Someone found the real Spotify accounts of famous politicians, journalists, and media/tech figures and scraped their listening data for more than a year. They’ve published some of the data online as the Panama Playlists.
The Panama Papers revealed hidden bank accounts. This reveals hidden tastes.
Scroll in wonder and/or horror!
File this one away as another excellent example of culture surveillance, which I’d argue would make for an excellent entry in an updated addition of the New Liberal Arts.
We all have our own antilibrary, the books we buy with the best intentions of reading but never quite get around to. For architects, a similar concept might be the sketches and plans that never leave the drawing board: antibuildings?
I’d venture to say there’s likely as much to learn in studying the antibuildings of great architects as there is in studying those works that have been fully realized.
Frank Lloyd Wright left behind a treasure trove of antibuildings (582 that we know of!), and artist David Romero has been creating digital models based on their plans as part of a project called Hooked On The Past. That includes The Illinois: FLW’s ambitious plan for a mile-high skyscraper in downtown Chicago that would have been twice the height of the Burj Khalifa.
Mary Oliver once said that “attention is the beginning of devotion.” I want to highlight a few examples of this in practice that have recently crossed my desk.
First: the YouTube channel of Baumgartner Restoration, of which I’ve been recently obsessed. The videos feature the proprietor, Julian Baumgartner, narrating the painstaking process of restoring and conserving fine works of art.
There is some peculiar pleasure in seeing a centuries-old painting transformed under steady, gloved hands. It’s not just the ASMR crackle of varnish being carefully removed, or the delicate touch with which he inpaints a lost eyelash on a Madonna’s cheek. It’s the sense that you’re witnessing a dialogue across time: a conversation between the artist, the restorer, and the persistent materiality of the canvas itself.
As a generalist it’s incredible to see the combination of disciplines that go into this sort of work: chemistry, material science, fine arts, woodworking, history, and more. Plus it’s just really relaxing to watch!
One of the foundational principles in art restoration is reversibility: the notion that any intervention made to a work should be removable without harming the original. It’s a kind of humility encoded into the restorer’s practice, a tacit acknowledgment that today’s best solution might be tomorrow’s regrettable overstep. You see this restraint in Julian’s work: the materials he uses are chosen not just for their compatibility with the painting, but for their ability to be taken away if future conservators, armed with better tools or new information, decide to try again.
But what happens when the artwork in need of restoration isn’t made of oil and pigment, but of code and pixels?
Brandon isn’t a painting hanging on a wall; it’s a sprawling, interactive digital narrative exploring gender, identity, and the malleability of self in cyberspace. The work, like much of the early web, was built on now-obsolete technologies like Java applets, deprecated HTML, and server-side scripts that no longer run on modern browsers. Restoring this piece isn’t about cleaning and repairing a surface but rather reconstructing an experience, reanimating a ghost in the machine.
Not to mention the piece is made up of 65,000 lines of code and over 4,500 files (!!).
The restoration of Brandon focused on migrating Java applets and outdated HTML to modern technologies. Java applets were replaced with GIFs, JavaScript, and new HTML, while nonfunctional HTML elements were replaced with CSS or resuscitated with JavaScript.
Don’t miss the two part interview with the conservators behind the project. (And please, if I am ever rendered unconscious, do not resuscitate me with JavaScript.)
In the physical world conservation is tactile, direct: a kind of respectful negotiation with entropy. In the digital realm it’s more like detective work, piecing together lost fragments of code, emulating vanished environments, and making decisions about what constitutes authenticity.
There’s an odd poetry in this sort of work. Just as a restorer must decide how much to intervene—when to fill in a crack, when to let the passage of time show—so too must digital conservators choose what to preserve: the look and feel of a Netscape-era interface? The original bugs and quirks? The social context of a work that once existed in the wilds of early internet culture? The restoration of Brandon becomes not just a technical project, but a philosophical one, asking what it means to keep an artwork alive when its very medium is in flux.
