Maybe one frame is through taking control of your own personal development and learning: after all “learning is the one thing your employer can’t take away from you”

Over the years we’ve seen the rise of bro-etry and cringe “thought leadership” and crying CEOs. When I scroll my feed I have to sidestep the clearly threadboi and #personalbrand engagement-farming posts and try and focus on the real content.

Networking is useful, but distasteful to many. Instead, participating in self-directed learning communities is networking

“Don’t become a marketing manager, become someone who knows how to run user research”

We might think of the shifting relationship of human beings to the natural world in the terms offered by German sociologist Gerd-Günter Voß, who has traced our movement through three different models of the “conduct of life.”

The first, and for much of human history the only conduct of life, is what he calls the traditional. Your actions within the traditional conduct of life proceed from social and familial circumstances, from what is thus handed down to you. In such a world it is reasonable for family names to be associated with trades, trades that will be passed down from father to son: Smith, Carpenter, Miller.

But the rise of the various forces that we call “modernity” led to the emergence of the strategic conduct of life: a life with a plan, with certain goals — to get into law school, to become a cosmetologist, to get a corner office.

thanks largely to totalizing technology’s formation of a world in which, to borrow a phrase from Marx and Engels, “all that is solid melts into air,” the strategic model of conduct is replaced by the situational. Instead of being systematic planners, we become agile improvisers: If the job market is bad for your college major, you turn a side hustle into a business. But because you know that your business may get disrupted by the tech industry, you don’t bother thinking long-term; your current gig might disappear at any time, but another will surely present itself, which you will assess upon its arrival.

The movement through these three forms of conduct, whatever benefits it might have, makes our relations with nature increasingly instrumental. We can see this shift more clearly when looking at our changing experience of time

Within the traditional conduct of life, it is necessary to take stewardly care of the resources required for the exercise of a craft or a profession, as these get passed on from generation to generation.

But in the progression from the traditional to the strategic to the situational conduct of life, continuity of preservation becomes less valuable than immediacy of appropriation: We need more lithium today, and merely hope to find greater reserves — or a suitable replacement — tomorrow. This revaluation has the effect of shifting the place of the natural order from something intrinsic to our practices to something extrinsic. The whole of nature becomes what economists tellingly call an externality.

The basic argument of the SCT goes like this. We live in a technopoly, a society in which powerful technologies come to dominate the people they are supposed to serve, and reshape us in their image. These technologies, therefore, might be called prescriptive (to use Franklin’s term) or manipulatory (to use Illich’s). For example, social networks promise to forge connections — but they also encourage mob rule.

all things increasingly present themselves to us as technological: we see them and treat them as what Heidegger calls a “standing reserve,” supplies in a storeroom, as it were, pieces of inventory to be ordered and conscripted, assembled and disassembled, set up and set aside

In his exceptionally ambitious book The Question Concerning Technology in China (2016) and in a series of related essays and interviews, Hui argues, as the title of his book suggests, that we go wrong when we assume that there is one question concerning technology, the question, that is universal in scope and uniform in shape. Perhaps the questions are different in Hong Kong than in the Black Forest. Similarly, the distinction Heidegger draws between ancient and modern technology — where with modern technology everything becomes a mere resource — may not universally hold.

Thesis: Technology is an anthropological universal, understood as an exteriorization of memory and the liberation of organs, as some anthropologists and philosophers of technology have formulated it; Antithesis: Technology is not anthropologically universal; it is enabled and constrained by particular cosmologies, which go beyond mere functionality or utility. Therefore, there is no one single technology, but rather multiple cosmotechnics.

I think Hui’s cosmotechnics, generously leavened with the ironic humor intrinsic to Daoism, provides a genuine Way — pun intended — beyond the limitations of the Standard Critique of Technology. I say this even though I am not a Daoist; I am, rather, a Christian. But it should be noted that Daoism is both daojiao, an organized religion, and daojia, a philosophical tradition. It is daojia that Hui advocates, which makes the wisdom of Daoism accessible and attractive to a Christian like me. Indeed, I believe that elements of daojia are profoundly consonant with Christianity, and yet underdeveloped in the Christian tradition, except in certain modes of Franciscan spirituality, for reasons too complex to get into here.

this technological Daoism as an embodiment of daojia, is accessible to people of any religious tradition or none. It provides a comprehensive and positive account of the world and one’s place in it that makes a different approach to technology more plausible and compelling. The SCT tends only to gesture in the direction of a model of human flourishing, evokes it mainly by implication, whereas Yuk Hui’s Daoist model gives an explicit and quite beautiful account.

The application of Daoist principles is most obvious, as the above exposition suggests, for “users” who would like to graduate to the status of “non-users”: those who quietly turn their attention to more holistic and convivial technologies, or who simply sit or walk contemplatively. But in the interview I quoted from earlier, Hui says, “Some have quipped that what I am speaking about is Daoist robots or organic AI” — and this needs to be more than a quip. Peter Thiel’s longstanding attempt to make everyone a disciple of René Girard is a dead end. What we need is a Daoist culture of coders, and people devoted to “action without acting” making decisions about lithium mining.

