Digital Litter
We leave little footprints.
Each tiny digital creation tucked away forgotten in server farms.
The robots crawl in to check on you occasionally. Add you to their list.
The pile of digital litter grows. The algorithms picking through the pile, in search of relevancy. And occasional serendipity.
We leave broken clay pots in the digital earth. For future archaeologists to piece together. With their own algorithms.
Even the unread article makes the pile bigger.
Making each search that little bit harder.
Why I Uninstalled TikTok
I woke up tired and that tiredness followed me to my desk.
Nevertheless, I was working. Words were flowing. Imperfectly, but steadily. A series of tiny frictions, but each tension overcome with a pause and a prompt to 'just keep writing'.
Then, a whisper in my ear: turn your eye to TikTok. Just for a moment. There might be inspiration there.
Rabbit holes rising up to meet me. Man Utd, early Irish archaeology, baby names.
Back to writing then, but stuttering.
Another TikTok interlude. Once you pop, you just can't stop.
It's got to go.
I need my dopamine hit hard, and hard to get.
Against the Commodification of Community
We've come to accept that we will be commoditised. That our own actions are other peoples' incomes.
This was a clever corporate thing until recently. Now we're monetising each other.
And that's a bad thing.
Digital creator culture is flourishing. And with it, a gold rush. The playbooks point to creating an email list and creating communities. Then milking both.
This is a bad thing.
We are at a point where internet culture needs space to breathe new life into its corners. Where people can come together in ways that they no longer are doing in person. These communities, these as-yet-to-be-invented communities are valuable and important. The act of commoditising them is crude and counter-productive.
Interrogating a little my own thoughts here. Is it how blatant it is? Is it that there is no clear value-add; instead it's just an entry fee to filter? Is it that my perception of value delivered is lower than the asking price? Perhaps it's the transactional nature? In ways it's all of these things. And more.
It strikes me as a real step backwards in internet culture.
It feels like individuals mimicking the worst aspects of social media platforms. It feels like a step backward in time to the era of men's clubs and its manufactured scarcity.
It sounds like a low-pitched whimper of wanted exclusivity.
But even the X club has substantial running costs, and those costs are shared by the members. They typically have expensive properties in wealthy environs. They have staff and subsidised costs for food and drink.
Online communities don't have these. So why are they so expensive.
Why not instead, organise around the principle of helping each other. Sure, there may be a fee. But let that fee go towards strengthening the community, and that alone. Find interesting ways to spend it on the group. Invite speakers, get access to tools, put it toward shared assets.
Or more inspiring still, re-invent the old Irish meitheal culture. A community of helping each other out. Today we will build your thing - tomorrow mine - the day after somebody else's. Some days we'll just pitch in to strangers who need a hand. Or to a cause that craves it.
Rather than this scanty schematic.
Get people together. Then charge them for the privilege.
Our would-be creator communities are too valuable to commoditise.
David Deutsch on Knowledge
David Deutsch has a core perspective that I find extremely inspiring.
In his book The Beginning Of Infinity, he points out that there are only two real obstacles to any problem: physics and knowledge.
Your goal needs to be possible according to the laws of physics. If it isn’t, then no amount of knowledge will make it possible. You cannot get to Mars in your Toyota Yaris, no matter how much you know about space travel.
If it’s physically possible, then the fundamental obstacle is always knowledge.
Flooding the Zone of the Ancients
Developers and fantasy authors share a penchant for the ancients. In naming things, mostly.
An unintended consequence of this - obscuring the original sources.
An innocent flooding the zone with @mentions and blogposts, making the original material near-unfindable.
Burrying historical whispers beneath the algorithm.
The original Daemons were spirits of the Greek world; one of whom was the spirit inside. Famously, Socrates listened intently to the guidance of his Daemon. Who inevitably spoke to him in the negative—telling him what to avoid.
Surely a thread worth exploring. So thought the 18th century Romantics, as they too flooded the zone in their own way. Again famously, Goethe's daemon was a spirit that dwelled within him, compelling him to fulfil his destiny.
Without the algorithm as guide, the term evolved in meaning but not in discoverability.
Then into the 20th century and the creation of software daemons running in the background and later Philip Pullmans His Dark Materials with fantasy spirit-friends guiding the characters.
Onwards to 2018, George R.R. Martin's Fire & Blood and Daemon Targaryen rising to prominence in the TV adaptation, House of the Dragon. This Targaryen, the only daemon on TikTok, the principal one on Google.
Burying original references deep in the literature.
Socrates’ spirit snuffed out.
Speculative Futures and Barriers to Entry
An idea is worth nothing. An idea can change the world.
