I use this newsletter to explore the ideas that drive my own platform, Clusta, for developing new ideas. If you’d like to see how I use Clusta, here’s how I developed this article. To try it yourself, you’re very welcome to sign up.

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This is my personal favourite from a list of film ideas sent to John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion from Disney’s ‘imagineers’. Dunne shares that his contact in the imagineers, a middle aged ex-private investigator, said the worst part of the role was being known as an imagineer.

I think what I enjoy most about this anecdote (beyond the comedic value of the ideas themselves) is how much rests in the one to two pieces of paper faxed through to Dunne and Didion, with a handful of one-line ideas that could result in a piece of cinema of which millions are invested, and hundreds of millions made.

What is also striking to me is that this is all Disney could do. They can invest a great deal in imagineers themselves, but the best system they could create for their output is a few lines on an A4 page.

It touches on a broader issue, that we aren’t taught what to do with our ideas. We learn in school how to take notes, practice studying for memory - but the idea of organising information for our own designs, for bringing the disparate parts of ourselves and our interests into a single space, not at the request of someone else, is for many a foreign concept.

I had the great privilege of working as an assistant lecturer for a period after graduating my Bachelor’s degree. My role was primarily focused on supporting students to develop their dissertation ideas in seminar-style sessions.

The number one challenge that students faced was breaking away from dissertation ideas they thought were expected of them, trying to reach for a brief, rather than leaning into what they themselves were passionate about.

For many, a university dissertation is the first opportunity to combine passion directly with education, and the adjustment can be difficult.

But developing this skill is crucial for life beyond university. It doesn’t just help us become good employees, it gives us a guiding vision of the work we really want to do, and helps us to connect our passion into our lives, which ultimately allows us to produce our best and most original work.

Developing a system

In Albert Read’s The Imagination Muscle, he shares a fascinating work by the philosopher Johannes Tetens, a relatively unknown philosopher but apparent inspiration of Immanuel Kant, who attempted to describe the process of how we develop new ideas.

Briefly, he split this process into three parts:

Discovery - taking in new experiences, and being inspired by them. This could be going for a walk, reading a good book, an apple falling on your head.

Pegasus - this is all about connection, like a horse and wings (hence, pegasus.)

Fusion - this is the creation of something new from those connections. Tetens speaks to the rarity of a moment of fusion, making it perhaps akin to the ‘Eureka’ moment we are more familiar with.

As someone who helps people to develop their own systems of ideas, I was fascinated with Tetens’ interpretation of this creative process. However, preceding even this fascination was how much it hit home to me that we almost never hear about the process of developing new ideas described beyond the ‘discovery’ stage of this process.

Clearly, this first stage is essential, but it feels that often developing new ideas is simply about continuing to ‘discover’ until a moment of fusion or ‘eureka’ occurs - if we’re lucky!

Read writes about Thomas Edison, a famously avid inventor, creating hundreds of original designs and prototypes. He had a system of noting down his ideas, and regularly returned to old ideas in order to inform and inspire ideas he was working on today.

His company had many workers, and the primary performance indicator of these employees was the amount of ideas they could produce, with an expectation in the hundreds.

I find it extraordinary how foreign this concept is today. When was the last time you heard of a job posting that wanted you to produce ideas in volume? Have you ever heard of a job like that?

It almost feels like regression - Edison’s system to Disney’s A4 page of huge bunnies.

At the very least, it’s a shift of culture. In today’s climate, the onus is on producing the one big eureka moment, the fusion, as a singular moment. The idea of producing ideas in volume, and iterating upon them, is far more foreign to us than to Edison.

But there are murmurs of a shift. Meta’s own Jimmie Stone, head of their ‘Creative Shop’ which works in brand strategy, spoke recently of the importance of a ‘system of ideas’ over ‘the next big idea’.

The thinking behind this? Ideas can compound over time. Much like Edison, even the ideas which never make it to reality can continue to contribute to the framing and consideration of future ideas, and they allow us to continually exercise a muscle which will ultimately make us better designers of new ideas.

A creative edge is a competitive advantage, this is something that people who work in branding are acutely aware of today.

Pegasus

So, how do we build this system of ideas? Returning to Tetens, we need to expand on the missing piece of the puzzle: pegasus, or connecting.

We need to make time and space to connect wings to horses, to combine the experiences and inspirations that come from discovery and combine them into new structures and combinations.

What this is is a process: a process which allows us to create improbable, unique connections, and to allow those connections to compound over time.

The truth about fusion, and where perhaps my philosophy of ideas differs from Tetens, is that it isn’t a complete and discrete entity. Instead, fusion is made up of amalgamated pegasi, with multicoloured wings, creating new shapes in murmuration.

If you’d like to try developing your own system of ideas, or a system for your organisation, drop me a line - I’d be delighted to show you how we facilitate this very process with Clusta.

In the meantime, take a peek into my system of ideas for how I develop these articles (and more) here: app.clusta.live/rhizome

I use this newsletter to explore the ideas that drive my own platform, called Clusta, for developing new ideas. If you’d like to see how I use Clusta, here’s how I developed this article. If you’d like to try it yourself, you’re very welcome to sign up.

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In the philosophy of mind, there is a concept known as the ‘hard’ problem, which refers to our attempt to understand how the mind and body connect.

I always found the naming of this concept amusing - the idea that within philosophy, an area of study quite famous for its lack of concrete answers, there lies a distinctly ‘hard’ problem, amongst a comparatively easy (yet still unsolvable) set of quandaries.

But this hard problem can be extended further, to describe the barrier we perceive between what is abstract and what is discrete.

Something discrete is a box. A real box, which we can count the sides of, and measure the length.

Something abstract is a memory, a sensation - an idea.

We cannot count their sides, nor measure their length, although we certainly try. The existence of the hard problem itself comes from an attempt to categorise the full anatomy of a conscious being. You may be familiar with Descartes (‘I think, therefore I am’) - he is attributed as the first philosopher to define this separation between mind and body, and consequently created the hard problem we have been stuck with since.

This goes some way to understanding the paradox of this separation, whether it be mind and body or discrete and abstract. We understand to some degree that ideas are abstract, and yet we see the very real impact they have on the world around us. Whether this be feats of architecture, political movements, a remarkably effective vacuum cleaner, the products of ideas surround us wherever we go. It is not that these supposedly opposing forces don’t connect, it is that we don’t understand their connection.

We cannot count the sides of an idea, but we know they exist. In philosophy, the study of existence, or being, is called ontology. Ideas exist, and so we can (attempt) to understand their ontology.

Representation

Whilst we may struggle to grasp the shape of ideas themselves, through art, literature and academia, we have a rich history of representing ideas in order to communicate them. We cannot measure an idea, but we can count the pages of a book.

The book is one of the longest standing artefacts of ideas, and Foucault provides my favourite quote on the ontology of the book:

“The frontiers of a book are never clear-cut: beyond the title, the first lines, and the last full stop, beyond its internal configuration and its autonomous form, it is caught up in a system of references to other books, other texts, other sentences: it is a node within a network.”

- Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Language

Whilst it may seem that the book is pulling ideas into the realm of the discrete, Foucault argues here that the opposite is happening: the ideas within the book are extending the ontology of the book, into ‘a system of references to other books, other texts, other sentences… a node within a network.’

It seems, at first glance, the best way to understand the shape of an idea is to represent it in discrete form. But perhaps the discrete is more abstract than we think.

Relationism

Julian Baggini provides what I think is the most accessible description of relationism in his excellent book How the World Thinks, and I highly recommend reading the full book. But I will attempt to paraphrase:

When you look at the label on an item you buy from the supermarket, you will see the set of ingredients used, and the amounts of sugar, carbohydrates, fat etc, which we often use to judge the health value of an item. However, depending on the combination of ingredients, or elements, which make up an item of food, these elements might be more or less healthy.

A certain amount of sugar can be found in both an apple and a chocolate bar, but we recognise their health benefits greatly differ. This is because of the relationships between the sugar and the other elements that make up the apple and chocolate.

The concept of relationism pushes this to its very limits at an ontological level. Nothing in the universe exists in isolation, anything and everything we can think of depends on anything and everything else in order to exist.

Every colour has a shape, and every shape a colour.

It is easy to comprehend something abstract existing as relationism dictates. Ideas are the epitome of this, their existence made up of connections, references, nodes in a network. But relationism argues that everything, even a box or a book, falls into this definition of existence. Books need paper, that need trees, that need water, that need an atmosphere, that needs a healthy planet, that needs climate scientists, that need books.

A box needs the fundamental laws of physics in order to maintain its structural integrity. You get the idea.

The shape of an idea

To understand the ontology of an idea, we have to understand the ontology of one thing that is made up of many things.

My favourite writing on this is Deleuze’s concept of the ‘multiplicity’ in A Thousand Plateaus. Let’s jump off the deep end:

“A multiplicity has neither subject nor object, only determinations, magnitudes, and dimensions that cannot increase in number without the multiplicity changing in nature (the laws of combination therefore increase in number as the multiplicity grows).”

- Deleuze, Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

You’d be hard pressed to describe anything Deleuze has ever written as a light read, this probably doesn’t buck the trend. Let me extrapolate what I think is most interesting about what he’s saying here, when it comes to the ontology of ideas:

The structure of a multiplicity, as Deleuze describes, is something where the content and structure are the same. To add or change the content of a multiplicity is to change its structure. To change its structure, you have to change its content.

We don’t have spaces to express ideas that combine structure and content. The world today exists in the image of the spreadsheet, the database. We create columns, and we insert rows into a table with the information defined by those columns. Even the book, the essay, the monograph, whilst much less rigid, demands a linear argument, a story, point example analysis.

For us to construct ideas in their image, we must create information which is both content and structure, column and row, and have their value as these be defined by the relationships between them.

And if we can construct ideas, we can design them.

Anyway, here’s how I designed this article: https://app.clusta.live/rhizome/spark/a3527fbb-346c-4fcd-b4c5-e9f3bc71c31d

I use this newsletter to explore the ideas that drive my own platform, called Clusta, for developing new ideas. If you’d like to see how I use Clusta, here’s how I developed this article. If you’d like to try it yourself, you’re very welcome to sign up.

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I cracked out the walkie talkies the other week.

Of course, my housemate and I could just WhatsApp each other if we want to meet in the kitchen. We know that. But where’s the fun? Where’s the challenge? Where’s the spending half an hour getting on the same frequency?

I couldn’t tell you how long it’s been since I booted them up. I’ve had them since I was a teenager, but I’ve faithfully kept them close, in my obligatory box of miscellaneous wires and chargers and tech-y stuff that doesn’t have a purpose right now, but looks awfully important.

It’s somewhat amusing to imagine this process of re-engaging with walkie talkies as if they were part of the paradigm of the digital tools and platforms we use today.

Imagine you switch them on, and a few minutes go by. The ding and buzz comes through on your phone. You open up your email.

“Hey, Ethan, great to have you back! Here’s 10 ways {{people}} in {{London}} are using Bosch walkie talkies today.”

Then, of course, the initial walkie talkie excitement fades. One of the talkies runs out of battery. WhatsApp’s punishingly convenient mode of communication rears its head, as it inevitably would.

A day goes by, and then:

“Hey, Ethan! We noticed you haven’t tried our most exciting new features…”

And we know how the story goes. Three-to-five more emails like these, and eventually silence. Hey, they tried, and their customer engagement funnel not only increased user retention by 27%, over 12% of re-engaged users were successfully upsold.

Those poor souls have walkie talkie range boosters, multi-charge stations, they’re being arrested for interfering with radio transmissions from the international space station.

Thankfully, this is all just a bad dream. No one knows when, how or why I booted up those walkie talkies. No one knows the precise detail of the thrill, the child-like joy I found in discovering how simple technological tools can open a sandbox for my imagination.

Bad Dreams

Strange, I thought the bad dream was over.

And yet, the emails persist. But it isn’t the walkie talkies. It’s Spotify, Instagram, the email client I tried one time because I go from zero to two-thousand unread emails in a couple of weeks.

It would be simple to say that the people who run these platforms are evil. Sure, they probably are, but that isn’t the root cause of why we can’t have relationships with digital technology like we do with walkie talkies.

Technofeudalism, a term back in the zeitgeist thanks to Yanis Varoufakis, describes the current state of the digital landscape, where those who provide digital platforms through the internet must pay recurring fees to one of the big players of data centres, like AWS or Google, in order to serve their platform from servers. This subscription is then passed on to the user, who ultimately foots the bill.

Or at least, that’s the idea. More often than not, the biggest digital tech companies are never profitable, and instead raise eye-watering sums of money from venture capitalists in order to keep the lights on. Think OpenAI or Uber.

The subscription-model universe is the true villain here. Using Spotify once every few years is useless to Daniel Ek. He needs you slurping up new albums, radios and artists all day and all night. Keep it on while you sleep, or tomorrow is the day the music will truly die.

But where are we, the users, in all this?

Is using something as much as possible the same as finding something valuable? This surely depends on the the thing you are using. But in the digital world today, this is the only kind of value we measure.

But what range of value could digital spaces offer if they broke free from this paradigm?

Buttered Toast

One of my favourite things about philosophy is the fantastic words you come across that you wouldn’t have done otherwise. One of those words is qualia.

I remember one of my first philosophy teachers, Dave, would always use the example of the smell of buttered toast to explain qualia.

Qualia isn’t the smell of buttered toast itself, it’s his experience of the smell of buttered toast. It’s the creation of ‘something’ in your mind’s eye, when your nose smells buttered toast. That something is qualia.

