Our digital worlds often feel like endless rivers of images, memes and text flowing in our feeds like water between our fingers. We sometimes like a piece of content, share it with others, and move on. But when do we stop to come back to what we found?
Robin Sloan wrote in his tap essay Fish back in 2012 that “to love is to return.” He realized that on the Internet we liked many things, but we rarely love. How many blog posts, videos, or tweets did you read twice over the last year? Did you even come back to anything, once?
Thirteen years have gone by since this essay. And we still don’t have any ways to show love for what we find in this territory we explore for large chunks of our awake time. We are in dire need of ways to come back to the pieces that touched us in the waterfalls of the web, and share this love with our friends, peers or loved ones.
To fill this need, we hosted an experiment with the members of the Sensemaking scenius we called a gem sharing ritual. The concept is simple: every participant prepares one or two gems they found on the Internet that resonated with them. A gem is a piece of content that can be shared with others in less than 30 seconds, so think of a short quote that can be read out loud, an image, or a short video excerpt.
The participants shared their gems one by one, using a tldraw canvas as our visual support. They would introduce why they picked this gem, and then open the discussion for anyone else to jump in, and share related thoughts.
Here are the gems we shared during this event, along with their sources, and some comments that popped up during the conversation.
This is what we loved. We hope you’ll like (or love) it too!
Thanks to Momcillo , Matt, Artem, and Bill for taking part in this first experiment.
Consulting firms have become Too Big to Think....in compiling a number of high-quality ideas in a short amount of time, it made it clear that there is an enormous blind spot in the thinking of current institutions.
From Too Big to Think 🤔- Beyond The "Next New Normal" by Paul Millerd
Comments from the event:
A lot of these corporates would say that they do welcome feedback, that they're interested in new ideas, but in fact they're not. They are explicitly preaching something that they actually don't want to embody themselves.
A lot of these corporates would say that they do welcome feedback, that they're interested in new ideas, but in fact they're not. They are explicitly preaching something that they actually don't want to embody themselves.
If you think of the house only as a place to live, you’ll have a hard time explaining it. Rebar seems nonsensical, even dangerous to the residents.
It’s only when you start treating the house as a dynamic structure, from its historical and evolutionary perspective so to say, that things begin to make sense. Of course, the rebar is there to anchor the next floor — if and when it’s ever built!
I was involved in rebuilding a house somewhere and all the neighbors first do the facade because it's really important for them to show that the house is kind of tidy. But for me the most important thing was to actually have it habitable inside... probably because I come, you know, I live in the west and I do not care that much what people think about what I'm doing. Really, it's all about me.
Habitus represents the context of the world. It's a pre-reflective, embodied nature of human existence - reflected in social structures and experiences. Humans don't exist outside of it - the habitus is defined temporally, historically, situationally and relationally. One is always to be found within a habitus. We belong in the habitus without a conscious awareness - it is a fundamental aspect of our reality. There's a tension between the structure (or norms, value mechanisms) and agency - one can be authentic despite the conditioning of the structures of the world. We find ourselves being thrown in the habitus and it inhabits us, like a virus!
From Momcilo (personal writing) on the concept of habitus by Pierre Bourdieu.
The strength of habitus is in its structural place in our reality grounding. Who we feel we are and what the world looks like, to a great extent, relies on the habitus for coherence and artifacts. It’s pre-cognitive and pre-reflexive - meaning it comes before conscious thinking and is not subject to deliberate reflection - it’s hiding it.
She’s also seen me at my most raw: early in the morning; pulling all-nighters; with my coach, discussing what matters most to me; things that I can say of almost no one else in my life.
It just feels irrational, we never talked, we don’t get each other. I’m not even sure if my presence makes her life better or noticeably worse. I know I kill unspeakable amounts of her kind.
From Always have a friend in your corner by Felix Dorn
The post is a bit like a riddle. When you read it, keep trying to guess who is “she”. A bit like when you read a crime novel, you think, “will I be able to solve it before the end?”.