In both cases the act of restoration is, at heart, an act of care. A refusal to let things slip quietly into oblivion. It’s love as an active verb, the intentional transfer of energy.
And perhaps, as our lives become more entangled with the digital, we’ll find ourselves needing new ways to honor not just the objects we can touch but the experiences, stories, and communities that flicker across our screens. I personally feel very grateful that there are organizations and individuals taking on this sort of work.
Both of these examples remind us that conservation is less about freezing the past than about paying attention to it, and keeping it in conversation with the present. In that dialogue we might discover new forms of devotion: ways to care, to remember, and to imagine what else might be possible.
It’s not every day that you get to experience a whole new color, and yet: scientists recently viewed an entirely new color by firing lasers to manipulate individual cone cells. No, really!
Most of us don’t have precise eye-lasers at home, but luckily there’s a workaround to approximate the effect. A biological cheat code, if you will.
This blog post over at dynomight.net features an animation you can stare at for a bit and, eventually, you might see the new mystery color. It works pretty reliably for me, and it is kind of wild. My brain doesn’t expect a screen to be able to produce such a saturated color.
You might describe the color as a sort of HDR cyan, but luckily the authors of the paper gave it a much better name: olo.
Olo! To quote the paper, “olo lies beyond the gamut.”
Why do we hallucinate this specific color?
M cones are most sensitive to 535 nm light, while L cones are most sensitive to 560 nm light. But M cones are still stimulated quite a lot by 560 nm light—around 80% of maximum. This means you never (normally) get to experience having just one type of cone firing.
Because M and L cones overlap in the wavelength of light they capture, we don’t get to see the full range of either cone without lasers or mind tricks. Kinda like that myth about not being able to use 100% of our brain power, but in this case: cone power.
Most of modern software is industrially produced for mass-market use, so people get used to lazily thinking that is all that is possible. If you can write software, you can build your own kitchen where you can cook your own food. You can host your friends and feed them too. Maybe it will inspire your friends to cook for themselves and invest in their own metaphorical kitchens, too. Hopefully it can be something that grows with you and becomes a part of your every day.
There’s a feeling of thinness that I believe many of us grapple with working digitally. It's a product of the ethereality inherent to computer work. The more the entirety of the creation process lives in bits, the less solid the things we’re creating feel in our minds.
From Things Become Other Things by Craig Mod:
Thirty years later and I'm still operating on scarcity, still trying to put in the distance between then and now. As if there would never be enough steps. As if that town could reach out and grab me and pull me back at any moment.
Each year you invited me and each year I begged my mother to let me go. Just to observe. I'd be an adoptee there, too, but one swaddled in a vitality we just didn't have (despite my mom's concerted and genuine efforts), our tiny family, my quiet grandparents. I would have cut off a leg to sit in the corner of your home, soundless, motionless. To bask in whatever shape your lives took on. To try to understand a fullness I had never known, to wear it like a suit, even if just for a moment. These are the simple dreams of the adopted.
I don’t know if there’s some Platonic or deontic mode of travel, but in my opinion, the most rewarding point of travelling is: to sit with, and spend time with The Other (even if the place / people aren’t all that different). To go off the beaten track a bit, just a bit, to challenge yourself, to find a nook of quietude, and to try to take home some goodness (a feeling, a moment) you might observe off in the wilds of Iwate or Aomori. That little bundle of goodness, filtered through your own cultural ideals — that’s good globalism at work. With an ultimate goal of doing all this without imposing on or overloading the locals. To being an additive part of the economy (financially and culturally), to commingling with regulars without displacing them.
Hopefully I’ve illustrated how pointless it is to try and talk about quality by showing how malleable and variable a term it is.
This slipperiness is also something worth keeping in mind if and when you need to contend with other people bringing up the term. Remember that it is a proxy phrase, often born of an inability or unwillingness to articulate other concerns.
Like “interesting,” “quality” is a neutral word. It is a proxy phrase, and can almost always be replaced by more concrete, constructive, and actionable things that contribute more towards the conversation.
