Hey, friends -
Here are a few things that caught my eye last week.
1/ Erin Kissane writes about the Dark Forest Theory of the internet and reminds us that we have the opportunity - imperative - to work for a better internet.
Instead of retreating, we need to build forward.
Forgive the long quote, but this entire section is worth highlighting, underlining, printing out and putting it in a place where you can't unsee it.
It’s equally important to remember that the patterns we’ve experienced on mega-platforms are not the only way to do networks but the result of specific combinations of under-thinking and malign commercial pressures—and that the currently ascendant systems are not inevitably annihilating forces, but legal and financial constructs that can be brought to heel, forcibly reconfigured, or just replaced. Keeping these basic facts in mind is oddly difficult, because there’s so much money involved, and money is a spell for blurring the truth.
But all these platforms and attendant dipshits will be replaced, eventually, and what happens next isn't guaranteed. The British East India company was a commercial atrocity factory at near-global scale; what came after it was direct colonial rule. The assumption that "Twitter but decentralized" or "Facebook but open-source and federated" will necessarily be good—rather than differently bad—is a weak one.
So the necessary counterpart to understanding that the Dark Forest Internet complex obscures the arbitrary and temporary nature of the current situation might be accepting that there is no moral arc of the world. Our systems bend toward justice when we bend them, and keep on bending them, forever.
I think our failure to remember that the mega-platforms are just intentionally extractive constructs run by brainmelted but very human weirdos is a failure of accountability, but our failure to remember that it doesn’t have to be this way is a failure not only of imagination, but of nerve.
I've tried to put into words why I am so focused on reimagining social experiences on the internet. When there are so many crises in the world, it can feel so small or silly to focus on something like this.
But, I agree with Kissane when she writes:
This all stops being an individual problem and becomes a collective one when bad products of the social internet get worse, as when platform turmoil and manipulation helps remodel the offline world in the image of the most grotesque parts of the online one. And also when previously good products of the social internet are lost, as when it becomes impossible for people to find sustaining work, learn from one another, or organize responses to the rolling crises in which we live.
The online and offline worlds are entangled. What we do in one impacts the other.
2/ Jay Springett writes about knowledge objects and the need to signal important information in text to a LLM.
I see Knowledge Objects as handcrafted artefacts—collections of dense metadata and symbols that play with the model’s context in unpredictable ways. Weird, markdown files full of material that, that when dropped into a model, produce something entirely different than expected: shifting tone, reordering context, or amplifying particular ideas.
Jay experiments plays with marking up the text with a specific symbol to give it more importance to the LLM.
Earlier this year, my friend, Shuya, talked about how an executive would ask his employees to say his name three times at certain moments in a meeting so that the Zoom summary would make sure to catch it and mark it in the summary. We were just tickled by that story and did the same thing in our meetings going forward. Jay describes a similar pattern here.
We need a way to start signposting important information in the text – like using a highlighter pen – to signal to the machine which parts of the text we as authors consider significant. In this sense, a standard machine-readable markup, or machine-readable markdown (MRM?), is a logical next step.
We can Enchant Knowledge Objects (books, websites, PDFs, whatever) with power—guiding the AI’s focus within documents through structured annotations and symbols and turn them into powerful Talismans.
Earlier this week I experimented marking sections of an 18k word essay I’m in the middle of for work. I used the Unicode symbol (**ꙮ**) as the many eye glyph literally means many-eyed seraphim, and appealed.
If one of the reasons to write is to build a dataset for the future, then it makes sense to annotate and emphasize different pieces of that writing.
Also, after checking out his website, I think that I, too, may have aphantasia! Wild.
3/ The New York Times features OpenAI's first artist in residence, Alexander Reben.
It's a nice feature that showcases how Reben used AI in his craft.
Toward the end of the residency, he focused on a prototype system that turned photos of real objects into A.I.-generated images, poems and even short, satirical blurbs.
His setup consisted of his phone, a Fujifilm Instax photo printer and another printer that spit out receipts and labels. A web browser-based system combined Mr. Reben’s code with a version of the large language model that powers ChatGPT.
The conceptual camera that he built reminds me a lot of Poetry Camera, a project by our IDEO CoLab Ventures residents: Kelin Zhang and Ryan Mather.
4/ Benedict Evans published his annual report on technology.
It's a great overview on the big questions that the industry is wrestling with to date: how far will this scale? How is this useful? How do we deploy this?
Whenever I talk to friends who aren't chronic early adopters, I am still surprised by how so many of them don't use AI or don't see a meaningful "use case" for it. But when you zoom out, maybe this shouldn't be too surprising given where we are in the overall hype cycle.
And speaking of use cases, I often find the exercise of looking for use cases somewhat of a head scratcher. Benedict captures this moment well: it does feel like asking someone to imagine what the internet could be useful for back in 1995.
The presentation is long, but it's definitely worth a read. Here are some select slides that I thought were particularly useful:
On "errors"
Role of LLMs
5/ More from John Maeda on navigating a hybrid career.
A student asked me about navigating the world without a traditional credential in any single discipline. Here’s what I said: credentials open doors, but they’re not enough. Being a maker is what makes people listen. When I left MIT and entered design, people doubted me. When I went to Silicon Valley, they doubted me again. This is a recurring theme in my life: being underestimated — and then over-delivering through persistence.
Ok, that's it! See you next week!
