Hi there. I am RM. I read on someone else's blog it's always good to set the scene for what these notes are about, because most readers haven't read what came before. So here we are.
I have this long-term goal to start a practice focused solely on play. Not games, not contests, but unsupervised, free play. Not "free to play." Free from stigmas.
My early thesis is that we somehow either lost or are not confident enough anymore to embrace play wholeheartedly. So this blog post—or better, these notes—are simply me capturing thoughts and observations as I develop my theory. If this sparks ideas and pushes you down a rabbit hole, leave a comment, follow along or reach out, that's what I hope for.
Lately, my head’s been a mess of entangled wires. I’m a.) neck-deep in a large scale research project about a massive ecosystem and the stories that drive it, b.) decided to start writing a zine on a theory about play to complement game theory, c.) reading way too many books that are probably messing with my sanity, and d.) started to “vibe code” a ton of small, weird helpful playful tools just for myself. Somehow, against all logic, these threads feel like they’re all part of the same knot.
This all really kicked into high gear with my last few years in Crypto, or Web3, whatever we’re calling it this week. I ended up there mostly for ideological reasons – a belief in an open, interoperable, decentralized internet. After a few years in SF, I was sick to death of walled gardens, of "business interests" always seeming to trample on genuinely good, beneficial innovation. Web3 felt like the antidote. Openness would fuel real competition, real evolution. Interoperability would build stronger, more resilient network effects. Decentralization would give it all longevity. That was the dream I lived by.
On top of that, I had this pet theory: whenever and wherever in human history we create new markets, new forms of culture inevitably emerge and flourish. Looking at the NFT and DAO boom of 2020-2023, I still think there’s a kernel of truth to that. But if I’m being brutally honest, the whole experience also just made me a lot more cynical.
It's hard to argue that DeFi wasn't the spark for a Cambrian explosion in Crypto. The ERC-20 token standard, smart contracts, the ballooning value tethered to these tokens – it unlocked a whole "new" financial system. Or did it? I keep wondering if it’s truly new. So much of it just looks and feels like the old systems we already have, just with a few extra features and, okay, increasingly better speed. Composability, that holy grail so hard to achieve in disconnected legacy systems, allowed for fascinating new combinations. These are cool experiments, no doubt. But as someone who grew up loving LEGO and worked there, it felt like we just found slicker ways to combine the same old bricks, not a fundamentally different way to play.
What really hit me, though, on a personal level, was how deeply unfulfilling I found working in this and with this "decentralized Excel" all day, every day. And it started to make me question, more and more, if any of this stuff even makes sense. From an outsider's view, a lot of crypto often doesn't. Pictures as data entries in a shared spreadsheet valued at millions? A meme becoming a currency people pay top dollar for? Complex financial loops designed to multiply returns from nothing? Sure, that’s cool for my virtual analogy of a bank account, maybe. But what is value, actually?
Here’s a weird thing I noticed about myself: I totally lost any intuitive sense of value and price. I actually started to appreciate hard fiat cash, the kind you can hold in your hands, a hell of a lot more. It gave me an actual, tangible sense of what I possessed. I’m still constantly amazed at myself – how I can have these completely different value systems operating in parallel. One minute I’m in a store, meticulously hunting for discounts on groceries, and literally minutes later, I’m "aping" into some leveraged perps position, risking (and often losing more of than I would like to admit) multiples of that grocery bill. It’s like these worlds are fully disconnected, operating under different laws of physics.
If there’s any place where our textbook belief in economic equilibrium should exist, crypto markets ought to be it. With my obsession for learning how economics and markets work, I thought – and honestly, still kind of think – crypto is one of the best massive multiplayer real-time research projects happening right now. But it made me question so much of economic theory itself. First off, having seen behind the curtain more often than I probably wanted to, I don’t think even these programmatic markets are as "efficient" as we tell ourselves. There are just too many damn variables. It brings to mind Timothy Morton’s idea of hyperobjects – things so massively distributed in time and space, so complex, that we can’t fully grasp them. And, as a fan of Metaphors We Live By, I know how deeply these conceptual frameworks shape our understanding and how we navigate the world. Or as Marshall McLuhan put it, "the medium is the message." Markets, at least as we define and see them, aren't necessarily hyperobjects themselves, but we always, always seem to simplify them. I’m guilty of this myself; I love the idea of flywheels and feedback loops. As much as they make intuitive sense and are often right, they still get sideswiped by black swans, because no flywheel can ever capture the full, entangled reality of the system it operates within.
