Subject Matter 18: 2020 Spring Update
Approaching the solstice, filled with radiant energy and stretching my hand toward the warmth of the ever-giving sun...
I've been working on a new tool with Tom Critchlow, which launched this week. The tool is called Quotebacks. Although much commenting online has moved to Twitter, we're interested in enabling more dialogue between blogs, through networked writing. Quotebacks is a Chrome extension (Firefox soon) that lets you select a piece of text and turn it into an embeddable component that looks like like this (but higher resolution, all HTML, and interactive).
You can read a little more about the project and find a link to try it out yourself here:
https://quotebacks.net/
This is the first piece of production-grade software I've really developed and released myself, and I'm very proud and excited for where it can go. If you find it useful or have suggestions, we'd love to hear from you and see how you're using it on your own blog.
Recent Work
I recently wrapped up a few work projects, some of which I'll properly announce as they drip out in the next few weeks.
I've been working with Jesse Walden, formerly of A16Z crypto, on thesis and thought leadership, since last year. This has been a truly wide-ranging intellectual partnership, involving helping sharpen Jesse's published thinking, devising terminology and narratives for his investment thesis, and some other strategic tasks I can't talk about yet. I take shots at VCs on Twitter all the time, but the thesis on cooperative ownership of businesses and fair revenue sharing is not a joke. This is really a future worth building towards and contributing to.
I also worked with a design executive at a social impact startup in a similar way, focused more around brand strategy and developing language for internal communications. These projects are cases of what I have been calling narrative strategy, which I wrote briefly about in the Winter Update. I'm going to have more to say about this soon, but a few current thoughts. Although these partnerships are based around ongoing conversation, diagramming, and writing — a sort of "pure" knowledge work — they also have made clear use of practical experiences designing products and leading teams. I've come to understand that doing this sort of work, which Venkatesh Rao calls "sparring," is most effective when the intellectual partner and strategist can step into the idioms of practitioner, individual contributor, founder, investor.
On the product side of things, Denis Nazarov and I received a grant from the Arweave community to design a publishing tool and social graph on top of Arweave's permanent data storage network. A chief accomplishment here is inventing some good UX patterns for decentralized social network and publishing, including providing "unpublish" and "edit" experiences for immutable content. I'm also pleased with the project's design language. This will get a proper release soon.
I also collaborated with John on UX and strategy for a pre-launch proprietary knowledge graph startup, a startup which I suspect will be a theme in the coming years.
..
From Other Internet Network
John's Spatial Software essay, which a few of us collaborated on, was a hit and led to the aforementioned knowledge graph project. Kei wrote about memory practices and relating the self to cosmology. Darren launched his new website, and Sam started his new position as grants director at the Interchain Foundation. Bryan has been working on a carbon impact analysis project. Kara has been working on a mysterious ARG we barely know about.
From the extended network: my dear friends at Foreign Objects launched their Mozilla-funded provocation "Bot or Not," a very fun Turing test which I encourage you to play. Jaan has been working on a long-reads recommendation algorithm. And Laurel wrote a beautiful reflection, "Ambient Cemeteries, on ways death and life are around us, in names and places, how they co-mingle and enhance each other....
Reflections
....this spring, fear, sorrow, and anger have been in the atmosphere, as many lives have unexpectedly ended, or been taken away from us. Yet these events have also been permeated with a sense of urgency; we are seeking to understand what is happening, to secure the premises, to move faster than the market, to raise one's voice and move one's feet in allyship, a flurry of action and history as time dilates and we perceive a hyperreal series of stretched moments—have any of us had time to grieve?
Processing death does not happen at any measurable speed. It is an intimate timeline, provoking, resisting, and finally incriminating the body in a physical reflection on its limits. It cannot be done from afar and not only with one's eyes. Funerary professionals sensitive to this truth design rituals that involve families with dressing the deceased, or decorating the casket. Sans this, we are left to contemplate death through our own bodily actions, sensitizing our connection with the ground, with plants we take into our mouth, with the touch of those who buoy us with their love, with even their mere acknowledgement that we exist, which forms the boundary of our being.
As my grandmother died last fall, I wrote this:
Were the sun not landing where the grass still sprouts up in greener patches
Between lusher shadows
Of pines whose needles soak gently in the warm surrounding bath
Were these children not rolling down the hill
Babbled laughter vibrating excess energy through the medium
Blended with the cooling breeze, fragments of speech, music,
Were I not as I sit here lifting words into my eyes from some timeless white page
the imminence of death would still not fail to invite its wondrous sibling into its proximity
Kissing you in the cemetery's fragrant grasses, I remembered these words. Spring is not known as a season of death, but it is only from the dark, damp soil of decomposed plant and animal matter, can dry seeds germinate and sprout, enriched by warmth, upwards and reaching toward its source, approaching the solstice, following the sun.
Music
Pianist Nobuyuki Tsuji performs Kapustin's Concert Etudes Op.40 No.2, "Reverie:" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0-J3NTAQ8c. Though he is blind, does Nobu not radiate a light as he plays?
