When we started looking for tools to help us build a design system from scratch, we discovered that there are many tools that help you with the outcome, but they care little about the process. When we say outcome, what we mean is “We want a documentation website for our design system, and it needs to be nice and shiny!”. That was certainly true, but it also wasn’t our primary concern at that moment. Instead what we thought was “We need to build a design system, and we’re creating it from scratch!”. It felt like people were offering us display cabinets when we were looking for a sturdy workbench.

So I wish more people were making tools for a specific creative purpose rather than for general consumer adoption. I wish more people were making tools that very intentionally do not scale—tools with users by the dozen. Tools you experience not through a web signup form, but through pathbreaking creative work.

I guess I want fewer aspirational Apples and more Pixar wannabes.

Sometimes the person you resent for being bossy is the person you need to do your best work.

For McCartney, the domestic isn’t opposed to the world of the imagination; it is a portal to it. He is a poet of the mundane; a writer who will start off writing about his dog, or fixing a hole, and see where it takes him.

His unashamed “normality” was an act of inverted rebellion, as transgressive, in its way, as Lennon and Yoko posing naked. But neither fans nor critics saw it that way, and to this day it is Lennon who best fits our Romantic idea of a great man; tortured, difficult and deep. Long before it became commonplace for male public figures to hymn the joys of parenting, Paul McCartney was showing us a different way to be a man, and we have never quite forgiven him for it.

Working with systems requires designers to consider context, connections, and consequences; parts and wholes; stocks and flows of material, energy, and information; transformations and feedback; the sources of inputs and the disposition of outputs; larger and smaller scales; longer and shorter periods; which groups and actions are empowered or inhibited; and other dimensions of systems.

In many practices, designers face a shift from designing discrete artifacts to creating conditions in which dynamic systems can thrive and evolve. Designers must embrace working with systems of systems (information-product-service ecologies, other socio-technical systems, and nature itself). They must also embrace designing conditions for others to design; the design of design (meta-design, developing platforms on which others build).

Sometimes what we want is impossible. The life you want to live is not the life that wants to live in you. And to be become who you actually are, to honor your calling, your feelings, your joy, requires you choosing the life that wants you back.

I worry that being immersed in a world of hungry, gaping maws, grasping for ideas – any idea – to gobble up; to compulsively transact in ideas for status, money, and friendship; pulls me further away from the divine somehow. Chasing ideas can be just as materialistic as chasing money or power.

In recent years, I've begun to suspect that a life consumed by ideas will not bring me closer to the divine. The freedom I seek, it seems, doesn't lie in my laying about, steeped in my own brain, but rather in the stillness I've found in the more mundane moments of my life. In these moments, there is no euphoria, nor even any active reflection on gratitude or happiness. Rather, it's the sense of just being – the absence of introspection – that brings me peace.

The conversation you are participating in, even the primary experience that you are having, exists there, online. You’re not eating; you’re having Girl Dinner. You’re not cleaning your kitchen; you are taverncore. Your family isn’t rich; you’re just a coastal grandmother. The mood makes real life more interesting, or at least interweaves it more with life online, where feedback is instantaneous and it’s easier to keep score.

But I am a big believer that a blog should be embarrassing! That’s like half the point of a blog, to be wrong about things ruthlessly, over and over again, to stumble in front of a crowd of strangers and hope that they at least smile at your attempt.

Here I am, as free as it's possible for anyone to be free to travel, work, fall in love – and I'm holding back, like I'm waiting for my life to start. This is my life. It's not a preparation for anything -it's the thing itself. I have got to remember that.

Everyone has their own particular form of self-destruction. Mine, I'm starting to think, is standing outside myself, watching myself live my life, turning my face so as to give the cameras a better angle, and thus missing the whole thing.

Over at twitter this dance was happening but with weirdo right wingers. They were always mad because no one likes them because they are hateful, stupid, and have absolutely no rizz. Because they only know other weirdo right wingers IRL, however, they were convinced that there was some sort of nefarious plot to dunk on them online and they wanted to know when Twitter would acknowledge them, the biggest victims known to man. At the head of this was, of course, your man there Elon who is mad that he isn’t funny. He became convinced that there was an army of bots or something making fun of him and he demanded to know why twitter was letting people be mean to him. “You say that you want weirdo right wingers to be on this site and yet! You allow people to be very mildly mean to them!!! Even when they are the richest man on the planet! So much for free speech, etc.” Anyway, he accidentally got forced to buy twitter for too much money because he is quite stupid, and now here we are.

An indus­tri­alist might soon purchase Twitter, Inc. His substan­tial success launching reusable space­craft does nothing to prepare him for the challenge of building social spaces. The latter calls on every liberal art at once, while the former is just rocket science.

And that brings me to the heart of it. I miss the internet. But to a degree, I also miss the person I was back when I had it; the person who had more energy and more fucks to give, who wasn’t quite so jaded by it all.

I miss the wide-eyed curiosity, the unbridled excitement, and the audacious hope we brought to our early digital voyages.

I think better when the stakes are higher. One way to raise the stakes is to share work with people whose good opinion I desire.

"Monetize" is a terrible word that tacitly admits that there is no such thing as an "attention economy." You can't use attention as a medium of exchange. You can't use it as a store of value. You can't use it as a unit of account. Attention is like cryptocurrency: a worthless token that is only valuable to the extent that you can trick or coerce someone into parting with "fiat" currency in exchange for it. You have to "monetize" it—that is, you have to exchange the fake money for real money.

