Search Results for: legibility

Completed Residencies

This is an archive of completed blogging residencies by Drew Austin, Kevin Simler, Mike Travers, Jordan Peacock, Kartik Agaram, Sam Bhagwat, Ryan Tanaka and Greg Rader. For currently active residencies, check this page.

Metropolitan Vapors by Drew Austin of Kneeling Bus. Drew’s series of guest posts will explore various ways that rapidly changing technology has altered the ways that people inhabit cities, which architectural historian Spiro Kostof called “amalgams of the living and the built.” The physical form of cities, found in their buildings, roads, and monuments, cannot possibly be rebuilt fast enough to keep up with the people and information that flow through them, and the lag between the two creates fascinating problems for which refactoring is often the best solution. Technology changes the ways that humans live in cities, as well as the reasons why we continue to need cities, and whether those reasons are as vital as the reasons of previous eras remains to be seen.
  1. Navigating the Holey Plane
  2. Machine Cities and Ghost Cities
  3. The Wave of Unknowing
  4. Civilization and the War on Entropy
  5. Freedom in Smooth Space
  6. The Networked Narrative
  7. The New Human Wilderness
Biology of Human Behavior by Kevin Simler of Melting Asphalt. Kevin will explore how society is anchored to biology — how we use body language, facial expressions, eye contact, touch, and synchrony to show affiliation, dominance, and submission (ritually or otherwise). Though the industrialized world is increasingly Cartesian (split between mind and body) and our public lives governed mostly by the mind, our bodies still play a fundamental role. Topics will include: body->mind effects on individuals, pairs, and groups; honest signalling; territory as a metaphorical extension of the body; the economics of status; and political ethology in the workplace.
  1. Anthropology of Mid-Sized Startups
  2. Honesty and the Human Body
  3. The Economics of Social Status
  4. Consciousness: An Outside View
  5. Projected Presence
  6. UX and the Civilizing Process
  7. Technical Debt of the West
First Person Plural by  Mike Travers of Omniorthogonal. Mike will be exploring a variety of refactoring of minds, persons, social relations, institutions, and the ways they are being transformed by technology.
  1. Patterns of Refactored Agency
  2. Solidarity and Recursion
  3. So I Shall be Written, So I Shall be Performed
  4. War and Nonhuman Agency
  5. I and Thou and Life in Aspergerstan
  6. The Government Within
  7. Morality for Exploded Minds
Marginally Acceptable by Jordan Peacock (Google+). Jordan will be reflecting on the ways the promises of hyped new technologies fail to materialize, the reasons (and rationalizations) why firms and individuals stick with poor solutions, and the social ramifications of these decisions. Stepping away from the technology titans, he will be focusing on more quotidian concerns: invoicing systems, email to fax appliances, business forms processing, COBOL payroll applications and SCADA control systems; the workaday systems that we love to hate, but which lubricate our modern lives and persist despite all reason.
  1. The Poor Usability Tell
  2. Love your Parasites
  3. Power Gradients and Spherical Cows
  4. A Koan is not a riddle
  5. We have them surrounded in their tanks
Consensual Hells by Kartik Agaram. Kartik will be exploring how our institutions (organizations, bureaucracies, markets, governments) reflect blind spots in human nature, with debilitating consequences. What would institutions look like in a hypothetical alien race without these blind spots? Might they conceivably work on Earth? This work will build on last year’s series by Mike Travers, in particular.
  1. From Cognitive Biases to Institutional Decay
  2. The Legibility Tradeoff
  3. Geopolitics for Individuals
Data Gardens by Sam Bhagwat of Moore’s Hand. Voltaire’s metaphor of “tending your gardens” reflects a fairly universal human desire to reduce the world’s complexity into a set of familiar, manipulable objects and metaphors (gardens).We all know frameworks and people who reductively map the world into data sets and generating/processing systems — inhabitants of what we’ll call “data gardens.” Posts will start with soil inspection; then examine the impact of data garden cultivation on other gardens; and finally explore the roots of sustainable “gardening” in the modern world.
  1. Algorithmic Governance and the Ghost in the Machine
  2. Authors and Directors
  3. Replaceability and the Economics of Disequilibrium
  4. Playing Games to Leave Games
Rituals in Digital Space by Ryan Tanaka.  Ryan will be exploring notions of rituals and culture in relation to the internet, technology, and social media, with an emphasis on time constructs as means of organizing content delivery systems.  In today’s visually-dominated web environments, time is a concept that often gets overlooked in the development of technological products and design, making it fertile ground for innovations and experimentations to come.As a musician, Ryan also does a musical improvisation as means of formulating his ideas, and each post will be accompanied by a recording of a live musical performance.