There’s one platform for which none of this is true, and that’s the web platform, because it offers the grain of a medium — book, movie, album — rather than the seduction of a casino. The web platform makes no demands because it offers nothing beyond the opportunity to do good work. Certainly it offers no attention — that, you have to find on your own. Here is your printing press.
The phone, the great teleportation device, the great murderer of boredom. And yet, boredom: the great engine of creativity. I now believe with all my heart that it’s only in the crushing silences of boredom—without all that black-mirror dopamine — that you can access your deepest creative wells. And for so many people these days, they’ve never so much as attempted to dip in a ladle, let alone dive down into those uncomfortable waters made accessible through boredom.
Your job is not to lock the doors and chisel at yourself like a marble statue in the darkness until you feel quantifiably worthy of the world outside. Your job, really, is to find people who love you for reasons you hardly understand, and to love them back, and to try as hard as you can to make it all easier for each other.
These were sad and difficult times in which we all learned that it is often impossible for us as individuals to save someone we love from the sum of their suffering, especially so when you’re ignoring your own needs in the process. But to extrapolate that reality into the idea that we shouldn’t want to tend to our loved ones, to receive them as flawed and imperfect people and care for them anyway, is a grave miscorrection. We all exist to save each other. There is barely anything else worth living for.
But even outside of the material barriers imposed by this kind of standard, I am troubled by its implication: it insists that healing is a mountain to be climbed alone, and that relationships are the reward we get once we’ve reached the summit. When we insist that we could only ever effectively love someone who’s been perfectly “healed” — who will not struggle, accidentally hurt us, trigger us, say the wrong thing, do the wrong thing, or participate in any other uncomfortable display of humanity — we are reinforcing, and perhaps projecting, our own beliefs that we have to be perfect in order to be loved.
Such insistence on forcing love into a meritocracy-shaped mold doesn’t only do a disservice to everyone who dates, it reinforces the idea that any negative, even traumatic, experiences could and should have been avoided, had we done things differently. It’s not quite victim-blaming, but it sure reeks of it.
Here’s something that checks all kinds of boxes for me: Lori Emerson has a gorgeous new book coming soon (April) called Other Networks: A Radical Technology Sourcebook, which you can preorder now from publisher Mexican Summer.
Other Networks is writer and researcher Lori Emerson’s speculative index of communications networks that existed before or outside of the internet: digital as well as analog, IRL as well as imagined, state-sponsored systems of control as well as homebrew communities in the footnotes of hacker culture.
You would be hard pressed to purposely conceive of a book more squarely aimed at my niche interests. And the book itself is a beautiful hardcover tome, rife with archival imagery as well as original artwork. Instant preorder material right here.
I really enjoyed this writeup from Matt Webb about extending AIs using Anthropic’s proposed Model Context Protocol. In its own words, MCP is “an open protocol that standardizes how applications provide context to LLMs”.
Back in 2023 I wrote a bit about an early attempt at something similar by OpenAI and was pretty excited about the potential. MCP takes things to another level by making it an open protocol. Anyone can host an MCP server, or create a custom client that works with any language model.
Protocols are cool! And it’s fun to explore them. So I wanted to get a sense of MCP for myself.
I was pleasantly surprised by how easy it was to get started with and see the potential of MCP servers. You don’t even have to build your own as there are lots that have been built and shared by the community. Here’s a great list of reference servers by Anthropic, and there are also over a thousandopen source servers available.
If you do want to build your own, I recommend checking out this video from Cloudflare on how to get started using their open source workers-mcp package.
But to quickly get a sense of the potential of MCP, I recommend checking out an existing server first. I decided to start by exploring the Filesystem MCP server which is exactly what it sounds like: a server that gives an LLM access to your filesystem through various tools like read_file, list_directory, search_files, etc. This is great place to jump in and see the potential of MCP.
Adding the server to Claude’s desktop application (one of several clients that currently support the protocol) is as simple as dropping this into the app’s config file:
All this is really doing is allowing the LLM to run an npm package which implements an MCP server. Neat!