When we measure the ‘success’ of a digital space, we do so through representative means. The number of daily active users, interactions, length of sessions, is meant to demonstrate meaning as to the positive experiences, or qualia, of its users.

But these same measures could be applied to casinos, or cigarettes, but we wouldn’t attribute their ‘success’ to a positive experience for the user.

The reality is that these measures are correlative, and could represent extreme addiction as well as they could some kind of near-euphoric value.

We build digital tools to maximise these statistics, but what if we stopped doing that. What if we built purely for the experience of the user, and no more?

The Cybernetic

There is a common thread between the technology I have used in my life which has given me the most joy. A bit like the walkie talkie, they extend a small part of myself, and in doing so, inspire my imagination to explore ideas I wouldn’t have been able to otherwise.

It is easy to forget, in the world of multi-billions and unicorns, that technology is not inherently valuable. It is only valuable because of us, because of the people who use the technology.

I have worked as a digital community manager for over three years, and the guiding principle I held with my work was understanding that a community is a group of people first, and any digital platform we use is simply an extension of that.

We often get this the wrong way around. We build technology, and then we coax people onto it to make it into something valuable, to prove it should receive additional funding.

But I want to see digital platforms more like walkie talkies. Even if I only use it once a year, the qualia I possess from using it is, to me, infinite in value.

I think about this idea a great deal, because I am building a platform to support people’s creative process.

This is a delicate value in many ways. So much of the joy of creativity comes from its mystery. We do not understand entirely how we are able to synthesise new ideas and bring them into the world, nor do we completely understand what drives our desire to do this.

I don’t want to solve this mystery with Clusta, I want to celebrate it. I want to create a digital space where your creativity is welcomed, but not forced. Like how one of those mechanical hand grabbers can help you reach the top shelf, I want Clusta to help your imaginative mind explore the possibilities and connections between what were once disparate ideas, and ponder something new.

The beauty of creativity is you never know when things will come together. It is delicate, and not readily available.

As such, there is no use measuring Clusta as a platform in terms of consistent usage, or depth of usage. Indeed, there is almost no point in measuring Clusta at all.

I built Clusta because I wanted a space that matched the structure of how my creative mind works. It is a joy to use, and others who use it have found this same joy.

The value of imagining a world free of technofeudalist subscription isn’t just that we can stop bothering everybody to keep using digital platforms all day - it’s that we can imagine digital spaces that have value completely separate to what is out there now.

Clusta doesn’t fit easily into the current world of digital technology. But people will always be creative, and they will always have the drive to put something into the world that didn’t exist today.

The human spirit will outlast your sales funnel, and it will only be stronger for it.

I use this newsletter to explore the ideas that drive my own platform, called Clusta, for developing new ideas. If you’d like to see how I use Clusta, here’s how I developed this article. If you’d like to try it yourself, you’re very welcome to sign up.

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I remember the day I first googled ‘CRM’ - short for Customer Relationship Management. Here’s the definition given when I searched the same question today:

“Customer relationship management is a process in which a business or other organization administers its interactions with customers, typically using data analysis to study large amounts of information.”

Wikipedia

That’s essentially what I read when I first searched for it too, about three years ago. I remember thinking then: what does that mean?

You may have come across the term CRM. But you, like me back then, may not know what it is, or how it impacts a majority of your daily life.

The more human-friendly definition of CRM is this: as a business, you have a ‘relationship’ with your customers which goes through different stages. For example, someone has visited your website once, and may be a potential customer, whilst someone else has been subscribed to your service for over five years, and is a brand ambassador. A CRM aims to track the stages of the relationship between a business and a customer, and how that relationship changes over time.

CRM has become much more than this. You can build websites, take payments, manage grant programmes, pretty much anything that began as tracking the relationship between you and a ‘customer’ of some kind has billowed out into different products and offerings from CRM companies.

The value of this relationship tracking is segmentation. If you can segment your customers and/or potential customers, you can advertise and communicate to them in a more targeted way. Netflix, for example, can use viewing history to advertise different films to subscribers. But Netflix can also use age, location, gender, and other personal attributes to do this too. It is this kind of data which is the bread and butter of CRM.

Today, every company has a CRM. When you sign up for something, even visit a website, a record of you is updated or created, to be added to and padded out, and create the most comprehensive picture of ‘you’ that they can.

That’s more than enough on CRM, back to Baudrillard.

Henry Ford’s Goldilocks

The System of Objects is a wonderful evisceration of the advertising industry, and an excellent explanation of how it arose from industrialisation.

In Henry Ford’s assembly line, you had the car-door-making-machine, that comes after the car-body-making-machine, and after that the wheel-fitting-machine. It doesn’t matter that the aluminium for the car door could be melted and moulded and turned into a sculpture, or an armchair. It’s a car door, that’s what it is. Once it’s done being a car door, it will be thrown in a landfill, because it can only be a car door, and if it can’t be that, then it’s trash.

But the assembly line doesn’t stop when the car is built. Now the car needs to slot into its correct place in the world. It needs to find the person who wants it, who slots into the driver’s seat just right. A Goldilocks, if you will.

Who needs a Ford? A man, in his forties, mid-career with disposable income. He has a wife and kids, a dog too. Let’s get more specific. He lives in Ontario, he’s got an old Ford model currently, he works in the finance industry. His name is David.

David is like the car door. He is a part of the assembly line. He sits in the segment of ‘people who will buy a Ford’ - if he can’t be that, then he’s trash.

And this relationship goes both ways. Not only do Ford sell their car, but the Ford David buys becomes a representation of his own identity. Owning a Ford means David is part of the segment of people who ‘should’ own a Ford. People who have disposable income in their mid-forties, who need the extra space in the boot for the dog, the extra seat for the kids. David is a success. David is winning.

Baudrillard’s quote goes on from what is written at the beginning of this article - he says next: “they [objects] police social meaning.” David’s identity being defined by his ownership of a Ford is exactly what Baudrillard means by this.

Our world is built on the image of the assembly line. The ecological movement already recognises the inherent challenge this creates with objects and materials themselves, with the single-use and non-recyclable nature of this system creating the climate crisis we currently find ourselves in.

What is talked about less today, and why Baudrillard’s work is so relevant, is that this same effect applies to people too.

To sit on the assembly line requires you to be single-use. The car, and the car buyer. But, like the objects we buy, we are not single use. Not only can we change, but we can be multiple things at once.

Today, in the digital world, it is CRM systems which uphold the authoritarian assembly-line image of the world, and keep us locked into a single-use vision of our identity. The ads you see on Instagram, the recommendations you see on Netflix, the posts promoted on social media, these are all based on the single-use description of your identity which has been reduced to a row on a spreadsheet, with multiple-choice columns set to define your very essence.

You are irreducible

Each time I update my LinkedIn profile, I feel this strain against the rigidity of the questions it asks me:

What do you do?

When did you start this job?

When did you finish?

What skills did you use?

Which certificates do you have?

Can’t I be multiple things at once? Can’t I do nothing? Can’t I do something which isn’t quite this, but isn’t quite that either?

I have worked as a CRM manager for three years, and I can tell you for a fact that updating your LinkedIn profile is no different to updating the record of an individual in a CRM system.

I feel this strain because I am not simply my job title. I am a researcher, a writer, a film-maker, a community manager, a web developer, an artist. These do not feel disparate to me, and I do not want to choose between them. I want to live, and work, with the ability to pursue all of these and more. I do not want to do some simply as hobbies, because I believe they are all expressions of values that I hold, and goals I want to achieve.

Something I have been wanting to do for a long time is explain how I use my own platform, Clusta, to bring all these seemingly disparate parts of my life into a single place.

I have a Collection on Clusta, called Rhizome. The name is inspired by Deleuze’s concept of the rhizome, which explores a system of information which does not conform to categorisation, inspired by mycorrhizal root systems of mycelium (mushrooms!)

You can explore my collection here - but before you do, read on for some thoughts of how best to interpret the space.

You will arrive at the ‘home page’ of the collection - I have pinned eight cards here, where you will see titles for film-making, writing, coding, research, my work on Clusta itself, and more.

Where to go? Where to start? That is up to you. Click on the card that best aligns with your intention, your intuition.

The card you click on will become the centre of the screen. You will find more cards connected around it. Apply the same process again when considering where to click next.

From here, you can begin exploring. Read what I’ve written, click links to webpages, view the images I’ve attached.

You may find, after some exploring, that you find another of my titled cards from the home page connected to a card you have centred. This is how Clusta supports me to be many things at once: information is not segmented away into one specific branch, it can be connected to multiple cards at once, and as the connection is bi-directional, you can take these meandering, circular journeys between parts of your work that were once disparate, but are no longer.

Here’s the link to my collection again, if you’re now ready to explore.

The message in the medium

In Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman writes “don’t just look at the way things are being expressed, look at how the way things are expressed determines what’s actually expressible.” On LinkedIn, you simply cannot express yourself as an individual with multitudes. On Clusta, you can.

The information you enter into Clusta lives in a system that liberates it from categorisation. There is no hierarchy to information, only bi-directional connections between these small chunks within the cards. The meaning of any card is defined by the relationships it has with the cards it is connected to, and these connections can shift and change as you, the user, shift and change.

It is such an immense struggle to live in a way that lets you explore multiple fields, interests and professions. Terms such as multidisciplinary and generalist are quietly picking up steam, but there is a certainty to the world of the assembly line that is so tempting to be drawn back into.

I believe that we might make this jump, to truly be our unique, irreducible selves, if we can see new systems created in the image of a world that works for people, and where people no longer work for products. Clusta is built in this image, maybe it will inspire you.

Thanks so much for reading. If you’d like to explore my research for this article and other stuff I’m reading / working on, I have it all collated on Clusta - my own platform that helps you develop your best ideas.

Check it out, and sign up (for free) if you’d like to try it yourself!

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“Efficiency and invention are sort of at odds… real invention, real lateral thinking, that requires wandering.”

- Jeff Bezos

I was surprised to hear Jeff, Mr Efficiency himself, utter these words. It surprised me even more how much time he dedicated to this inventive process in a rare long-form interview. But as I thought on it further, it made more and more sense that the process of invention, creativity, imagination, would be at the forefront of Bezos’ mind

He may be Mr Efficiency, but Amazon today can deliver packages to billions of people within a matter of hours. Any gains that could be made on their freakishly, disturbingly efficient process offer diminishing returns against the promise of the next big breakthrough - the next spark which will tip Amazon, and the world, on its head.

Can you name one piece of software, solution, service, which promises the same gains in the creative realm as we readily see for efficiency and productivity? Name me the Salesforce, the Asana, for the ‘efficiency’ gains made to the development of original, valuable ideas.

Of course, you can’t. I can’t. No one can. The realm of new, original ideas - their discovery and development - exists in a realm outside of efficiency and productivity in the sense that we have come to understand them, as Jeff highlights in his original quote.

Software offers ‘inspiration engines’ - displaying new and somewhat surprising content to someone in the hope the collision with their subconscious will inspire a new idea. McLuhan’s DEW cards, Bowie’s Verbasizer software, and now generative AI all provide methods for this.

There is no revolution to be found in these solutions. You are no better an ideator for using these than you were before. They offer an alternative to going for a walk.

You cannot Google this problem and find a revolutionary solution only the digital world could deliver. You’ll find mind maps and overly complicated systems to organise notes into a deep, dark chasm from which they’ll never return.

No wonder, then, that Jeff spends such time considering new ideas. Any improvement he could make to his ability to have original ideas is open road: free real estate in competitive advantage, value immeasurable.

The world of computers has transformed efficiency. Global operations and logistics have elevated to a level beyond anything conceivable before the digital age. Why can’t the digital space achieve the same for creativity? Why can’t it facilitate anyone in the world to become an expert ideator?

The lack of a solution stems from an obsession with a kind of efficiency that permeates the entire software industry. The idea of building software with any kind of business case that isn’t aiming to maximise efficiency and reduce process wherever possible is inconceivable. The total and overwhelming obsession with AI is testament to this.

Creating a space that allows someone to wander warrants two bold decisions in product design: a focus on interface, and a distinct lack of AI. A platform that lets you go somewhere, but isn’t aiming to speed anything up. There is no sense of progress, of time running out, or a finish line in sight. A place to add to, to re-arrange, to return to, to return to again. A place to wander.

A platform for creativity must also commit to a subjective experience. The world is in search of an objective best practice for organising and exploring information - but when it comes to creativity, it is in the uniqueness and diversity of perspective, of the subjective, that value is found. The best way to resurface the perfect information at the perfect time is to let people return to it themselves, to wander there under their own steam, using their own intuition.

These are the principles with which I’ve built an inefficient platform - Clusta. How could I not? My obsession and my drive to create this lie in a fascination with this truly enormous blindspot in an entire industry. It is as though the world has given up on facilitating creativity, a mystery the computing industry has no business involving itself in.

Computers used to be for scientists and bankers, Macintosh gave computers to artists too. Software today has revolutionised operations. Clusta is software’s revolution for ideation.

Thanks for reading - Check out my collection on Clusta to see my ideas and research - for this article, and beyond…

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Thanks so much for reading - if you’d like to explore my research for this article and other stuff I’m reading / working on, I have it all collated on my platform, Clusta. Check it out, and sign up if you’d like to try it yourself!

