I’m excavating a series of old essays from a defunct blog that feel pertinent to current conversations in design and artificial intelligence

This essay was first shared on August 07, 2017

Since the introduction of the Mac, and the Adobe-Quark-DTP worldview that followed, computer-based design tooling has largely revolved around dragging rectangles.

Want to insert a photo? Drag a rectangle. Want to change the width of your columns or gutters? Drag a bunch of rectangles. Want to take a screen designed for UIKit and see what it would look like on Android with Material Design? Drag a whole lot of rectangles

And yet I see nothing to tie the role of designer to rectangle-dragger. A designer is a manipulator of symbolic and aesthetic concepts, and that needn’t be limited to the input paradigms we’ve grown up with.

We’ve been empowered to build exciting new tooling in a large way by the React paradigm. It’s easy to spin up a new design tool that maps some niche input domain to a tree of React elements, and render it to screen. It’s a trick we used with react-sketchapp — when you know the name of a thing, you can instantiate the thing at will. This is something that was radically more complicated only a few short years ago.

As we explore non-mouse-based design tooling at Airbnb, I thought I’d lead with an example.

https://twitter.com/miekd/status/573218769482457088

Dutch design-philosopher Maykel Loomans observed that as designers mature into leadership roles, we move from pixel-based tooling to writing documents. Quip documents and Google Docs and Markdown files; slide-decks and meeting agendas and PRDs and specifications.

Of course these tools lack the ability to visualize what you’re specifying—writing tools end up with reading as the end interaction—but what if you could just describe the interface you wanted? We've had language for thousands of years, and can surely express design intent clearer with our words than with a mouse or stylus.

Literate DLS was my hackathon project from February 2017, exploring the intersection of literate programming, notebook-based tools (e.g. Jupyter), and symbolic design systems.

I keep coming back to this quickest, dumbest of prototypes as a compelling example of why we don’t need to drag rectangles to design products — it’s far quicker than using Sketch, and outputs cross-platform applications with the click of a button.

In the winter I tripped, fell down a rabbit hole, and unexpectedly found myself in some of the most exciting social circles I can remember. I’ve been in technology for over a decade at this point: long enough to have once been wide-eyed and optimistic, to have spent many years wandering through a period of alienation, and to have seen the light once more.

In every direction I turn I see kind, generous, collaborative, conscientious, visionary geniuses. Somehow I tricked them into being my friends, too.

Today I look into the future and see the glimmers of the utopian society I first hoped technology could bring about. “How naive you were!”, I’ve sneered at myself in the years since as a handful of exploitative & extractive corporations strengthened their domination of the industry.

Today that cynicism feels like an ancient memory, just like the period of deep burnout that seeded it.

Legacy Silicon Valley’s fatal flaw is its zero-sum competitiveness necessitating unbounded growth and the crushing of competition. We have an opportunity to learn from their mistakes.

All of the bleeding-edge web3 projects are powerfully aligned and inherently better as part of an ecosystem than in isolation. Rather than compete, we collaborate: a technical “Yes, and…” benefiting the whole world rather than trying to own it.

In this world there is so much alignment already, and yet so much uncharted territory we get to joyfully explore together in the years ahead of us as see how virtuous our circles might become.

A few weeks ago, in between watching talks at Figma Config, my roommate & I were reminiscing about the “good old days” of design conferences that we had independently frequented in Europe.

I was due to give my talk the next day and was in the process of rewriting the entire thing while trying to rethink the metaphysical format of what a “talk” even was & how that should really manifest.

Conferences are weird: at their most surface level, they’re ostensibly just paying a bunch of money to travel somewhere and sit in an auditorium or banquet room drinking stale urn coffee, processing a hangover, and watching someone give a talk that would end up on YouTube by the time you’d returned home. Indeed, some were just like that - but the best ones I went to were transformational experiences. They were where I met & reconnected with hundreds of friends I’ve maintained across borders & oceans for a decade and where as a design student & new grad I first felt part of something bigger & more exciting than myself rather than an anonymous “designer” in London’s stagnant graphic design scene. They were more than just watching a future-video be delivered live: a magical form of collective energetic entrainment that could never fully translate by the time a video reached YouTube.

