Sooner or later, we are all superheroes.
Superman wears a costume. As we all do.
He isn’t great at time management, always focused on the urgency at hand instead of investing in long-term planning.
He rarely works to change the foundational system he’s part of.
Supervillians exist in opposition to him and his work. Without him, they have no purpose.
He has a closely-guarded secret identity he doesn’t want the world to see.
Reputation, trust and good work are at the heart of his brand.
He misses home. In fact, his uniform is made from his baby blanket.
When technology evolves, he gains new powers.
In the official narrative, the Bechdel test is rarely passed. We can tell better stories than that.
His best exploits involve thoughtful strategy. The punching is boring.
When it counts, he shows up with bravery.
His most important relationships are based on mutual trust.
It turns out that bending steel with his bare hands is a distraction from the real point.
July 14, 2025
They can carry us away, amplify our work or slowly change everything around us. These arcs can easily become invisible forces, pushing us to make choices and to ignore their origins or consequences.
Capitalism is the most common one, along with its shadow, industrialism. We show up on behalf of the invisible hand, engaging with the market in search of profit and productivity. It begins by serving the market, but can become soulless industrialism. The work can be focused on finding a need and filling it. Or it can shift to “I’m just doing my job,” and “If I don’t do it, somebody else will…”
Technology evolves as a species, and we either work for it or against it. The folks who enabled the internet to go from five minutes to eight hours of our day were working on behalf of this now-visible and increasingly dominant cultural force.
Scarcity is the path of power. Connection is the way toward abundance. Connection creates culture and possibility, while the inverse, scarcity, creates a kind of value. Some work to create status roles and monopolies and the leverage that we have over others, while others work toward resilience and mutual support.
Justice is the one that Reverend Parker argued for. It doesn’t happen by itself, and it doesn’t always support the three other arcs, but with effort, we have the chance to bend it.
Which ones are pushing you forward and narrating your days?
July 13, 2025
There isn’t much of a correlation between how fast you swim and how much energy you put into it.
In fact, drowning people burn plenty of calories but they don’t go anywhere.
When we’re confronting a new problem, more effort might not be the answer.
It could be that we benefit by staying calm and focusing on our technique instead.
July 12, 2025
[written by claude.]
Here’s the thing about ChatGPT that nobody wants to admit:
It’s not intelligent. It’s something far more interesting.
Back in the 1950s, a Russian linguist named Roman Jakobson walked into a Harvard classroom and found economic equations on the blackboard. Instead of erasing them, he said, “I’ll teach with this.”
Why? Because he understood something profound: language works like an economy. Words relate to other words the same way supply relates to demand.
Fast forward seventy years. We built machines that prove Jakobson right.
The literary theory nobody read
In the 1980s, professors with unpronounceable names wrote dense books about how language is a system of signs pointing to other signs. How meaning doesn’t come from the “real world” but from the web of relationships between words themselves.
Everyone thought this was academic nonsense.
Turns out, it was a blueprint for ChatGPT.
What we got wrong about AI
We keep asking: “Is it intelligent? Does it understand?”
Wrong questions.
Better question: “How does it create?”
Because here’s what’s actually happening inside these machines: They’re mapping the statistical relationships between every word and every other word in human culture. They’re building a heat map of how language actually works.
Not how we think it should work. How it does work.
The poetry problem
A Large Language Model doesn’t write poems. It writes poetry.
What’s the difference?
Poetry is the potential that lives in language itself—the way words want to dance together, the patterns that emerge when you map meaning mathematically.
A poem is what happens when a human takes that potential and shapes it with intention.
The machine gives us the raw material. We make the art.
Why this matters
Two groups are having the wrong argument:
The AI boosters think we’re building digital brains. The AI critics think we’re destroying human authenticity.
Both are missing the point.
We’re not building intelligence. We’re building culture machines. Tools that can compress and reconstruct the patterns of human expression.
That’s not a bug. It’s the feature.
The real opportunity
Instead of fearing these machines or anthropomorphizing them, we could learn to read them.
They’re showing us something we’ve never seen before: a statistical map of human culture. The ideological patterns that shape how we think and write and argue.
Want to understand how conspiracy theories spread? Ask the machine to write about mathematics and watch it drift toward culture war talking points.
Want to see how certain ideas cluster together in our collective imagination? Feed it a prompt and trace the semantic pathways it follows.
What comes next
We need a new kind of literacy. Not just reading and writing, but understanding how these culture machines work. How they compress meaning. How they generate new combinations from old patterns.
We need to become rhetoricians again. Students of how language shapes reality.
Because these machines aren’t replacing human creativity.
They’re revealing how human creativity actually works.
The future belongs to those who can read the poetry in the machine.
