Brian Wiesner

The barrio is a living and breathing social experiment. There are no algorithms funnelling like-minded people down echo chambers. It’s organic. It’s both routine and spontaneity.

Better social nutrition

Social media feels like the “empty calories” of human connection. I’m filling my cup with connections, but they lack nutrition. They’re social donuts.

In its place, I’ve spent most of my social time in intimate and often vulnerable 1-1 conversations, usually while on walks in the woods.

I’ve been more present with my wife, kid... See more

Everything around us is literally vibrating. As we’ve discussed before, that’s why you feel the difference when you sit in an IKEA chair versus something handcrafted. You may be saying, well, a chair is a chair—but even in the most strictly utilitarian worldview, the quality is different. And though you may justify this through modes of mass produc... See more

language models are not intelligent in the ways that even small children are intelligent, but they are already superhuman at tasks like summarization, translation (both linguistic and conceptual), and association. And when you apply those skills to artfully curated source material written by equally, but differently, gifted humans, magic can happen... See more

Rarely do we think of creatives as wealthy or successful, even cracking jokes about the wastefulness of art degrees and theater classes. We have heard how pursuing creativity is not a safe career move, whether that means chasing an interest in literature, music, or some other endeavor.

You must become so ruthless with your time that it borderline pisses people off. Otherwise, all you are is a people pleaser.

This new model takes what we have learned from the Aggregation Era and finds a way to blend it with the independence enjoyed by the “sovereign writer”—or, to be appropriately expansive, let’s call it “sovereign creator.” It is, I believe, the natural model of the internet, taking advantage of the web’s massive scale and interconnectivity and mergin... See more

This is the backdrop of the whole phone as an extension of arm thing. The way that we experience time is completely warped now. Time has been compressed to the past and present and future all at once as we interact with everything all of the time across every time period, as Douglas Rushkoff discusses in his (very good book!) Present Shock .