I’ve spent years trying to learn and understand systems design. The more I did, the more I thought it’s less a science and more a weird blend of intuition, intervention, and observation – something that can’t ever be fully captured or formalized. It makes me think a lot about Gödel's incompleteness theorem: no formal system can define its own consistency or capture its entirety. Yet, working in crypto plunged me even deeper into systems that are, first and foremost, data-driven, and therefore metrics-driven. The metrics you establish, the metrics you measure, those are the things you live by. But we rarely, if ever, really question the metrics themselves.
Crypto’s relentless attempt to put a price on everything started to feel like a profoundly limiting factor. This really crystallized for me when I started paying more attention to the common metrics we use – Liquidity, Volume, Revenue – to assign value to an ecosystem. It made me think about the books I was devouring on the concept of GDP, that yardstick we use to measure the health, wealth, and growth of a nation. What I struggle with is that GDP is a made-up construct. It intentionally ignores the fact that the world, and the way we humans navigate and exchange within it, is a hyperobject itself. GDP tries to circumvent this complexity by deliberately leaving vast swathes of reality out of the equation – care work, the environment, the informal economy. It’s the same trick I’d pull with a flywheel diagram. You make a case, you create the metaphor or metric to live by, and that then shapes us. But black swans still happen because, well, we ignored crucial aspects of the whole damn thing. Because Gödel was right, and we end up with things we just can’t fully comprehend.
This is where my zine idea started to percolate. Two years ago, internally at IDEO CoLab Ventures, I was asked to write my thesis for the future. I wrote it more like a poem – because, I think, at heart, I’m more artist than designer. I titled it "The Internet Is Not For Us." The core idea was an observation from crypto: I deeply believe we misunderstood the rise of bots. We saw them as spam, as noise, not as a the key signal to who this internet was actually made for. Fast forward, and with dead internet theory gaining traction alongside the explosion of generative AI tools, it feels like we’re just at the beginning of a true content and activity deluge – on a scale no single human could possibly compute. I say "compute" intentionally because I love the historical quirk that, not even a hundred years ago, "computer" was a human job description. Maybe our degrading attention spans, our sense of overwhelm, isn't just about the sheer quantity of new things to process, or even the quality. Maybe it’s a form factor problem. Maybe the medium itself is rewiring us.
No matter what, it feels like whatever we do these days needs to fit some metric. Our attention, our intention, our efficiency, our productivity – it’s all being measured. And if it’s measured, it seems logical to apply a price, or better yet, a cost to it. This, over the years, has made me really struggle. As I said, I’m an artist and designer, and I found myself increasingly wrestling with how to define the value I add. I operate largely through WE3.co, a design collective we started in 2021, born from the idea that Web3 desperately needed better design and storytelling. Crypto although several years old through an adoption lens it was a technical novelty, still finding its feet, needing clearer images, better experiences, and more human translations to attract the next wave of users and builders. Looking at our clients, I’ve been lucky to work with some of the smartest founders out there, and I’m proud that the quality of design across the entire space has massively improved since we started. So many good designers have joined this field, and in close collaboration with developers, we've made something that was incredibly hard to understand and use a lot more usable. Still a long way to go, though.
My real struggle, however, came in figuring out the value of design itself. It’s not rare for someone I might work with to ask me to jump into a sprint, to "just improve it," "make it more beautiful." I think among designers, we all know that quiet pain when you’re asked to just make something look good, rather than actually think about it. Years at IDEO taught me one crucial thing: design isn’t just the look and feel. The look and feel emerge from a holistic understanding – of the space you’re in, the organization and team, the vision, the users you want to attract, how they operate now, and how they might operate in the future. It's a hyperobject itself. A good design process, for me, was often more intuition, intervention (the actual design work), and observation. An iterative dance. But that often feels completely at odds with the breakneck pace of the startup ecosystem, where results are demanded immediately.
For me, design is a form of cultural glue, a skillset to translate thoughts and ideas into different forms and media, to help proliferate a shared aspiration. Only at the very end might that manifest as a brand or a UI. But things got really hard when trying to value or price that deep, messy, foundational part of the work. Especially since the "last mile" – that final translation, the increasing resolution of the design itself – seemed to become more and more commoditized and streamlined. With the added "benefit" that almost anyone can do it. I’m a huge advocate for anything that lowers the bar for creation. And I’m still mind-blown by how "good" design is becoming accessible. Generative design is a shortcut for many, a net-positive. But it also made me feel more under pressure than ever; it’s the most obvious, tangible part of my work, and therefore the easiest to put a price tag on.
