The task of hypertext is not to manufacture connections, but to discover where they have always been. Hypertext researchers before the World Wide Web built systems to support this endless, sacred hunt for entanglement and hidden structure, as inherent to thought as ecosystems are to the natural world. Judy and Cathy marveled at their oddly linked lives, but we are all connected. Difference is only the unknown. For a database poet and a hypertext researcher, that much was obvious. Links are what is waiting to be found, by those with the patience to pull the threads: backwards, forwards, anywhere.

Cathy gave up on the map, and the pair settled on a hypertext interface design drawing elements from Judy’s earlier work. In published form, the screens appear one at a time, driven by three functions: forward, anywhere, or lines. Forward moves through the screens in the order they were written. “This type of navigation simulates the process, and captures the mystery,” Cathy wrote. Anywhere calls up a screen at random. Cathy observed that this revealed their interconnectedness even more; “through new juxtapositions, the Anywhere function reveals unintended connections at the merging of our voices.” The final function, Lines, is an interactive tool for building new screens based on keywords, from a database version of the text. In each new composition it generates, the lines link back to their origins, creating paths through the work neither linear nor entirely random. These functions, which Judy had been exploring in literary “narrabases” and hypertext works like Uncle Roger, my name is scibe, and l0ve0ne since as early as 1986, resulted in a highly interactive text. Of the Lines function, Cathy writes, “this function adds a third voice to the work,” meaning the reader.

I had become completely obsessed by Apple and its online community: from indie developers like Panic and Loren Brichter, exciting designers in the space like Tim Van Damme and Jessica Hische, to bloggers and podcasters like Gruber, Siracusa, etc… I had never felt so consistently excited about a world and community like this one, and I desperately wanted to be a part of it.

When your platform organization is running three different generations of solutions to the same problem with no clear plan to remove any of them, and your customers are both confused by the offerings and dissatisfied with them, you have a serious product failure on your hands. The migration strategy must be a primary part of the product planning.

When platform teams build to be building, especially when they have grand visions of complex end goals with few intermediary states, you end up with products that are confusing, overengineered, and far from beloved.

This is how we restore the old internet — not in its original form, but in its glorious, fragmented essence. People call Twitter an indispensable public space because it’s the “town square”, but in the real world there isn’t just one town square, because there isn’t just one town. There are many.

On the old internet, you could show a different side of yourself in every forum or chat room; but on your Facebook feed, you had to be the same person to everyone you knew.

Interfaces, incentives, emergence, and second-order thinking constitute the biggest differences between platform and application design.
Interfaces are the points of contact between elements, where simplicity and flexibility can lead to efficiency at scale.
Incentives drive the motivation of both platform- and end- users. By designing incentives, we can re-invest users’ energy, amplifying desired outcomes
and preventing undesired results.
Emergence is the open-ended feedback loop that platforms can create and maintain. By designing for emergence, not against it, we enable users to
discover applications we never imagined.
Second-order thinking lets us plan for, and potentially tame, the complexities that threaten to turn platforms into dead ends — or worse.

Second-order thinking requires creativity. Platform designers have to ask: how will interfaces and incentives create emergent behavior? How will those
behaviors change the incentives? What can we build to channel these feedback loops towards our goals?

Emergence presents a unique opportunity in design. When behavior is predictable, we design tightly-tuned experiences (“happy paths”) to realize the best
outcomes for users. When behavior is emergent, users’ creativity becomes a multiplier on top of our own, exponentially increasing the best outcomes for
both users and business.

Platform designers have to understand and plan experience APIs: interfaces both in space (how elements appear beside each other, in front of or behind
each other, inside or surrounding each other) and in time (how elements or entire screens appear before or after each other, how to communicate causal
relationships).

Platform designers have to understand and plan experience APIs: interfaces both in space (how elements appear beside each other, in front of or behind
each other, inside or surrounding each other) and in time (how elements or entire screens appear before or after each other, how to communicate causal
relationships).

I think you’re in love with poetry itself, the soulful salvation of words that lift you out of the disappointments of the mundane, into a more expansive universe of intense colors and sensations.

What is romantic love, beyond lust and pretty words?

Put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down there to write, remind yourself why it isn’t in the middle of the room. Life isn’t a support-system for art. It’s the other way around.

If you accept (even partially) this idea that our real power as writers is located in the split-second decisions we make, and in the way these accumulate in a story over many passes through it, then you’ll see that the beauty of a piece of writing doesn’t depend on what we have decided about it in advance, but in the accumulating quality of those split-second decisions (i.e., how in touch we are with our good instincts) and our willingness to go through it again and again.

I live on Earth at the present, and I don't know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing - a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process - an integral function of the universe.