After restarting the Claude app, I was off to the races. I use Obsidian as my personal knowledge base, and the great thing about it is that it stores notes as plain text on the filesystem. Combined with the filesystem MCP server, I could now ask Claude about my own notes.
Here’s a screenshot from my very first time using the filesystem MCP server in Claude. I asked it to find my log file (the file I use for running notes throughout a year) and summarize the entries from the past month:
What’s fascinating here is the chain of thought the model goes through, and how it uses the tools exposed via the MCP server to solve problems. It starts by searching for files with a .log extension, doesn’t find anything, and thus broadens its search parameters and tries again. It’s then able to find and recognize my Log.md file, read its contents, and summarize them for me. Neat!
I’m really excited about the potential here to make computers more malleable for the masses. There’s been a lot said about the ability for non-technical folks to create their own apps using LLMs, but the ability for those LLMs to manipulate data and interact with APIs themselves might even reduce the need for a lot of dedicated apps entirely.
I was down bad. I had forgotten what it felt like. Scarier still, I had forgotten how much I loved the feeling. If you do it right, being down bad is transcendent. It’s an existential response to the elusive search for meaning: your purpose, now, is to bend your world towards the object of your affection.
The internet has an original shape, and it’s not the bells and whistles of platforms that we see today. It is an architecture that incited near-spiritual practitioners, one that appeared to be unique from the top-down or bottom-up control of the real world, the control instead running horizontally on protocols that were necessary to adhere to—HTTPS, HTML, and so on—in order to connect various parts of the web together securely, for various webpages to speak with each other, in order for anything online be able to operate at all.
The issue is that we are now deluged with data, our interpreter antenna is going haywire trying to calculate, to store, to relate, to understand. LLMs have changed the math entirely in this endeavor, particularly thanks to the ability to store, reference, and transform data that we find to be important, not data that others tell us is important.
2016 was a turning point for oral culture. Peak Trump, peak Twitter, the death of the text and the fact. When we all lost our minds to the collective unconscious, the birth of a worldwide “vibe” that could shift together as one. And at the risk of sounding hyperbolic: I think there is a correlation between oral culture and authoritarianism, between a less literate population and strongman leaders. When people don’t evaluate ideas separate from their speakers, power gravitates to the most magnetic voice in a room.
Contrary to oft-repeated wisdom, the internet isn’t written in ink. Physical ink on paper is often a far better method for carrying data forward into the future. Manuscripts that are hundreds and even thousands of years old are still with us, and still being discovered every day. Will the same be true of our own data a hundred years from now?
Physical collections benefit from their form: by taking up space in the real world they demand attention and care. Digital collections more easily fall into the trap of “out of site, out of mind”. How many online services have you signed up for, added data to over time, and then later forgotten about? How much of our data, the traces of our lives online, are permanently lost?
It’s amazing how fragile we’ve let our data become. When I hear about someone who loses a device and with it their entire digital photo collection (if not backed up), I consider it a tragedy. Photo albums used to be sacred heirlooms, passed down through generations to remind us all that we come from certain people and places. Now we turn over all of that data to a custodian like Apple or Google, and we don’t think about whether their stewardship will continue throughout or beyond our lifetimes. Will Apple exist and still be storing my photo library in 100 years? Even if the data exists somewhere, will there be a way for me to access and view it?
I worry about this especially for those of us who aren’t chronically online or attached to their devices, who might not understand the effects of fragmentation and walled gardens might have on them in the future, and who don’t have the foresight or knowledge to protect their data for the long haul.
Even digital artifacts that are preserved are still lossy in an important way. When looking back at the work of creatives from the past, we can trace their process through a series of physical artifacts that lead up to a final work. Digital files are often “flattened” representations of a creative process, capturing the final state but missing the messy middle. Another way our digital legacies are flattened is through the loss of metadata. Traditional filesystems lack standard ways of capturing the context around files: why they were created, by whom, how they relate to other files, what topics they pertain to, etc.