Posts to date:

  1. Ritual and the Productive Community
  2. The Rhythms of Information: Flow-pacing and Space-time
  3. The Design of Crash-Only Societies
  4. Let’s Play! Narrative Discovery versus Expert Guides
  5. Technopaganism and the Newer Age
onthespiral Individuality and Decision-Making by  Gregory Rader of On The Spiral ( on the Tempo blog). In his guest posts Greg will explore the role of individual differences in decision making.  Is narrative rationality a perspective available to everyone?  How do mental models differ in form and structure from one individual to another, and how do these differences translate into enactment styles?  Is it possible to distinguish potentially generative mental models from those that will eventually prove subtly disorganizing?  And ultimately, what is the point of it all?  Can personality types (“psycho-typical” archetypes) play a role in differentiating healthy ambitions from compulsions?
  1. The Cloistered Hedgehog and the Dislocated Fox
  2. Allowing Personality to Flow
  3. Deliberate Practice versus Immersion

The Economics of Pricelessness

August 12, 2014 By

The digital economy has taught us a lot about one extreme of pricing: zero. The price-point of zero is a place where weird things happen. We now know what it is to have our attention productized in three-way attention markets. We understand what it means to  devalue to a zero price, things which required nonzero effort to produce. Perhaps most importantly, we know what it is like to constantly be inundated by advertising, the sine qua non of zero-point economics. The zero-point economy has of course always existed, but it has only recently gained a great deal of economic mass.

But we aren’t talking as much about the other end of the spectrum, the price point we poetically call priceless, as in the Mastercard tagline, “there are some things money can’t buy, for everything else, there’s Mastercard.” I think the two are connected (mathematically, via division by zero, and philosophically via “the best things in life are free”), so it is impossible to construct a proper theory of the zero price point without also creating a theory of the infinity price point.

Pricelessness is at the heart of what I call saint-saint transactions, a weird economic regime where people who abide by the guardian moral syndrome, in the sense of Jane Jacobs, are forced to play by the commerce moral syndrome. This means somehow trading things, which are culturally assumed to be priceless, via indirection. Depending on who you ask, the category of nominally priceless products and services includes life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, nature, human dignity, religious values and the welfare of children.

Such priceless things trap us between a rock and a hard place. If we admit that we do in fact price these things indirectly, and get rid of the indirection, we might manage the economy better, but will likely stress our sanity. If we continue, as we do today, to pretend that priceless things are literally rather than poetically priceless, we will continue with our grand display of possibly unsustainable species-level honor and nobility.

An economics of pricelessness might help find a way to get out of this bind. The fact that the phrase itself likely sounds like a profane contradiction in terms suggests it is the right direction to explore. Let’s take a stab at it.

[Read more…]

Roundup: January – June 2014

July 2, 2014 By

Here’s the mid-year roundup. Not counting procedural posts, we’ve had 23 essays in the first six months. The Now Reading page also been updated for the year, check it out for the current state of the ribbonfarm reading radar.