The chills, tingles & tears I experienced during the best conferences I attended left indelible marks on my perception of myself and the world. They were so much more than “just watching talks”; holistic moments of micro cultural zeitgeists.

The event producers at Config had also recognized that an online conference should be more engaging and interactive than “a streaming video embedded on a webpage”, and had arranged a whole program of experiences to bring attendees together between talks. You know how the process of finishing is though: before I could “finish my talk” I had to fully explore my own thoughts on conferences and connection.

As a musician it is my assertion that performers are only one component of the experience of a performance: an attentive & open audience is integral to co-creating the conditions necessary for really magical experiences. Public speaking is no different.

Performing to a webcam in your bedroom can be an isolating experience. Virtual concerts on Zoom—where I can see people’s faces, and unmute them in between songs so it’s not weird & silent—are infinitely more interesting to me than streaming to something like Instagram Live or Zoom. One-to-many streaming platforms may contain a flurry of metrics or comments, but broadly the interactions with my live audience are either quantitative & depersonalized, or distractions that take me out of the mental headspace I need to drop into what I’m trying to bring into the world. What I want in my digital events is to feel the presence of an engaged, thoughtful & present audience in just the same way as I might when performing in a whisper-quiet living room or “listening room” concert.

At Config, the speakers streamed from a different application than was used by the audience to watch the talks: that is to say, I didn’t get to see the attendees’ live comment sidebar as I was speaking. Friends sent me screenshots afterwards & I’m grateful for the kind words people had to say about my talk, but had I been scanning it in the moment it would have certainly taken me away from the focus I needed to speak.

Still, I wanted to know that I was not speaking into a void: that I was not in an empty auditorium doing a dress rehearsal but that there were real humans out in the front row if I squinted past the stage lighting.

I also wanted to prototype something of a less ephemeral experience than the chat box that my talk was paired with: a permanent trail of thoughtful breadcrumbs marking the experience of my community listening to my talk.

I was considering all of this as I laid awake all night (literally: I couldn’t sleep for a second) after the first day of Config, mentally reworking the talk I was due to give in a few hours.

A few things came together in a wholly unexpected way. John Palmer had just given a real corker of a talk about spatial software, and I couldn’t stop thinking about enamored I had been a decade ago when I first encountered Jef Raskin’s seminal The Humane Interface, or in 2020 when Aza Raskin showed me a prototype of what became MakeSpace. This paired with my own rejection of anything that feels like shoehorning my divergent, ADHD thought process into a boring linear flow - whether designing or writing a presentation, I resent being forced inside arbitrary boxes and sequences.

I also wanted ways to bring in my patrons & friends in a way that recognized their support of my work & the conversations we have that drive each others’ work forward. I wanted to weave together a brand new spin on the collective reflection & pondering of IRL conferences in the old days, in a realtime, living, and permanent way: the digital version of nudging your seatmate & whispering “holyshit”, or having lengthier conversations about what you’d just witnessed over lunch.

Being an independent individual working in technology, I get the best of both worlds: the firehose of inspiration from my friends launching cool things, and the autonomy to immediately use them without waiting for it to be “enterprise ready”, or doing months of proposals. Indeed, one of the themes about my talk was about how the drudgery of the corporate technology company is antithetical to why I got into technology in the first place or how I think interesting things are invented. My talk was also about just doing the thing and living our values in every moment rather than waiting for permission from imaginary gatekeepers.

20 hours before, Dylan Field had introduced Figma’s brand new, collaborative “digital whiteboard” app: FigJam. I hadn’t used it yet, but it sounded rad and I had an excellent excuse to see how it worked.

I find that when I realize that there is a crystal clear path to congruent action, the thought of living for the rest of my life with an unanswered question is unbearably painful. Action is fun.

After giving up on my naive desire to sleep, at 9am I texted a handful of friends variations of “yoooooo, what are you doing in like 2h??? Wanna try a weird experiment I literally just thought of, live, in front of like 60k people??? Lmk asap & I’ll tell you more (omg I’m so tired fml)”. Because my friends are the BEST, they all said yes. Then I texted Rogie (who had been helping me refine my talk from the Figma side) ~“gonna try something different, might bomb, might work, sorry lol”, and got out of bed.