It made me think a lot about those books I was reading, about the things we omit from our economic calculations, especially in GDP – like care work, housework, all seen as "non-productive" capital. I felt that, in some ways, creative work, especially the foundational, intuitive exploration often infused with lot of randomness and playfulness part, falls under that too. Beyond that we all do so much free labor in content creation, the very labor that trained the AIs we’re now grappling with. But just like in GDP discussions about care work or even taxes, we don’t account for the time and labor users put in. It made me wonder more and more: is our current understanding of everything just inherently broken?
Simultaneously, I got a bit addicted to learning about quantum mechanics. To be very clear, I am no expert; at best, I have a layman's understanding. But it wasn’t the hardcore physics that really fascinated me. While learning about it made me think a lot more about the idea that multiple things can be true at the same time, that more things exist in superposition than we generally want to admit, what hooked me was the historical context. The idea that at the beginning of the last century, there was a consensus among many physicists that they might have reached the end of all there was to understand, only to have a massive paradigm shift lurking just around the corner. Because all of this is so well-documented, it felt like the right place to learn how some of the smartest people alive dealt with the terrifying prospect that their entire worldview might need to change.
And in some ways, these learnings about quantum physics made me think more and more about the internet itself.
We already talked about the idea that the internet might not be for us, but for the bots, the agents, the self-executing smart contracts. The more I learned about quantum phenomena, the more I thought, maybe, just maybe, the internet is actually a sneaky way we’re all learning its fundamentals by immersion. What do I mean by this? The more I immersed myself and experienced it, the more it made me question some core assumptions I had about the world. Online, all things exist right next to each other; there’s no fixed now or then, it all just collapses in front of you. There’s no real locality, especially if you embrace a worldwide, async, collaborative lifestyle. And time seems to flow differently. Things can happen at their own pace, or not just linearly but simultaneously, almost in parallel realities. It’s like entering a universe with completely different rules, separate from our lived physical reality.
So, what if we’re all collectively going through the same kinds of thoughts and challenges that kept some of the smartest minds awake when they had to come to terms with light being, at least, two things at the same time – a wave and particles – but only observable as either/or? That the laws of physics we live by made mostly sense… until they didn’t. The internet itself is that kind of hyperobject, and we all have to deal with it. Sometimes I wonder if our pervasive exhaustion comes exactly from there: it forces us to accept that the reality we try so hard to capture, measure, and define in simpler terms is fundamentally, irrevocably incomplete.
Now, let’s go back to crypto, or better, markets. If the internet is this weird place with physics that are more quantum-like than Newtonian, my readings about economics started to make me even more worried. Somehow, we try to make economics, and therefore systems theory, an accurate science while willfully ignoring that our knowledge is incomplete. We end up with statistics and insights that often, more often than not, spectacularly fail – which we then benignly call "black swans" and analyze with profound hindsight bias. Yes, there’s probably some truth to "history doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes," but it’s equally true that this can be very limited thinking. It makes me think of the days before we moved to a heliocentric solar system, when everything supposedly revolved around us and the Earth. We came up with incredibly complicated explanations to make sense of the things that didn’t make sense – why the moon was predictable but other celestial bodies weren’t. Only once we accepted a different reality did other things start to fall into place.
This is what got me thinking about our current state of affairs. One thing I learned the fast way with crypto is getting better at understanding game theory; plus, if you work in a space full of ex-poker players and financial experts, everything becomes a probability and a tit-for-tat. But I felt so out of touch with what I would witness around me. Yes, some of that game theory held true in a perfect, efficient market – which, when a crypto ecosystem is still small and emergent, is more likely to be the case. But at scale, it just breaks. Economics wants to be a "traditional" science but loves to ignore inconvenient aspects to make its case. Obviously, this is probably true for all other sciences to a degree too – again, incompleteness. But it made me wonder what we got wrong from the starting point. It’s a metaphor and a medium we live by. It makes me think a lot of Plato’s cave, where we’re so primed by the shadows that we can’t see what’s really there. Maybe it’s just me being depressed and burned out, but maybe when there’s a collective feeling that something is broken, but we can’t quite name it yet, there must be something there.
So, where are we by now? Crypto is economics on steroids. But economics is built on simplified assumptions in order to be quantifiable. This has led to a set of metaphors and metrics we are informed by and live by. Metaphors that continuously seem to break. And this rupture is intensified by our lived experience in a digital space that immerses us in a form of physics mostly foreign to our intuition. What if we are just at the edge of a paradigm shift, where the most important "truths" we currently operate by are flawed in themselves? Again, I am no economist; I don’t even hold a college degree. But what if economics is just a bit like thinking the world is simpler than it is, and the reality we all know and witness is just a lot more faceted, more quantum?