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For the makers of digital platforms, new features can be incredibly useful:

• They provide increased ‘value’ to a platform, potentially allowing you to raise prices

• They offer onboarding ‘guardrails’ - implicitly suggesting both why to use the platform, and who the platform is for

What this implies is that the only path to offering users ‘more’ in a certain platform, is by increasing the number of features available in said platform.

But what if this wasn’t the only way to offer users more from a platform?

We tend to see platforms in a business-focused context - how can this platform solve a certain problem? How can it solve it better, for more people? This context lends itself to a feature-heavy product.

But a platform and a business are not synonymous. A business owns a platform, but a platform itself is a structure within which we can read and write words, media, art and more. A platform is, first and foremost, a text.

As something that can be read and written, it follows that there is a kind of literacy that is associated with a specific platform. Or rather, an electracy.

Electracy

Coined by Gregory Ulmer, his most succinct description of electracy explains that it “is to digital media what literacy is to print.”

At its core, electracy deals with the idea that there is an element of artistic practice in the creation and reading of digital media that extends beyond the purely rational, scientific literary systems - specifically the alphanumeric system of written language (words and numbers).

Ulmer utilised the concept to explore a new kind of pedagogy (methods of teaching) that could promote a more diverse and inclusive learning experience. This pedagogy allows students to construct objects of digital media as an expression of their learning, breaking out from the traditional academic framework of exams and essay-writing.

Rather than exploring the learning experience, I want to consider electracy in communicative practice - reading and writing.

I want to consider how the artistic practice of digital platform design can revolutionise written language.

Liberating words

Ulmer’s electracy was inspired by Jacques Derrida’s concept of grammatology.

I know, I know - who wants to read the word ‘grammatology’? At least ‘electracy’ had some zing to it. Bear with me, we’ll be back to digital platforms in just a moment.

In Derrida’s Of Grammatology, he proposes a controversial, yet fascinating idea about the relationship between speech and the written word.

Derrida critiques 19th century thinker Ferdinand de Saussure, who defined the relationship between spoken and written language hierarchically - spoken language was the primary form of language, and written language exists purely as a representation of the spoken.

Derrida, however, took objection to this. He argued that in fact written language did not purely exist to represent spoken language, but that the form and structure of writing influenced the knowledge and ideas we have. According to Derrida, writing has its own, unique, communicative value, separate from speech.

I find this decoupling fascinating because it offers designers of digital platforms a much broader reach of how they can ‘wrap’ written language in a digital space - by breaking away from an expectancy to represent spoken language, we can explore and experiment with structures of written language that is not only possible with written language alone, but only possible with written language in a digital space.

A new way to offer more

Returning to the very start of this article, there is a common notion that the only way to offer users of a platform ‘more’ - be it value, variety etc - is through adding new features.

But it can also have the opposite effect.

As mentioned, one of the values new features provide is this idea of a ‘guardrail’ - an implicit explanation of why to use a platform, and who it is for.

But, as you add more features, this implicit explanation creates more specific why’s, and more specific who’s. The process begins to have a narrowing effect, rather than an expansive one.

Electracy offers us a different avenue. Focus instead on creating a simple, core set of features. We could even step back and look at an analogue example: a paper and pen.

With this core set of features, explore and define human-driven systems for how we can use these features to create objects of expression that can be read by others. A book, a poem, an essay.

The more we create these systems, the more they can evolve: writing and grammar, poetry and meter, essays and paragraphs - and diversify: cut and paste, interactive reading.

By allowing users to find their own systems of electracy, and exposing others to those systems, a platform could have a near-infinite diversity of uses without a single extra line of code.

Well, maybe a bug fix or two.

Thanks for reading! Remember to check out my collection on Clusta to see my research - for this article, and beyond…

Thanks so much for reading - if you’d like to explore my research for this article and other stuff I’m reading / working on, I have it all collated on my platform, Clusta. Check it out, and sign up if you’d like to try it yourself!

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We have all had moments like these. Picture it -

Your shoulders raised. Fingertips slip ever so slightly on the keyboard, as you feel a cold sweat take hold of you.

Your whole body is tense. Time is moving so slowly, yet you can’t escape an overwhelming feeling that time is running out. You think to yourself:

“Where am I?”

Perhaps you clicked the wrong button. Perhaps you don’t know what button you clicked.

Why is the screen black? Why is the screen blue?

Have I paid? Did it work?

That isn’t what’s meant to happen when you scroll???

It is truly a special kind of neurosis - this feeling that we feel when we are ‘lost’ in a digital space. Something hasn’t worked like it’s meant to - you are the one-in-a-billion who found the tiny chink in the armour of legions of Google product managers, who check and test every edge case in the user experience.

I couldn’t tell you what spurred this, but I was recently thinking about how extreme our reactions can be to this situation - and it led me to consider how absent the concept of ‘being lost’ is in the digital space.

Dérive

The term dérive, a French word, literally translates to ‘drifting’ - it is not explicitly to do with getting lost, as I have implied in the headline.

The term was coined originally by Guy Debord in his aptly titled essay Theory of the Dérive. He explains that for someone to perform the act of dérive, they must walk through an urban space “and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there.” (62)

This doesn’t sound particularly radical on the surface. So let us consider what it is not meant to be.

Dérive is not taking in the scenery on the way to work. It is not observing other people on public transport on the way to a specific destination.

Dérive is the act of exploring an urban landscape with specifically no destination, other than the immediate destination created by ‘the attractions of the terrain and the encounters [you] find there’.

At the time, Debord was already outspoken on his criticism of urban landscapes - a physical landscape that has been designed explicitly to enable its inhabitants to participate in the ‘society of the spectacle’ - Debord’s most ubiquitous concept.

There is a great deal of material to read on the society of the spectacle, so for those who are unfamiliar I will keep my definition brief - the society of the spectacle is Debord’s definition for the societal structure that we currently live under, which seeks to turn citizens into passive consumers of commodities through the attention-diverting creation of ‘spectacles’ that utilise aesthetics to achieve their purpose.

Think Times Square, New York - probably the most obvious and literal example of the spectacle. There is little that better encapsulates a spectacle than the gigantic billboards with flashing advertisements. This is why Debord was particularly focused on criticism of urban landscapes, where this kind of landscape design was, and is still, most prominent.

But what has this got to do with dérive?

Dérive is meant to reject the urban landscape’s inclination toward the spectacle, by moving around an urban environment in such a way that the ‘drifter’ will eventually participate in ‘situations’.

These situations, from which the ‘Situationists’ derive their name, are meant to be moments of lived engagement that excite, entertain and enrich their participants, but that fall outside the clutch of any spectacle, due to their unplanned, unexpected creation.

Digital Dérive

I hope you stuck with me through nearly four-hundred words of non-digital theory, but perhaps you can see where I’m going with this:

There is a great deal of comparison to be made between the urban landscapes that receive Debord’s criticism, and the digital spaces we occupy today.

Like urban landscapes, digital spaces are almost entirely artificially constructed ‘spectacles’. Beautiful, sleek design that inspires, shocks, and provides seamless experience. So beautiful you can’t stop looking. So shocking you can’t stop looking. So ___ you can’t stop looking.

The only difference? The digital has no Guy Debord. The digital has no theory of the digital dérive.

There is so much discussion, that seems to only get louder, about the lack of agency and endless harvesting of every moment for profit that we all experience engaging with digital spaces.

Even the counter-culture of this prevailing digital culture, that promotes being ‘trustworthy’ or ‘ethical’ or ‘responsible’ still take out the same advertisements, still implement the same principles of design in order to attract customers.

It has gotten to the point where we are unable to separate someone claiming to be trustworthy from someone utilising the aesthetic of trustworthiness in order to sell to a particular market.

What the practice of dérive offers is a way for us to get off this hamster-wheel of madness.

By participating in a digital dérive, where we explore the internet with intention, and not passivity, we open ourselves to the possibility of participating in situations.

These situations will be moments that excite, that fascinate, that enrich our lived experience in that exact moment.

And those experiences will be ours. They are not artificially constructed, they do not have ulterior motives. They are truly beyond the reach of the spectacle because they are not planned, they are not expected. They sit outside the reach of probability, and are instead utterly, authentically unique.

What’s the easiest way to begin? Stop scrolling, start clicking.

A further suggestion

Before you say it - I appreciate the irony here. But, whilst I usually keep mention of this under wraps in my articles, I feel compelled to share my work, Clusta, as it relates so directly to this concept of digital dérive.

Would you like to experience being lost in a digital space, right now? I use my own platform, Clusta, to create structures of writing that are deliberately made to allow you to get lost.

My dream for Clusta, one day, is for people to see it as a form of written communication in its own right.

That, one day, a writer will decide to write, and they will ask themselves ‘will this be a book, a poem, or a collection?’

That to write a collection is to write sentences that can be read in opposite directions. That to write a collection is to write a text with no start and no end. That to write a collection is to create infinite pathways for the reader from a finite number of words.

That to write a collection is to write, so a reader may drift.

Drift through my collection here, at your leisure.

Thanks for reading! Remember to check out my collection on Clusta to see my research - for this article, and beyond…

Thanks so much for reading - if you’d like to explore my research for this article and other stuff I’m reading / working on, I have it all collated on my platform, Clusta. Check it out, and sign up if you’d like to try it yourself!

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Generally, in these articles, I like to try and explore different and alternative possibilities for digital platforms, tools and communities. I often explore these possibilities in response to prevailing and topical issues in the digital tech space, and I utilise design as a vehicle for them.

Upon hearing the news of Reddit’s community blackouts, currently under effect in response to the new announcement by Reddit’s CEO to monetise access to their API, I felt this was a pertinent subject for an article that explores different possibilities for platform ownership.

(If you aren’t clued up on the situation with Reddit, bear with me - I will provide a brief summary in a moment.)

However, I wasn’t feeling particularly inspired to write about the topic, which I found somewhat strange. It is a topic I have possibly written about and researched more than any other in the digital platform space.

I felt the need to step back for a moment and assess why I wasn’t as keen to write this article as I thought I would be. I landed on two reasons:

• The discourse on platform ownership is tired. It feels like we are still collectively recovering from the amount of discussion and intensity generated by Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover, and I didn’t want to just rehash old arguments because a similar topic was in the news again.

• I began to wonder if my opinion on better alternatives to standard, private ownership of digital platforms had evolved at all since I was last reading and writing about this topic.

It was the latter reason which ultimately helped me find the inspiration to write this article. This Reddit blackout has provided an opportunity to reassess our options for owning, managing and hosting digital platforms in an ethical and responsible way, and I want to consider how my perspective has changed over a turbulent last few months in the space.

The Reddit Blackout: A Recap

I won’t go into too much detail about the different reasons why Reddit users felt the need to boycott the platform in reaction to monetising API access. As a short summary: access to the API for free is ultimately in the spirit of internet culture. Reddit, particularly, is built in the image of the forum interface that defined early, Web 1.0 social networking, and it continues to be a space where people around the world share information, insight and resources freely.

Quick aside - an API (Application Programming Interface) allows developers to access the data stored in Reddit (e.g. a post, which contains text, an author, corresponding subreddit etc.) and plug that data directly into a different application. For example, there is an app called Apollo that offers an alternative interface for browsing Reddit, made possible by this API access.

Reddit’s CEO, Steve Huffman, has fuelled the fire of backlash by his explanation for what is driving this change. He has made it clear he takes inspiration from Elon Musk’s strategy with Twitter to drive monetisation, and that this decision has not been made because Reddit is currently running an untenable business model, but purely to increase margins.

The Easy Response

In the sub-headline I described Reddit’s unfolding story as ‘predictable’. I also described discourse around platform ownership as ‘tired’ just a few paragraphs ago. I use this terminology because this kind of story is becoming more of a trope than a unique narrative - it can be broken down like this:

Owner of private company decides to change digital platform in order to make more money, but this change diminishes the value and experience of the platform for its users.

Yes, we get it: one big platform owner is bad, therefore we should have lots of little owners and that will be good.

This was essentially the thinking behind the influx of users to Mastodon away from Twitter on Elon Musk’s takeover. It was a really fascinating time for those, like me, who are interested in digital platforms and their future, as it gave a true alternative to the prevailing model of platform ownership a run-out.

While I do like and support Mastodon, a platform built with great intentions, in the wash it hasn’t really toppled Twitter, and at this point it doesn’t feel like it’s going to.

I think there are a couple of reasons for this. The interface is a little bit dated, and the overall experience just feels less compared to Twitter or other major platforms.

I also believe that there was an aspect missed in the selling of Mastodon over the issue of ownership. Mastodon was pitched on a model of federated ownership, meaning there are many owners and you can choose which one you want to trust your data with. But as owners in-and-of themselves, there wasn’t any particular value emphasised on their ability to be responsible or ethical as custodians of users’ data.

Yes, it’s true that having the option to take your data and put it elsewhere is a good thing, and one current prevailing platforms don’t provide in the same way. But just having an out isn’t much of a selling point - who wants to be endlessly moving their data around every time they discover the manager of their data is doing a bad job?

As more people migrated to Mastodon, reports arose of confusion over guidelines for certain servers, and strange reasons provided for having content removed.

There seems to be an aspect missing from the piece around platform ownership. We, as users, care about how platform owners manage platforms - that they are managed ethically, responsibly and with the users’ needs in mind.

Intrinsically connected to this, is the framework with which platform owners communicate with users. We care about transparency and accountability.

But what could this framework be?

Answers in Unexpected Places

I wrote an article a little while ago on curation as an alternative to algorithm in how we discover digital content, and I did some exploration into the culture on Twitch, the streaming platform.