Luckily I’m not much of a “give a Serious PowerPoint Presentation With Slides & Bullet Points & Graphs & Stuff” kind of person. Like I said, I have ADHD and the linear flow of presentation software makes me feel constricted & doesn’t let me fully experience ideas as I would prefer to communicate them. My “deck” at that point was mostly photos of moss & flowers from my garden to form a soothing background montage as I spoke (it will make sense when the video comes out next week, I promise). As the clock counted down to my talk, I moved the slides that I did have over to FigJam, invited my friends to the document, and shared my screen.

As I gave the talk I panned around the FigJam canvas while my friends laid down digital sticky notes, drawings & stamps with their reflections & pulling out quotes from what I was saying.

Something magical started happening too - people started taking notes together, building off of each other, in a way that I hadn’t predicted. There was no group chat thread and I hadn’t really given much guidance beyond “you have edit access to this doc - I haven’t used FigJam before either, let’s figure it out live”.

Of course, this format was just an experiment. We had a couple of hours to pull it together, but the mechanics of it hint at something bigger.

The people I invited were mostly the friends who I’d been chatting to recently and so were towards the top of my message lists in Telegram & iMessage as I scrambled to pull together a crew. It was an imperfect system, but a gesturing towards a more robust form of bought-in patronage. My intention is that future experiments are broadened out to include the full scope of who I consider my patrons: those who have financially supported me, intellectually driven projects forward with conversation, contributed in-kind to codebases, energetically supported me, or have just been engaged & receptive on social media.

The video of Config talk—New Futures, Together—will be published my Figma in the next few weeks.

As I’ve been processing the experiment & getting back into my writing habit on Mirror I realized that collaborative, participatory, spatial canvases are really interesting primitives for any form of communal discussion. Mirror doesn’t have a comment section, and yet I crave a place for my patrons to reflect on my writing more publicly than our DMs, and in a more focused & less attention-hostile place than on social media.

With that said, I have created another FigJam canvas, just for this post. Think of it like a more interesting alternative to a comment box. Let's see what happens!

FigJam embed

My imperfect-invite-system at this point is compromised of:

• the friends who I invited to the original FigJam document on the day of the conference

• people who have bought my NFTs on Foundation, Zora or Catalog

• people who hold my social token $CHRYSO (more on that soon)

• people whose NFTs or social tokens I hold (it means I think you’re rad!)

• a handful of friends who have been my confidants as we navigate the emerging trends in interdependent crypto-powered creative communities this spring

• the folks I’m holed up with IRL in Texas right now at Creator Cabins, scheming about the implications of all of this for the Creator Economy

• other folks who seem to be genuinely & authentically engaged with what I’m putting out - on social media and my Discord

And, of course, whichever individuals or groups bid on the NFT of this piece.

Token #3110

If you think you fit one of those groups & I forgot to invite you, please DM me somewhere & I’ll get you in.

This ~ * whole situation * ~ wouldn’t have been possible without the support of Dylan Field, Rogie King, Azra Daniels, Vanessa Chung, John Palmer, Michael Feldstein, Matt Pistachio, Lachlan Campbell, Nicole, Drew Coffman, Wojtek Witkowski, Joy Cozby, and everyone who worked on FigJam & Config. Thank you all so much!

When I became disenchanted with technology in the spring of 2018, it shattered the mythology that I had spent my 20s immersed in.

Technology was extremely meaningful to me: a curious & super-powered primitive to allow us to explore the depths of the collective unconscious by skillfully interfacing human & machine. And yet I found myself in San Francisco: supposedly the global center of innovation, caught day-to-day in the mundanity of a large corporation & doing anything but inventing.

Looking around, the picture was bleak: at some point between 2011 and 2017 it felt like every exciting & scrappy early-stage startup in the Bay Area became subsumed by a corporate surveillance-technology company: every bright-eyed inventor I knew eventually spending 3 hours/day on a shuttle bus to be sad in meetings at a suburban office park.

In the world capital of invention the only things that I could see being invented were new ways to prey on attention, spread misinformation, and boost arbitrary engagement metrics for products that didn’t need to exist in the world. Technology, from my perspective, was making the world a worse place.

