you are in all likelihood reading this on an unfathomably powerful machine.
the kind of machine whose creation requires the robust collaboration of 100,000s of people (a) and whose complexity rivals that of the brain.
take a moment.
let that sink in.
thousands and thousands and thousands of people across the planet, whom you have never met, using alphabets you cannot read, poured hour after hour of their best efforts into creating the computer in front of you, the phone you are holding in your hand.
a thing so complex that no single person can hold the full design of it in their mind.
... and here it is just chugging away, waiting for the next command, responsive to your next subtle touch.
truly we live in a glorious age!
the internet is at the center of all of this glory.
if you're anything like me, you've been finding yourself spending a lot of time here.
... and you've been noticing that spending time here well isn't a trivial undertaking.
what does it mean to spend time here in a good way?
what does it mean to be a good citizen of this place?
i don't have fully articulated answers to those questions (yet), but i think good online citizenship is served by good curation and tight responsiveness.
curation. there is so much content these days!
what of it is worth our attention?
what of it is worth memorializing so we can revisit it years from now?
thus far Big Tech has proven to be poor stewards of our material (a).
and their algorithms attempt curation, but struggle to disambiguate our higher-self desires from our lower-self desires.
so compiling a list of worthwhile things i encounter online each week feels additive, given the current state of play.
(the algos aren't doing it for us!)
responsiveness. what do the humans like? the humans like responsiveness (a).
in this season of life, it often feels like loops open faster than i can close them. i'm not as responsive as i aspire to be.
as an experiment, i'm tethering the compilation this newsletter with a systematic practice of reviewing my inbound from the week.
i have two intentions for this:
i view this newsletter as an exercise in practicing these virtues.
onward!