Tools that do not contribute to the Way will neither be worshipped nor despised. They will simply be left to gather dust as the people choose the tools that will guide them in the path of contentment and joy: utensils to cook food, devices to make clothes. Of course, the food of one village will differ from that of another, as will the clothing. Those who follow the Way will dwell among the “ten thousand things” of this world — what we call nature — in a certain manner that cannot be specified legally: Verse 18 of the Tao says that when virtue arises only from rules, that is a sure sign that the Way is not present and active. A cosmotechnics is a living thing, always local in the specifics of its emergence in ways that cannot be specified in advance.

It is from the ten thousand things that we learn how to live among the ten thousand things; and our choice of tools will be guided by what we have learned from that prior and foundational set of relations. This is cosmotechnics.

Multiplicity avoids the universalizing, totalizing character of technopoly. The adherents of technopoly, Hui writes, “wishfully believ[e] that the world process will stamp out differences and diversities” and thereby achieve a kind of techno-secular “theodicy,” a justification of the ways of technopoly to its human subjects. But the idea of multiple cosmotechnics is also necessary, Hui believes, in order to avoid the simply delusional attempt to find “a way out of modernity” by focusing on the indigenous or biological “Other.” An aggressive hostility to modernity and a fetishizing of pre-modernity is not the Daoist way.

“I believe that to overcome modernity without falling back into war and fascism, it is necessary to reappropriate modern technology through the renewed framework of a cosmotechnics.” His project “doesn’t refuse modern technology, but rather looks into the possibility of different technological futures.”

“Thinking rooted in the earthy virtue of place is the motor of cosmotechnics. However, for me, this discourse on locality doesn’t mean a refusal of change and of progress, or any kind of homecoming or return to traditionalism; rather, it aims at a re-appropriation of technology from the perspective of the local and a new understanding of history.”

Always Coming Home illustrates cosmotechnics in a hundred ways. Consider, for instance, information storage and retrieval. At one point we meet the archivist of the Library of the Madrone Lodge in the village of Wakwaha-na. A visitor from our world is horrified to learn that while the library gives certain texts and recordings to the City of Mind, some of their documents they simply destroy. “But that’s the point of information storage and retrieval systems! The material is kept for anyone who wants or needs it. Information is passed on — the central act of human culture.” But that is not how the librarian thinks about it. “Tangible or intangible, either you keep a thing or you give it. We find it safer to give it” — to practice “unhoarding.”

It is not information, but relation. This too is cosmotechnics.

a cosmotechnics is the point at which a way of life is realized through making. The point may be illustrated with reference to an ancient tale Hui offers, about an excellent butcher who explains to a duke what he calls the Dao, or “way,” of butchering. The reason he is a good butcher, he says, it not his mastery of a skill, or his reliance on superior tools. He is a good butcher because he understands the Dao: Through experience he has come to rely on his intuition to thrust the knife precisely where it does not cut through tendons or bones, and so his knife always stays sharp. The duke replies: “Now I know how to live.” Hui explains that “it is thus the question of ‘living,’ rather than that of technics, that is at the center of the story.”

As the construction industry matured, and best practices were commodified, the percentage of buildings requiring the direct involvement of architects plummeted. Builders can now choose from an array of standard layouts that cover most of their needs; materials and design questions, too, have been standardized, and reflect economies of scale more than local or unique contextual realities.

Cities have lots of rules and regulation about how things can be designed and built, reducing the need for and value of creativity

The situation is similar in our field. In 2009, companies might ask a designer to “imagine the shoe-shopping experience on mobile,” and such a designer would need to marshal a considerable number of skills to do so: research into how such activity happens today and how it had been attempted online before and the psychology of people engaged in it; explorations of many kinds of interfaces, since no one really knew yet how to present these kinds of information on smartphones; market investigations to determine e.g. “what % of prospective shoppers have which kinds of devices, and what designs can accommodate them all”; testing for raw usability: can people even figure out what to do when they see these screens? And so on.In 2023, the scene is very different. Best practices in most forms of software and services are commodified; we know, from a decade plus of market activity, what works for most people in a very broad range of contexts. Standardization is everywhere, and resources for the easy development of UIs abound.

It’s also the case that if a designer adds 15% to a design’s quality but increases cycle time substantially, is another cook in the kitchen, demands space for ideation or research, and so on, the trade-off will surely start to seem debatable to many leaders, and that’s ignoring FTE costs! We can be as offended by this as we want, but the truth is that the ten millionth B2B SaaS startup can probably validate or falsify product-market-fit without hiring Jony Ive and an entire team of specialists.

We design apps downstream of how Apple designs iOS. There’s just not that much room for innovating in UI at the moment

Today, for a larger-than-ever percentage of projects, some good libraries and guidelines like Apple’s HIG can get non-designers where they need to go. Many companies could probably do very well with1 designer to do native design + create and maintain a design systemPMs and executives for ideationFront-end engineers working off of the design system / component library to implement ideasSo even where commodification doesn’t mean no designers, it still probably means fewer designers.

If, for example, they land AR / VR, we will once again face a world of businesses who need to figure out how their goods and services make sense in a new context: how should we display Substack posts in AR, for example? Which metaphors should persist into the new world? What’s the best way to shop for shoes in VR? What affordances empower the greatest number of people?