Based on a post by Henry Farrell
July 11, 2025
What’s possible and what’s required? It’s still surprising to me that some of these ideas aren’t widely held, because they seem so clear to me:
Skill is a choice. Talent is overrated, and if we choose to get better at something, we probably can.
Responsibility is a privilege. It’s not given to us, it’s taken. When we choose to be on the hook for something, it makes our work better.
The benefit of the doubt creates connection. When we exclude people based on surface judgments, we penalize each other.
Agency is our recognition of all three of these ideas, in one.
- The system can be changed and normal is not permanent
- Find the smallest viable audience
- Pick your customers, pick your future
- Outdated maps might be worth less than no map at all
- Reliability is a superpower
- There are no side effects, merely effects
- There’s usually an opportunity to be of service
- Silence is an option, and so is leadership
- There is no perfect moment to begin
- Shame is a dream killer
- Everyone who disagrees with you believes they are correct
- Ship the work
- Treat different people differently
- I am not stuck in traffic, I am traffic
- Invest in slow growth
- The problem with the race to the bottom is you might win
- Uncomfortable facts are often the most helpful ones
- A good deal is better than a big deal
- When in doubt look for the fear
- Avoid arguments, embrace conversations
- Easy to measure doesn’t make it important
- Find clarity about who the customer is (and isn’t)
- Genre is a platform, not a fence
- Lowering expectations can increase satisfaction
- Improve project hygiene
- Ask what the system is for
- We might not need more time, we simply need to decide
- Consider the cost of keeping a promise before making it
- Earn enrollment
- Helping someone get what they want is easier than changing what they want
- Not all criticism is equally valid
- Write down the things you’re sure you’ll never forget
- Focus on the hard part
- Quitting one thing is the only way to find the focus to do the next thing
- Perfectionism is not related to quality
- Your competitors are actually your allies
- Surfing is better than golf
- Criticize ideas, not people
- Cannibals rarely get a good night’s sleep
- Status roles are the unseen force in almost every system
- Embrace necessary discomfort
- Gratitude is a more useful fuel than anger
- Create tension and relieve stress
- Imposter syndrome is real, and it arrives whenever we’re doing important work
- Solve interesting problems
- Offer dignity
- Ignore sunk costs
- Don’t try to fill an unfillable hole
- This might not work
- Consistency is more useful than authenticity
- People like us do things like this
- Simple hacks rarely fix long-term problems
- Trade short-term wins for long-term impact
- Today’s world is unpredictable, and this is as stable as it will ever be again
- Generous doesn’t mean free
- Make assertions
- Invest in skills that compound with effort
- Culture conceals systems, and systems construct our future
- Peeves make lousy pets
- Reassurance is futile
- Take responsibility, demand freedom, don’t seek authority
- Ideas that spread, win
- Earn trust through action
- Become the person your future thanks you for and forgive the past for the mistakes it made
- Attitudes are skills
July 10, 2025
Publicity is the hard work of getting media outlets and social media influencers to talk about you. Hustle for attention and mentions.
Public relations is the much harder work of engaging with internal teams to make something worth talking about. It’s not spin, it’s story telling that resonates and holds up to scrutiny.
Sometimes, organic publicity is a natural byproduct of good public relations. Mostly, though, the work is about the public, not the folks in the middle.
If you want to do public relations, you need access and leverage and time.
If you want to do publicity, you’ll need a thick skin.
July 9, 2025
It doesn’t care whether you’re excited or filled with trepidation.
It arrives, regardless.
What an opportunity. Or a threat.
Up to us.
July 8, 2025
Not smart is a passive act, remedied with learning, experience and thought.
Stupid is active, the work of someone who should have or could have known better and decided to do something selfish, impulsive or dangerous anyway.
The more experience, assets and privilege we have, the less excusable it is to do stupid things. And at the same time, the more useful it is to announce that we’re not smart (yet).
July 7, 2025
Everything flows from the strategic decisions we make early in the process:
Choose your landlord. The rent is due every month. The place we set up (whether it’s a retail storefront, a social media platform or a warehouse) determines our cost structure, our deal flow and the space we have to work with.
Choose your investors. They decide the scale of the resources we have to invest, the timeframe and the decision-making rubrics.
Choose your customers. This either flows from the first two choices, or, if you’re smart, this is the one you make first. Your customers decide whether or not to spread the word, to be loyal, and to push you to raise or lower your standards… Your customers are the engine of your growth and also the architect of how you spend your day.
It’s easy to back into all three of these choices. To do what others are doing, to find yourself with a mortgage or SEO strategy or payment schedule that pushes you to run your project in ways you never would have chosen.
It’s your project. And then you choose.
Choose your landlord, choose your future.
July 6, 2025
