Things I Like
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Despite the awkward moments and missing out, this year has been the shove I needed to try new things. The best thing about the challenge is that I’ve been willing to say ‘yes’ more and that I’ve become more adventurous.Having the choice to spend, or not, is a privilege and I have become far more aware of why we buy. I have come to realise that consumerism keeps us chained to our desks, working to earn money to spend on stuff we think will make our lives better. And when the stuff doesn’t make us happy, we go back to work to earn more money to buy something else. The last 12 months have allowed me to step outside this cycle and I can honestly say I’m happier now. I’ve gained confidence and skills, done things I would never have done and met lovely people I wouldn’t have otherwise met.
I live what many may see as a frugal life. We keep a very close eye on our spending and it's for the very reason McGagh outlines. The more you spend, the more you need to work. And in the quest to spend less we've found out that being content with what you have and enjoying what is around you is truly wonderful, instead of always striving for more stuff that you often forget about in time.
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Which brings me to the saddest thing about these platforms: they are taking all of our input and time, and our thoughts, energy, and content, and using all of that for free to make money. Think about how many times you’ve tweeted. Or written or commented on a Facebook post. Or started a Medium draft. These are all our words, locked in proprietary platforms that controls not only how our message is displayed, but how we write it, and even more worrying, how we think about it.
So many good points in this piece. I will admit that I'm most saddened that so many are using tweetstorms or threads to share longer form thoughts. I find them jarring to read and while they contain good thoughts, they'd be so much better as a blog post. And, as the author states, I get why people do it, but these platforms aren't good for meaningful discourse anymore; maybe they never were.
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But let me make my own personal argument in defence of making art: I don’t even know who fashioned this particular phrase or idea, but there’s this idea that we do war so that our children will do commerce so that their children will be poets. Well, Adam, I’m not doing war, and I’m not gonna waste my life with commerce. Whether or not it’s financially viable for me, I want my goal of civilization to be as follows: to do the work, to pay attention to what’s beautiful, to encourage others in that form of attention as well. That’s where I want to be. And I will listen to Bismillah Khan and I will listen to Young Thug. Deferring one’s pleasure because of other peoples’ anxieties seems kind of weird to me.
I love Cole's writing and now can't wait to read the essays.
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This is not a lament. It is counsel. It is saying: We can awaken completely. The best sign of which will be how we treat every being who crosses our path. For real change is personal. The change within ourselves expressed in our willingness to hear, and have patience with, the “other.” Together we move forward. Anger, the pointing of fingers, the wishing that everyone had done exactly as you did, none of that will help relieve our pain. We are here now. In this scary, and to some quite new and never imagined place. What do we do with our fear?
Reading a lot of things to help me through these days and Walker is one I'll be coming back to, I'm sure.
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In the wake of recent events I’d encourage those of us who build hypertext to have discussions about how you measure success. Are all of your KPIs attention-based? Are you driving addiction? Are you comfortable with the repercussions?
So much good thinking is coming out right now about the way in which we use social media, our devices, and how we spend our time and what we give our attention. Dave's right on here and asking some very good questions about how, as creators of these things and web workers, we may want to think about.
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Evil settles into everyday life when people are unable or unwilling to recognize it. It makes its home among us when we are keen to minimize it or describe it as something else. This is not a process that began a week or month or year ago. It did not begin with drone assassinations, or with the war on Iraq. Evil has always been here. But now it has taken on a totalitarian tone.
Teju Cole <3 <3 <3 <3
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Lady writers who inspire similar devotion (in far smaller audiences): Muriel Spark, Joan Didion, Jane Austen. Such writers offer the same essential qualities (or illusions): total control (over their form) and no freedom (for the reader). Compare and contrast, say, Jean Rhys or Octavia Butler, lady writers much loved but rarely copied. There’s too much freedom in them. Meanwhile every sentence of Didion’s says: obey me! Who runs the world? Girls!
A lovely piece looking at dancing as it relates to writing.
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Alternatively, it concerns me that folks in the Bay Area tend to treat their websites as business cards instead of archives, as Jeremy suggests. Many designers and developers that I’ve met believe personal websites are constrained to a lonely paragraph of text that only clarifies what they do for a living.
As I've spent more and more time on the web, I've come to believe that this site is my true home. While I've written for other publications, I've always come back here for my thoughts, my ideas, my archiving of what I like. The reason is because I control it and I can search through the files to find things again. And so I keep adding to it. I'm not only sad by folks who don't see the value in having control of their words, I wonder how many words will be lost, yet again, when the current hot platform shutters and the urls are lost.