But there will at least be another period when engineers who “just ship” will produce such massively worse user interfaces that software designers will be important again.

“design process” and “design cycles” are under pressure and may face much more soon. Speed helps, and so too does a general orientation towards working with production however it’s happening. This basically sums to: “Be less precious, and try to fit in in whatever ways help your company ship.”

being capable of more of the work of making software can mean becoming better at strategy and ideation, such that you’re ever executive’s favorite collaborative partner; you listen well, you mock fast (maybe with AI), and you help them communicate; or it can mean becoming better at execution, learning, for example, to code.

Women and marginalized people who change jobs: Flakey and incapable. Unable to handle a job. Something must be wrong. Clearly a sign of caution to be taken as a reason not to work with them.Men who change jobs: literally articles inventing new vernacular stemming from the mental gymnastics required to justify the hypocrisy — men aren’t incapable because they change jobs — they are prodigy — men aren’t untrustworthy for changing jobs — they are taking nonlinear career paths because of the uncertainty in the market

Stories like these are unhelpful at best, and damaging at worst. Someone skimming the Insider homepage uncritically might see this headline and chuckle at how coddled the kids are these days. That simply is not the case. The kids are alright. It is, as ever, the rich and truly powerful — the actual managerial bureaucracy — who are enriching themselves at the expense of the rest of us.

Gen Z has its own problems to confront: its members began their adult lives in the middle of a pandemic with a whiplashing economy and, in many parts of the world, an overheated market for renting or owning a home. Surveys show they want a healthier balance between their work and personal lives, and they understand developing a successful career takes time and constant learning. They do not want to be pandered to; they just want a reasonable level of respect, as with pretty much everyone else.

Every software framework you've ever used is in the abstraction game: it takes a general-purpose tool, picks a specific set of common use-cases, and puts up scaffolding and guard rails that make it easier to build those specific use cases by giving you less to do and fewer choices to think about. The lines between these three are blurry. Popular abstractions become standardizations.

When content is shorter and maximized for engagement, we often lose track of the origin, history, and context behind it: a new designer is more likely to hear about a UX law from a UX influencer on an Instagram carousel than through the actual research which brought it about.The lack of nuance from algorithm-suggested posts undermines any value we could get from them. For a discipline known for asking "why" and for striving to understand users’ context, it’s time we become more intentional about our own information sources.

Shifts in visual narratives happen every decade or so, so it’s not surprising that the design world is moving away from the corporate flatness of web2. Instead of reminding us of the problems of our current world and the harm that’s been caused by Big Tech, the new, abstract forms of web3 distract us from the crises of the day with the promise of a new virtual world.

ChatGPT feels like the current aim assist debates in a lot of FPSses to me. It'll make you better at the shooting part of the game, perfect even. But, won't necessarily make you that much of a better player, because aiming is only one aspect of what makes someone good at FPSes. However, if someone is generally good enough or very good at the "not aiming" portion of the games, then having aim assist would drastically increase their overall skill.

Purpose is the bedrock of a motivating role, but even if the purpose is there, disengagement can result from two other key issues: Lack of growth opportunity, or A poor feedback/improvement loop.

One of the top reasons for distrust and disengagement among employees is feeling like their needs are unmet, their feedback is not heard, and things will not improve

People have been known to put up with fairly egregious situations if they can see incremental progress toward improving them.

It’s not just a question of “how do we make this usable?” it’s more about “how do we make this usable for users and increase feature adoption which will drive more revenue?“

For a cultural explanation, I look at the rise of liberalism. In Why Liberalism Failed, Patrick Deneen argues that the project of liberalism seeks to detach us from the constraints that once tied us down — family, culture, place, identity, tradition. As liberalism grew more popular, the circumstances of kin and place became more malleable. Thus, today’s Westerners are increasingly free to shape their identity. I don’t think liberalism is inherently a bad thing, but like anything else, it has its tradeoffs. Freed from the ties of kin and place, people aren’t bound by the traditional virtues of honor and loyalty, which are two of the defining pillars of a commitment-heavy culture.

For a technological explanation, I look at our culture of abundance. The “so muchness” of modern life has given us commitment anxiety. It’s a version of the Paradox of Choice, which argues that people can reduce anxiety by eliminating choice.

Instead of thinking about building intergenerational family wealth, people are thinking about their own desires and their own freedom. People are more likely to grind for their own success instead of their family name.

professor Mihir A. Desai defines optionality as “the state of enjoying possibilities without being on the hook to do anything.” With enough optionality, you can always change what you’re doing in order to pursue something better. Desai critiques students for seeing optionality as an end in itself. Instead of trying to work towards a meaningful goal they can commit to, they try to accumulate options in order to delay making a firm commitment. The result is that we’re under-committed as a society (with the curious exception of tattoos, which are everywhere now).

The challenge is that the greatest rewards generally go to people who are tied down in certain ways.

Once I committed to running Write of Passage for the long term, my FOMO disappeared and I felt calmer.

I’ve learned that the commitments you make in the present are made possible by the experiments you’ve tried in the past.