This is enshittification: Surpluses are first directed to users; then, once they're locked in, surpluses go to suppliers; then once they're locked in, the surplus is handed to shareholders and the platform becomes a useless pile of shit. From mobile app stores to Steam, from Facebook to Twitter, this is the enshittification lifecycle.

Here is how platforms die: First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two-sided market," where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.

Working for the platform can be like working for a boss who takes money out of every paycheck for all the rules you broke, but who won't tell you what those rules are because if he told you that, then you'd figure out how to break those rules without him noticing and docking your pay.

To curate means to care, not to make a list. We like to remember those who start things, but the real work of archives and institutions is the maintenance and continuation of them. Starting something is easy, caring for it over centuries is hard.

To be alive in the sense found in A Timeless Way of Building, a system would have to:

1. avoid piling unresolveable stresses onto the people inside it,
2. maintain its own aliveness through self-sustaining evolution and repair, and
3. avoid worsening the life of the systems around it, ranging from peer-level technical systems to things like “civil society.”

Business—ownership—does not contribute to production. It can only earn revenue through sabotage. Without the fences, the toll booths, the armed guards, the enshitification, then owners do not earn any profits. Capitalism must constantly make things worse than they would be if we were free to produce to meet our own and each other’s needs.

Part of me suspects that 2009-19 was something of an invalidated cache of a decade, outside of the main continuity of history; a premium mediocre cul-de-sac of speculative collective existence. A decade that was all noise and fury, signifying nothing. A decade destined to be largely forgotten, much like the 90s.

This is more than a place; it’s an embodied set of personal memories. Memories that exist against the eerie backdrop of the now-ephemeral-feeling zero-interest-rate decade with all its frivolities. Memories destined, perhaps, to be lost to cultural amnesia along with the rest of that somewhat embarrassing period.

Still, it’s unsettling to be reminded that you’ve consciously chosen a life in the slow lane, marked by spectatorship, contemplation, and what looks like idleness from busier perspectives. A life filled with what seem like consolations rather than prizes when viewed from the perspective of a more intensely lived one. It’s not unpleasant to live this way, but it is certainly unsettling to be correctly seen to live this way by a thoughtful observer. I once tweeted, “you have no obligation to be interesting or useful to the world,” and I’ve certainly lived by that thought. But I guess I’m now seeing that life reflected in an honest mirror, and I’m doing a bit of a double take to understand what I’m actually looking at.

The young heroes of these shows got agency from their devices, too — the devices were representations, perhaps, of their control over their own lives and the adventures they were on, something that I desperately wanted. If you had the device, you could do anything, go anywhere.

Palm Pilots came out in 1997 and the first BlackBerry in 1999. I remember wanting one of these devices even as a 12-year-old, when I would have had no use for the kind of calendar planning and to-do list making that made up most of its functions. Boring, adult stuff! The devices were clunky, their screens were plasticky, and they used styluses. But still there was this ineffable appeal to holding a gateway to a digital world in your hand — though I don’t think I could even conceptualize getting the internet on a portable device at the time, since this was the era of dial-up.

About 25 years into the social internet era, we’ve seen weirdly little experimentation with social forms at scale. Most of our emerging networks have been driven by the workability of technical forms: chat, forums, feeds, galleries, streaming video, two or three variations on comments, and increasingly powerful (and decreasingly transparent) recommendation engines.

Fungi and plants are not simple stores or servers; they too are individual life forms with their own disposition and agency. In thinking about the strange and wondrous life of other beings, we must be careful not to fall back into such reductive, anthropocentric models. Nevertheless, of network theory, and perhaps more importantly the idea the power of universal, scale-free networks, is that it allows us to appreciate these forms in ways we were incapable of doing before. This is a gift from the technological to the ecological: a way of seeing and thinking the natural world which emerges from the things we have crafted for ourselves.

One such clonal wonder is Pando, an aspen living in Fishlake National Forest in Utah. At ground level, Pando looks like a forest. They take the form of more than a hundred acres of quaking aspen trees; 47,000 tall, slender trees with white bark and black knots, whose leaves turn shades of brilliant yellow in the autumn. But in fact Pando is one individual, a single organism, in which each tree trunk is a shoot from a single root system. They are one of the largest and oldest individuals on Earth.

No wonder then that the poet Richard Brautigan was moved to imagine 'a cybernetic forest / filled with pines and electronics / where deer stroll peacefully / past computers / as if they were flowers / with spinning blossoms'.

While the machines we are constructing today might one day take on their own, undeniable form of life, more akin to the life we recognize in ourselves, to wait for them to do so is to miss out on the full implications of more-than-human personhood. They are already alive, already their own subjects, in ways that matter profoundly to us and to the planet. In the words often attributed to Marshall McLuhan (but more properly ascribed to Winston Churchill): ‘we shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us. 23 We are the technology of our tools: they shape and form us. Our tools have agency, and thus a claim upon the more-than-human world as well. This realization allows us to begin the core task of a technological ecology: the reintegration of advanced human craft with the nature it sprung from.

Ecological thought, once unleashed, permeates everything. It is as much movement as science, with all the motive, restless energy that word connotes. Every discipline discovers its own ecology in time, as it shifts inexorably from the walled gardens of specialized research towards a greater engagement with the wider world. As we expand our field of view, we come to realize that everything impacts everything else – and we find meaning in these interrelationships. Much of this book will be concerned with this particular ecological thought: that what matters resides in relationships rather than things - between us, rather than within us.