  1. Free, as in Agent
  2. Consent of the Surveilled
  3. The Poor Usability Tell (Jordan)
  4. Technical Debt of the West (Kevin)
  5. An Information Age Glossary
  6. From Cognitive Biases to Institutional Decay (Kartik)
  7. The Cactus and the Weasel
  8. Demons by Candelight
  9. Immortality in the Ocean of Infinite Memories
  10. Authors and Directors (Sam)
  11. Love Your Parasites (Jordan)
  12. Ritual and the Productive Community (Ryan Tanaka)
  13. The Legibility Tradeoff (Kartik)
  14. A Life with a View
  15. Product-Driven versus Customer-Driven
  16. Replaceability and the Economics of Disequilibrium (Sam)
  17. Science! and Other Off-the-Wall Études
  18. Power Gradients and Spherical Cows (Jordan)
  19. The Logic of Uberreaction
  20. Saints and Traders: The John Henry Fable Reconsidered
  21. The Deliberate Practice of Disruption
  22. The Physics of Stamp Collecting
  23. Portals and Flags

Artistic Forestry: 2014 Annual Letter

May 29, 2014 By

For the past three years I’ve been doing a sort of annual letter to shareholders/call for sponsorships a la Warren Buffet’s Sage of Omaha act, roughly around March-April. I am about two months late this year. I am just going to start calling this my annual letter from now on. I plan to make it approximately 5% more magisterially smarmy every year until people start calling me the Sage of Ribbonfarm (the name of a short-lived gag panel  that I experimented with in 2008. I had to give it up because Yurij, my off-oDesk Russian artist, suddenly dropped out of sight. I sincerely hope Putin didn’t do something to him).

So if you consider yourself even a minor shareholder in ribbonfarm (through comments, guest posts, sharing, recommendations, playing couchsurfing host to me on my travels, sponsorships or whatever you’ve been doing to help keep this show going), this letter is for you.

Each year, I also add one line to my evolving business philosophy. In 2011, the line was go where the wild thoughts are. In 2012, it was go deep, young man. In 2013, the line is grow branches and roots.  Continuing with the arboreal theme from previous years, this year, my line is  practice artistic forestry. That’s the first topic on the agenda. Here’s the rest of the agenda.

  1. Practicing artistic forestry
  2. The state of the forest, in numbers
  3. The Web, it is a-changing
  4. Bitcoin and online publishing
  5. The future of longform

Let’s get started.

[Read more…]

Love Your Parasites

March 26, 2014 By

Parasitism is usually defined as a multi-party ecological organization in which one party benefits at another’s expense, and is contrasted with commensalism (the host is neither harmed nor helped) and mutualism (a type of symbiosis in which both parties benefit). Missing from this triptych are organizations in which a harm is partially offset with second-order benefits.

New research brings a little light to the subject in its analysis of the notorious brood parasites, the common cuckoo. The cuckoo lays its eggs in the nests of other birds, externalizing the costs of raising its young to other species, which bear the burden of feeding and caring for the cuckoo chicks, who compete strenuously with their own. However, it was found that the parasitized nests thrived relative to those left alone by the cuckoo; and this effect was causally related to the cuckoo chicks themselves, as moving the eggs to other nests moved the beneficient effects as well.

It turns out that cuckoo chicks defecate a kind of black, tarry substance that is incredibly toxic and serves to dissuade predators, resulting in net improved fitness for the host species despite the costs.

Ecological thinking is transforming our understanding of the natural world, and is blurring many of the firm boundaries erected under the old paradigms that fetishisized ‘identity’ and assumed in advance the nature of benefit and harm. The world of software seems perfectly poised for ecological analysis, as many of its fundamental concepts parallel those of biological systems (source code as the genotype to compiled code’s phenotype, for instance).

So what would parasitism in software look like?

[Read more…]

From Cognitive Biases to Institutional Decay

February 12, 2014 By

Kartik is a 2014 blogging resident visiting us from his home turf at akkartik.name.

The past hundred years have transformed how we imagine ourselves. Freud catalyzed a greater emphasis on the unconscious. Kahneman and Tversky inspired a lot of research into how our subconscious biases affect day-to-day decision-making. Between those tectonic shifts, our understanding of our selves has been radically overhauled.

Gone is the Cartesian, centralized mind mystically separated from the physical world. In its place we’re left with a schizophrenic brain inextricably bound to the body and, at bottom, nothing but atoms. We’re still struggling to work out the implications of this new perception for different areas of human endeavor. Building effective institutions is one of them.

