we are shaped by our tools, systems, and environment

Tools encourage default behaviors, they dictate patterns and golden paths. These represent the tool makers’ ideal user experiences. If following along breaks your back, then it’s not because you tried to lift too much, it’s because the tool applied pressure in all the wrong places.

Rather than getting hung up on the technology itself, it’s worth thinking about how it works on us. The effectiveness of a generative artwork has a lot to do with the medium of its output. A single still image, for instance, affects us differently from a song, and they’re both different from a movie. That’s where Eno’s idea about the human brain “c... See more

What city you live in. Who you date or marry. Which job you choose. What clothes you wear.

We all think we make these choices ourselves. It certainly feels like we’re in full control. But it turns out that our choices — both in our startups and in our lives — are more constrained than we think.

The unseen hand in them all is the networks that surroun... See more

The short of it is that when we think about information diets we might fixate on the quantity of information but ignore the quality and the processing of it. That’s like only looking at calories to determine if a diet is healthy. We need to have a higher-fidelity picture of the information we consume – our entire perception of reality relies upon i... See more

the things in your immediate vicinity are the things that are going to dominate your life. So picking and influencing your neighborhood is really important... the neighborhood determines quite a bit about our life and our happiness.

Books you read are sending you input. Your friends modeling behaviors for you. Newspapers. Tools. People you follow on Twitter. The architecture of a Gothic church beaming serenity into you—that is input too.

At the same time, you are also sending output to other nodes. Now, I am sending these ideas into my pocket notebook, which will send them to m... See more

Fiction Lag (aka Experience-Taking)

When people are captivated by a work of fiction, they unconsciously adopt the traits of their favorite characters. We develop our identities by copying others, and perhaps one reason we enjoy fiction is that it gives us ideas on who to be.

"frictionless experiences with technology mean that we notice less about the tools we’re using and what it is they actually do. This, he thinks, promotes a kind of self-absorption. We don’t see ourselves as being in conversation with our tools or the physical world; instead, we see ourselves as masters of our environment, with the expectation that ... See more