Speculative futures is a discipline of idea exploration. Speculative future scenarios allow us to explore the unknown unknowns. The act of design here is not to try to fix a problem.
Instead to model a possible future state of the problem and the human behaviours that result from that system change.
But even idea exploration is not an exercise in thought alone. It requires tangible design skills to conceptualise those ideas in the digital or physical world.
The cost (material, time, skilll aquisition) of creating artifacts depicted in images and video is a barrier to the design of speculative futures in quantity and speed.
While speculative design is 'conceptual' design know-how is still required. And so, is a barrier to entry.
Generative AI tools like Midjourney rapidly decreases the time and cost taken to create these speculative design pieces.
By implication, the barrier to entry for conceptual and speculative futures has just dropped. We are moving closer to the pure form of concept or idea. With the ‘design and doing’ automated.
When things become easier to do, more of it gets done.
What would a world of more speculative design look like?
Is it a world where fears or hopes become amplified. Making futures vision states and nightmare scenarios more real. And therefore more likely to be acted upon?
Or perhaps over time we will see a neutralising effect. The possible, the weird, becomes commonplace and less evocative. Pushing us towards 'real' and immersive multi-sensory experiences to evoke a response.
Planting speculative futures firmly in the physical.
500 Whys: Writing your Purpose Statement
Purpose matters.
A purpose can give coherent meaning to a career. It can help with the difficult decisions required to craft a career worth creating.
Articulating what we believe in, what our objective is, makes us more aware of what we should be doing. It makes us accountable to ourselves. It stops us from following job offers that are tempting in the short run but leave us far from happy and far from where we want to be. Purpose helps us navigate, motivate and filter out the noise.
It opens our eyes to opportunities we’ve been neglecting.
Purpose reminds us of the possible.
— — —
The hardest part in crafting a purpose statement is beginning.
Conjuring a definitive single sentence that encapsulates what it is that you are working for is daunting. It seems furiously final, and far-fetched.
My belief, firmly held, is that to craft a purpose statement, one should immerse yourself in examples. Play with them. Try them on for size. Tweak and remaster and experiment.
The blanker the page, the more likely we are to procrastinate. The more intimidated we become.
Crafting a purpose statement from the cuttings of other statements is more effective than beginning with a blank page.
And yet, finding examples of purpose statements is much harder than it should be.
There are occasional blog posts that list 10 or 20, a handful of books detailing corporate mission and vision statements of Forbes Top 50.
Esteemed authors and coaches like Simon Sinek, Bill Burnett and Daniel Pink each have excellent books on the methods of understanding and unearthing one's purpose.
But there's nothing that emphasising a broad, far-ranging, diverse set of example purpose statements.
— — —
And so 500 Whys: Writing your Purpose Statement is a short book that focuses on exactly that.
It is a book of 500 single sentences. 500 purpose statements.
Examples that will help you immediately find a statement that’s 80% right. A statement that resonates mostly but not perfectly. That will give you something to remaster. Something with which to experiment.
This book is about examples and examples alone. 500 of them. It assumes that you already recognise the benefit of defining a purpose for yourself; the clarifying value of viewing life and career decisions through a defined purpose.
— — —
These “Whys” been loosely categorised as Technology, Education & Empowering Others, Peace & Safety, Human Responsibility, Knowledge & Reason, Human Flourishing, Community Building, Justice, Culture & Creation, Economic Growth & Progress, Little Pleasures, and System Changes & Moonshots.
Some examples, drawn from the book:
Use technology to further our understanding of the universe.
Ensure that the Legislature keeps pace with technological advances.
Democratise access to fashion.
Help people to grow their focus and reclaim their attention in the Age of Distraction.
Build products that delight users.
Help individuals to understand themselves better via their preferences.
Build homes that people want to grow old in.
I help people work on the right problem.
I solidify promising prototypes.
I test ideas in the wild.
I create tools that support people making difficult moral judgements.
I work to ensure that human rights are global.
I give young scientists the tools to do novel research.
I help young people identify questions worth asking.
I shine a mirror on society's bad habits.
Help people craft their life narrative.
Use language in ways that make people think.
Use language in ways that help to open minds.
I make meals that put smiles on peoples faces.
Build tools that make business fun.
— — —
I invite you to test these beliefs. And test them quickly.
This book is designed for exactly this.
And begin experimenting with that purpose, immediately.
Ju’wasi Hunting Story
A hunting story, an excerpt from The Old Way.
Hunting stories, told by hunter-gatherer men in special chant-like voices.
Mythlike accounts of actual hunts.
Ai! What?
Is that an ear? Yes, an ear!
There's his ear against the sky,
He's in the bushes,
Just there, the edge of the bushes.