A life without the sacred is a life flattened to what can be measured and controlled. The sacred, for Marcel, is not just religion—it is the felt sense that existence itself carries mystery, value, and transcendence. When this dimension is lost, life becomes mechanical and disenchanted: we may achieve comfort and efficiency, yet feel existentially empty. Recovering the sacred means reclaiming awe, gratitude, and reverence for being—seeing life not as a problem to be solved, but as a mystery to be lived.
From Momcilo (personal writing) on Gabriel Marcel’s notion of sacredness, problem and mystery.
Garbrie Marcel described two concepts. Mystery and problem. Problem is something you come to, observe, reduce and try to solve. A problem can be passed onto someone else, as a puzzle. . Mystery is an event or a situation that involves you.. With problems - you approach them, with mysteries you find yourself captured by them. According to Marcel - it’s not possible to remove oneself out of a mystery and turn it into a problem because the problem of you still remains. The contextual problem of oneself in a mystery cannot be resolved independently.
When you reject mystery to apply rationalism and turn everything into a problem , you lose the original context because the problem doesn’t contain the most important bit - yourself.
When teams take on a stakeholder request to “build my idea” they stop solving problems together and become a workgroup of individuals producing outputs... The problems they are solving, and the users they are solving for, don’t exist. The team is, effectively, lying to itself.
And when product teams lie to themselves, they fall apart.
A shared goal is what makes a team.
Fake user stories don’t provide a unifying goal, because they are not solving a real problem."
Form When teams lie to themselves, they fall apart by Pavel Samsonov
[When there is no clear shared problem a team tries to solve] the engineers sort of fall back into building things that are complicated or worrying about performance of code. And the designers make pretty things that look really nice, but again don't necessarily solve problems. And that's where that first sentence talks about how they become work groups, chasing their own individual thing.
Globally, 4.4% of all children die before they are 15 years old. This is the data for 2021, the latest available year. [...]
Historians estimate that in the past, around half of all children died. [...]
The world region where children have the best chance of surviving childhood is the European Union. The mortality rate in the EU is 0.47% — 99.53% of all children survive childhood.
From The world is awful. The world is much better. The world can be much better. by Max Roser
Even when you have the numbers, and probably most people will be like, yeah, those numbers seem fairly accurate scientifically, you don't feel them. It's true, this is history, it's all there is. But how do you really feel this world in which suffering is massive, we're doing better, and we can do much better?
Among the Old Believers, decentralization was forced, because there were no bishops, they were forbidden to build their own churches and even publish books. Sacraments were performed by laypeople, so in the 'priestless' communities self-governance and mutual aid funds actively developed, plus a work ethic comparable to the Protestant one. As a result, they created a parallel ecosystem with enormous resources, began giving their own people interest-free loans to buy themselves out of serfdom, invested in factories, engaged in philanthropy, built schools and hospitals throughout the country, and bought up all the Impressionists wholesale in Paris.
From Why are Old Believers such successful entrepreneurs? by Danila Raskov (in Russian)
For context, Old believers (Starovery) are a Russian Orthodox community that split from the official Church during the 17th-century reforms of Patriarch Nikon (1654-1666), and have been facing severe persecution for centuries. They rejected changes like using three fingers instead of two for the sign of the cross and other liturgical modifications, viewing them as departures from true faith.
I think it's fascinating that religion and states, like political repressions, lead to such a beautiful thing. People who didn't read the French philosophers, Proudhon or Marx, or anything like that, but they developed a really innovative economic system before cooperatives in the U.K.
5 untapped opportunities for AI to support dialogue facilitators
From Research Note: How can facilitators inspire new AI tools that meaningfully serve collective dialogues? by the Google Jigsaw team
It’s a conceptual framework deliberation or public discourse that consists of five steps and this report from Google Jigsaw is about how AI can be used on each of those steps. And sense making is step three and step five. It's very high-quality research.
From Favorites Drawings by Dan Allison
What always surprises me is how simple they are. But, you know, I've never seen a drawing like this before, you know, and isn't that so funny that you can have two stick figures and a face in between, and never have seen a drawing like this before? It’s like visual poetry.
I love how poetry can actually work. It can give you amazing insights. It can guide you in a certain way. It's really puzzling how it can work.
Poetry is the language to talk about mysteries.
