Escaping Reality: Refactor Camp 2019, Los Angeles, June 15-16

April 4, 2019 By

Refactor Camp is back! The 2019 edition will be held in Los Angeles, the weekend of June 15-16, at the lovely design studio of Philosophie in Santa Monica. The theme for this year is “Escaping Reality.”

Theme details, registration link and session proposal submission link can be found at the swanky new event website

(it’s the first time in the 7-year history of the event that we’ve had a proper website, thanks to long-time reader Megan).

As you know if you’ve attended before, we’ve always run the event on a no-profit/no-loss basis. The cost this year works out to $95. Registration will remain open until tickets run out. The venue capacity is limited to 120, and as I write this, 63 regular tickets remain (an auspicious 42 tickets were taken during the closed pre-registration period for returning attendees, and we’re holding 15 in our cronyism reserve). The event tends to sell out early, so if you plan on attending, you should register early.

Session proposals are due by April 30, and you can find the proposal submission link on the event site. Earlier is better, and if we get enough proposals early enough, the program may get locked down early, so if you’d like to do a talk or session, get your proposal in as early as you can.

We’re still working out the program details, but as usual there will be a mix of lightning talks, longer talks, interactive sessions, and hopefully a beach outing (outdoor walkabout sessions have always been a feature of Refactor Camp, though we couldn’t do one last year due to it being in the Texas desert with buzzards and rattlesnakes around).

Look for the final program sometime in early May. As with previous years, we’ll be trying to pull together a good mix of returning and new people among both attendees and speakers/session leaders. For now, the theme blurb should give you an idea of what to expect.

This year’s efforts are being led by Darren Kong (who was also a lead organizer last year in Austin), with support from Megan Lubaszka, Patrick Atwater, Nolan Gray, Ryan Tanaka, and myself.

So hope to see a bunch of both new and familiar faces in June. Register and/or submit session proposals here.

Infinite Machines: 2 – Plasticized Erotica

March 25, 2019 By

Today, the sexbot industry gives men the inverse of what Barbie gives girls: a sense of control over the opposite sex.

Upgrade her to suit your needs. Mostly docile. Never late. She’s yours to keep.

This industry isn’t particularly anti-woman, but does reveal an enthusiasm for male freedom through decreased interdependence from the emotional needs of women.

This begs the question: how does the value of synthetic life influence social norms toward natural life? Turns out, it’s complicated.

  • Sexbots aren’t sentient, therefore have no dignity to uphold.
  • They give power, but can’t be genuinely influenced.
  • Pornographic pleasures, but no intimacy.
  • Control, but no consent.

I could continue, but when examining what’s lost in this emergent future, it seems male users will be inevitably forced to reconcile their desires with real women, legal systems, and the broader public. Individuals are escalating concerns and regulation, and rightfully so. The female body has been objectified and stripped of sexual freedom across nearly every aspect of humanity. In an era where ‘consent’ is still ambiguous from the streets to the sheets, should we further empower men who choose not to practice it?

Whether sexbots could be used for radical autonomy is an interesting question. VR is being used to treat PTSD, anxiety, and facilitate sex therapy. Consider for a moment if sexbots took a similar path.

  • Less rape in prisons.
  • Interactive consent lessons in classrooms.
  • Men on campuses knowing how to ask for what they want at the end of the night.
  • In homes, sexbots might reduce sexual tension that’s often tangled with the economic aspects of marriages.

In the near future, women will continually be expected, unfortunately, to owe their bodies to men. But perhaps with the right intervention, sexbots can absorb ignorant and toxic mistakes; helping re-distribute power to design a world of social equality between sexes.

Constructions in Magical Thinking

March 21, 2019 By

If you’re one of those sharp-eyed readers who notices such things, you may have noticed that earlier this week, we adopted a new tagline: constructions in magical thinking. We also got a cheery set of new mastheads to go with it (thanks Grace Witherell), which you’ll see in rotation at the top of the site from now on.

In the best traditions of magical thinking, I will now respond to the most Frequently Asked Questions that have never actually been asked about our new tagline, in the hopes that doing so will somehow make them always-already never unasked.