I watch it.
Yes, it moves, he turns a little,
a little, hi!
he lifts his head, he's worried, he sniffs,
he knows!
He looks, I'm down low, down low, just very quiet,
down low, he doesn't see me! He's safe, he thinks.
He turns around.
I am behind him. I creep forward, eh!
I creep I creep,
I am just that far, eh! just that from me to there,
quiet, quiet, I'm quiet, I'm slow,
I have my bow,
I set the arrow.
Ai! I shoot. Waugh!
I hit him! He jumps.
Ha ha! He jumps!
He runs.
He's gone!
I shot him. Right here, just here the arrow went in.
He jumped, he ran that way, going that way,
but I got him.
Tiny Bets
Two concepts bubble to the surface of the digital zeitgeist.
— — —
Small. The smallest possible thing. The tiniest viability.
Small, in service of removing frictions to creation.
Small, in favour of immediately making.
Small, an act of confidence-building. A salve for self-consciousness.
Tiny as smaller still.
— — —
Bets. A little gamble. Belief exchanged for money.
Bets. A slice of skin in the game.
Bets. Money in place of mouth. But not too much to ruin.
— — —
Tiny Bets are a series of minuscule gambles on creativity.
I will be making one tiny bet a week for the next 12 weeks. Each tiny bet, a diminutive act of creation that adds to the world of things. Filling some miniature gap in the tapestry of needs.
— — —
The first of these will be 500 Whys, a very short book on Purpose Statements. My beliefs:
Purpose statements are deeply valuable. They help us navigate, motivate and filter out the noise.
Putting an imperfect purpose into practice is infinitely better than crafting the perfect statement.
Crafting a purpose statement from the cuttings of other statements is more effective than beginning with a blank page.
500 Whys is a collection of purpose statements. To help others more easily craft their own.
Three Beliefs about Purpose
My three beliefs, firmly held, on purpose statements.
Purpose statements are useful. They help us navigate, motivate and filter out the noise.
Putting an imperfect purpose statement into practice is infinitely better than crafting the perfect statement.
Crafting a purpose statement from the cuttings of other statements is more effective than beginning with a blank page.
Who TikTok hires
TikTok hires for hard workers.
What have you done - but more importantly, what fire in your belly do you have now. Will you sweat for this company.
The people who do best at Tik Tok, have something to prove. And will run through walls todo so.
That will inevitably mean long hours. It will also mean compromising hard on ways-of-working.
In exchange, you will receive more responsibility than you care to hold, exposure to projects and decision-making that you wouldn't otherwise see.
And hands-on preparation for a future that’s more VUCA.
— — —
This post is part of the TikTok Sequence, a series of short thoughts inspired by my time working with TikTok. The posts focus mostly on the experience of work culture at TikTok and companies like it.
There's no such thing as Sustainability
The Biosphere is a superset of dynamic systems.
Sustainability is not some fixed state that we achieve and then maintain forever.
Not least because definitions of sustainability are too vague to manage.
But because, even a sufficiently precise measure of sustainability aims to manage a system that is too complex to be managed.
There are simply too many moving parts, too many competing incentives, too many players and too many new arrivals.
From Designing Regenerative Cultures, by Daniel Wahl:
Sustainability is a dynamic process of co-evolution and a community-based process of continuous conversation and learning how to participate appropriately in the constantly transforming life-sustaining processes that we are part of and that our future depends upon.
But this does not mean we cannot live sustainably within the Biosphere.
In fact, we must do so.
Why are Humans worth Sustaining?
Before embarking on a journey of sustainability - why bother? What is exactly is it that we wish to sustain?
The Earth? A Humanist would have no such need. Earth is but a stage.
The human species itself? Because we are intelligent and we are us, and continuing to exist on an inhabitable Earth is our best bet for further growth.
Again, not satisfying.
A more convincing rationale comes from Daniel Wahl in Designing Regenerative Cultures.
We are co-creative participants in a 14-billion-year process of universe becoming conscious of itself. We are a keystone species capable of creating conditions conducive to all life. We can design for human, ecosystems and planetary health, and nurture resilience, adaptability, transformability and vitality.
We care; we are compassionate beings able to love and to express this unifying emotion through poetry, music and art.
We, like other species, but perhaps more so, are life's gift to life.
We are a mirror in which the universe can glimpse itself.
Who knows how far we can ride and support this journey of evolution and intelligent design.
But we should want it to continue.
And continue.
And continue.
Le Corbusier On Mastery
Le Corbusier's description here is of Mastery in Architecture.
Mastery materialised in design creates some additional something that cannot be described.
