesis. It's the strong version of theories like embodied cognition, situated cognition, and enacted cognition that are all the rage in cognitive science departments.

There's a scramble to make sense of all these new releases and the differences between them. YouTube and Medium explode with DIY guides, walkthrough tours, and comparison videos. The productivity and knowledge management influencer is born.[ giant wall of productivity youtube nonsense ]The strange thing is, many of these guides are only superficially about the application they're presented in. Most are teaching specific cultural techniques

Zettelkasten, spaced repetition, critical thinking.These techniques are only focused on a narrow band of human activity. Specifically, activity that white-collar knowledge workers engage in.I previously suggested we should rename TFT to CMFT (computational mediums for thought), but that doesn't go far enough. If we're being honest about our current interpretation of TFT's, we should actually rename it to CMFWCKW – computational mediums for white-collar knowledge work.

By now it should be clear that this question of developing better tools for thought can and should cover a much wider scope than developing novel note-taking software.

I do think there's a meaningful distinction between tools and mediums: Mediums are a means of communicating a thought or expressing an idea. Tools are a means of working in a medium. Tools enable specific tasks and workflows within a medium. Cameras are a tool that let people express ideas through photography. Blogs are a tool that lets people express ideas through written language. JavaScript is a tool that let people express ideas through programming. Tools and mediums require each other. This makes lines between them fuzzy.

When we talk about exclamation points, people often think we’re talking about tone. But what goes unsaid is that tone is the performance of niceness or seriousness. It is the work of matching sentence structure to gender norms, industry norms, workplace norms, and generational norms. It is switching norms dozens if not hundreds of times a day, as you shift from text to email, from group chat to professional Teams Message. And we are doing this Tone Work exponentially more than at any point in history.

Tone Work is not new. But technological advances that promised to allow us to communicate more efficiently have, in practice, also allowed us to communicate more, and created an expectation that all others communicate more in return. Hence: overflowing email accounts, proliferating group texts (and group text guilt), hours if not days dedicated to catching up on Slack. Dealing with that communication is exhausting, in part because it involves so much tone work.

I started grading, which meant I had to figure out the “compliment sandwich” at the end of the essay. The first sentence would start with praise, then an em-dash, then the real news: what needed work. A short list of things to refine, ending with encouragement, almost always capped with an exclamation point. This is a fantastic first draft, and I look forward to seeing the second! An embodiment of my teaching style, really: I’m so happy you’re here, I want us to talk seriously about how to become better writers and thinkers, but I also don’t ever want you to leave a conversation or class or piece of feedback from me feeling like shit.

If you think someone’s written communication style is off, or wrong, or bitchy: see if it’s possible to clarify their intention without asking them to change their tone.

Hassabis pointed to the example of AlphaFold, DeepMind’s machine-learning system that had predicted the structures of 200mn proteins, creating an invaluable resource for medical researchers. Previously, it had taken one PhD student up to five years to model just one protein structure. DeepMind calculated that AlphaFold had therefore saved the equivalent of almost 1bn years of research time.

DeepMind, and others, are also using AI to create new materials, discover new drugs, solve mathematical conjectures, forecast the weather more accurately and improve the efficiency of experimental nuclear fusion reactors. Researchers have been using AI to expand emerging scientific fields, such as bioacoustics, that could one day enable us to understand and communicate with other species, such as whales, elephants and bats.

Although impression management has been relatively free of controversy as a scholarly topic, some disagreements have formed around the ethics of managing impressions, how to best measure impression management, and whether impression management explains some of the more venerable topics in social science such as prosocial behavior, cognitive dissonance, and moral judgment.

Other work has investigated how easy it is to mismanage an impression, such as when “humble bragging” and giving “backhanded compliments.”

One key problem across the apps is the slog of self-presentation, or “impression management,” said Rachel Katz, a digital media sociologist who studies online dating at the University of Salford in the UK. “An important aspect of it is knowing your audience,” Katz said. On dating apps, you don’t know who exactly you’re presenting yourself to when picking a profile picture or composing your bio. You also don’t have physical cues that can help you adjust that self-presentation. “You’re trying to come up with something that’s generally appealing to people, but it can’t be too weird. It can’t be too unique,” said Bryce. “That’s partly why it’s exhausting,” Katz explains, “because it’s this constant labor. ... You’re not really sure of how to do it, you can’t just fit into a comfortable social role.”

When dating apps are not delivering on compatibility, Dean said, they are leading you to “believe that there’s a forever volume of people you can always like.”

Ury rejects the notion that apps should be asking people for more about themselves in writing or through extensive questionnaires. Users may match up on paper but end up disappointed in real life. “I would have rather that people understand that sooner by meeting up earlier,” she said. “Use the app as a matchmaker who gives you the matches — and then, as quickly as possible, the two of you should be chatting live to see if you are a match,” she said. “We found that three days of chatting is the sweet spot for scheduling a date.”