..
Until next time.
I've been working on a new tool with Tom Critchlow, which launched this week. The tool is called Quotebacks. Although much commenting online has moved to Twitter, we're interested in enabling more dialogue between blogs, through networked writing. Quotebacks is a Chrome extension (Firefox soon) that lets you select a piece of text and turn it into an embeddable component that looks like like this (but higher resolution, all HTML, and interactive).
You can read a little more about the project and find a link to try it out yourself here:
https://quotebacks.net/
This is the first piece of production-grade software I've really developed and released myself, and I'm very proud and excited for where it can go. If you find it useful or have suggestions, we'd love to hear from you and see how you're using it on your own blog.
Recent Work
I recently wrapped up a few work projects, some of which I'll properly announce as they drip out in the next few weeks.
I've been working with Jesse Walden, formerly of A16Z crypto, on thesis and thought leadership, since last year. This has been a truly wide-ranging intellectual partnership, involving helping sharpen Jesse's published thinking, devising terminology and narratives for his investment thesis, and some other strategic tasks I can't talk about yet. I take shots at VCs on Twitter all the time, but the thesis on cooperative ownership of businesses and fair revenue sharing is not a joke. This is really a future worth building towards and contributing to.
I also worked with a design executive at a social impact startup in a similar way, focused more around brand strategy and developing language for internal communications. These projects are cases of what I have been calling narrative strategy, which I wrote briefly about in the Winter Update. I'm going to have more to say about this soon, but a few current thoughts. Although these partnerships are based around ongoing conversation, diagramming, and writing — a sort of "pure" knowledge work — they also have made clear use of practical experiences designing products and leading teams. I've come to understand that doing this sort of work, which Venkatesh Rao calls "sparring," is most effective when the intellectual partner and strategist can step into the idioms of practitioner, individual contributor, founder, investor.
On the product side of things, Denis Nazarov and I received a grant from the Arweave community to design a publishing tool and social graph on top of Arweave's permanent data storage network. A chief accomplishment here is inventing some good UX patterns for decentralized social network and publishing, including providing "unpublish" and "edit" experiences for immutable content. I'm also pleased with the project's design language. This will get a proper release soon.
I also collaborated with John on UX and strategy for a pre-launch proprietary knowledge graph startup, a startup which I suspect will be a theme in the coming years.
..
From Other Internet Network
John's Spatial Software essay, which a few of us collaborated on, was a hit and led to the aforementioned knowledge graph project. Kei wrote about memory practices and relating the self to cosmology. Darren launched his new website, and Sam started his new position as grants director at the Interchain Foundation. Bryan has been working on a carbon impact analysis project. Kara has been working on a mysterious ARG we barely know about.
From the extended network: my dear friends at Foreign Objects launched their Mozilla-funded provocation "Bot or Not," a very fun Turing test which I encourage you to play. Jaan has been working on a long-reads recommendation algorithm. And Laurel wrote a beautiful reflection, "Ambient Cemeteries, on ways death and life are around us, in names and places, how they co-mingle and enhance each other....
Reflections
....this spring, fear, sorrow, and anger have been in the atmosphere, as many lives have unexpectedly ended, or been taken away from us. Yet these events have also been permeated with a sense of urgency; we are seeking to understand what is happening, to secure the premises, to move faster than the market, to raise one's voice and move one's feet in allyship, a flurry of action and history as time dilates and we perceive a hyperreal series of stretched moments—have any of us had time to grieve?
Processing death does not happen at any measurable speed. It is an intimate timeline, provoking, resisting, and finally incriminating the body in a physical reflection on its limits. It cannot be done from afar and not only with one's eyes. Funerary professionals sensitive to this truth design rituals that involve families with dressing the deceased, or decorating the casket. Sans this, we are left to contemplate death through our own bodily actions, sensitizing our connection with the ground, with plants we take into our mouth, with the touch of those who buoy us with their love, with even their mere acknowledgement that we exist, which forms the boundary of our being.
As my grandmother died last fall, I wrote this:
Were the sun not landing where the grass still sprouts up in greener patches
Between lusher shadows
Of pines whose needles soak gently in the warm surrounding bath
Were these children not rolling down the hill
Babbled laughter vibrating excess energy through the medium
Blended with the cooling breeze, fragments of speech, music,
Were I not as I sit here lifting words into my eyes from some timeless white page
the imminence of death would still not fail to invite its wondrous sibling into its proximity
Kissing you in the cemetery's fragrant grasses, I remembered these words. Spring is not known as a season of death, but it is only from the dark, damp soil of decomposed plant and animal matter, can dry seeds germinate and sprout, enriched by warmth, upwards and reaching toward its source, approaching the solstice, following the sun.
Music
Pianist Nobuyuki Tsuji performs Kapustin's Concert Etudes Op.40 No.2, "Reverie:" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0-J3NTAQ8c. Though he is blind, does Nobu not radiate a light as he plays?
..
Until next time.
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