Are you sick of our new schtick yet? No? Well, give it time. We’re sticking with this for the next decade.

[Read more…]

Refactorings Roundup: 1/28/19 – 3/10/19

March 12, 2019 By
This entry is part 9 of 9 in the series Refactorings Roundups

It’s been nearly 6 weeks since the last time I did this roundup from our mastodon. It’s now a series, so you can navigate backwards to find good stuff.  Even with some automation (thanks Zach), generating a reasonable curated selection from the hive-mind of a community is not an easy task. Still, I find it’s worth doing for the sheer oddity of the things that get into the dragnet.

In other news, I’ve gotten really good at making omeletes with the Just Egg plant-based egg substitute, which is really good.

Unlike auteur-curated link roundups, which tend to have an impoverished sameness even with the best curators, a reasonable sized community that is sufficiently open tends to have weird shit on its mind if you periodically fMRI it. I’ve been trying to follow a bonsai-style curation approach, trying to reveal the natural tendencies of this firehose rather than filter by my own interests. We have a total of 16 posts from friends of ribbonfarm, and 27 links from around the web.

Among the new posts, I want to call out Chenoe Hart’s post Free Shipping (#1 on the New Posts list), Sarah Constantin’s posts on general intelligence (#7) and Ilia Gimelfarb’s post (#14).

Alright here we go.

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Elderblog Sutra: 4

February 19, 2019 By
This entry is part 4 of 13 in the series Elderblog Sutra

The idea of hypertext trails predates the internet. Vannevar Bush envisioned trails and trailblazing as early as 1945, in As We May Think.

I am part of a long tradition of trying and failing to build trails technology. I led a team at Xerox that built a product, called Trailmeme (2008-12, RIP), that created navigable, visual trail maps of web content that looked like this.

It was a lovely product that did exactly what I wanted. We just couldn’t find a way to sustain it.

Failures stay with you in a way successes don’t. I’m still licking my wounds from that failure, but I’m also still trying to figure trails out. So are others. Every couple of years, somebody takes a fresh tilt at the problem and fails. One part of my elderblogging experiments is a second serious stab at trails, this time from the content side rather than the technology side.

The closest we’ve ever come to trails has been the special case of chronological ordering, which eventually became the stream UX metaphor. But piggybacking chronology as a way to get to trail-based organization is not only limiting, it is a kind of cheating. Like floating down a river, but pretending to be moving under your own power.

The best generalized embodiment of trail-based organization can be found on blogs, in the form of post series. But such series rarely go beyond 2-3 parts.

But we’re close to cracking trails. The key breakthrough has been the rise of threads on Twitter (an invention arguably attributable to Marc Andreessen). Twitter threads are genuine trails, even though they’re confined to a single platform. They are not chronological sequences. The key idea: trail-like structure is created during the act of authoring, not as part of subsequent curation. The trail authoring and blazing problems are coupled.

Weirding Diary: 4

February 18, 2019 By
This entry is part 4 of 11 in the series Weirding Diary

The Things Fall Apart series on Epsilon Theory is an excellent exploration of the Great Weirding, particularly the “As Above, So Below” principle:

“As Above, So Below” means that our social lives are organized as a fractal, that when there is disorder in the heavens or the seats of worldly power, so is there disorder in our communities, our families, and our personal lives.”

Case in point: Recently, a Starbucks I used to frequent closed. The story was obvious to regulars: it had become an urban deadzone, more attractive to the homeless than to laptop warriors.

Over several years, the store deteriorated. You would often find homeless men parked in armchairs for hours, nursing a single grimy cup. Once, one such man got out of his armchair, and there was a pool of what I could only hope was water under him. He flipped the cushion over and left. Going to the restroom increasingly meant finding a homeless person washing up. I observed the Schelling sorting effect play out to the end, as the clientele drifted to the sort better served by a McDonald’s.

The Starbucks menu has a digital soul. It is a combinatorial consumption feast at the end of a global supply chain weaving its way from plantations, through factory-scale roasteries that  tame natural variety to nail a consistently mediocre taste year after year, to the cups of us cloud mice.