Subscribe to Scenius Digest
<100 subscribers
Our digital worlds often feel like endless rivers of images, memes and text flowing in our feeds like water between our fingers. We sometimes like a piece of content, share it with others, and move on. But when do we stop to come back to what we found?
Robin Sloan wrote in his tap essay Fish back in 2012 that “to love is to return.” He realized that on the Internet we liked many things, but we rarely love. How many blog posts, videos, or tweets did you read twice over the last year? Did you even come back to anything, once?
Thirteen years have gone by since this essay. And we still don’t have any ways to show love for what we find in this territory we explore for large chunks of our awake time. We are in dire need of ways to come back to the pieces that touched us in the waterfalls of the web, and share this love with our friends, peers or loved ones.
To fill this need, we hosted an experiment with the members of the Sensemaking scenius we called a gem sharing ritual. The concept is simple: every participant prepares one or two gems they found on the Internet that resonated with them. A gem is a piece of content that can be shared with others in less than 30 seconds, so think of a short quote that can be read out loud, an image, or a short video excerpt.
The participants shared their gems one by one, using a tldraw canvas as our visual support. They would introduce why they picked this gem, and then open the discussion for anyone else to jump in, and share related thoughts.
Here are the gems we shared during this event, along with their sources, and some comments that popped up during the conversation.
This is what we loved. We hope you’ll like (or love) it too!
Thanks to Momcillo , Matt, Artem, and Bill for taking part in this first experiment.
Consulting firms have become Too Big to Think....in compiling a number of high-quality ideas in a short amount of time, it made it clear that there is an enormous blind spot in the thinking of current institutions.
From Too Big to Think 🤔- Beyond The "Next New Normal" by Paul Millerd
Comments from the event:
A lot of these corporates would say that they do welcome feedback, that they're interested in new ideas, but in fact they're not. They are explicitly preaching something that they actually don't want to embody themselves.
A lot of these corporates would say that they do welcome feedback, that they're interested in new ideas, but in fact they're not. They are explicitly preaching something that they actually don't want to embody themselves.
If you think of the house only as a place to live, you’ll have a hard time explaining it. Rebar seems nonsensical, even dangerous to the residents.
It’s only when you start treating the house as a dynamic structure, from its historical and evolutionary perspective so to say, that things begin to make sense. Of course, the rebar is there to anchor the next floor — if and when it’s ever built!
I was involved in rebuilding a house somewhere and all the neighbors first do the facade because it's really important for them to show that the house is kind of tidy. But for me the most important thing was to actually have it habitable inside... probably because I come, you know, I live in the west and I do not care that much what people think about what I'm doing. Really, it's all about me.
Habitus represents the context of the world. It's a pre-reflective, embodied nature of human existence - reflected in social structures and experiences. Humans don't exist outside of it - the habitus is defined temporally, historically, situationally and relationally. One is always to be found within a habitus. We belong in the habitus without a conscious awareness - it is a fundamental aspect of our reality. There's a tension between the structure (or norms, value mechanisms) and agency - one can be authentic despite the conditioning of the structures of the world. We find ourselves being thrown in the habitus and it inhabits us, like a virus!
From Momcilo (personal writing) on the concept of habitus by Pierre Bourdieu.
The strength of habitus is in its structural place in our reality grounding. Who we feel we are and what the world looks like, to a great extent, relies on the habitus for coherence and artifacts. It’s pre-cognitive and pre-reflexive - meaning it comes before conscious thinking and is not subject to deliberate reflection - it’s hiding it.
She’s also seen me at my most raw: early in the morning; pulling all-nighters; with my coach, discussing what matters most to me; things that I can say of almost no one else in my life.
It just feels irrational, we never talked, we don’t get each other. I’m not even sure if my presence makes her life better or noticeably worse. I know I kill unspeakable amounts of her kind.
From Always have a friend in your corner by Felix Dorn
The post is a bit like a riddle. When you read it, keep trying to guess who is “she”. A bit like when you read a crime novel, you think, “will I be able to solve it before the end?”.
