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Nobody tells people who are beginners — and I really wish somebody had told this to me — is that all of us who do creative work … we get into it because we have good taste. But it’s like there’s a gap, that for the first couple years that you’re making stuff, what you’re making isn’t so good, OK? It’s not that great. It’s really not that great. It’s trying to be good, it has ambition to be good, but it’s not quite that good. But your taste — the thing that got you into the game — your taste is still killer, and your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you’re making is kind of a disappointment to you, you know what I mean? A lot of people never get past that phase. A lot of people at that point, they quit. And the thing I would just like say to you with all my heart is that most everybody I know who does interesting creative work, they went through a phase of years where they had really good taste and they could tell what they were making wasn’t as good as they wanted it to be — they knew it fell short, it didn’t have the special thing that we wanted it to have. And the thing I would say to you is everybody goes through that. And for you to go through it, if you’re going through it right now, if you’re just getting out of that phase — you gotta know it’s totally normal. And the most important possible thing you can do is do a lot of work — do a huge volume of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week, or every month, you know you’re going to finish one story. Because it’s only by actually going through a volume of work that you are actually going to catch up and close that gap. And the work you’re making will be as good as your ambitions. It takes a while, it’s gonna take you a while — it’s normal to take a while. And you just have to fight your way through that, okay?

I was talking recently to a friend who teaches at MIT. His field is hot now and every year he is inundated by applications from would-be graduate students. "A lot of them seem smart," he said. "What I can't tell is whether they have any kind of taste."

Mathematicians call good work "beautiful," and so, either now or in the past, have scientists, engineers, musicians, architects, designers, writers, and painters. Is it just a coincidence that they used the same word, or is there some overlap in what they meant? If there is an overlap, can we use one field's discoveries about beauty to help us in another?

“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.

higher-level observations around underlying behavior.

In 2011, Google found its search results facing severe scrutiny because so-called “content farms” (websites that produced high volumes of low-quality content) were dominating the search results. Google’s SERPs were also cluttered with websites featuring unoriginal and auto-generated content – and even, in some instances, scraper sites were outranking content originators

Graduate HCI classes are far better because there is so much depth to the field. Basically, through a combination of understanding human psychology, knowing the right questions to ask, and understanding how to properly model how people will use a system you can make software that flows naturally. That last point, sometimes referred to as Cognitive Engineering, is extremely important.

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.

“We are talking about a specific time [in history], 1823. We’re not talking about 1750 or 1870. Clearly, there was one thing on the mind of the king and the whole country, which was the Oyo Empire and how do you liberate yourself from economic dependence and having to pay tribute? That was the focus. This movie is not about the whole history of Dahomey, it is about a specific time where all the stars were aligned against continuing the slave trade.

“What is the goal of film?” said Gates. “Is it to educate? Is it to portray history or is it to capture themes and the spirit of issues facing the human condition? I’ve seen plenty of films that deal with the civil rights movement, slavery, where the filmmaker, the screenwriter will find that one random white person who was kind of sort of around and design the entire film around them as the hero and the protagonist.

“Now, is that historically accurate? I guess that white dude was around. Are you translating the spirit of the civil rights movement when you do that? No, you’re actually doing something incredibly offensive by centering whiteness in a story that is supposed to be about Blackness and about Black liberation. And so my question is, you throw historical inaccuracy out there, like you back it up. What do you think this film is doing that you find offensive?

The trouble with being a woman and making your art look so natural is that the world believes you unaware of your own magic; you’re less skilled artist than unaware naif merely happening upon great talent.

The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe author Sarah Churchwell argues that storytellers too easily evade the ethical question about Monroe’s representation. “Marilyn was not only a fiction; she was not simply an icon,” she writes. “And it is wishful thinking to believe that focusing exclusively on the surface does anything but make her superficial.” Blonde, for all its posturing and virtuoso stylings, shores up a mythology — in death, Monroe remains a vessel into which directors and actors can pour their ideas about the entertainment industry and the broader patriarchy, female beauty and female image-making.

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.

One way the agency achieves its aim is the installation of hardware. Documents show Roskomnadzor mandated installation of “censorship boxes” by local internet providers. These devices allowed the Russian government to become the man-in-the-middle when public sentiment turned against it, giving it the power to throttle services utilized by government critics. They also allow the government to pull the plug on services whenever it deems it necessary. Twitter access has been repeatedly throttled. The agency has also completely blocked access to Facebook and Instagram and ensured VPN services are unusable by Russian citizens.

In some cases, censors recorded their screens showing detail down to the movements of their computer mouse as they watched over the internet. They monitored overtly political videos and, at other times, focused on less obviously worrisome content, like this viral song by the young rapper KEML. Bashkortostan is known as a hub for rap in Russia.

David Foster Wallace once said that:The language of images. . . maybe not threatens, but completely changes actual lived life. When you consider that my grandparents, by the time they got married and kissed, I think they had probably seen maybe a hundred kisses. They'd seen people kiss a hundred times. My parents, who grew up with mainstream Hollywood cinema, had seen thousands of kisses by the time they ever kissed. Before I kissed anyone I had seen tens of thousands of kisses. I know that the first time I kissed much of my thought was, “Am I doing it right? Am I doing it according to how I've seen it?”

A lot of the 80s and 90s critiques of postmodernity did have a point—our experience really is colored by media. Having seen a hundred movies about nuclear apocalypse, the entire time we’ll be looking over our shoulder for the camera, thinking: “Am I doing it right?”

what I think the Know Your Meme report illustrates so well is that we’re now currently in a world where we have two different kinds of social platforms: Ones that make new culture and ones that consume that culture. And, according to the report, the two most important platforms for creating new internet culture (which is now just pop culture) are Twitter and TikTok.In fact, according to Know Your Meme, about 60% of the memes we’ve seen in 2022 were created by Twitter or TikTok. And the three biggest apps behind those two —YouTube, Reddit, and Instagram — all trail far behind, contributing around 10% each.

The current growing malaise in the podcast world is because the advertising industry, and thus the entertainment industry, still treat different kinds of digital media on the internet as entire industries that are somehow separate from each other. This is how you end up with weird micro-fads where very important people say things like “it’s all about audio now,” or “the next big thing is live video or short video or VR video,” or sit on some panel and say that everyone’s into GIFs or whatever. (It’s also the exact same mindset that allowed a lot of investors to get suckered into NFTs.) All of this, inevitably, leads to massive companies dumping jaw-dropping amounts of money to over-saturate what are essentially just different file types. But none of that means anything on the internet!

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)