During my research, I came across a particular category of content that seemed to be quite popular at the time: Twitch unban appeals.

It wasn’t what I was looking for, but I was curious. I work as a moderator of a digital platform, so any new example of moderation is always something I’m keen to learn more about.

The format goes something like this: Twitch allows users who have been banned from a streamer’s ‘chat’ by moderators to submit an appeal to the streamer themselves, to have their ban removed. Streamers discovered a successful form of content was publicly reviewing a selection of these ‘unban appeals’ and deciding live, on stream, whether or not to repeal the ban.

What I find so interesting about this, is its revolutionary transparency. I have never come across a digital content moderation process that works anything like this. All content moderation is invariably opaque, and you are lucky to be provided with any explanation at all.

A process such as this doesn’t make all content moderation magically correct by some objective definition. But what it does do is humanise the process of moderation, and give users a clear, transparent understanding of the thought process that went into a decision.

These unban appeals are intended to be comedic, but I think they shine a light on a way forward for how platform owners, no matter how big or small, can develop a better relationship with their users.

I was chatting with a friend recently, and they made the observation that when a major platform makes a change that negatively affects the community of users, it is often hard to tell whether or not they have made the decision out of a lack of understanding of the community, or out of an actively business and economically-minded decision which disregards users.

I think this issue accurately summarises the need for this kind of transparency. Yes, it is vitally important the right people are in control of such powerful social spaces, but what makes this so important is understanding how they will wield that responsibility.

We should judge those we entrust our data and attention to by their ability to be accountable and transparent - as a minimum.

Thanks for reading! Remember to check out my collection on Clusta to see my research - for this article, and beyond…

Thanks so much for reading - if you’d like to explore my research for this article and other stuff I’m reading / working on, I have it all collated on my platform, Clusta. Check it out, and sign up if you’d like to try it yourself!

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In case you weren’t aware, Apple released their own foray into the Metaverse on Tuesday, with their flagship Augmented / Virtual Reality headset, Vision Pro.

Resisting the urge to dunk on Apple for this latest release is, truthfully, challenging.

Even the name, Vision Pro, which heavily implies the monetisation of our sense of sight, feels almost too easy to write some witty remarks over. Too easy to contribute to the swell of hate and doom that, like clockwork, floods our digital news channels on each new, noteworthy release by a big tech company.

Now, I’m all for hate and doom. I do think it’s generally warranted when considering the exorbitant power and questionable strategies (from the perspective of the average person and planet) the largest tech companies possess. I’m just not sure anyone needs my addition to it in this instance.

So I thought, instead, I’d discuss something positive which could emerge out of a potentially new paradigm of web design.

2D in Augmented Reality

One of the many, many things people have been questioning Apple’s choices over with Vision Pro is the majority of their promotional material demonstrating people using the headset to project normal web browsers and computer applications. Normal, as in the same browsers and applications we use on a computer, just without a monitor to frame them within.

The criticism levelled at Apple is: why would we spend above £3,000 for a majority of benefits we already have in a computer?

There’s definitely something to this, but I believe this perspective is only half right.

I think the question ‘why would we continue to use the same software and user interfaces in AR?’ is absolutely valid as a reason not to want the headset at this time.

However, the question ‘why would we continue to use software in two-dimensional space in AR?’ is something I intend to answer now.

When designing applications for the web, there is a major challenge that web designers face when attempting anything innovative or experimental: screen sizes.

When you design for the web, you aren’t designing something once. You are designing something many, many times.

Yes there are phone screens and computer screens, these are the main two. But within these, there are so many variants. Wide and short screens, long and narrow screens, screens that bend, screens that separate.

An experience I continue to have is being sent a photo of my own web app, Clusta, on some utterly bizarre monitor or device that I have neither heard of, nor can find a tangible use or benefit for. Clusta, of course, looks all bent out of shape. And I am left once again working out what logic I can tell the app to behave differently to a new set of specific dimensions.

It’s becoming a common theme in my writing that all web design is becoming progressively similar. I explain here why algorithms influence this, and here why diminishing support for visual design innovation contributes too.

Well, in this article, I want to share that endless screen sizes are another, considerable, contributing factor.

Why experiment, when you can use a styling package or framework which has already accounted for all these arbitrary sizes?

My intention was to discuss an exciting future in this article. But at five-hundred words in, this is feeling a bit negative. Let’s move on to the exciting bit.

Less logistics, more design

Back to our Vision Pro and the Augmented Reality web browser. You might be able to see where I’m going with this.

When you take away the screen, you take away the screen sizes.

When you design a new website, for viewing in Augmented Reality, you really do only have to produce one design. No more endless testing. No more exceptions to your previous work.

When building an experimental, innovative user interface, this is a truly liberating development. From experience, I can tell you that so many hours that could have been spent further refining and developing the innovative interface were instead spent on making the application compatible across screen sizes.

But that’s just for the designers who have continued to dare to innovate at this time. Even more exciting, I would argue, are all the designers who will feel liberated to actually attempt innovating and experimenting with the interfaces they create.

I appreciate this won’t happen tomorrow, and there will likely be a long period where we will have to account for screen sizes alongside Augmented Reality environments like Vision Pro - but the door has been opened, and web designers should start to consider this light at the end of the tunnel.

Ian Bogost, writer for The Atlantic, made a pertinent observation in a recent Tweet:

That end of the quote, on interfaces being the same since the Macintosh, is so important. By shaking up the fundamental, physical boundaries that contain user interfaces, we are for the first time since the Macintosh arriving at a moment where designers can be liberated to push the boundaries of interfaces much further than ever before. And it is inevitable this will happen.

The first part of the quote, however, is also important. Apple has always been a computer interface company. It is, for me, what makes them stand out from the rest of the big tech players.

Their commitment to innovating and developing interfaces has, in my opinion, done more for computers and digital technology than anything else. Because it has continued to expand the scope of who a computer is for, and inspire people to find different ways to use computers.

As a final thought, I will add that what is most exciting here is specifically originating from the technology of Augmented Reality, and not from Vision Pro or Apple specifically.

If you want to support makers in the AR / VR Tech space who aren’t government-sized private companies, I would highly recommend checking out the work of my friends at PlaylabZ CIC who do some amazing work with the technology, and regularly collaborate with Mozilla amongst other organisations.

Thanks for reading! Remember to check out my collection on Clusta to see my research - for this article, and beyond…

Thanks so much for reading - if you’d like to explore my research for this article and other stuff I’m reading / working on, I have it all collated on my platform, Clusta. Check it out, and sign up if you’d like to try it yourself!

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As someone who has spent quite a few years researching and experimenting with digital user interfaces, I often think about how little support there is for innovation in visual design.

The reason I often think about this, is because it really pisses me off.

Occasionally, I will excitedly notice an email with a subject along the lines of ‘design innovation’ - only to take a closer look, and see the ‘design’ being referred to is for a new kind of semiconductor, agricultural engine system, or some kind of ‘social’ innovation around how to structure a workshop.

I’m sure these are perfectly reasonable avenues of innovation. But, truthfully, they are not what I’m looking for.

Compared to the multiple decades we saw of the Bell labs, a testament to unrestricted state support for innovation powered and informed by the arts, there is next to no sources or avenues of innovation that look to explore what else we can do with visual design in the digital space.

On the opposite end of this spectrum - we are all plainly aware of the major focus drawing the attention of innovation funders: Artificial Intelligence.

The state of innovation’s focus is, at least in the UK, a microcosm of a wider financial strategy that has been employed over the last ten-to-fifteen years - a total focus on engineering and STEM, whilst the arts is shrunk to near extinction.

The effects of this strategy have undoubtedly shone in the last few months, as we have witnessed what has been made possible via the newest wave of AI-powered technologies able to mass-produce original images and writing.

The effect this is currently having, and will have, on the visual arts deserves a separate article, probably a few. For now, I want to focus on writing, and writers.

But first, let’s talk about reading.

A Culture of Reading

Michael Sacasas wrote his essay Reading as Counter Practice on the wave of people (particularly in the tech scene, think Sam Bankman-Fried) who are actively against reading books. He suggests that we should view the act of reading books as a counter-practice against “the default settings of our techno-social milieu.”

I think this suggestion is a good one, and he makes some great arguments in favour of reading books - but the concept we must see this style of reading as ‘counter-practice’ reflects how the practice of reading is seen as little more than “pointing toward information” amongst a majority of people, rather than as a source of original, artistic practice (something Sacasas highlights in the article.)

In The Matrix, we see a hard-drive plugged into Neo’s neck - and once the loading bar is full, he is now a master of martial arts. Those who share Sam Bankman-Fried’s perspective would like to see the reading experience ‘improve’ to this point: maximum efficiency, zero process.

The attitude comes from the post-industrialist, productivity-obsessed culture that dominates much of modern culture - speed and efficiency is everything. As arts is cut out of education and culture more and more, any arguments against why this attitude shouldn’t necessarily enter the space of reading and writing is hard to find.

It has taken longer for the technological sophistication to arrive, but with the newest innovations in AI, this attitude is now starting to enter the practice of writing more aggressively than ever.

Writing and AI

We have already had the ubiquitous example of Grammarly for a number of years now - the poor souls who have been a student at any point in the past three-to-five years and also didn’t have an ad blocker (a small demographic, admittedly) will know of the plague of Grammarly adverts which would follow you around the internet.

Value propositions along the lines of ‘improve your writing’, ‘save time on your essays’ and ‘be more concise’ are all Grammarly classics - a piece of AI-powered software which would analyse your writing and find ways to ‘improve’ it.

I really despise Grammarly. Not only is the deliberate breaking of the rules of language such a hugely important part of the joy of writing (think, you know, literally Shakespeare) but I am always reminded of Roland Barthes’ concept of écriture (from Writing Degree Zero)

Écriture, a French term, doesn’t have a direct English translation, but refers to the ‘style’ of writing of a particular author. This concept of style isn’t inferring perfection, accuracy or ‘effectiveness’ by some metric - it refers to originality, to artistry.

Grammarly destroys originality. It destroys artistry.

If you are unable to write fast enough to make your assignments, you shouldn’t have to take away your originality in order to do this. We should be changing the education system to accommodate what you need in order to bring the ideas from your head into the world, on your own terms.

But Grammarly was only the start. Something even more sinister is approaching, fast.

A Glimpse of the Future

We have already seen the rise of copywriting AI software. Copywriting refers to informational writing typically for marketing purposes, which seeks to promote a certain business, organisation or project through clear, digestible writing. A skill in itself, one which some people have mastered impressively. However, clearly a prime target for the new skillset of current Large Language Model AI systems.

But I am even more interested in a novel application of AI to the writing world. Just recently, I watched a short video on what seemed like an AI-generated CEO announce an ‘exciting new product’ which can generate longer-form, original writing - automatically.

https://twitter.com/jamesjyu/status/1658933765824192512

The CEO suggests that this tool is meant to be a ‘partner’ to writers, like a co-writer. Their tagline is ‘writing AI that puts the author in charge.’ I’m not joking.

I’m almost left speechless by this tagline. It sounds satirical.

To be clear, the issue with software like this is based on how Artificial Intelligence works. The ‘output’ of any AI system works on the basis of aiming toward results that are as close to the ‘line of best fit’ as possible. This is a line, we can imagine it drawn on a graph, which reflects the average mathematical values of training data that is deemed to be ‘successful’ or ‘optimal’.

But it is this definition of success that is the problem. The software advertised in the tweet above will only have one definition of this, and thus all generations will be aiming towards the same concept of ‘perfect.’ This ends one way: with us all reading, and thinking, the same.

Technology like this doesn’t put the author ‘in charge.’ It is the exact opposite. This technology represents the beginning of a campaign with one purpose - to remove the need for writers, and to make the experience of writing the same as the idealised experience of reading: maximum efficiency, zero process.

Anyone who is involved in the arts will tell you that art is about the creation and engagement with the art - it is about the process.

Instead, we have engineers, who have had little to no education or exposure to the arts, and who believe art is simply a product to be bought and sold, creating ‘solutions’ to problems that don’t exist, and actually only create problems.

When it comes to technology and actually supporting writers, I believe there is a much more interesting discussion to be had.

And at its core, is innovation in visual design.

A Different Future?

Writing has a much closer relationship with technology than we may think.

Writing itself is technology. The pen, the paper, the system of alphabets and characters themselves are all technological feats, that propelled our capacity to communicate further through space and time immeasurably.

We can also see much more modern examples on the power of technology to support writing. The creation of new mediums like film provided an entirely new framework for writing to be expressed and engaged with.

The fact that all technological innovations to writing are focused entirely on automating the process out of existence demonstrates how utterly devoid of involvement the arts actually is in technological innovation.

It often feels like there is a sense that we are finished with innovating the visual design of digital user interfaces. For non-developers, you may be unfamiliar with a software package called TailwindCSS. Tailwind is actually a really useful tool for developers that makes managing the visual design of coded websites much easier to create - however, if you venture onto their website and look at their visual components, you may notice something: it looks like every single website you ever visit.

And it looks nice. It works. It’s accessible.

But I just despair at the idea that there is nothing more we can do with how we display digital information on a computer. This field is still so unbelievably new in the grand scheme of things, we should be just at the beginning of exploration into this space.

And I’m not referring to multi-media, or video games - I’m referring to the written word.

Substack is a huge testament to the continued timelessness of written language. The rise of the platform amidst the waves of social media and digital culture which has created a milieu of new, visual means of communicating.