'work reaches a maximum of intensity, when it has been made with the best quality of execution, when it has reached perfection ... When this happens the places start to radiate. They radiate in a physical way and determine what I call 'ineffable space', that is to say, a space that does not depend on dimensions but on the quality of its perfection.
It belongs to the dominion of the ineffable, of that which cannot be said'.
Highly Sensitive People at Speed
Some animals are more sensitive than others.
In any higher animal population, 15-20% are very sensitive to stimulation. Evolutionarily, it benefited the group to have a subset more alert to danger, comparatively better at sourcing new foodstuff or understanding deeply the habits of other animals.
For humans, same.
15-20% of humans have sensory processing sensitivity - an increased sensitivity of the central nervous system and a deeper cognitive processing of physical, social and emotional stimuli.
For me, same.
Summarised by Tom Falkenstein:
"Highly sensitive people (HSPs) observe things in great detail exhaustively, think longer and more deeply before they take action, and generally react more emotionally to positive as well as negative occurrences in their surroundings."
Clearly then pluses and minuses.
So how do fast-paced environments impact those whose natural tendency is to 'pause to check' in novel situations? How does this greater sensitivity to subtle stimuli fare in an environment with intense, and varied stimuli, arriving quickly?
Not obviously fantastically.
But there are ways and means of coping - and indeed advantages to be had if the worst impacts of this natural mismatch can be contained.
Pace brings tiredness and tiredness brings tension. Both bring pressure and physiological symptoms like breathing more shallowly. Together, these manifest as fast feedback loops of overwhelm.
This and other reasons means that the highly sensitive person needs to become extremely competent at calming themselves down when they notice that they feel overstimulated, tense, or emotional.
In fast-paced environments, calming rituals need to become a core part of any daily routine. It is not a nice-to-have. It is not salve to be applied in acutely stressful situations. It must become a hyper-frequent preventative measure; an uncompromising, committed ritual.
Beyond this, prioritising rest, sleep, and recovery above all is essential. Rest is a HSPs responsibility and should be treated with the same deliberateness and importance as elite athletes treat their recovery.
Inevitably, this will mean saying no to other things. HSPs working in fast-paced environments do so at the neglect of other areas of their lives. That is the calculation that you must do before joining.
If fast-pace environments are the equivalent of 5 years in slower organisations, consider then that the raw stimulation to HSPs will be multiples of this. That is an opportunity of extreme learning. But should be undertaken with care.
Take seriously your attempt to drink from the firehouse of experience.
Biophilia
Humans are innately attracted to the natural world. We have a tendency to connect with it, especially with other forms of life.
We evolved in a natural, grown, unbuilt environment and have deep-seated psychological and emotional connection to that world.
But the natural world is a harsh mistress. She is cruel, unforgiving and always threatening. More 'nature' is not always a good thing.
A somewhat sanitised version is perhaps more truthfully what we seek. Not the teeming, writhing rainforest that prompts the Piraha people to fear deep sleep.
Don't sleep there are snakes.
How might we discover where lies the threshold between Biophilia and the neuroses of nature?
And then design for the twin-optimisation of biodiversity and human well-being?
Refining my Information Diet
Snacking dominates my information diet.
Snacking on the wrong things. Snacking on too many of them.
The new year is an opportunity to mindfully select what information I consume and how that relates to what I create.
In 2022, the portion of information I consume from Twitter and TikTok was higher than I wanted. This was obviously bad in three main ways.
Low ROI. Too much irrelevancy. Forgetting most of what I consumed.
Fragmented attention and the downstream impacts of cheap dopamine thrills.
Opportunity cost of consuming better sources.
Apart from social media being fun and habit-sunk, there are strong reasons why I do keep coming back to both Twitter and TikTok.
Pulse-check from scenes. Most of the ahead-of-the-curve information I have accessed in the past year has come from here. I don't have a strong viable alternative.
Serendipity filter, a randomness button. Twitter and TikTok have opened up new areas for me, and injected novelty and interestingness to my reading.
But on balance the costs outweigh these benefits. And I don't have good replacements for these beyond time-limiting and more strictly curating sources.
I would like my information diet to lean heavily toward creation and consumption of deep, high-quality material.
It should look more like this: a clearly defined hierarchy weighted to the left-hand side.
Creating Things > Writing > Books > Papers > Articles.
Interwoven with the bias towards snacking is that I often cannot recall what I read, let alone the details within. The slapdash context-switching of Twitter and TikTok are prime offenders here.
Instead, on any given day I would like to be able to list off what I wrote, and what I read. Like this:
I created this. [One sentence summary].
I wrote this. [One sentence summary].
I read this chapter. [One sentence summary].