Here’s our daily prayer: I’m a regular mortal, not a superhero. The big mistakes I’ve made only make me more lovable, more humble, more sensitive to the trials of others. Today, instead of beating myself up, I’ll celebrate who I am, in all of my delightful imperfections. I have love to give, and I have plenty of time left. My job is to enjoy this day.

It’s just how the creative process works: You have fun and make mistakes, over and over. Learn to enjoy the work itself and you’ll get shit done, full stop.

Queer people don't grow up as ourselves, we grow up playing a version of ourselves that sacrifices authenticity to minimise humiliation & prejudice. The massive task of our adult lives is to unpick which parts of ourselves are truly us & which parts we've created to protect us.

When stumped by a life choice, choose “enlargement” over happiness.

The paradox of modernity is that you can share your entire life and still not have said anything that matters to you. Exposure can be, but often isn’t, the same thing as intimacy.

What a story is "about" is to be found in the curiosity it creates in us, which is a form of caring.

Writing is not psychology. We do not talk "about" feelings. Instead the writer feels and through her words awakens those feelings in the reader.

Don't identify too strongly with your work. Your words are not you. They were just a great moment passing through you. A moment you were awake enough to write down and capture.

When you write, don't say. "I'm going to write a poem" That attitude will freeze you right away. Sit down with the least expectations of yourself; say, "I am free to write the worst junk in the world."

It takes a while for our experiences to sift through our consciousness. For instance, it is hard to write about being in love in the midst of a mad love affair. We have no perspective.

I’ve known for my entire adult life that going for a walk is how I can think most easily. Walking is not simply moving your thinking mind (some imagined insular thing) outside. The process of walking is thinking. In fact, in his book Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World, David Abram proposes that it is not we who are thinking, but rather the environment that is thinking through us. Intelligence and thought are things to be found both in and around the self. “Each place is a unique state of mind,” Abram writes. “And the many owners that constitute and dwell within that locale—the spiders and the tree frogs no less than the human—all participate in, and partake of, the particular mind of the place.”

Writing has so much to give, so much to teach, so many surprises. That thing you had to force yourself to do—the actual act of writing—turns out to be the best part. It’s like discovering that while you thought you needed the tea ceremony for the caffeine, what you really needed was the tea ceremony. The act of writing turns out to be its own reward.

Assume the worst. About everybody. But don’t let this poisoned outlook affect your job performance. Let it all roll off your back. Ignore it. Be amused by what you see and suspect. Just because someone you work with is a miserable, treacherous, self-serving, capricious and corrupt asshole shouldn’t prevent you from enjoying their company, working with them or finding them entertaining.

The discovery of the things that matter is three quarters of the battle.

You cannot get a simple system by adding simplicity to a complex system.

These days when I think about agency I think about how freedom is terrifying. Because there’s no one to approve of what you’re going after, no one to tell you you’re good for pursuing it. To be free, you have to stop wanting approval. For most of us, approval is the signal that matters more than anything else. It matters more than pleasure, more than satisfaction, more than love. To wear someone else’s fantasy like a second skin is liberation from having your own. To chase after what you can never enjoy is a way of avoiding the question of what to do when you get it.

“Compassion is not a finite good, that you use up when you care for something,” Donath writes. “Instead, it is a practice that grows stronger with use.”

I have long been drawn to the use of architectural, rather than cinematic, language to express my experience of interfaces and have been most inspired as a designer by reading about architecture. I believe this is because the comparison to films misses a central property of interfaces that is so constitutive that it outweighs the other similarities: Agency — it is human action that is indispensable to an interface. Like visitors to a building, users of an interface are given the agency to choose their own path, to move through it at their own speed and discretion: to wander and to linger, to move swiftly and purposefully, or to explore. Another striking similarity is that interfaces are, like buildings, never experienced all at once, but piecemeal: screen by screen, or room by room. Only in the user’s mind are they shaped into a coherent entity, are seen as a uniform whole.

And anything new is by nature without precedent — meaning, without data to know whether it will work or not. So when we approach building new things, we don’t optimize for metrics. We optimize for feelings. Our own, and of those we serve. Because our most treasured, human creations are far from neutral… In fact, they are full of opinions, taste, and subjectivity! That is what gives them their spirit and vitality, so own what moves you and let it run wild in your software!

There are no separate systems. The world is a continuum. Where to draw a boundary around a system depends on the purpose of the discussion.

I find it difficult to read this criticism of the web because, well, I’m a child of the hyperlink. My entire career is based on the existence of the <a> tag; creating, sharing, surfing, making sure that web pages can fit together in just the right way so that people will want to click this blue link over another.