But, like the medium of film, I believe the digital space can still go much, much further when it comes to what we can do with writing.

But the innovations that achieve this won’t be in technology itself - this will not be algorithmic. This will come from visual design, from how we construct a written text, and how it is read.

If we want to create digital technology that actually supports writers, we need to be exploring how digital technology can give writers new ways to express their ideas, and new ways for readers to engage with those ideas. Writing, reading, art - is about the process.

Thanks for reading! Remember to check out my collection on Clusta to see my research - for this article and beyond…

Thanks so much for reading - if you’d like to explore my research for this article and other stuff I’m reading / working on, I have it all collated on my platform, Clusta. Check it out, and sign up if you’d like to try it yourself!

Subscribe now

Parkour, or free-running, holds roots in military training and martial arts. It’s original aim is to reach point B from point A as quickly and efficiently as possible, employing gymnastics-like techniques in order to achieve this.

But parkour has become so much more than that. Communities of athletes all over the world continue to evolve and explore the art of parkour, and use it as a creative outlet to find new routes and paths through urban landscapes.

My favourite aspect of parkour, and the reason I bring it up, is because it teaches us a valuable lesson about design:

Imagine a series of skyscrapers. These were designed with a ‘vertical’ mindset - you are meant to travel up and down the skyscraper, but you are very rarely meant to cross, horizontally, between skyscrapers anywhere above the ground level.

Yet this is exactly what many parkour athletes do - some of the most iconic parkour moments are roof jumps, hundreds of feet in the air.

It doesn’t matter how specifically you design something for a certain purpose. You can never entirely know, let alone control, how it will be used.

This principle can also be found in the digital space.

An example I am personally fond of is the subversion of the ‘reaction’ buttons introduced to Facebook a few years ago. The ‘angry’ reaction was most commonly used for humorous purposes, and there was a general culture of choosing a specific reaction almost randomly to someone’s post for comic effect.

We can find a more pronounced example recently on Twitter. A number of users changed their display name on Twitter to their Mastodon handle, so that an application that scrapes Twitter can find all the Mastodon handles of a certain user’s followers, and follow them on Mastodon automatically.

Design and Purpose

Charles Eames defined design as “a plan for arranging elements to accomplish a particular purpose.”

A more than reasonable definition. But I find the relationship between design and purpose an interesting one.

It can be both true at once that an object is designed for a specific purpose, whilst also able to be used for different purposes to the one it was designed for.

However, the latter is discussed far less. Why is this?

When discussing the concept of speculative design and its relationship to purpose, James Auger provides an interesting point:

“By operating outside of normative design contexts, [speculative design] is free from the demands of industry and the market forces that inform the majority of technological trajectories.”

Auger, J. 2014 Living with Robots: A Speculative Design Approach

Speculative design, being a framework for design which explores more abstract and philosophical applications, is only able to free itself from the specificities of purpose by freeing itself from ‘industry and market forces.’

It is design’s connection to the selling and advertising of products which makes its connection to a specific purpose so strong.

Dissolving the Market

In the business world, ‘know your market’ is the one true mantra. Having a specific purpose lets you market a product to a specific demographic, a specific audience.

We can see this clearly in software: there is software for founders of startups to automate emails to potential investors, software to calculate the load balance on a plane for pilots, software for accountants to categorise expenditure. These softwares are evidently prescriptive.

But now, all of a sudden, we have ChatGPT, Bing and Bard.

These applications can automate emails to potential investors, calculate load balance on planes, and categorise expenditure. But it’s one application.

And it’s designed like a chat application - WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger etc.

When you load up ChatGPT, you don’t look at the interface and go ‘ah yes, this is for startup founders’ or ‘ah yes, this is for plane pilots.’

When you load up ChatGPT, you just think you’re going to do something with an AI.

In the business world, it has always been so essential to have a clear definition of your market, your demographic breakdown, and tailor your product to this. But these new AI chat apps are dissolving this need.

When you load up ChatGPT, it is on you, the user, to decide what to do with the software. This is a revolutionary concept for digital applications, and digital design.

What will it mean to have a majority of software users who are prepared to engage with software proactively, and find how to best use the software themselves, rather than have a use prescribed to them?

Will design itself change? Can we start to design applications agnostically, embracing a multitude of uses by a multitude of users?

These new AI chats are just one, single example of an agnostically-designed user interface. But I don’t believe AI is the only application for this. I think it has simply opened a door for what we can do with digital design.

By focusing so heavily on solely the original, intended use of an object of design, you ultimately limit its potential.

By designing with the understanding that we can’t know, or control, all the uses of our design, we pave the way for a new generation of digital free-runners.

Thanks for reading! Remember to check out my collection on Clusta to see my research - for this article and beyond…

Turtles is back! I’ve been on a bit of a hiatus as I’ve been building my own digital platform, Clusta (now in open beta!) - I’ll be attaching links to each article from now on to my collection in Clusta, so you can explore my research into digital media without the (doom)scrolling!

Find my research for this week’s article here (not currently optimised for mobile, sorry!)

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The algorithms which dictate the content of social media feeds have always had a fairly fractious relationship with, well, all of us - the people who use these platforms.

Most recently, we have seen backlash to Instagram’s recent update, replacing the ‘timeline' of posts from followed accounts in users’ feeds with the more in-vogue algorithm style of major platforms, which combines ‘suggested posts’ with posts from followed accounts, and in the order of ‘relevance’, of which there is no publicised metric.

Our fractious relationship with these algorithms exists for good reason. Social media feeds hold the power of our shared narrative as a society, even now a planet, something I have explored in a previous article.

Not only is this power great, it is also one we have no control over.

We, the users, are both the most vital party in the success of these platforms and simultaneously the least important to considerations made when designing the algorithms for feeds.

The most important party? The advertisers, otherwise known as the real customers of major social networks.

The trick is that social networks no longer need us to like the feeds - they just need us to be addicted to them. The casino-style psychology of the doomscroll (article coming soon) has proven just as, if not more effective for keeping us all plugged in, and consequently making our opinions void.

A fairly dreary start to this article, I know. Maybe you are thinking ‘help! I need to escape!’ That would be understandable. Perhaps we consider a way to do just that.

It wasn’t always like this

There is lots of talk about web 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, x.0 etc. - but I want to focus specifically on the difference between 1.0 and 2.0. Broadly, we know that web 2.0 is meant to represent the web in the image of the tech giants such as Google, Amazon, Facebook et al, but there is also another way to frame this difference:

Web 1.0 was the internet before the algorithms.

There was no Google search. No feeds to scroll. You entered a URL, and where you went from there would depend solely on the hyperlinks contained in whatever site you were routed to.

What I find personally so interesting about this method of ‘surfing the web’ (why did we stop using this phrase?) is how it is driven by intention. It isn’t the passive, drool-inducing doomscroll or advertised, optimised content - it is you, right here and now, going ‘that sounds kind of interesting’ and acting on that.

These websites are ultimately a curation. The content and hyperlinks they provide are not selected algorithmically, but by hand.

One of the ultimate examples of ‘curating’ a website is the behemoth that is Wikipedia. An excellent example of the intention-based exploration which can be achieved on the site is the niche practice of Wikipedia speed-running, where the speed-runner attempts to arrive at a specific wikipedia page from a seemingly totally irrelevant page as fast as possible, by only clicking on links through to other wikipedia pages.

One interesting phenomenon that is also noticeable in Web 1.0 is the much wider range of design and content. The image above (from 1996) a testament to this. How many websites would you find today that look like this?

There are many reasons for why we have seen design and content become more and more similar over time, but there can be little doubt a significant factor has been based on what algorithms favour. Be it website architecture and copy tailored for search engine optimisation (SEO) to inflammatory posts on Facebook to reams of twenty-something’s gasping in Youtube thumbnails, content has slowly become more homogenous in the interest of ‘pleasing’ the algorithm.

We, as humans, ultimately have a much more diverse set of criteria between us than any algorithm for what we may define as ‘pleasing’. Web content didn’t have to please one giant algorithm to ever reach an audience - it just had to please one person who had a website, and anyone can have a website.

The return of curation

We have most likely seen the back of an internet made up predominantly of pure HTML, Times New Roman sites with pretty intense colour schemes (and perhaps that is for the best - at least we have the memories) but there are new modes of digital curation that are becoming increasingly prominent.

The first of these is right in front of you - the return of email newsletters through platforms such as Substack has generated a whole new culture of digital discovery through the people you choose to follow and engage with.

There is a kind of beautiful chaos to reading an article on the issues of social media algorithms and discovering the Wikipedia speed-run world record, the 1996 Space Jam website and another article on social media’s relationship to meta-narratives.

There is, of course, nothing stopping an algorithm serving these different materials together in a feed. However, we know that curated information will always create this kind of diversity, whereas the trend we are seeing with content produced to maximise algorithmic potential suggests we may see less and less of the most bizarre works for which the internet has always been most notorious.

Another channel keeping the weirder side of the internet publicised is the culture of ‘reaction’ content.

A number of Youtube creators and Twitch streamers produce the majority of their content around reacting to videos / media predominantly found by their viewers.

Not only are these videos themselves a personal curation of content that the creators find most interesting, funny or relevant, but there is another value this kind of curation provides.

One of the most intriguing aspects of social media algorithms is how intensely personalised they are. This personalisation has been attributed to playing a major part in the rise of disinformation online and its effectiveness was clearly proven all the way back in the Cambridge Analytica scandal, let alone the Trump-induced January Capitol storm.

It may seem strange to reference these in the context of a Youtube videos and Twitch streams, but what this reaction content is doing is creating a distinctively shared experience between the creator and their viewers and between the viewers themselves.

And perhaps this is what is most powerful about curated content - it enables all who interact with it to see the same internet for once, and truly form a community around that.

Thanks for reading! Remember to check out my collection on Clusta to see my research for this article, as well as my wider research into digital media.

Today’s newsletter continues on from my previous article with the Future of Work - check it out here if you haven’t already!

I recently came across an article which was discussing a topic that I, and perhaps you, have seen before.

Concerns about the definition of the ‘cloud’ as the name for remote servers, which are most commonly used to store their customer’s data, arise from the implication that a cloud connotes a kind of weightless entity. Something which is both there and not there.

A number of people, often citing ecological issues, point out how this can be a misleading description of a very much real set of computer servers that consume a considerable percentage of the Earth’s entire electrical output.

In today’s article, I want to continue to explore this idea of how the digital world touches the ‘real’ (physical) world. However, rather than exploring hardware, I want to explore digital design.

What does it mean to you?

Whenever I go to a swimming pool, the smell of the chlorine immediately takes me back to my childhood, and swim classes in primary school.

But it isn’t just the smell. It is also the blue walls, and the reflection of the water’s ripples onto them. The echoing sounds of human voices. The blurred world seen through foggy goggles.

Places we visit repeatedly become intertwined with our memory. It imbues them with new meanings, and new feelings.

For anyone who works in digital design, this is extremely important.

The Workplace

What does the professional space mean to you?

For some, it may be the usual thoughts: desks, emails, deadlines etc. But for many others, the professional space connotes exclusivity, a feeling that it is meant ‘for’ others unlike yourself. A place in which you are only invited so far into, while others are allowed to make it to the top.

And for some, to this day the professional space means a basic lack of safety, as is the case for a number of employees at Activision Blizzard. As I discussed in my previous article, Activision Blizzard have been exposed to reveal a range of professional misconduct, including but not limited to sexual harassment in their workplace.

I can’t imagine what meanings and feelings such connotations would create, but I can’t believe they would be positive. I also struggle to believe it would promote any feeling of belonging or inclusivity, far from it.

What I am curious about, is whether or not these same people bring their connotations of the workplace into the digital space as well.

For me, for you

I appreciate a Chuckle Brothers reference isn’t really appropriate for the topic of inclusivity in the workplace (my apologies to non-British readers, although I recommend giving them a search) however, sometimes an opportunity must be seized.

I opened one of my previous articles for this newsletter discussing a report a colleague and I were putting together a few months ago on the performance of a digital platform for professionals, and we were discussing some of the themes we uncovered from user surveys and focus groups.

One theme that particularly caught our attention was a widespread reporting of ‘imposter syndrome’ from respondents of a wide range of demographics.

A user experience such as imposter syndrome is a challenging issue to prove with quantitative data, because evidence for its prevalence can appear in a wide range and often disparate sets of data. This is also the case with qualitative data like the kind we were dealing with, and requires a human touch to piece together.

This perhaps goes some way to explaining why we do not see more research conducted into its prevalence in digital (and physical!) spaces, but its importance toward designing inclusive digital platforms cannot be understated.

The Digital Professional Network

Where do you think of, when you think of a digital professional network?

LinkedIn. Google. Microsoft.

A nice, clean Serif font. White background with blue highlights. A neat, but somewhat busy interface with a range of interactive elements.

Which one of the three am I describing? That’s right, it’s a trick question.

I’m very interested, and concerned, with how much of the design of the digital space has become homogenised through the rise of big tech. When we think of, and visit, digital professional networks, we are presented with essentially the same style, same functionality, and same feeling of interface.

If a certain individual was to feel in any way excluded from the professional space in the real world, who is to say they wouldn’t feel the same way in a digital professional space?

What difference is there between a swimming pool from my childhood and a swimming pool today, compared to a physical professional space and a digital one? They may be different places, but they are used in the same way.

I appreciate there is some reaching here. But I believe this is a hypothesis that deserves some further consideration.