It feels more important than ever in a future with LLMs that we not only control our data, but that we all maintain our own sort of wildlife preserves made up of content unspoiled by computer generation. Over time I expect original, unique datasets will become a commodity for those looking to train models.
Managing our data has only gotten more difficult as personal computing has gotten more sophisticated. So much of our digital lives have moved from our machines and into the cloud. Our documents, photos, and music used to exist on our devices where they could be backed up and preserved, but now they exist more and more in privately-owned corporate silos.
It’s no surprise that we turn to these tools. Organizing and browsing the masses of data we generate is not a task well served by modern operating systems. People love online tools like Notion, Airtable, and Google’s suite of apps because they make it easy for consumers to organize data in a way that makes sense to them. They make it searchable, shareable, and available everywhere. But this power comes at a cost: we hand our data over to privately-owned silos whose long term existence is far from guaranteed.
Sure, you could store all of the same data on your computer as you could in a tool like Notion. But I think the metadata those tools allow for is what is so important to preserve. A folder full of files is limiting compared to the database-ness of something like Notion.
In order to properly organize, retrieve, and preserve massive amounts of data (which we all generate nowadays simply by being online) we need ways of tagging, commenting on, sorting, filtering, slicing, linking, searching, etc. A folder is static, representing one way of looking at data, but most information is useful in many contexts.
The rise of graph and database-like features in popular tools like Notion or Obsidian is a sign that the simple filesystem has failed us. And that failure has pushed us towards other solutions which require sacrificing ownership of our data.
If an average consumer wanted to organize information like they might in Notion while maintaining ownership and storing their data locally, I literally do not know of a solution that doesn’t involve administrating a database. That’s crazy, right?
Personal computers could feel like this
I’d love to see these sorts of use cases solved for at an operating system level. Third party apps have been a great way to experiment with new computing primitives, but at some point those primitives need to exist without the compromise of giving away control of our data. A simple, hierarchical file structure just doesn’t cut it when it comes to organizing and making use of the massive amounts of data we accrue simply by being a human on the internet.
What might that look like? I’m not sure, but taking cues from relational and graph databases is probably a good place to start. Imagine databases a la Notion as a first class feature of your operating system. A GUI built in to browse and organize a vast repository of data, and programmatic ways for 1st and 3rd party apps to hook into.
One place we might take inspiration from is Userland Frontier, an object database and scripting environment for both native and web applications. Frontier made it easy to create your own software, using your data, on your terms.
At the center of Frontier was its object database, a set of nested tables that could contain data, scripts, bespoke UIs, and, of course, other tables. The object database could be browsed visually via an app, and accessed easily in scripts where you could persist data to disk as easily as setting a variable.
Frontier was first and foremost a developer tool, but I think the ideas contained therein are powerful for average consumers as well. I keep using Notion as an example, but it demonstrates perfectly how these ideas could resonate beyond developers.
It’s inherently geeky, since it’s a developer tool. But at the same time it’s more accessible than text editor + command line + Ruby/Python/whatever. It can give more people a taste of what power on the internet is like — the power to create your own things, to re-de-centralize, to not rely on Twitter and Facebook and Apple and Microsoft and Google for everything.
Our computers should be databases! We should be able to script them, access them using browser APIs, browse them via a first party application, etc. They should accrue data and knowledge over the course of our lifetimes, becoming more useful as we use them. They should be ours, something we can control and back up and preserve long after we’re gone.
Bespoke software, created on the fly is becoming increasingly common thanks to AI. But software is only as useful as the data it’s able to operate on.
All of our emails, recipes, playlists, text messages, Letterboxd reviews, TikTok likes, documents, music, photos, browser histories, favorite essays, ebooks, PDFs, and anything else you can imagine should be something we can own, organize, and eventually leave behind for those that come after us. An archive for each of us.
One day, someone will find the flash drive on the ransacked floor of a house, the forgotten server in the ruin of a data center, the file in the bowel of a database. It will matter. Even if their contents had been damaged or forgotten, actions of previous care can bear fruit decades later. They are the difference between recovery and despair.
