2025-07-14 17:03:00
Sooner or later, we are all superheroes.
Superman wears a costume. As we all do.
He isn’t great at time management, always focused on the urgency at hand instead of investing in long-term planning.
He rarely works to change the foundational system he’s part of.
Supervillians exist in opposition to him and his work. Without him, they have no purpose.
He has a closely-guarded secret identity he doesn’t want the world to see.
Reputation, trust and good work are at the heart of his brand.
He misses home. In fact, his uniform is made from his baby blanket.
When technology evolves, he gains new powers.
In the official narrative, the Bechdel test is rarely passed. We can tell better stories than that.
His best exploits involve thoughtful strategy. The punching is boring.
When it counts, he shows up with bravery.
His most important relationships are based on mutual trust.
It turns out that bending steel with his bare hands is a distraction from the real point.
2025-07-13 16:54:00
They can carry us away, amplify our work or slowly change everything around us. These arcs can easily become invisible forces, pushing us to make choices and to ignore their origins or consequences.
Capitalism is the most common one, along with its shadow, industrialism. We show up on behalf of the invisible hand, engaging with the market in search of profit and productivity. It begins by serving the market, but can become soulless industrialism. The work can be focused on finding a need and filling it. Or it can shift to “I’m just doing my job,” and “If I don’t do it, somebody else will…”
Technology evolves as a species, and we either work for it or against it. The folks who enabled the internet to go from five minutes to eight hours of our day were working on behalf of this now-visible and increasingly dominant cultural force.
Scarcity is the path of power. Connection is the way toward abundance. Connection creates culture and possibility, while the inverse, scarcity, creates a kind of value. Some work to create status roles and monopolies and the leverage that we have over others, while others work toward resilience and mutual support.
Justice is the one that Reverend Parker argued for. It doesn’t happen by itself, and it doesn’t always support the three other arcs, but with effort, we have the chance to bend it.
Which ones are pushing you forward and narrating your days?
2025-07-12 17:03:00
There isn’t much of a correlation between how fast you swim and how much energy you put into it.
In fact, drowning people burn plenty of calories but they don’t go anywhere.
When we’re confronting a new problem, more effort might not be the answer.
It could be that we benefit by staying calm and focusing on our technique instead.
2025-07-11 21:30:11
[written by claude.]
Here’s the thing about ChatGPT that nobody wants to admit:
It’s not intelligent. It’s something far more interesting.
Back in the 1950s, a Russian linguist named Roman Jakobson walked into a Harvard classroom and found economic equations on the blackboard. Instead of erasing them, he said, “I’ll teach with this.”
Why? Because he understood something profound: language works like an economy. Words relate to other words the same way supply relates to demand.
Fast forward seventy years. We built machines that prove Jakobson right.
In the 1980s, professors with unpronounceable names wrote dense books about how language is a system of signs pointing to other signs. How meaning doesn’t come from the “real world” but from the web of relationships between words themselves.
Everyone thought this was academic nonsense.
Turns out, it was a blueprint for ChatGPT.
We keep asking: “Is it intelligent? Does it understand?”
Wrong questions.
Better question: “How does it create?”
Because here’s what’s actually happening inside these machines: They’re mapping the statistical relationships between every word and every other word in human culture. They’re building a heat map of how language actually works.
Not how we think it should work. How it does work.
A Large Language Model doesn’t write poems. It writes poetry.
What’s the difference?
Poetry is the potential that lives in language itself—the way words want to dance together, the patterns that emerge when you map meaning mathematically.
A poem is what happens when a human takes that potential and shapes it with intention.
The machine gives us the raw material. We make the art.
Two groups are having the wrong argument:
The AI boosters think we’re building digital brains. The AI critics think we’re destroying human authenticity.
Both are missing the point.
We’re not building intelligence. We’re building culture machines. Tools that can compress and reconstruct the patterns of human expression.
That’s not a bug. It’s the feature.
Instead of fearing these machines or anthropomorphizing them, we could learn to read them.
They’re showing us something we’ve never seen before: a statistical map of human culture. The ideological patterns that shape how we think and write and argue.
Want to understand how conspiracy theories spread? Ask the machine to write about mathematics and watch it drift toward culture war talking points.
Want to see how certain ideas cluster together in our collective imagination? Feed it a prompt and trace the semantic pathways it follows.
We need a new kind of literacy. Not just reading and writing, but understanding how these culture machines work. How they compress meaning. How they generate new combinations from old patterns.
We need to become rhetoricians again. Students of how language shapes reality.
Because these machines aren’t replacing human creativity.
They’re revealing how human creativity actually works.
The future belongs to those who can read the poetry in the machine.
Based on a post by Henry Farrell
2025-07-11 16:27:00
What’s possible and what’s required? It’s still surprising to me that some of these ideas aren’t widely held, because they seem so clear to me:
Skill is a choice. Talent is overrated, and if we choose to get better at something, we probably can.
Responsibility is a privilege. It’s not given to us, it’s taken. When we choose to be on the hook for something, it makes our work better.
The benefit of the doubt creates connection. When we exclude people based on surface judgments, we penalize each other.
Agency is our recognition of all three of these ideas, in one.
2025-07-10 17:03:00
