08: Glass walls
Hello!
My friend Luke makes physical RPGs. Think pen-and-paper tomes. When we got together last summer, he showed me a game he’d recently published, called Inheritance. It’s about a Viking family that gets together, on the eve of their grandfather’s death, to split up their inheritance.
Luke handed me a wooden box, which I opened up, pulling item after item out in wonder: cloth pouches, parchment envelopes, rune-carved branches, a will transcribed in Latin. But when he told me it took 12 years to get the mechanics of the game right, I blanched in horror. Why would anyone spend TWELVE YEARS designing a game?!
And not just any game: Inheritance was a limited print run for 380 customers. From an economic perspective, it was “a complete disaster and failure”. [1] The only reason anybody would complete such a thankless task is because they simply had to do it. Which immediately brings another phrase to mind, the famous mantra of YCombinator: “Make something people want."
I always thought Silicon Valley lacked a thriving intelligentsia [2] because tech culture prioritizes execution over thinking. But I think that analysis does a disservice to creators. Creators are obsessed with shipping things, too. They’re just trying to satisfy a different customer. The mantra of creators is more like: “Make something you want.” Paradoxically, we respect creators more when they *don’t* pander to an audience.
Given these constraints, when I think about designing an ideal environment for creators, I think about that scene in Blade Runner 2049: Ana Stelline living behind a glass wall. She’s cheerful because she’s protected from the outside world. So from a product standpoint, it’s like: how do you create that glass wall? Where anyone is welcome to observe what they’re doing, but the creator is shielded from their audience, too. It’s livestreaming without the comments, tweeting without the likes, writing code without the issue tracker.
Somewhat idealistic, perhaps, but something I’d like to see represented more in our online social systems, especially as we shift our collective gaze towards the individual, and their audiences begin to grow and grow.
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[1] Luke’s words, not mine! From a great talk he gave about Inheritance.
[2] For lack of a better term...
Writing
Posts I’ve written this month.
“Shamelessness as a strategy”: Examining the strategy of “being shameless” online, and why it works better today than previously
“Reclaiming public life”: Thoughts on managing our public and private selves online, inspired by Jane Jacobs’ research on cities (see "Books" below)
“Between animal and God”: Finding meaning in meaninglessness, aka Nadia’s rambling thoughts on “what is the meaning of life” that have nothing to do with anything
Notes
Notes from this past month have been updated. Notes from 2018 have been archived. I was asked, “for the sake of all that is holy”, to please think of the non-American readers, so they’ve been reformatted to YYYY-MM-DD.
A few highlights:
Henri Cartier-Bresson’s “decisive moment”, frozen and expanded into 300 years. Can we fit our entire lives inside in the moment when a glass vase shatters into a thousand pieces? (Perhaps this is a form of the hauntological?)
The creator-curator dynamic = Jesus and his apostles
Keeping a changelog of your identity: if journaling contains the raw data, would love to summarize and track the actual changes made, i.e. versioning my identities
Curious why we aren't reframing the decline of journalism as the rise of content creators? Still messy, to be sure, but there's a great "unbundling" narrative of people being free to research, write, and report on interesting stories independently of an institution. Similarly to music artists breaking free of agencies and record labels. We haven't yet figured out all the mechanics (i.e. $$, platform), but it still feels like the right direction to move towards
Dubstep as Tibetan singing bowl -> “mental cleansing” activities
Links
Useful articles I’ve read this past month.
Postmortem: Every Frame a Painting (Tony Zhou): Lessons learned in making a popular YouTube series, from the creative process to funding and motivation. I originally read this last year, stumbled upon it again and remembered how much I like it.
“Books as Software” (Shriram Krishnamurthi) + “Practical Typography (Why you should pay)” (Matthew Butterick): Two authors with popular books explain why they're NOT going the traditional publishing route. Butterick also includes annual financial reports on his book sales, which is cool.
“The ‘Future Book’ is Here, But It’s Not What We Expected” (Craig Mod): In case you can't tell, I dug into the world of publishing this month ;) There's a lot of fluff out there about new book formats, but I thought this was a very levelheaded read.
“Unlocking the Commons: Or, the Psychoeconomics of Patronage” (Tim Carmody): Patronage has kind of a weird reputation these days, thanks to becoming essentially synonymous with Patreon, but I think we've only barely scratched the surface. Tim’s views mirror mine re: “give it away for free, focus on building value around WHO'S producing". As he puts it: "Free-riders aren’t just welcome; free-riding is the point."
Burial: Unedited Transcript (Mark Fisher): I'm biased because I love Burial, but I thought this interview was chock-full of tasty bits like: maintaining anonymity, angels, songs as talismans, and making "genderless" music
Deal Opacity (Semil Shah): You know what they say about hammers and nails: I enjoyed reading this through the lens of online interactions at scale. If too much noise forced investors back to private deal flow, did the internet really "democratize" anything? IMO, the value looks less literally like “commoditized public deal flow”, i.e. Crunchbase/AngelList, and more like: you can now leverage public life to form high-leverage connections more easily than before. Maybe transparency finds stasis with one layer of abstraction: access to influential people is “public”, but of course the best deals will flow through private channels, just as they always have.
Books
Relevant books that I’ve read this month. TBH, didn’t get much reading in this month.
Building Successful Online Communities: Evidence-Based Social Design (Robert Kraut and Paul Resnick): This book is like doing a speedrun through the basic dynamics of online community design: easy-to-skim insights, with deeper dives into experiments if you care to read them. The examples are charmingly historic now, and the book supports my hypothesis that “online communities” are mutating into something different today, BUT I still recommend it as a super-fast way to get up to speed on prior literature.
The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Jane Jacobs): I only regret not reading this earlier. Anyone who lives in a city should read this, but also, anyone who cares about designing social systems (if you read nothing else, read the final chapter on “organized complexity”). Beyond the substance of her work, I’m in awe of her methodology and writing style: she really masters this tone of impassioned indignation that could only stem from a genuine love of cities.