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Affordance is provided by the way something looks regardless of the cursor. Remember, the cursor is only available when hovering with a pointing device such as a mouse.
I'm almost done with the Heydon Pickering's new book on accessibility and this article was cited. I'm sold. No more hands for buttons.
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It’s the vision of humility, collaboration and acknowledgement, that we are not as gods…but instead, we are as children lost in dreams, yet to realise our true potential and place in the universe.
This was originally a talk at Webstock this past February and it's so good.
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For better or for worse, the last eight years have been defined less by the rise of small tech companies than by the expansion of Big Tech. We’ve seen the second Silicon Valley boom, with companies valued in the billions, including Facebook, Uber, Snapchat, Palantir and Dropbox. Established technology companies like Amazon, Apple and Google have expanded their reach and influence throughout the world. And while many countries have pushed back against that spread, our government has essentially left them alone. (In August, for instance, WhatsApp announced that it would begin sharing user data with Facebook, its parent company, and its suite of products — news that gave some Americans pause but caused German regulators to intervene on behalf on their citizens.)
This is a great piece looking at how the Obama administration has pushed for technology. And the author references a speech Obama gave a few days later where he admits that government has to do it all and it's messy, unlike Silicon Valley. But I enjoyed the perspective about how our government hasn't protected the citizens from bad practices as much as some other world governments have. Privacy and how our data is used/shared/leaked is one of the biggest issues as everything moves online.
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Apple’s own apps don’t even come close to providing the features most regular workplaces rely on, let alone addressing the needs of the multitude of specialised industries that are using Apple’s platforms.
I've seen a lot of anger about the updated Macs that were announced last week. Most of it is coming from my developer friends, for the very reason that Baldur talks about in his piece. In my house, we are talking about getting a Surface Tablet, we don't use devices a lot when not working, and the Surface would allow us to share it and each have an account. And I'm seeing a lot of colleagues considering switching to Microsoft.
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I don't normally do this, but I read two different pieces in the New York Times Sunday Review yesterday that were talking about two sides of the very same coin and I found it interesting. The first was on the cover and got the big splashy illustration, "Go Midwest, Young Hipster", about how we are self segregating ourselves based on political leanings. The second was much more subtle, in an inner page, just along the side of the page, a full page column and that was it, "Good Neighbors, No Politics", where the author talks about living her neighborhood for 21 years and politics don't divide them. As neighbors they support each other through their life crisis and it's OK if they don't agree politically, they're still in community and close friends.
The reason these two are so interesting to me is that they point to some assumptions we're making about people based solely on one thing: how they vote. But when you get to know people, when you are in community with them, when you support them through good and bad times, that may not be the most important thing. I'm starting to believe more and more that community is what will see us through the crazy polarization we are in, being in community with people who are different than you in many ways. We aren't moving, but I do think about this as I realize where we live and what that means for our community and echo chamber.
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When people tell you who they are, Maya Angelou famously advised, believe them. Just as important, however, when people try to tell you who you are, don’t believe them. You are the only custodian of your own integrity, and the assumptions made by those that misunderstand who you are and what you stand for reveal a great deal about them and absolutely nothing about you.
It was hard to pick a quote for this one because I loved all 10 of the learnings. But I chose this one because I've been in a bit of a funk lately and this is what I needed to hear this weekend. It's hard, in an age of all the information flying at you all the time, to feel like you are enough, just as you are. But this piece, along with the piece I linked to about Ursula Le Guin, are helping set me to rights. I'm also staying away from the noise, which means less Twitter and more reading and posting here.
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But Trump’s success in the primary among the civically disintegrated suggests another way forward. Improving the United States’s immune response to authoritarian leadership—a response that could be repeatedly tested in the century to come—can follow from weaving its civic fabric ever tighter. I don’t know what this will look like, exactly, for every person. But here are some places to start: Volunteer. Run for local or state office. Give to charity (whether due to religion or effective altruism). Organize at work. Join a church or a community choir or the local library staff. Make your hometown a better place for refugees to settle. Raise a child well.
We talk a lot about climate change at my house, it's our main worry about the future. This piece is really great for how it looks at the climate crisis and how it may be compounded by unscrupulous leaders and it's people who will suffer. It feels very much like capitalism is in a thrash because it's goals and the goal of protecting the earth don't go together very well.