In Conclusion

In my most recent article (in collaboration with Startup ROI - go check out Kyle O’Brien’s excellent work on French Tech if you haven’t already) I concluded the article with a look toward the future of work.

I considered how Facebook’s Horizon, their new VR platform for professional collaboration, was essentially bringing the same old workplace into the new frontier of the ‘metaverse’, and how this was a shame considering we have an opportunity to construct an entire environment from scratch.

Isn’t it worth giving some alternatives a go, at least attempting to answer some of the most persistent social issues that have plagued the workplace for far too long?

I feel that a similar consideration is due here also. The best way we can start to explore with quantifiable data whether or not the permeating exclusivity of the physical workplace is responsible for the prevailing imposter syndrome in the digital workplace is by having at least some kind of comparison.

Why don’t we give something else a go?

For this article, I have had the pleasure of co-authoring with Kyle O’Brien, author of Startup ROI, whose extensive knowledge of the tech sector combined with a finger on the pulse of the French tech scene makes his writing a must-read if you are at all concerned with the present, and future, of technology. I have learned a lot from Kyle working on this article, and I’m sure you will too when you check out his newsletter, I highly recommend it!

Designing Digital Communication - where to begin?

Where to begin?

A question I asked myself as I began preparing to write my segments of this article - not only is the subject area of digital communication both vast and complex in many ways, but I have also dedicated the past five or so years to researching this subject in both my academic and professional life.

I can take some solace, however, knowing that this is a question many others would have asked as the World Wide Web was being first developed. This technology and its protocols, developed by Time Berners Lee and a number of collaborators, is the framework through which all internet-based communication between people is able to occur.

The vast potential of this technology would have been as apparent then as it is now: a space where you can visually create almost anything and then share it with the world.

But where to begin?

I recently wrote an article which explores whether the use of analogue analogies for digital tools and spaces is helping or hindering digital innovation. Whilst there are arguments pointing in both directions regarding how these analogies impact the use of the Web today, there can be little doubt this was a necessary step in order to begin introducing people to the Web.

In the beginning, the ‘design’ of objects of communication in the digital and physical spaces were essentially the same. We had two broad categories of these objects physically: the ‘document’ and ‘mail’. For the sake of convenience, we will group the telegram with mail, for while the telegram was an important innovation, its ‘design’ as an object of communication was still modelled on the mail.

We can easily see these translated onto the Web as the ‘web page’ for a document and e-mail for mail.

This was incredibly useful for ‘onboarding’ potential users of the Web, and I need no citation to demonstrate its effectiveness, evident by the integral role this technology now plays in all our lives.

But, of course, the digital is not the physical. And where the digital excels, is inevitably where it would evolve.

Synchronising in Progress

Sending information through the internet is fast. Really, really fast. So fast, that you could send someone an email, and they could respond almost as quickly as they might in a real life conversation.

And so the ‘message’ was born. Arguably the first truly ‘internet-only’ artefact of digital design, the message combines the communicative function of the e-mail with the real-time interactivity of a live conversation.

I am aware I am probably explaining something you already know. The reason I do so, however, is because the obviousness of this progression can sometimes detract from how utterly groundbreaking it is.

Before the internet, there had never been any real form of innovation on the design of an object of text-based communication. We had the document, and the mail. For centuries. And then thirty-something years ago we just chucked the ‘message’ in and carried on.

How we, as humans, communicate is inextricably linked to how we socialise, a complex and fluid practice which is ever-changing and very fine-tuned, and closely linked with design. We can see this in real life, with fashion, jewellery and possessions (or a lack thereof) communicating just as much as what we literally ‘say’ to each other. We can also see this in documents and letters. We have very specific etiquettes and habits connected to these objects - we use titles, paragraphs, page sizes for documents. We introduce a letter with a greeting to its recipient(s), and we tend to sign both.

What the hell do you do with a message?

Just as a child learns to interact with the world through play, we started ‘playing’ with the message in similarly low-stakes environments. Early forums and chatrooms emerged online, and we started to tentatively explore this seismic addition to our social lives.

From this point of genesis, the message heralding the beginning of forms of communication only made possible via the internet, all aspects of our lives were set to change, and none less so than the professional space.

Because then we learned how to do a video call.

You've Got Mail

I have a vivid memory of the very first instant message I sent. It was the mid-90s and we had just installed our very first dial-up internet connection. We lived in a suburb outside of Chicago and created a space in the unfinished basement we designated the "computer room." We fired up the modem to an abrupt, ear-shattering — EEEEEE-OOOOO-EEEEEE-AAAAHHHH — that indicated we were, in fact, connecting to the internet. Minutes later, the dialog box appeared and I had to choose an AOL screen name: kyleob123. Seemed appropriate. Then I chose a password (likely of equal complexity) and came face-to-face with the magical place we call the internet. And then it happened. I clicked on the icon with the little yellow running man, called my uncle using a landline to confirm his screen name, and opened a chat window. 

…Hello?

This was my very first online communication. Primitive but transformational. From there, my knowledge of the internet and the power of the internet itself expanded concurrently at breathtaking speeds. Chatting with friends online after school became a part of my regular routine. Soon after, it wasn't unusual to hop into chat rooms and meet "strangers" on the internet. In middle school, Facebook launched their offering outside of the university system and suddenly we attributed real, identifiable information to our online personas and evolved from basic conversations to creating metadata, commentary and threads. The mobile era only accelerated adoption and ensured that we were in constant communication at virtually all times. So it's no wonder that an online generation precipitated the rise of the "social enterprise" -- fusing personal habits around real-time communication and knowledge sharing with the workplaces we now inhabit. 

That said, the social path to the enterprise wasn't clear cut and certainly wasn't smooth. I still remember an early internship where I got set up with IT and opened Lotus Notes for the first time. I remember encountering internal communication issues that seemed easily solvable if we just applied standard consumer internet techniques to our team's approach to collaboration. I recall thinking how ironic it was that a company that prides itself on efficiency, productivity and performance (and goes to great lengths to measure it) was missing out on the biggest opportunity to harness collective knowledge, enable good ideas to bubble up from below, and ultimately impact the bottom line. Inevitably, this happened, albeit with a variety of tools and various products over the years. For a long time, productivity tools were either built in-house or the startups working to solve the problem were acquired by large, enterprise companies as a way to differentiate (not to mention these startups hadn't quite figured out how to monetize their innovation). Let's break down this first era of enterprise collaboration and productivity, a time where startups were gobbled up by the big fish, the term social enterprise was scoffed at, and the precursor to modern collaboration tools made its way into public consciousness.

A Bumpy Ride

Circa 2012 onwards, and the dust has started to settle (as much as it can in the digital age) to reveal the landscape of digital collaboration and communication for professionals.

As far as collaboration of the synchronous kind was concerned, you had direct messaging and video calling, and that was essentially the ‘suite’ available.

Over time, we started to see more task-managing solutions introduced such as Trello, but the real ‘activities’ of digital collaboration essentially broke down to messaging and online calls.

And unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past eighteen months, you are probably aware that these methods of collaboration may have some underlying issues.

You have probably seen a number of articles cite the term ‘Zoom fatigue’ or discuss the issues of direct messaging and the ‘always available’ professional culture it has generated, but these topics do little to better understand the underlying reasons why these means of communicating create such problems.

Let’s step back from the technology for a moment. Here is a quote from the first page of Albert Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, first published in 1953:

"When they (my elders) named some object, and accordingly moved towards something, I saw this and I grasped that the thing was called by the sound they uttered when they meant to point it out. Their intention was shewn by their bodily movements, as it were the natural language of all peoples: the expression of the face, the play of the eyes, the movement of other parts of the body, and the tone of voice which expresses our state of mind in seeking, having, rejecting, or avoiding something. Thus, as I heard words repeatedly used in their proper places in various sentences, I gradually learnt to understand what objects they signified; and after I had trained my mouth to form these signs, I used them to express my own desires."

— Ludwig Wittgenstein (G.E.M Anscombe), Philosophical Investigations, 1953

Wittgenstein here is quoting Augustine, who wrote this in his ‘Confessions’ in circa AD 400.

I find this quote fascinating because it demonstrates how deeply rooted our ability to communicate is to the environment we communicate in.

What I mean by that is, the way we use language and learn to use language, the same today as it was for Augustine, is through the relationship between words and the real objects in the world they represent.

You could argue that language never works better than when you have something to ‘point at’, as Augustine’s elders did for him.

What is different between now and AD 397 (well, one thing that is different) is that we also have the digital environment as well as the physical.

And in the digital, you have nothing to point at.

A name I will give to this concept of ‘pointing at’ is ‘shared context’. We are building a house. I need you to pass me a brick. I say ‘pass me the brick’ and point to the brick. You see the brick. You pass me the brick.

In this instance, the brick is our shared context.

We find it challenging to communicate online through direct messages and online calls because it isn’t how we learned to use language. It’s almost like having only half your vocabulary to work with. This goes some way to explaining the phenomenon of ‘Zoom fatigue’ and the long list of articles concerned with the intricacies of message-etiquette such as how many ‘ha’s’ to put in a laugh.

But a new world is forming. Remote work is a much more serious prospect for companies around the world, and many teams are becoming more and more spread out via location and timezone. We can no longer put up with these digital shortcomings for communication.

Digital communication needs a new design.

Inertia in the Enterprise

There are two key dynamics in this era that I find particularly interesting:

1. The first is adoption of social/consumer-style tools by the Enterprise

2. The second, is the viability of these early tools as stand alone products. The ensuing skepticism, optimism, acquisition cycles and products replacing the "irreplaceable" is quite a trip.

Evernote: The Elephant in the Room

Let's start with an early mover to the "productivity" scene: Evernote. Described as note-taking and task-management software, it provided an early (and eventually, cloud-based) alternative to something like Microsoft Word. For highly organized researchers & note-takers, there were some advanced features that enabled archiving, organization & enhanced formatting. But for the general public, the difference was hardly noticeable. They must have been one of the first internet startups to adopt a freemium model, whereby app usage was free up to a certain data storage limit where you paid a modest monthly fee. With a majority of users under the free plan and a few die-hard paying customers, the challenging economics start to become clear. Though slightly better than what's available today, most users are not willing to pay for the service. In addition, the rise of Google Docs provided a free competitor that sits squarely in the existing user workflow for G Suite users (same with Notes for Mac users). 

However, if you put that in the context of the enterprise, the dynamic changes pretty quickly. And so do product requirements. The first advantage: large companies have a budget for tools like this. Not only that, but they have a huge incentive to invest in a single tool used across teams that is searchable, shareable, and collaborative by nature. This pivot from user-focused to Enterprise ready became the model for many early productivity apps. Later, the playbook to the enterprise via user-focused early adoption would become standard.

Salesforce's Chatter: Shark Teeth

Thinking back to the early years of social media, it's hard to imagine companies like Facebook as the "underdog." At the time, it wasn't obvious they could monetize. Today, they are a behemoth advertising machine with nearly 3B monthly active users. You might also recall that the power of social media as a brand building mechanism was misunderstood (or flat out denied). Social Media Management was outsourced to college interns who just get how to use the damn thing. While the rise of internet culture, influencers and performative social media accounts received plenty of eye-rolling, the next generation of consumers was being primed to adopt new online behaviors and expectations. Large companies simultaneously mocked millennials while desperately searching for a way to connect with the incoming class of university graduates accustomed to streamlined, conversational interactions on the web, and ultimately in the workplace. 

One of my favorite examples of forward-thinking that was not well-received by critics in the tech community was Salesforce's announcement of Chatter, it's embedded feed within their CRM interface.

"Who needs Facebook at work? 

It's going to be a distraction!

You call this productivity?"

Benioff revealed it at Salesforce's annual Dreamforce event to crickets. The reality is, they were ahead of their time, but eventually the idea took hold. Social tools are inherently "social" but that doesn't necessarily mean distracting or unproductive. Using an @mention on a Sales Opportunity to notify a teammate or tagging Leads with information you could later query in your reports and dashboards was completely logical and in fact visionary. But once again, the company they acquired, likely wouldn't survive independently. It needed to be nested within an enterprise application that could support it. I think of it like a symbiotic relationship between a shark and a cleaner wrasse (fish). Why might this tiny fish enter the jaws of a top-tier predator? The little fish feeds off the extra food stuck in the shark's teeth. In exchange for their service, the shark doesn't swallow them whole.

Death to Excel, Long Live Excel!

If there is one tool that might be considered irreplaceable, it's Microsoft Excel. It's the backbone of the modern enterprise. And while that's changing, new age competitors typically try to build something adjacent or use-case specific. There are very few companies that would endeavor to re-invent Excel. If it ain't broke don't fix it. Nevertheless, someone tried and succeeded. That's not to say Excel is obsolete (far from it!), but the fact that a company like Airtable can go head to head with an Enterprise mainstay and dominate the market shows that the way we work and our product expectations are vastly different than they were just 20 years ago. Not everyone is an excel wiz, and many users would gladly take the diet excel in exchange for a better user interface, enhanced functionality, and of course, baked in collaboration tools. Which is exactly the approach Airtable took. Forget macros, create a visual workflow. Who remembers every formula? Let's make it simple for the masses. Saving updates and sharing an attachment via email 100x? Let's put it in the cloud and layer in chat capabilities. 

