I’m in meetings completely credulous, believing whatever anyone says, even though Lucy from Peanuts taught me that that’s a mistake. I don’t have an intuitive sense for where money is. I spend hours on laborious projects that will make me just enough money to buy me four burritos, and fail to follow up on opportunities that would pay my rent for months. I have almost 80,000 followers on Twitter, and have made maybe only $1000 off the platform, most of which has been in the form of meal kits I’ve had to beg companies to send me after they used my Tweets without compensation on their Instagram page.

My job is actually one billion smaller jobs in a trench coat, many of which I’m actually not preternaturally gifted at or even experienced in.

Mixed in with seeing Disney movies, at age 10, she discovered John Cassavetes’ Minnie And Moskowitz and thought, “To see that and to say, ‘What’s this world out there and how do I fit in it?’ that to me is the most important part of filmmaking and being in films.

Again, this is just another example of the U.S.’ harmful obsession with megamergers, consolidation, purposeless (outside of stock fluffing) deal making, and growth for growth’s sake. All of these deals make perfect sense to the executives, lawyers, and accounting magicians exploiting them for tax breaks and various financial benefits, but that doesn’t make this whole saga any less preposterously pointless.

Whoever is behind the scenes of these movies fails to understand that you can actually make more money by making something that is "good". That making a "good" movie means people will want to watch your movie multiple times and then purchase it again later, and purchase more tickets, and purchase the streaming service with your movie, and purchase the box-set with your movie.

There are three ways you could make a film like this, and make it somewhat "good", whatever that term may mean. You could:A) Make a good movie. Make a movie that is artistically fulfilling, filled to the brim with interesting themes and ideas, passionate craftwork, talented artistry. Something that makes people proud that they went to the movies.B) Make a good Jurassic Park/World movie. Make something that builds on the source material before it in an interesting way and gives itself a purpose to exist in the first place outside of being just a cash cow. Something that makes people proud to be a fan of the franchise.C) Make a good dinosaur movie. Just show a bunch of fucking dinosaurs crashing into each other. Something stupid but ultimately fun. Something that makes people proud to have eyes and ears so that they can see something cool.

Discord stands at an exciting moment in history, in which brands and businesses evolve from a Web2 mindset to a Web3 mindset where more dynamic and organic communities come first. The expansion of Discord from a gaming platform to one all brands can leverage is a clear sign that gamification is becoming the new mainstream: designing for niche-driven communities who are seeking co-creation opportunities and rewards for participation

The problem is that the main incentive for pursuing corporate sustainability work is its ability to create more marketable products. Outside of sustainability efforts that are pursued based on compliance or regulation, much of this work is built around the idea of pandering to consumers' understanding of sustainability, something that’s notoriously variable.

in Instagram apologies, even when someone ostensibly confronts their ugliness, it’s hard to read the gesture as anything but an effort to publicly reclaim their image. But at least the Notes App Apology permitted us a semblance of sincerity, and suggested there might be a human being who typed the message—even if that human was an intern or assistant. There’s nothing sincere about a trickle-down excuse crafted to look pretty for Instagram grids, and the processed nature of Photoshopped Apologies implies the absence of the one thing all genuine apologies must possess: accountability straight from the person who committed the transgression.

it is very difficult to figure out what specific effect ATT has because there are so many factors involved

If ATT were so significantly kneecapping revenue, I would think we would see a pronounced skew against North America compared to elsewhere. But that is not the case. Revenue in North America is only slightly off compared to the company total, and it is increasing how much it earns per North American user compared to the rest of the world.

iOS is far more popular in the U.S. and Canada than it is in Europe, but Meta incurred a greater revenue decline — in absolute terms and, especially, in percentage terms — in Europe. Meta was still posting year-over-year gains in both those regions until this most recent quarter, even though ATT rolled out over a year ago.

there are those who believe highly-targeted advertisements are a fair trade-off because they offer businesses a more accurate means of finding their customers, and the behavioural data collected from all of us is valuable only in the aggregate. That is, as I understand it, the view of analysts like Seufert, Benedict Evans, and Ben Thompson. Frequent readers will not be surprised to know I disagree with this premise. Regardless of how many user agreements we sign and privacy policies we read, we cannot know the full extent of the data economy. Personal information about us is being collected, shared, combined, and repackaged. It may only be profitable in aggregate, but it is useful with finer granularity, so it is unsurprising that it is indefinitely warehoused in detail.

Seufert asked, rhetorically, “what happens when ads aren’t personalized?”, answering “digital ads resemble TV ads: jarring distractions from core content experience. Non-personalized is another way of saying irrelevant, or at best, randomly relevant.”

does it make sense to build the internet’s economy on the backs of a few hundred brokers none of us have heard of, trading and merging our personal information in the hope of generating a slightly better click-through rate?

Then there is the much bigger question of whether people should even be able to opt into such widespread tracking. We simply cannot be informed consumers in every aspect of our lives, and we cannot foresee how this information will be used and abused in the full extent of time. It sounds boring, but what is so wrong with requiring data minimization at every turn, permitting only the most relevant personal data to be collected, and restricting the ability for this information to be shared or combined?

Does ATT really “[deprive] consumers of widespread ad relevancy and advertisers and publishers of commercial opportunity”? Even if it does — which I doubt — has that commercial opportunity really existed with meaningful consumer awareness and choice? Or is this entire market illegitimate, artificially inflated by our inability to avoid becoming its subjects?