[Read more…]

An Information Age Glossary

February 7, 2014 By

We live in an information-rich environment, but our minds are still wired for an environment of information scarcity. It still hasn’t really hit us that in the last 20 years, we’ve experienced a transformation that is as dramatic for our brains as climbing out of the water and learning to breathe air was for our ancient fishy ancestors. 

For the past year or so, I seem to have been unconsciously retooling my thinking and writing to operate in an information-rich environment. A big part of such cognitive ret0oling is  learning to favor particular terms (or unusual redefinitions of existing terms), and deprecating older terms and meanings that assume information scarcity. 

I figure it is time to get more conscious and deliberate about the retooling, so I am sharing the current state of my glossary. Proposals for new terms, or refinements of definitions welcome. I’ll edit this post for a while, and if people find it useful, we can try to figure out a more permanent home for it.

Very little of this is original to me by the way. I’ve credited people where I can, but a lot of this is the outcome of conversations with people I am not at liberty to cite publicly. So you can credit me for any substance here, and blame these invisible collaborators for any bullshit.

Related: I’ve wanted a CMS dedicated to creating shared glossaries for a long time, and even took a half-hearted stab at building one with a friend. I’d enthusiastically support any such effort.

[Read more…]

Technical Debt of the West

January 28, 2014 By

Kevin is a 2013 blogging resident visiting us from his home blog over at Melting Asphalt. This is the finale of his residency.

Here’s a recipe for discovering new ideas:

  1. Examine the frames that give structure (but also bias) to your thinking.
  2. Predict, on the basis of #1, where you’re likely to have blind spots.
  3. Start groping around in those areas.

If you can do this with the very deepest frames — those that constrain not just your own thinking, but your entire civilization’s — you can potentially unearth a treasure trove of insight. You may not find anything 100% original (ideas that literally no one else has ever seen), but whatever you find is almost guaranteed to be underappreciated.

In his lecture series The Tao of Philosophy, Alan Watts sets out to do just this for Western civilization. He wants to examine the very substrate of our thinking, in order to understand and correct for our biases.

So what is the substrate of Western thought?

[Read more…]

Consent of the Surveilled

January 10, 2014 By

I’ve been interested in the question of governance under conditions of mass physical mobility for a while. The interest is partly selfish, since I am one of those people with a romantic longing for a nomadic lifestyle. But now, there are better reasons to ask the question.

In 2012, for the first time in history, there were over a billion international tourist arrivals worldwide. Chinese tourists led the way, spending $100B of a market of over a trillion dollars. The data isn’t in yet, but it seems like 2013 might turn out to have been another record-breaking year. And that’s just the beginning. What has started as a tourism boom is likely to end as a secular lifestyle shift enabled by mobile digital technologies. In a few decades, we might be living in a world where at any given time, only half the nominal population of a country is actually living and working in that country. A world with far fewer “vacations” but a lot more (and more extended) travel. At least, I hope that’s the direction we’re headed.

Mobility, especially across jurisdictional boundaries, both domestic and international, is a problem for governments because it interrupts or complicates their ability to govern. This is why the forced settlement of illegible nomadic peoples is an essential part of any serious history of governance.

As Julius Caesar once said, “hold still dammit, so I can see and rule you!”

But thanks to surveillance technologies —  and this is the silver lining to the Snowden affair — soon we might not need to hold still. Those of us who want to might be able to become nomads without dropping out of society.

[Read more…]

For New Readers

This is a start page for writing by me (Venkatesh Rao) on this blog. For writing by guests, check out the Contributors page. I started it in 2007 (here’s some background), and as of February 2022, it has 1061 posts totaling almost 2 million words. For an easier introduction, try my ebook collections. Here are some of my better-known posts:

  1. The Gervais Principle
  2. A Big Little Idea Called Legibility
  3. Welcome to the Future Nauseous
  4. King Ruinous and the City of Darkness
  5. The Premium Mediocre Life of Maya Millennial
  6. The Internet of Beefs

Ready to binge?

The ribbonfarm archives are organized into 6-year-long “ages”. We are currently in the last year of the third age of ribbonfarm, (2019-2024), the Charnel Age.

If you want some reading inspiration, check out the Now Reading page, where I track what I am reading.