In that case, I’m not surprised we’re seeing a rise in faith-based ideas. Because we are all then thrown back into the Einstein-Bohr debate. If things are incomplete, if there is randomness and not just deterministic outcomes, then who rolls the dice? With faith often comes mythicism. While I don’t want to make this a faith-based post, I feel there’s something to it – that unknown unknowns, probabilities, superposition are frightening concepts to accept, or perhaps they require a leap of faith to truly embrace. Now, this isn’t saying everything is random. What I adore about physics is that we found a way to hold two sets of thoughts – classical and quantum – as complementary to each other, to a degree. Things can be different things at the same time.
This actually gives me a bit of peace, and it also helps me navigate my world a bit better. But then I look at the interfaces in my life – the short-form content, the prompt-to-execution tools, the 140-character limits – and it makes me think that everything around us, by design, reinforces the idea that there is only a singular truth to things. Look at any political, cultural, or economic discussion: if you look closely, it’s never easy or simple. There are always multiple sides, something I truly learned working on privacy. Designing for privacy is never just one thing. It’s always in a grey area. What privacy is to you might be an actual danger for someone else. What I learned, though, is that it’s often less about us defining what is private or not, and more about empowering individuals with more agency and control – therefore, giving power. But that very agency is eroded in a system that is predominantly metric-driven.
Agency is still something else I obsess about, which is where we finally come to the theme of the zine and play. I’ve always considered myself to be playful, or at least to get easily lost in play. If I could travel back in time, it would be to that exact moment where I understood that the LEGO sets I had contained more possibility than what they were explicitly sold as; they were a tool that could collapse into so many other things.
But why play? So, let’s revisit: the world we experience is much more complex and incomplete than the systems, metaphors, and metrics around us seem to tell us. We live and operate in a made-up "efficient" world that often operates in actuality outside of these simplifications. And if I look at the progress of our tools and the way we work, we just mirror that demand for efficiency. My work as a designer feels more and more deterministic and execution-driven, while deep down, I know this is not how good design, real innovation, happens. So, if the last 300 hundred years were driven by an "efficient" invisible hand of simple "if this, then just that," profit-loss, supply-demand, creating the games we compete in (mainly economics), then maybe introducing a theory of play is the other part of the equation needed to balance it out.
For me, play is a state where thoughts are much more in superposition. Where things can collide a lot more randomly and lead to more unexpected outcomes. This is where my "vibe coding" just reinforces this. Currently, most of the tools we are using are just linear pathways, leading us to the most probabilistic, predictable outcome. I want to get out of this. I want to embrace randomness as something positive. Because the more randomness I inject into my process, the more interesting and surprising my thoughts become. Maybe, just maybe, all of this is just an elaborate excuse to find a different way to define "process" as a designer.
But what I secretly hope is that by changing the way we design the world around us, by embracing a more quantum-like mindset, an incomplete mindset – one where intuition and observation, even if it comes with metrics, are valued as part of a new, more organic way for progress and innovation. Now, that comes with a big, scary question, because it forces us to rethink our concept of value itself. If value is incomplete, then metrics are not as determined, as fixed, as they seem today. If that is true, we might be up for a rude awakening. It’s heretical shit, really. It forces us to revisit most of the ways we think about ourselves and the world. And maybe, just maybe, that's exactly what we need.
I generally use AI to co-write my notes. I do this because I feel that AI is a wonderful tool more to explore your thoughts and ideas further rather than just fixing your grammar. It's easy to generate AI slop. But I think we underestimate the aspect of how our tools are tools for expansion rather than just getting something out fast based on your first impression.
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Back with the 44th edition of Paragraph Picks, highlighting a few hand-selected pieces from the past couple of weeks. ⬇️
@caro.eth reflects on the emotional and economic significance of both macro and micro bubbles, exploring how attention, behavior, and meaning shape our evolving digital economy. "The pop, when it comes, won’t be a spectacle. It will be a silence." https://paragraph.com/@caro/the-thought-bubble
@ramina13 shares the highs and lows of building a solo Mini App with ChatGPT as her co-pilot, offering practical lessons and encouragement for non-technical builders entering web3. "I didn’t have a co-founder or a team. What I had was ChatGPT." https://paragraph.com/@ramina13/what-i-wish-i-knew-before-building-my-first-farcaster-mini-app
@albertwenger argues that subjective experiences are fundamentally inaccessible to science, highlighting the inherent limits of objective understanding and the value of preserving diverse consciousnesses. "A world with many different subjective experiences is thus in an important way a richer world." https://continuations.com/philosophy-mondays-qualia-and-scientific-incompleteness
thank you so much for reading and sharing! I’m very inspired to continue writing here ✍🏽✨
didn't expect to appear on the list. thank you!!