Conflicts like these are one of many reasons why privacy rights should be established by regulators, not individual companies. Privacy must not be a luxury good, or something you opt into, and it should not be a radical position to say so. We all value different degrees of privacy, but it should not be possible for businesses to be built on whether we have rights at all. The digital economy should not be built on such rickety and obviously flawed foundations.

In complexity science, ‘emergence’ describes the way that interactions between individual components in a complex system can give rise to new behavior, patterns, or qualities. For example, the quality of ‘wetness’ cannot be found in a single water molecule, but instead arises from the interaction of many water molecules together. In living systems, emergence is at the core of adaptive evolution.

Design for emergence prioritizes open-ended combinatorial possibilities such that the design object can be composed and adapted to a wide variety of contextual and idiosyncratic niches by its end-user. LEGO offers an example — a simple set of blocks with a shared protocol for connecting to one another from which a nearly infinite array of forms can emerge. Yet as we will see, design for emergence can generate value well beyond children’s toys.

In contrast to high modern design, user-centered design takes a more modest position; the designer does not inherently know everything, and therefore she must meticulously study the needs and behaviors of users in order to produce a good design. User-centered design remains the dominant design paradigm today, employed by environmental designers, tech companies, and design agencies around the world.

In this paradigm, design is about gaining knowledge from the user, identifying desirable outcomes, and controlling as much of the process as possible to achieve those outcomes. ‘Design’ remains synonymous with maximizing control.

But consider even the ‘desire path’ example pictured above. The modal user may be well supported by paving the desire path indicated by their behavior, but what good is a paved path leading to stairs for a wheelchair user? In practice, user-centered design tends to privilege the modal user at the expense of the long-tail user whose needs may be just as great.

User-centered design has a better track record than high modern design, but it still exerts a homogenizing effect. The needs of the modal user are accommodated and scaled through software or industrial manufacturing, while power users and those with edge cases can do nothing but actively petition the designer for attention. In most cases, diverse users with a wide variety of niche use cases are forced to conform to the behavior of the modal user.

In design for emergence, the designer assumes that the end-user holds relevant knowledge and gives them extensive control over the design. Rather than designing the end result, we design the user’s experience of designing their own end result. In this way we can think of design for emergence as a form of ‘meta-design.’

In other words, to address the long-tail problem, the tool must be flexible enough that it can be adapted to unexpected and idiosyncratic problem spaces—especially those unanticipated by the tool’s designer.

In contrast to user-centered design, design for emergence invites the user into the design process not only as a subject of study, but as a collaborator with agency and control.

What all these tools have in common is support for open-ended adaptation to highly contextual problems without the need for technical knowledge. Rather than building a static, purpose-built solution to a single common problem with lots of users (and lots of competitors), they’ve won robust user bases by supporting a broad swath of long-tail user needs.

Design for emergence is composable. It provides a limited ‘alphabet’ and a generative grammar that’s easy to learn and employ, yet can be extended to create powerful, complex applications. As Seymour Papert once remarked, “English is a language for children,” but this fact, “does not preclude its being also a language for poets, scientists, and philosophers.”

It creates more generic-looking interfaces that may perform well in numbers but fall short of appealing to our senses.

It’s easy to make data-driven design decisions, but relying on data alone ignores that some goals are difficult to measure. Data is very useful for incremental, tactical changes, but only if it’s checked and balanced by our instincts and common sense.

It became clear to the team in that moment that we cared about more than just clicks. We had other goals for this design: It needed to set expectations about what happens next, it needed to communicate quality, and we wanted it to build familiarity and trust in our brand.We could have easily measured how many customers clicked one button versus another, and used that data to pick an optimal button. But that approach would have ignored the big picture and other important goals.

Not everything that can be counted counts. Not everything that counts can be counted.Data is good at measuring things that are easy to measure. Some goals are less tangible, but that doesn’t make them less important.While you’re chasing a 2% increase in conversion rate you may be suffering a 10% decrease in brand trustworthiness. You’ve optimized for something that’s objectively measured, at the cost of goals that aren’t so easily codified.

Design instinct is a lot more than innate creative ability and cultural guesswork. It’s your wealth of experience. It’s familiarity with industry standards and best practices.

Overreliance on data to drive design decisions can be just as harmful as ignoring it. Data only tells one kind of story. But your project goals are often more complex than that. Goals can’t always be objectively measured.

The main problem with the book review today is not that its practitioners live in New York, as some contend. It is not that the critics are in cahoots with the authors under review, embroiled in a shadow economy of social obligation and quid pro quo favor trading. The problem is not that book reviews are too mean or too nice, too long or too short, though they may be those things, too. The main problem is that the contemporary American book review is first and foremost an audition — for another job, another opportunity, another day in the content mine, hopefully with better lighting and tools, but at the very least with better pay. What kind of job or opportunity for the reviewer depends on her ambitions.

He wants honest reviews of novels; instead he gets hype and a dizzying, outrageous, stultifying profusion of adjectives. He wants serious literary criticism of novels; instead he gets withering assessments of the era in which said novels are written, which, by endlessly discussing the same five novels, only confirm his fears that literature has reached the unsustainably small gene-pool era of its long, slow slide to extinction. The contemporary reviewer is unhappy too: she works too hard, and still everything she does is wrong and insufficiently compensated. Her careful reviews end up reading like stenography, and when she swings for the fences her actual readers — unlike the trigger-happy tweeters — complain that she has swung too far.

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.