These three (mini) case studies illustrate some powerful concepts that have influenced trends permeating the productivity & collaboration ecosystem today:

• Individual consumers tend to be a point of entry, but the Enterprise is the end goal to achieve sustainability and widespread adoption

• Consumer social is no longer just for consumers, social media has rewired our approach to work, collaboration and productivity in the workplace

• There is always room for new ways to collaborate, nothing is set in stone. Cultural (social media), technological shifts (cloud computing) and exogenous events (Covid-19) alike drive fundamental changes that leave room for new entrants, no matter how much established incumbents appear to have a vice grip on the market

What's Normal, Anyways?

In the advent of Covid-19, the early precedents for collaboration and productivity software can be thrown out the window. Everything has changed. At the risk of repeating every tech newsletter writer on the internet: current tools for collaboration and productivity simply weren't designed for a 100% distributed workforce. There's a difference between pivoting a business trip into a Zoom call to save time, money and the environment; but when it comes to 8+ hours a day on video conference, you end up with all sorts of new health disorders (see: Zoom Fatigue). For a while, there's been an active camp on Twitter (and elsewhere) touting their vision for the future of work. But recently, it's come barreling into the mainstream in a near comical fashion. 

The premise is simple: will we ever go back to the office? There are proponents on both sides, but we find ourselves at equilibrium somewhere on the spectrum of hybrid. That is, a mix between working from home, the office and in some sort of virtual or augmented reality. The futurists will pitch you some Ready Player One vision of the metaverse where as more conservative speculators talk a big game about home office ergonomics. But for my portion of this section, I want to continue with the theme of collaboration and productivity and how it will evolve in a highly distributed work environment. In the French tech ecosystem, I've encountered two startups working to pull it off. And to do so, they not only have to reckon with the challenges of building a company in the current climate, but entirely rethink the way their product facilitates collaboration in this brave new world.

From my vantage point, there are two approaches to building solutions for the future of work (and they just so happen to mirror our original onboarding to the internet). The first, is to take physical properties of the office/meeting culture/collaboration and digitize them. The second is to redesign workplace collaboration from the ground up to accommodate the movement towards highly distributed workforces. In my mind, both approaches make sense. The on ramp to fully remote will require some muscle memory from the olden days when we commuted to the office and bumped into colleagues at the water cooler. But there are without a doubt, certain motions that either cannot or should not be replicated at a distance. 

First up: Klaxoon. I first encountered the app during a brainstorming session in which a clever developer initiated and shared a space for everyone to contribute ideas that we subsequently arranged, modified and shaped into a formal project plan. It was the closest thing I've encountered to a digital-first design thinking session. As it turns out, this functionality only scratched the surface. The company is championing what they call the "meeting revolution" -- taking ordinary meetings and up-leveling them with digital and physical tools to make them more productive and engaging and to generate better outcomes.

The company raised a €5M Series A in 2016 that was quickly followed by a €50M raise just 2 years later. Their product suite expansion is commensurate with the multiple on their Series B. The digital whiteboard served as a starting point for surveys, kanban boards, async communication tools, and even hardware (the Klaxoon box & meeting board). While they've got one foot in the physical world, they've made their intentions clear: hybrid work is the way of the future. 

There are innovative companies and then there are category defining companies. According to Pierre Touzeau, their CEO, Claap aims to be the latter. Many companies are retrofitting their products for the remote workforce, but only a handful (for the time being) are emerging in this era of fully distributed work, presenting them a unique opportunity to start from scratch. Claap is combining lessons learned from before, during and after the "transition" to build something that's flexible enough to adapt to every team's needs but prescriptive enough to rewire our approach to collaborating with teammates from anywhere and at any time. They've identified a solution and are in the process of evangelizing their blueprint for the future of work.

For Claap, the real enemy is Zoom fatigue and back to back agendas. Boring meetings lead to unproductive outcomes, decreased engagement prevents decision-making, and our isolation-induced blurred sense of time makes us forgetful, not to mention lost between context switching. Which is why in-situ, asynchronous collaboration paired with decision logs and productivity tools seems to bring the best of all worlds. To illustrate, here's a screen grab of Pierre walking through the Startup ROI website with Claap running in the background. He can select any space on the page to add a context layer and assign to another user with deadlines and calls to action. When I open up the Claap later on, each comment will be demarcated on the screen with a built-in feed for continued discussion.

It should be noted that Claap itself is a remote-first company. They're drinking the remote-first Kool-Aid and should things go according to plan, they'll be serving it too.

Look to the Horizon

Companies like Klaxoon and Claap are proving that software which seeks to explore digital-first collaboration that reimagine the workspace are able to succeed, but what does the future hold from here? Will we continue this trend and use the unique properties of the digital for a future of work that builds on, and moves on from, the past? Or will we keep using the digital to simply replicate it?

So, Facebook launched its new VR workrooms application ‘Horizon’ this mid August.

It seems only apt to start here when considering the ‘future of work’. I think Charlie Warzel summarised the announcement of Horizon perfectly in his excellent article with a sense that is best described as ‘wariness’.

Zoom-ception, anyone? I thought not.

To go all the way back to the start of this article, I talked in my first section about how we were ‘onboarded’ onto the Web through the use of physical analogies, so that we could get a foothold on the Web and make some use of it.

Facebook would appear to be employing a similar strategy here. They want people to get used to the ‘metaverse’ as it is being called, the virtual universe that VR can create.

But nobody wants them to do that. And furthermore, there’s really no need.

The analogy worked great back in the nineties, nobody is questioning that. But now these physical analogies are just limiting the potential of the digital, and it’s time we start to push the boat out on not just being as good as the physical, the analogue, but finding a new, better paradigm for work.

And we already are. Anthony Tan and Jasmine Sun wrote a very insightful article recently comparing the development of the free VR platform VRChat and Facebook’s Horizon. The ability for users to design their own virtual environments in VRChat have led to extraordinary creations nearly impossible to imagine, and consequently social interactions we never thought possible.

Just as messaging began in the social space, so too is VR in its early stages flourishing there, where its development isn’t owned but shaped collectively.

The workplace we left behind when COVID began wasn’t one many remember kindly. This fact shouldn’t need citation, but for the sake of getting the point home we need not look further than the recent unveiling of the professional culture found at games company Activision Blizzard to know the workplace as we knew it has never been ‘for’ everyone.

Do we really want to let Horizon take us back there, when for the first time, we could go anywhere?

Didn't see that coming, did you? Yeah, neither did we…

Welcome to the future. Again!

What do you think? Did you guess ‘no’? That’s my guess too, but let’s consider this for a moment.

What is a book? I don’t mean in any philosophical sense (yet!) I mean physically, mechanically, what is a book?

‘dictonary.com' defines a book as:

“a handwritten or printed work of fiction or nonfiction, usually on sheets of paper fastened or bound together within covers.”

So, a bunch of pages within a kind of binding.

‘techopedia.com' defines the web as:

“a subset of the Internet consisting of the pages that can be accessed by a Web browser.”

So, a bunch of pages within a kind of browser?

They sound quite similar, when put like that. 

My problem is that I really don’t think they’re the same thing. So much so, that I wrote my entire circa-fifteen-thousand-word Masters thesis on the topic. 

Okay, they’re obviously not the same, anyone can see that. One is digital, one is physical, one can show videos and react to your actions and process payments and…

But, nonetheless, they are more similar than you might think. And this similarity is very much by design.

The Transition

The book ‘inspired’ the web. I could supply some linked references you probably won’t click on, or we could just consider the fundamentals of HTML, or ‘HyperText Markup Language’. It’s a bit wordy, but it is the backbone of every web page you have ever visited.

All HTML web ‘pages’ that contain text (including this page!) will most likely have at least one of the following tags within it:

The <h> tag, for headers, for example:

This is a header.

The <p> tag, for paragraphs. The normal text in this article is all contained within <p> tags.

These, and all other elements, are formatted with a ‘margin’ attribute, that by default sets exactly how far away from the left side of the window the elements will be formatted.

These are all normal functions for the average HTML page, and these are all normal functions for the average Word document.

And it makes total sense! Imagine considering how best to democratise take-up of this completely new technology in the 1990s. We needed some point of reference to help people make the switch from analogue to digital, no easy feat. By providing the analogy of the book, we gave the first builders on the web some training wheels for take up which has clearly worked incredibly well.

Similar or Different?

Didn’t I write fifteen thousand words on why they are different? Why am I arguing that they are similar?

Well, I’m not so much arguing that they are similar, but that we have deliberately made them appear similar in their structural design.

And we can see the results of this. Most web pages you visit, whilst maybe having some extra movement or actions with javascript code and the like, still ultimately conform to the structure of a ‘page’ as seen in a book. They have headers and paragraphs, and you scroll through them to keep reading. 

But books, and pages, have their limits. 

A book is a defined structure. There is only one way to read a book, by going page by page, start to finish. On the web, this is no different. We may have ‘links’ between pages that essentially offer us choices for the ‘next’ page we read, but even these links are linear, one way, providing extra options but ultimately not removing the same implicit ‘structure’ originally created in the book.

But the web is more than this. The web is a universe, a dimension, an environment. You only need to see the progress of Virtual Reality technologies to know this to be the case. 

An environment isn’t a predefined, one-way journey. An environment is defined by the ability to choose how, when, where and why you explore that environment. In an environment you have agency, maybe even freedom. 

Where to from here?

I described the tags for HTML as ‘training wheels’ to help us acclimatise to the web. But, eventually, we must remove the training wheels, otherwise they will just prevent us from doing more.

It is now more than thirty years since the internet, and the web, started to receive popular take up. Generations have been born and grown up with the internet as an implicit part of their everyday lives. 

Perhaps we are ready to remove the training wheels, and start to design environments, rather than pages, on the web.

“At any rate, what a vapid idea, the book as the image of the world.”

(A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze & Guattari, 1980)

“It’s turtles all the way down.”

The saying is a fairly common one, and deals with a philosophical concept known as ‘infinite regress’. If the world is held up by four elephants, what holds up the elephants? If a turtle holds up the elephants, what holds up the turtle? “It’s turtles all the way down.” The ‘infinite regress’ in this example is the ‘origin’ of the earth: what causes the earth to exist? 

Infinite regress occurs most frequently when dealing with causality: 

“What caused this?” 

“x caused this.”

“What caused x?”

“y caused x.”

Can you see the pattern? You could repeat this line of inquiry infinitely, and when we interrogate any causality of any kind we inevitably uncover the same problem. In essence, it is a gap in our ability to understand reality. 

So, what to do? And what has it got to do with digital design?

Frameworks

A good friend of mine, who studies physics, told me recently that one of the primary functions of natural science is to create a ‘framework’ through which the evidence they have acquired about the physical world can make sense. From experimentation, you have a series of data sets, but they are meaningless without a structure with which to piece them together.

For example, we have sets of scientific laws for thermodynamics, evolution or the solar system, which have been compiled and widely agreed upon based on overwhelming evidence in their favour. However, few within scientific communities are under any illusion that these frameworks are perfect. Each contains gaps for which no one can find an answer. And, eventually, it is not uncommon for these frameworks to be replaced by a new framework at the discovery of particularly groundbreaking evidence. One example of this is the Copernican Revolution.

What piques my curiosity no end, is what does a different framework for understanding reality look like, where we are no longer faced with this issue of causality and infinite regress? If it isn’t turtles all the way down, what the hell is it?

A suitable place to start seems to be to ask what the framework currently is. 

The Meta-Narrative

We live in a world (particularly the Western world) which is plagued by origin stories. Be it religions, nations, or since the industrial revolution, corporations.

Christianity teaches us that God created the Earth. Some (thankfully, few) British scholars teach us that the battle of three-hundred at Thermopylae during the Persian war was ‘the first English war’. Coca-Cola teaches us that Santa Claus has always worn the exact same shade of red as their brand.

These origin stories were given a name in 1979 by Jean-Francois Lyotard: ‘the grand meta-narrative’. (The Postmodern Condition, 1979)

Were you to read his work, you would quickly see that Lyotard was not a huge fan of these meta-narratives. His main reason for this are the inherent flaws that these stories deliberately hide in order to maintain their guise of ‘truth’.

Did God create the earth? At best, it is rather hard to prove. Was the battle of Thermopylae the first English war? It suggests a long, uninterrupted tradition of democratic rule extending from ancient Greece to modern-day Britain, which seems to brush over the thousand-plus years of autocracy that the country practiced (this is a great article on the topic). Has Santa always worn red? Actually, yes, thereabouts. Coca Cola did not, in fact, ‘rebrand’ Santa to their brand colours. However, they certainly did utilise their shared images to its full extent, and now it is second nature to imagine everyone’s favourite drink in the hand of the man who literally gives all children presents.

Why bother with these narratives? 

As I explored in a previous article, it is for the pursuit of power. These narratives have allowed religions, nations and corporations to control their own image in such a manner that they cannot be questioned, and can inspire loyalty at will.

The Digital

Wasn’t I meant to be talking about design?

I believe that this framework of meta-narratives that constructs our framework for understanding reality permeates throughout design, particularly digital UI and UX design, which is chiefly concerned with the practice of disseminating information to large numbers of people.

We have digital environments that contains documents within folders, within folders, within folders. We have lists that scroll, further, further, further down. Is it just me, or does this sound a bit like my example of infinite regress?

It would appear, that as far as the world of digital design is concerned, it really is turtles all the way down.

But the digital space is only just beginning. And I am of the opinion we have only begun to scratch the surface of what can be accomplished with digital tools. If there was to be a technology that could offer a pathway to a new framework, which doesn’t fall at the question of causality, it is surely digital.