Preserving digital data also requires preserving the means to access that data, just as preserving a book requires preserving the language in which it is written.)
One of my favorite albums from last year was Mk.gee’s Two Star and the Dream Police, so I was delighted to recently discover this collaboration between Mk.gee and another artist I like called Dijon. If the electricity of their creative partnership in this video doesn’t get you excited, I don’t know what will.
Happy New Year! I’ve returned from holiday travels and am settling back into work for 2025. Here are three, quick, bookish recommendations from links that have crossed my desk recently.
Katie runs an independent bookshop in Lancashire, and every Friday when she opens the shop she also starts a new draft of the newsletter. Throughout the day she fills it up with commentary on running a bookshop in these modern times, quips from the shoppers, witty observations, a record of books sold and purchased, etc. At the end of the day, she closes the shop and sends the newsletter.
One of my favorite genres of art is “totally mundane but fascinating and engaging for reasons that are hard to explain,” and Receipt from the Bookshop fits that bill perfectly.
More than just being fascinating, though, it’s a good reminder for us all how creativity and fulfillment as a writer can come from mundanity. There is beauty in the mundane! We can find it if we look hard enough.
Whatever this is: more of it please.
Books are powerful cultural artifacts, and so much of human history is wound around them. It should be no surprise then that notebooks carry a similar significance.
Well that’s just what Roland Allen’s book, The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper, is all about. I picked it up recently after seeing it recommended by a few folks in their 2024 reading recaps.
The cast of historical characters that pop up throughout the book is a lot of fun, and the author does a great job of showing just how critical notebooks were to the development of civilization and culture as we know it today.
Another truly great example of something unassuming (notebooks) being explored with a contagious enthusiasm. There is, repeatedly, poetry in the mundane.
By the way, I love reading books which tell history non-linearly through the lens of ultra-niche subtopics. Another great example that comes to mind is Fallen Glory: The Lives and Deaths of History’s Greatest Buildings by James Crawford. Books and buildings both make great portals back in time.
Finally, a celebration of the book collectors, dealers, sellers, and conservators who preserve the art of books and bring the most important ones along into the future.
While reading The Notebook: A History, I stumbled upon a 2019 documentary that resonated on the same frequency.
The Booksellers, which (from what I can tell) has recently been made free to watch on YouTube, focuses primarily on rare book dealers in New York City and their bookshops, and it’s a visual feast for book lovers. But more importantly it’s an homage to those still dedicating their lives to preserving the written word and the book as a form.
There’s a clear and present danger to the world of books that is felt palpably in the documentary, with many sellers and collectors worried about a diminishing market for book collectors. There are also those in the film who see a bright future. It’s nice to hear both takes.
As for myself, I am a huge fan of collecting physical books, and maintain a digital version of my collection which you can browse if you’d like. Whether you collect books or not, I recommend giving The Booksellers a watch.
Because feelings bring in unpleasantries. My feelings may not line up with how I want to be. My feelings seem chaotic and I want to be calm. My feelings make me vulnerable and I want to be in control. My feelings are childish and I want to be mature. My feelings are unpredictable and I want to know. My feelings don’t give a flying fuck about goals, plans, opinions, consensus, and I want to achieve, be cool, be approved.
You’re mad, bro, because you miss skinning your knees on the concrete, you miss the exfoliating properties of gravel and tar, you’re dying to get dragged, to meet a difficult new friend, to change your mind, to feel uncertain, to fall in love, to speak before you know what you mean, to ask better questions, to get lost and not know your way home.
From A Year With Swollen Appendices by Brian Eno:
There are many futures and only one status quo. This is why conservatives mostly agree and radicals always argue.
In the camera roll, the virtue of the image is completely reframed. A picture is no longer held to the rules of being good or bad, powerful or insignificant, evocative or dull. Rather, the photos maintain their own separate life within us, casting a gaze and a pressure of their own. Instead of possessions we have images; instead of memories, we have castoff snapshots.
