1/ Eli Pariser from New Public published an open, collaborative bibliography as a Google Doc to collect what people are reading to understand the 2024 election. I love this pattern (although I hate that it often requires a disaster to spark it): after a crisis, you'll often see Google Docs pop up to help people find resources and share information.
Elan Ullendorff calls this the "Doc Web" and offers a set of axioms.
Axiom 6: The cheaper and easier a publishing tool is to use, the more ripe it is for challenging power hierarchies
A tool that requires more technical literacy, time, or money becomes inherently inaccessible to many with less power, and its form will appropriately and intentionally project class, prestige, and rarity. For that reason, a feature-rich custom website designed and built by a web development agency can only have so much radical potential. A tool that is free, and whose interface is a common word processor immediately understandable by most creators and consumers, will often incorporate fringe ideas and language in a way that these websites do not.
This is one of the reasons why I'm encouraged by the development of creative tools that make it easier for more people to build and express their ideas. Robin Sloan writes that an app can be a home-cooked meal as he describes his journey building a small app for his family.
Building this app, I figured it out:
I am the programming equivalent of a home cook.
The exhortation “learn to code” has its foundations in market value. “Learn to code” is suggested as a way up, a way out. “Learn to code” offers economic leverage, professional transformation. “Learn to code” goes on your resume.
But let’s substitute a different phrase: “learn to cook”. People don’t only learn to cook so they can become chefs. Some do! But many more people learn to cook so they can eat better, or more affordably. Because they want to carry on a tradition. Sometimes they learn because they’re bored! Or even because they enjoy spending time with the person who’s teaching them.
With Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, and friends, more people now have the tooling to cook up something wonderful.
Matt Webb writes about his experience building an iOS app that points to the center of the galaxy. Like Matt, I'm not a developer, but I did build a functioning iOS app that I call "Walk and Talk" the other week. It's a simple app on your phone that lets you record a voice note, and then gives you a nice summary along with a cleaned up transcript. It's silly. It's simple. But it did scratch a particular itch.
If you haven't built an app before - why not go for it?
2/ Kate Brown, MIT professor, talks about the role of community gardens in combatting climate change.
Journalists and scholars have worked hard in the last two decades to get people to understand the scope and the scale and the verisimilitude of climate change. And that’s great, but some of these catastrophic stories we tell don’t make people feel very safe or secure. They have a paralyzing effect on us. Climate change is one of many problems that are too big for any one person to tackle, or any one entity, whether it’s a huge nation like the United States or an international body like the U.N.
So I thought I would start to work on something that is very small scale that puts action in the hands of just regular people to try to tell a more hopeful story. I am finishing a new book about working-class people who got pushed off their farms in the 19th century, and ended up in mega cities like London, Berlin, Amsterdam, and Washington D.C., find land on the periphery of the cities. They start digging, growing their own food, cooperating together. They basically recreated forms of the commons in cities. And in so doing, they generate the most productive agriculture in recorded history.
I love her description of these gardens as a coral reef.
You can think of a tiny city garden like a coral reef, where one little worm comes and builds its cave. And then another one attaches itself to the first, and so on. Pretty soon you have a great coral reef with a platform to support hundreds of different species — a rich biodiversity. Tiny gardens work that way in cities, which is one reason cities are now surprising hotspots of biodiversity.
3/ Scientists at UC Berkeley have developed a powder that can suck CO2 out of the air. Don't give up.
4/ As expected, there's another Twitter / X exodus. This time, people are signing up for Bluesky.
According to the New York Times, Bluesky gained over one million new subscribers in the week since the election. They now have ~15 million users. In contrast, Threads has 275 million monthly active users, Twitter has over 500 million monthly active users, and Facebook and Instagram each have over 2 billion monthly active users.
I'm encouraged by many of the small, but meaningful innovations that Bluesky has popularized. However, this is still a Twitter clone. We're still just playing around with variations on a theme and celebrating who is part of the conversation in these different platforms. There's a much bigger design space around reimagining what social networks / platforms / protocols / experiences actually look and feel like.
5/ John Maeda talks about what it means to embrace the hybrid path.
Being a hybrid is about exploring. It’s less about being an expert in any one area and more about staying curious across fields. A hybrid career invites us to break out of silos and think widely. In today’s world, the intersections are where exciting things happen — creativity grows in these spaces where we can see one field through the lens of another. But that scope requires a kind of energy and resilience that isn’t always easy to sustain. This path isn’t about comfort; it’s about finding new possibilities beyond what we know.
My friend, Mel, shared with me materials from a workshop she gave years ago on navigating multifaceted careers.
Both John and Mel have helped me see my own path in a warmer light.
Here's to a life of curiosity, creativity, connection, consideration, and celebration.
