("JP")

Process > artifacts

As I’ve learned to let go of my prior fixation with outcomes, I’ve found myself more inclined to explore and play, and in this is another lesson: play does not imply lack of purpose. Quite the opposite, it honors the most meaningful kind of purpose: that which arises from process. We don’t find meaning, we make it.

When we... See more

Back then, technical prowess meant market dominance. Y Combinator, the spiritual center of Silicon Valley,1 crowned technical founders as the chosen ones. Those who could manifest and master software were seen as gods. Venture capitalists funded those who could scale that code to massive heights. After all, software alone could transform giant, leg... See more

Marshall McLuhan wrote that every new technology was an extension of the human body but also an amputation of the same function from the body itself, and computers’ ability to furnish us with a second brain implies that our first brains have correspondingly atrophied.

The outcome of these visionary projects, as described in detail by Scott, is nearly always a complex but dead system. A city void of life, with empty streets, unused buildings, unhealthy forests, poorer people. The high modernist visionary falls victim to their overconfidence, and skips over building the simple systems that work first.

What we want ... See more

Naturally, I think about digital spaces a lot. And as many of you know, I have basically dedicated my life to consumer internet. Particularly social. Lately, maybe because of working on Eternal. I’ve been thinking about the next set of digital spaces. And how we will have to design for a sense of depth on mobile.

I think this will happen at the 3 p... See more

And worst of all, we’ve lost sight of the most salient part about computers: their malleability. We’ve acquiesced the creation of our virtual worlds, where we now spend most of our time, to the select few who can spend the millions to hire enough software engineers. So many of the photons that hit our eyes come from purely fungible pixels, yet for ... See more

I mention that Silicon Valley has been stuck within a primary aesthetic of knowing . And that Snap breaks this aesthetic and pushes towards an overarching aesthetic of seeing.

Digital technologies, like wood or concrete, are simply another design material we seek to bend to our will. To manifest and hold these ideas and functions and interaction se... See more