Some personal news: after four years of working on design systems at Stripe, I’m leaving to join Era as a design engineer.
This change is going to be pretty big for me in a few ways. I’ll be going from a large, enterprise company to a tiny, consumer startup. It will also be the first time in ~9 years that I won’t be focusing on design systems.
Why the change? One of the reasons is a desire to sharpen my hard skills. Running a design system involves lots of glue work, and while I really love that type of work, I could feel my core design and engineering skills atrophying.
Design systems work can also be very repetitive. I should feel as though I have 9 years of experience building and operating design systems, but instead I feel like I have 3 years of experience repeated 3 times.
Rather than jumping into another design systems role where I will ultimately repeat a lot of the work I’ve already done for other companies, I’ve decided to move to a role where I can practice my core skills daily on new and exciting problems, and ship software directly to end users.
And then there’s the burnout. Working on systems is hard, especially when you’re working in an organization doesn’t understand or value that kind of work.
The constant need to explain why what we’re doing is valuable is exhausting, and really feeds into that feeling of futility - that nothing we do is ever enough.
What I didn’t understand then, but I’m painfully aware of now, is that a lot of folks in management don’t get this kind of work. They can’t sell the work to leadership because folks in management often don’t use the product they work on. And they can’t see progress made because they’re not building the same thing that you are. They’re not building software, they’re building a giant spreadsheet of numbers.
Our industry will have to reckon with the tension between building quality software at scale and failing to understand and value platform teams. But I will not sit around and wait for that reckoning to happen.
I wanted my next gig to be as far on the opposite end of the spectrum as possible, focusing directly on designing and building a product with a small team of passionate builders. That’s why I’m so excited to join Era, a startup focused on building a consumer finance app to help anyone and everyone make the most of their money.
Like so many others, I grew up in a middle class family with parents who worked hard just to make ends meet and provide for my future. Investing was a foreign concept to me until later in life when I became more financially literate.
There are so many folks out there who make good money but don’t know what to do with it or how to manage it. Era wants to put a financial assistant in their pockets, and I’m excited to help with that mission.
Will I work on design systems again in the future? Maybe, if it feels right. In the meantime I’m going to enjoy shipping some hand-crafted software.
When I’m writing, I’m trying to be an architect. I’m trying to get the reader to feel the way I do; even when I don’t intend to convince them of something, and most of the time I don’t, writing is a subtly coercive act. The coercion is cooperative, like any performance. More precisely, I want a reader to arrive at my thought and feel close to the way I felt when I thought it. This may be authorial fantasy, delusions of grandeur, impossible dream, but it is what I want. I’m making the place where the thought is possible. I’m building a house to showcase the tree.
Just by beginning to think about an essay as such—by forming the intention to write on an idea or theme—I’m opening a portal, I’m creating a site, a realm. It’s a place where all my best thinking can go for a period of time, a place where the thoughts can be collected and arranged for more density of meaning. This place necessarily has structure, if it feels like a place.
Another experiment showed people judge houses with greater degrees of transition between inside and outside to be more “houselike.” If there is a courtyard or a partially hidden garden or a curving pathway to the front entrance, the house exhibits more “houseness.” The transitional space makes room for a shift in mood, for what Alexander calls “ambiguous territories” and “intimacy gradients”—increasing degrees of closeness, as you reach the inner realm. The vogue for conversation pits exploited this phenomenon. The act of descending, getting closer to the earth, is metaphysical; it changes how you speak and think. It is literally profound.
From A Year With Swollen Appendices by Brian Eno:
Are humans communicating more than they ever did in the past? Is this process of community forming now in hyperdrive because our old ways of making communities (i.e., by growing up and living and working with other people, or by engaging with them in common causes) are no longer working? Or do we just need more forms of community? And from whence arises this insatiable appetite for constant conversation? Is it a case of, in Eric Hoffer's words, you can never get enough of what you don't really want?
I have a wonderful life. I do pretty much what I want, and the only real problem I ever have is wondering what that is.