Starbucks stores, however, are firmly situated in meatspace, canaries in the neourban cores of the Weirding at the “below” end.

Today, I’m working out of a Starbucks in laptop-warrior zone, because the other Starbucks I frequent is also closed, for President’s Day, a surreal holiday that makes no sense in the flexwork economy embodied by Starbucks. And Howard Schultz is running for President.

As above, so below.

 

Breaking Smart Season 1 Online Workshop

February 14, 2019 By

After 3 years of dragging my feet, I’ve finally gotten my act together to put together the online, recorded version of the Season 1 Breaking Smart workshop, on how software is eating the world.

For those who came in late, Breaking Smart is my other site. It’s a technology analysis site that I launched in 2015 with a set of essays (Season 1) on “software eating the world,” based on a year of work with a16z. There is also an email newsletter with 6300+ subscribers. The content there is somewhat different from Ribbonfarm in tone and intent, and the audience/community is also somewhat different.

Through this weekend (until midnight Sunday, Feb 17), you can sign up for the workshop at the launch price of $200, (20% off), by using the discount code RIBBONFARMER. 


This is the online, self-paced version of the in-person workshop I conducted 7 times during 2015-16, based on the original Season 1 essays. In this version, I have adapted the material for online, self-paced consumption, and more importantly, updated the lecture contents to reflect the world of 2019.

We have now seen the software-eating-the-world phenomenon evolve a complete cycle, from the sunny and optimistic cultural springtime of 2011, when Marc Andreessen coined the phrase, to the dark and gloomy winter time of 2019. In preparing this version, I’ve tried to capture the full-cycle character of a revolution that will likely last as long as the industrial revolution, and evolve through many more such cycles in our lifetimes.

All the core content of the in-person workshop is now online. I also plan to add a few special topics and Q&A videos in the future, and as/when I do that, the list price will go up in proportion.

This is a course I hope to keep adding to and improving over the next few years, both to keep it current, and to increase the breadth and depth of relevance. So rather appropriately for a course on software eating the world, it will be in perpetual beta.

If you are interested in group access pricing for your workgroup, company, or a class at an educational institution, please get in touch. Depending on your needs, I may be able to create a customized version of the course for your organization or industry, or supplement the recorded course with a live, interactive session with your group. Having done the in-person workshop for audiences in banking, investment, entrepreneurship, government, and the arts, I have a good sense of how to customize/supplement the core material for those audiences. For other audiences, I’ll need to put in a bit more extra prep.

So, here’s the link again, and looking forward to seeing you in the workshop.

This is the second serious course I’ve put together at the Ribbonfarm School on Teachable. You may also be interested in the course we published last year, The Art of Longform, which has me and Sarah Perry teaching the longform style we practice here.

I hope to put together a couple more good courses this year, so stay tuned for more on this front.

Mediocratopia: 2

February 12, 2019 By
This entry is part 2 of 13 in the series Mediocratopia

Regular heroes are excellent people. Mediocrity is an anti-heroic ethos, but not along either of the usual dimensions of anti-heroism or villainy. The antihero and villain embody excellence of a sort similar to the hero’s. They merely bring different goals and values to the party.

The anti-excellence hero is the comic hero.

In Asterix and the Chieftain’s Shield we encounter Caius Pusilanimus, perhaps the most elemental example of a mediocre comic hero (though he’s a side character in the story).

Where the hero reluctantly accepts his own exceptional nature, the mediocre comic hero eagerly embraces his own unexceptional nature and schemes to gain rewards out of proportion with its potentialities.

Where the hero embodies fight, the comic hero embodies flight. Where the hero puts in 110%, the comic hero gets by with 60%. Where the hero aims to win honorably, the comic hero aims to survive by any means possible, and live to flee another day. Where the hero’s moments of weakness are marked by self-doubt and fear (usually on behalf of others, rather than for themselves), the comic hero’s moments of weakness are marked by a failure to be mediocre. An embarrassingly heroic act, for example. Or idealistic fervor descending as a momentary madness.

My new favorite example of a mediocre comic hero is the wizard Rincewind in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels.