A life without the sacred is a life flattened to what can be measured and controlled. The sacred, for Marcel, is not just religion—it is the felt sense that existence itself carries mystery, value, and transcendence. When this dimension is lost, life becomes mechanical and disenchanted: we may achieve comfort and efficiency, yet feel existentially empty. Recovering the sacred means reclaiming awe, gratitude, and reverence for being—seeing life not as a problem to be solved, but as a mystery to be lived.
From Momcilo (personal writing) on Gabriel Marcel’s notion of sacredness, problem and mystery.
Garbrie Marcel described two concepts. Mystery and problem. Problem is something you come to, observe, reduce and try to solve. A problem can be passed onto someone else, as a puzzle. . Mystery is an event or a situation that involves you.. With problems - you approach them, with mysteries you find yourself captured by them. According to Marcel - it’s not possible to remove oneself out of a mystery and turn it into a problem because the problem of you still remains. The contextual problem of oneself in a mystery cannot be resolved independently.
When you reject mystery to apply rationalism and turn everything into a problem , you lose the original context because the problem doesn’t contain the most important bit - yourself.
When teams take on a stakeholder request to “build my idea” they stop solving problems together and become a workgroup of individuals producing outputs... The problems they are solving, and the users they are solving for, don’t exist. The team is, effectively, lying to itself.
And when product teams lie to themselves, they fall apart.
A shared goal is what makes a team.
Fake user stories don’t provide a unifying goal, because they are not solving a real problem."
Form When teams lie to themselves, they fall apart by Pavel Samsonov
[When there is no clear shared problem a team tries to solve] the engineers sort of fall back into building things that are complicated or worrying about performance of code. And the designers make pretty things that look really nice, but again don't necessarily solve problems. And that's where that first sentence talks about how they become work groups, chasing their own individual thing.
Globally, 4.4% of all children die before they are 15 years old. This is the data for 2021, the latest available year. [...]
Historians estimate that in the past, around half of all children died. [...]
The world region where children have the best chance of surviving childhood is the European Union. The mortality rate in the EU is 0.47% — 99.53% of all children survive childhood.
From The world is awful. The world is much better. The world can be much better. by Max Roser
Even when you have the numbers, and probably most people will be like, yeah, those numbers seem fairly accurate scientifically, you don't feel them. It's true, this is history, it's all there is. But how do you really feel this world in which suffering is massive, we're doing better, and we can do much better?
Among the Old Believers, decentralization was forced, because there were no bishops, they were forbidden to build their own churches and even publish books. Sacraments were performed by laypeople, so in the 'priestless' communities self-governance and mutual aid funds actively developed, plus a work ethic comparable to the Protestant one. As a result, they created a parallel ecosystem with enormous resources, began giving their own people interest-free loans to buy themselves out of serfdom, invested in factories, engaged in philanthropy, built schools and hospitals throughout the country, and bought up all the Impressionists wholesale in Paris.
From Why are Old Believers such successful entrepreneurs? by Danila Raskov (in Russian)
For context, Old believers (Starovery) are a Russian Orthodox community that split from the official Church during the 17th-century reforms of Patriarch Nikon (1654-1666), and have been facing severe persecution for centuries. They rejected changes like using three fingers instead of two for the sign of the cross and other liturgical modifications, viewing them as departures from true faith.
I think it's fascinating that religion and states, like political repressions, lead to such a beautiful thing. People who didn't read the French philosophers, Proudhon or Marx, or anything like that, but they developed a really innovative economic system before cooperatives in the U.K.
5 untapped opportunities for AI to support dialogue facilitators
From Research Note: How can facilitators inspire new AI tools that meaningfully serve collective dialogues? by the Google Jigsaw team
It’s a conceptual framework deliberation or public discourse that consists of five steps and this report from Google Jigsaw is about how AI can be used on each of those steps. And sense making is step three and step five. It's very high-quality research.
From Favorites Drawings by Dan Allison
What always surprises me is how simple they are. But, you know, I've never seen a drawing like this before, you know, and isn't that so funny that you can have two stick figures and a face in between, and never have seen a drawing like this before? It’s like visual poetry.
I love how poetry can actually work. It can give you amazing insights. It can guide you in a certain way. It's really puzzling how it can work.
Poetry is the language to talk about mysteries.
Subscribe to Scenius Digest
<100 subscribers
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Alexandre Variengien
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