I read this paper. [One sentence summary].
I read this article. [One sentence summary].
With very clear understanding to myself of what I have consumed and why it's relevant.
Here's what yesterday would look like in this format (without the summary).
Published short-thought on Machiavelli.
Wrote a quote-article about the Ineffable from Le Corbusier.
Wrote a paragraph on Parenting Principles.
Read Ch1 of Sacred Spaces by James Pallister.
Read Sections 1 and 2 of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight by Simon Armitage.
Read Ratizinger on Europe's risis of Culture and On the Roots of European Culture.
Watched the Green Knight.
That was the day's information diet. Input and output. Short and simple.
Of course, even simpler would be better. More focused, and hence more compounding. Ideally more detailed in terms of concepts described, combined or internalised.
But a good start.
Beauty, Charisma and AI
Charisma is one of the two great transcendental forces in the social world: beauty is the other.
So says Knaussgaard. But there's more. Neither may be learned or acquired, mostly. Both are qualities of specific individuals.
It is difficult to square this with our twin obsessions of equality and meritocracy. And so beauty and charisma are forces rarely spoken about.
Beauty eclipses everything, bedims all else, it is what we see first and what we consciously or unconsciously seek.
Since the very first days of AI it has been questioned whether an AI is capable of art. Whether it could ever really be capable of beauty.
The latest generation of LLMs put that question to rest.
AIs can certainly create beautiful imagery - perhaps not yet masterpieces, but trending violently towards them.
Charisma is more neglected - as Chatbots optimise for lacking offense. But it may not always be thus.
Prediction: we will see LLMs (or interfaces on top of LLMs) trained for beauty and charisma before 2026.
What this might do to our discussions of beauty and charisma amongst ourselves, who knows.
Machiavelli’s 4D Chess
"He was sure that any prince who put [his advice] into practice would soon arouse popular hatred and self-destruct. And this ... was precisely what Machiavelli wanted. "
Machiavelli was playing 4D chess. Helping those with the worst intentions hurt themselves.
Where else in the advice literature could this deliberately or inadvertently be true?
Power by Robert Greene, Be Slightly Evil by Venkatesh Rao are two whose authors are sufficiently smart to warrant consideration.
— — —
Sources & Inspiration
Be Like the Fox, Erica Benner
Tibetan Creativity and ChatGPT
There’s no Tibetan word for ‘creativity’.
Or so David and Tom Kelley tell us in Creative Confidence. The closest translation is ‘natural’.
In other words, “if you want to be more creative, you just have to be more natural.”
Curious whether this was another ‘Eskimo’s have 50 words for snow’, I put ChatGPT to the test as a verification tool.
From ChatGPT:
It is not true that there is no word for "creativity" in Tibetan. The Tibetan language does have a word for creativity, which is ཤེས་རབ་ (shes rab) or རང་བར་དཀར་པོ (rang bar dkar po). This word can be translated as "creativity," "inventiveness," or "ingenuity."
Tibetan culture and language place a high value on creativity and innovation. Tibetan literature, art, and architecture are known for their rich cultural traditions and innovative styles. Tibetan language and culture have also been influenced by other cultures and languages, such as Chinese and Sanskrit, which have contributed to the development of a rich and diverse linguistic and cultural heritage in Tibet.
I then asked ChatGPT for direct translations.
ཤེས་རབ་ (shes rab) is a Tibetan word that can have multiple meanings, depending on the context in which it is used. Some of the possible meanings of ཤེས་རབ་ include:
"Mind" or "intellect": ཤེས་རབ་ can refer to the mental faculties or the intellectual capacity of a person.
"Excellence": ཤེས་རབ་ can also refer to exceptional quality or superiority.
"Wisdom": ཤེས་རབ་ can also be used to refer to knowledge or understanding that is gained through experience or education.
རང་བར་དཀར་པོ (rang bar dkar po) is a Tibetan word that can have multiple meanings, depending on the context in which it is used. Some of the possible meanings of རང་བར་དཀར་པོ include:
"Self" or "own": རང་ can refer to the self or to something that belongs to someone.
"White" or "pure": བར་ can refer to the color white or to purity or cleanliness.
"Snow lion": དཀར་པོ is a term that refers to a mythical creature that is revered in Tibetan culture as a symbol of strength, courage, and wisdom.
Given that ChatGPT is a bullshitter, this is inconclusive. But it’s adamant it is correct on this one.
If so, these proposed translations for creativity are compelling in themselves. Creativity as mind, or creativity as wisdom or creativity as excellence are all appealing and revealing.
To be creative, seek your mind.
To be creative, seek excellence.
To be creative, seek wisdom.