I named this newsletter ‘Turtles’ because I believe that this saying, which seeks to demonstrate the intrinsic issues with infinite regress, is one that needs to be heard more in the communities of digital design, and digital technology generally. I cannot promise answers to what a digital space that doesn’t succumb to turtles could be, but I intend to highlight where this framework permeates in digital design, and through analysis explain its limitations culturally, socially and philosophically. 

I hope you will enjoy reading these articles, and they may help you to consider, 

that it simply can’t be turtles all the way down.

It was the perfect user case for a community platform: the user had found and established a series of meaningful connections through the platform, and the group, the ‘community’ which formed had been meeting regularly ever since.

Why the exasperation? With all the solutions and methods for collecting, analysing and communicating user data within the platform, we had a total of zero metrics that could track this user story. 

Of course, this frustration was only held at a professional level. We are contracted to not only make these user stories occur as frequently and successfully as possible as managers of a digital community platform, but communicate these successes effectively to those who fund the project.

At a human level, we were of course very pleased. The platform we manage had provided an individual with a positive experience. This is exactly why we are in this line of work.

The sense of irony, however, remained. This platform is a community platform, but we are unable to track the success of the community. 

Why is this?

Because what we are tracking through analytics is ‘engagement’. And as it turns out, for a platform whose mission puts the actual users first in its priorities for success, the commonly used metrics for engagement reveal very little about meaningful user experience.

What is Engagement?

What do you ‘do’ on a digital platform? There is a lot of jargon surrounding the ‘value’ you may get from a digital platform, and the different ways they can be used. 

But I mean the real mechanics, the actual ‘doing’ bit. What do you do?

Personally, I scroll. Sometimes I might ‘like’, ‘friend’ or ‘follow’. Hell, let’s throw in a comment. Once or twice a year, maybe I’ll make an event for a birthday or New Year’s.

Chances are, this is what you do too. In fact, I know this is what you do. How? Because what else can you do?

Ok, yes, there’s messaging. Maybe you manage a group or ‘community’ page of some kind. But ninety-plus percent of the time, this is what we all do on digital platforms. 

These actions, these functions, are the tools of ‘engagement’. Easily quantifiable, they are best suited to metrics that reveal user ‘growth’, i.e more users regularly visiting the platform, and what causes a user to ‘react’ in some way, which invariably is something they care about.

What’s the Problem?

Name five digital platforms that don’t have the above features ingrained in their design. Okay, maybe five is too many. Three? One?

Don’t worry, I couldn’t either. 

All digital platforms are inspired by the major social networks. And why wouldn’t they be? These platforms are incredibly successful, used daily by billions of people. It would only make sense.

But these platforms aren’t built for the average ‘user’. They are businesses which sell data to advertisers.

What metrics suit a business that sells data to advertisers? There are two in particular:

• How much data have you got? And will there be more in the future?

• Is this data useful for advertising? Can I identify specific demographics and market segments? Can I identify what they want and care about?

It is for these metrics specifically that the ‘react’ button, the comment, and the endless amount of scrollable material was created. 

For Facebook, this is great! They tick the boxes of these metrics absolutely. As does Twitter, LinkedIn, Google, TikTok, you name it. 

But for the platforms that are focused on the users themselves benefiting from the platform, building a space that doesn’t demand their attention but offers meaningful interaction, it seems to me a shame that we can’t be a little more imaginative in what a digital space for this purpose could look like.

The truth is, it is incredibly difficult to measure human social interaction. But if there is one lesson I have learned in my experience with digital platforms, it is that the ‘success’ of a platform as defined by its growth of regular and longer use by more people is not synonymous with the ‘success’ of an individual’s or community’s lived social experience. 

Should those who fund digital platforms begin to recognise this distinction, we may be able to start to imagine platforms, and metrics of success for them, that truly benefit those who use them.

The museum, often used as an icon for history, is traditionally a government-controlled institution.

What is the difference between history and memory? 

I could cite dictionaries, academics, politicians and many others on the intricacies between these two terms, but at its core their separation can be defined in a word:

Power.

Memory is something we are all given as human beings. It is a part of our intrinsic ‘self’, and through communication becomes something we can share, albeit with its inconsistencies.

History, however, ‘is written by the victors’, as the saying goes. Not just anyone gets to ‘write’ history, the contents of its chapters are reserved for an exclusive club. There are far less inconsistencies to history compared to a shared memory: we know the cause, the effect. The good, the bad. The right, the wrong. The beautiful, the ugly. 

Or, at least, we know the writers’ perspectives of these. This has been known to lead to some issues in the past: the controlling of historical narratives is a powerful tool for propaganda - an example of which you can find in my previous article.

Photograph of Joseph Stalin before and after the image was doctored (Source)

Memory is owned by all, regardless of power. History is owned by those powerful enough to keep it for themselves.

But now we have social media. Anyone can post an artefact of an event, a time, a place, and have it preserved in a global forum for all to see. History is no longer reserved for this exclusive club, to decide the character roles of the past as they please. Now we can all display our version of events, we can all see the truth of the past for ourselves.

That was the idea of this whole internet thing, right? Is it just me, or does it feel like that isn’t quite happening currently?

Perhaps its previous owners aren’t solely responsible for history’s struggle to reflect the truth. Perhaps the very framework through which history is communicated also has its part to play.

History’s Framework

What is the framework of history? Narrative. 

All narratives share some core functions: beginning with a protagonist in a state of equilibrium, when suddenly a disruption occurs, usually by the antagonist. Our hero struggles, some helpers lost along the way. Maybe we see a twist, but in the end they prevail, finding meaning in their struggle through the lessons they learned on the journey.

We like narratives because of their drama. To create drama, we need conflict. These are key principles of storytelling. And it makes the story entertaining. 

This isn’t inherently bad, or evil, but it fails to accurately capture reality.

Hitler’s campaign of Nazism through World War II was inconceivably abhorrent, but does this excuse Churchill’s well-recorded colonialist ideology? 9/11 was too an immeasurable horror, but does this allow the United States to remain the ‘good guy’ despite its history of imperial occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan?

I, and most, would be inclined to say no, it does not justify this. But within the framework of history, we are only given two options: you’re the good guy, who writes the story, or you’re the bad guy, who proves how ‘good' the good guy really is.

The Feed

So, how does any of this relate to the ‘feed’ on Facebook or Twitter?

Narratives of history have traditionally been separated by nations: in wartime Britain and Germany during the 1940s, you would have found two very different narratives, and nations playing very different roles within them.

Social media has retained many of history’s narrative devices, but the divisions are not the same. We find, more and more, that these narratives are divided by ideology.

When you use social media, you interact with posts, pages, people. You like, comment, follow. And this influences the algorithm. We know this.

The algorithm then displays information in a certain order on your feed. These feeds loosely descend by reverse chronology, with the newest at the top and the oldest at the bottom, with some further filtering based on these increasingly complex algorithms.

All of a sudden, a story is created: a story that ever unfolds in the present, with a seemingly endless chronology of artefacts that explain reality through the lens of your interests and beliefs as a series of events that caused this moment. 

Just like the historical narrative, the linear, descending feed creates a consistent story of events that explains an individual’s specific ideology and the actors who are aligned to it as the protagonists in the epic that is reality, and any who aren’t aligned the antagonist.

The Result

The framework of the narrative will always exclude the ‘other’, the one who doesn’t get to write the story, but plays a central role. Meanwhile, they write their own story elsewhere, and the roles are reversed. 

Perhaps this goes some way to explain how, for the first time in history, it would appear that two different people won the US presidential election, despite the existence of substantial empirical evidence for who ‘truly’ won.

It is hard to blame social media platforms for this issue. They promote narratives because they entertain, and this was the original purpose of these platforms.

But perhaps we need a different framework, one which promotes the communication of collective memory, rather than the construction of historical narratives.

How do you remember? Do you scroll through a list of your life’s events to locate the memory you want? Or does it just appear, based on what you are doing right now? Maybe memory can inspire the next framework for a digital platform, rather than history.

Twitter have recently updated their verification system, providing new criteria for receiving ‘the blue tick’ in response to the widespread criticism of ‘confusion’ around its use and purpose. Have these updates cleared up the confusion? Or does the problem run deeper?

According to Twitter, a ‘verified’ tick attached to an account “lets people know that an account of public interest is authentic.” To receive this verified status, your account must be “authentic, notable and active.” 

Seems simple enough, right?

Let’s take a step back for a second. How did we get here? Why do we need these blue ticks? Why do we want them? What was their inspiration?

Verification and authentication are tied to authorship. We have used similar means for centuries to ensure the authenticity of a message or communication is being made by who we believe it to be. A comparable tool is the wax stamp that would seal letters, used by royalty and nobility. A seal would confirm that it is both from the intended sender, indicated by the design of the seal, and that they were the only reader, indicated by the seal being unbroken.

The need arose from communication that was no longer face to face. Unless we hear the words come out of someone’s mouth, we have instinctively looked to verification to confirm their words as their own.

This is all well and good, but it doesn’t explain what issues there are with online verification. Or does it? Let’s consider some of the implications from a design perspective.

The first aspect of verification that is important to consider historically is how closely it has always been tied to social status. When wax seals were most popular prior to the industrial revolution, those who used them weren’t just socially important, but also politically important. 

When an account is ‘verified’ on social media, the implication isn’t only that they are who they say they are, but also that they are important. 

Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and any other platform you can think of operate their verified user policy the same way. As with Twitter, they all explain that it is through a vetting process of public presence, be it the news, publications or other media that these platforms deem legitimate, that someone may become ‘verified’ as themselves. 

However, when they do become verified on a platform, their social status is no longer substantiated by these external publications, but by that blue tick itself. People put considerable effort into acquiring the blue tick status on major platforms, as they believe it to be in itself the marker of importance, or ‘clout’.

By putting this system in place, major platforms have created a much more powerful, and sinister, tool than merely a digital ‘seal’. These platforms now wield both a carrot, of the verified status, and a stick, by taking it away. The ‘donkeys’ who wish to engage in public debate are only able to do so within the platform’s rules that these mark out.

Further down Twitter’s info page on verification: 

“We may also remove the blue badge from accounts that are found to be in severe or repeated violation of the Twitter Rules.”

I personally find this concept intriguing. On the surface, it appears as though Twitter, or indeed any other major platform, is no longer confirming someone is who they say they are should they violate the rules of their platform. This is what this act should mean, by Twitter’s own definition of a verified account.

What it actually means is that Twitter is taking away your carrot and replacing it with a stick. Twitter has decided you don’t deserve to be important. Twitter has decided you are just like everyone else. 

I’m not saying that people who get un-verified aren’t deserving of some kind of action. The most common cause for this is spreading conspiracy, disinformation, and incitement of violence, which on the surface I and many others welcome. 

But no one elected Twitter to police public discourse. There is no real means of confirming Twitter are capable of managing this responsibility, and there is no structure in place should we, the public who are engaging in discussion, feel at any point that they have done an inadequate job. 

If we live in a democracy, surely we should get to decide what information is allowed, and who is allowed to participate?

Again, I will return to my early question: how did we get here? The answer, I believe, is in design.

The wax seal was never used as a tool of public discussion. It was for individual letters between a sender and recipient. The protocol for that kind of conversation relies on knowledge of who you are speaking with.

Not only that, but in a time of limited means of communication, the accountability of those who reported information was very important. There was no other way of knowing what happened during an event than from the word of someone in a letter. You have to trust the people who write to you to know what is happening around you. You had to rely on the quality of information when quantity was lacking.

What an author’s wax seal gave you, therefore, was the context of the information. 

This is exactly what a blue tick also provides. The tick tells the reader the context that Twitter not only knows this account represents who they claim to be, but also that they are ideologically aligned with Twitter. In other words: you can trust them.

But do you trust them? Do you trust Twitter? Or Facebook? Instagram?

Perhaps you do, but why rely on it? The fact is, we don’t need to trust platforms, or their blue disciples, to verify information for us. If we want to find something out, we have the entire internet to research, gain evidence, and build understanding. We don’t need to rely on quality of information in the same way, when we have so much more quantity than ever before.

This isn’t to say that authorship is entirely irrelevant as context - only that it isn’t universally essential as context.

Verification was only ever a stopgap due to lack of information, and never an ideal mechanism for verifying information. And with its new use as a carrot of social status that can be taken away, its primary function as a tool for accountability has been removed. 

The internet provides us with a many more functions of context than just an author: evidence. And lots of it. And yet somehow we find disinformation and conspiracies to be an even greater problem than they were before.

Perhaps this is because we are using the same systems to verify the truth of information as we were before the digital age. Back when, you know, disinformation and conspiracies weren’t exactly a non-issue. For example this article I found two seconds after typing ‘USSR’ into Google.

Maybe a redesign is in order: one that focuses less on who said it, and more on what ‘it’ really is.

Thanks for reading!

This article is the first in the Turtles (all the way down!) newsletter series. I hope this brief foray into how a small blue tick can have such major social repercussions in digital spaces sheds some light on why it is so important to discuss the relationship between digital design and the most pressing issues of the modern world. If you liked the read and would enjoy more, feel free to subscribe!

Welcome! Turtles contains a series of articles on the relationship between digital platform design and truth, memory, language and more, written by Ethan Corcoran.

Ethan is founder of Clusta - and works as a UX designer, researcher and web developer.

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I’m on Twitter too, come say hi :)

(Image Source: https://socialdigitalelective.wordpress.com/groups/rhizomes/)