Taylor Swift, iOS, and the Access Economy: Why the Normal Distribution is Vanishing
[Transitioning from scarcity to abundance will likely change distributions from normal to bifurcated.]
Homesteading the Twittersphere
[Status and capital in a gift economy is determined by what you give away.]
[As opposed to an exchange economy where there are transactions that try to match a precise value, the returns on imprecise contributions can far outweigh their 'real' value.]
Q&A with Sönke Ahrens on How to Take Smart Notes
[Think of the notes as a dialogue partner where they answer each other as opposed to as a collection that must be sorted and organized.]
[Painters design a course for the eye to move through using lines that are implied in the visual content.]
[Distinctions between foreground and background can go beyond spatial position and include things like color, level of detail, whitespace.]
[Think Vitamin uses visual prominence to create a hierarchy for your eye to move through, starting with the title/logo, followed by navigation, then the most recent post, followed by other posts.]
[Bleeding off the edge makes something appear larger and thus more in the foreground.]
[The most dominant element is like a magnet but also like an anchor that the eye repeatedly returns to while exploring other parts of the composition.]
[By creating geometric relationships between canvas and content, you help keep the viewers eye on the composition.]
[It took Gutenberg 16 years to perfect the technology for creating printed books.]
[When selecting a typeface, consider its origin and intentions as well as how the mediums influenced its forms.]
Let's talk about the type of political party we want....
[Radicals are always in the fight because progress is infinite and the mainstreaming of their idea will direct them to the next injustice.]
How To Hack The Epistemic Crisis, with Audrey Tang
[Create memes that outpace disinformation.]
[Humor over rumor exploits the fact that you cannot feel anger and outrage at the same time as fun.]
[Takedowns promote outrage. Attributing misinformation changes the framing so that people to continue to share but with different intent.]
Learn to enjoy and expect being surprised.
Collective intelligence with Alexandra Elbakyan
[Ancient religions had gods of information (such as Hermes, Thoth, of Nabu) and in the Bible, the Word of God is a proxy for the information which creates the world.
Half-assing it with everything you've got
[To save your energy by directing perfectionism not at unachievable or insignificant things but at the process, which you can control and apply to other things even if the current project fails.]
[Working hard to be lazy is about succeeding without wasting motion.]
[A creative project that designs a system probably needs to start as a cathedral to coordinate everything, and eventually transition to a bazaar when the foundations are secure so that the details can be perfected.]
[One way for someone to grade themselves is to provide three ways they succeeded and three ways they failed.]
[A name that means something is a commitment to a specific explanation, whereas a meaningless name commits to nothing.]
[Procrastinate and come back when it's easy.]
[Teaching it is more important than fixing it, which is more important than making it useful.]
[It's designed to achieve decentralization, not to be born with it.]
[A young network requires central governance so that it acts as a unit.]
The Poisoned Chalice of Hashtag Activism
[Twitter can be considered the opposite of a public square because it is the platform of a private company with the power to evict, censor, obscure as they see fit.]
A desperate activist tweets. An aspiring activist uses Facebook. A fledgling organizer uses email. An established organizer has phone numbers. A successful organizer is offered addresses.
Platform Decay, Decentralized Marketplaces, and Urbit
[Ad-supported web dominates because banks failed to make micropayments and other 'real money' infrastructure accessible.]
[As centralized marketplaces secure most of the vendor marketshare, the long-tail loses prominence to paid 'premium' placement because the deal has a greater impact on earnings - the vendors become competition.]
[Ad sales incentivize the 'sharing' or 'renting' economy because people are less likely to return after buying to own.]
[When search results make it difficult to buy a hammer, it causes the culture of 'building things' to suffer.]
[The test of any tool is its ability to shape the world.]
[Calm commerce follows naturally from calm computing.]
Let's talk about AOC, performative posts, and social change....
[Even when social media is 'merely performative' it can serve your political interests because it spreads ideas and increases the potential for people to change the way they think. The political spirit of the 60s and 70s can be captured by the concert, which gave attendees a context to associate themselves with: they are like the selfie generation of today.]
Be the most abundant source of your own qualities.
Write to remember if there is no other context into which you can encode it: social exchanges, creation, publishing are much more memorable.
The Princess Rescuing Application: Slides
[Games can be played immediately and they steadily increase your skills over time, shortening the learning curve.]
[Games are fun because they employ exploratory learning: there is a goal with no indications of how to achieve it, players can faill and be told that they failed, they can also succeed and it feels good when they figure it out alone, during the learning process they explore the possibility space.]
[Games are built of STARS atoms that create learning feedback loops: Stimulate the player to experiment with Skills to discover Tools and Actions that play out within the environment's Rules.]
[Games assume that the people change, that the player at the beginning is not the same as the player at the end because of the skills they picked up along the way. Apps could adapt themselves to the dynamic people who use them, rather than providing a static set of tools for everyone.]
[Apps could be organized into levels based on the experience of who uses it, people advance through gated environments where they can safely practice important skills, they continue after mastering.]
[Rather than presenting all possibilities the same way forever, games employ a 'items' or 'powerups' or 'widgets' or 'addons' or 'extensions' pattern that celebrate modular bits of functionality earned with experience.]
[Quests are easy to understand and provide to reason to try each activity. LinkedIn has 'profile completeness' and prompts people to 'add a picture' and 'ask for a recommendation'.]
[The score provides a simple always-visible metric of progress.]
[Some games progress from a more guided 'advancement' mode to an 'elder' mode where the player needs to figure more out on their own.]
[Games have three skill types: 'pre-existing' are used in the first few minutes and help the interface feel intuitive; 'rewarded' are finite and not initially known but taught through STARS atoms via punishment and reward; 'emergent' are potentially infinite and not rewarded.]
[Gamification is profitable because it combines delightful experiences with ease-of-use and depth.]
"Skip": exponential-backoff deferral mechanisms and fuzzy inboxes
Some techniques can help up front: don't "stockpile" material for some future day; avoid writing prompts in response to a feeling of "should"; write about connections, consequences, implications—not just about facts; avoid tangential "orphan questions"; etc. But this isn't enough. Review sessions need ongoing grooming to stay interesting. If you don't add anything new for a while, your sessions will feel stale. If you often forget an answer, you must refactor the question or risk future eye-rolls.