For the mediocre comic hero, impact is a function, not of exceptional traits, but of surviving long enough to get lucky in exceptional environments. This comic from webcomicname.com gets at this numbers-game aspect.

All excellence is exceptional, though not all that is exceptional is excellent. Exceptionality can be attained by either being highly present and situated in a complex environment, or by being exceptional in any environment (though sometimes, exceptional character can be canceled out by an exceptional environment).

Elderblog Sutra: 3

February 11, 2019 By
This entry is part 3 of 13 in the series Elderblog Sutra

When you walk, your typical step is a step along the path you’re on. Steps that exit down a new path are exceptions. On the web, exit clicks are the default, voice clicks — which keep you in the current conversational context — are exceptions.

This exit bias of hypertext makes it difficult to match the deepening-attention experience of the printed book. In a book, page-turnings far exceed book switches. A page-turner is a a thriller that reinforces the  stay-on-the-trail bias of print. Even the most difficult books tend to sustain 2-3 page turnings per session. Online page-turners by contrast — think Taboola listicles with one titillating nugget per page — fight a losing battle from Link One. Even if you don’t supply outbound links, there are always open tabs lurking in the background: competing books within thumb-reach.

My hyperlinking philosophy has always been to avoid fighting the medium. Successful online content works by deepening the stream of consciousness rather than fighting the exit bias. Three models do this particularly well: single-page longform, streams, and threads.

Single-page longform works like a meditative-attention gravity well that gets harder to exit the deeper in you go. My longest post is 14,422 words, 4x a typical magazine feature. It would need ~30 page turnings if it weren’t on a single page.

Streams work by letting topic-level attention go stochastic, and deepening conversation-level attention. Twitter and Facebook invite you to swim upstream in place, always in the now, modulo some atemporal algorithmic vorticity. The archives of an elderblog invite you to swim downstream into long-term settled memories via internal links.

The thread (sutra in Sanskrit) is the youngest and most exciting innovation. You deepen the stream of consciousness by working with the smallest possible chunks. Originally 140 characters.

Of the three, the thread is the most likely to disrupt the printed book.

Mediocratopia: 1

February 8, 2019 By
This entry is part 1 of 13 in the series Mediocratopia

I’m fascinated by mediocrity as an aspiration, understood as optimization resistance and withheld reserves. Mediocrity is slouching towards survival. Mediocrity is pragmatic resistance to totalizing thought. Mediocrity is fat in the system. Mediocrity is playful, foxy improvisation.

If premature optimization is the root of all evil, mediocrity is  slightly evil.

Mediocrity is the courage to be ordinary.

The increasingly mediocrity-hostile zeitgeist — witness this schwag t-shirt, ht Andy Raskin — has only made me double down.

Mediocrity has been a keynote theme for me for a decade, central to bookend viral hits nearly a decade apart: The Gervais Principle (2009) and The Premium Mediocre Life of Maya Millennial (2017).

In the former, I argued that Losers are self-aware minimum-effort slackers, while Sociopaths get to the top by avoiding the lure of excellence and practicing strategic incompetence on the way up.  “Excellence” is for the Clueless middle.

In the latter, I argued that much apparent excellence is just signaling in an economy wired to reward mediocrity with a veneer of excellence, and that this is a good thing (many perversely missed that latter point).

Mediocrity makes an appearance in many personal favorites: The Return of the Barbarian, The Gollum Effect, and The Calculus of Grit (2011), Fat Thinking and Economies of Variety (2016), and the posts collected in Crash Early, Crash Often (written 2014-2017).  In 2018, I began exploring it explicitly, in Survival of the Mediocre Mediocre,  and Why We Slouch.

Sadly, Hugh MacLeod, whose Company Hierarchy inspired The Gervais Principle, has gone dark-side with an allergic-to-mediocrity 2018 cartoon.

Et tu Hugh? 😢

It’s lonely where I stand, but I will continue to thought-leader humanity as we slouch towards a mediocracy utopia: a mediocratopia. A long-lived world built out of good-enough parts, including, and especially, human ones.

Can we get there? Yes we can, if we stop hustling so damn much.