I was at the peak of my career as a designer and technologist, and yet I was resigned to think that the future of the technology industry had been stolen by a handful of predatory corporations. Looking around at hundreds of talented & burnt out friends around the industry, it was was hard to imagine anything changing.

In that resignation, I gave up my agency as a technologist. I got up from my seat at the table, and retreated to my own physical & intellectual Walden Ponds. In lieu of any available action that matched my values, I chose to withdraw from any action at all.

Here’s the thing: the technology industry is still important to me. I still believe that properly harnessing technology is the key to our future as a civilization. I still believe that it has the power to transform us: personally & communally.

With the explosion of energy & attention into this current crypto cycle, there is once against spaciousness to imagine futures divergent from the myopic dreams of the Attention Economy. It is open, and yet it is not a certainty.

Crypto is a non-specific amplifier: it has the potential to create a hypercapitalist libertarian nightmare, or a mutually-beneficial interdependent utopia. One thing I do know is that the only way we can influence which outcome we get is by radically participating in its creation.

This time, the stakes of sitting on the sidelines are too high: the imagined darkest possible timeline a certainty only with our inaction. The call to adventure for every burnt out technologist is, therefore, not to surrender to the mundanity of the Silicon Valley of the past or the imagined outcomes of the future, but to bring our full attention to co-creating meaningful and human-centric digital environments that we can be proud of.

My pessimism is radically giving way to unwavering optimism: the energy of the past few days, weeks & months in crypto-powered utopian technology is shining a pure light on a path forward that we can be proud of walking together.

Will you join us?

if you enjoyed this post, please consider becoming a patron of my writing by supporting this NFT

Token #3101

Minted on Zora under the full moon in Virgo, February 02021

It was primarily designed as a spoken word audio-visual experience. I invite you to set aside 9 minutes and watch it full-screen. You might enjoy using headphones or your favorite speakers.

To hear sound, hit the 'mute' icon in the bottom-right of the image

NFT

Patron: Yaniv Tal

The meta-story is that this is an experiment in patronage. Please enjoy the piece first: it was intended as an audiovisual experience but for those who prefer text (or want to quote me), a full text transcription follows. When you're done, we'll talk about the meta-story surrounding it in the Afterword section.

The version using text

What a moment we find ourselves in.

A moment where we are being presented with the opportunity to write a new mythology for our civilization. We're being granted the opportunity to do that together, with the role of art & music & creativity at the center point. We're getting the opportunity to ask what happens if we take seriously the role of art & artists & the people who make our culture.

This isn't hypothetical wondering about what a utopia might be like; this isn’t a fantastical utopia that is out of reach. This is an opportunity for us to get to decide what we will build together in our lifetimes with no one to stop us but ourselves.

And so this is the question: whether or not we value art and music. I can tell you the answer for myself. For myself, I wouldn't be here had I not reconnected with my own humble and vulnerable creative connection. We're not asking for celebrities, for people to put on MTV, for people to put on pedestals, or for people to throw awards at: that's not what this is about anymore.

This is about recognizing that the human capacity for raw self expression is the biggest gift that we could have been given, and is the reason that we're on this planet in the first place. Our individual, humble, creativity is how God expresses themselves in the universe. Before I lose too many people by saying the “G” word: I mean God as in the energy. I don't mean, an old white dude with a big white beard up in the sky wagging his finger at you. Although, if that's what you believe, I'm not going to stop you from believing that either.

I mean, God as an extra dimensional, infinite form of the purest, purest love. Of the most powerful unity between everything in the universe; between every human on this planet; between every sentient being in every corner of the universe; in every molecule of carbon; between here and wherever those depths are. And that's just in this dimension! We're talking about creativity, love & unity that span, far, far beyond & far deeper than those affectations of time that we believe to be so permanent. That's the God I'm talking about. Let's get back to talking about creativity, we can go back into that some other time!

I believe that God & source energy & love & unity & creativity are the same thing. These are my spiritual beliefs—you don't have to take them—but I know I'm not the only one who believes this: that creative energy; the energy that we feel when we're in the zone & making something we love to do is as close to God as we'll ever see. It is the same energy: of flow states & of peak experiences. That's what All Of This is.

And so we have a responsibility, as I see it, to reconstruct our society in a way that honors this. In a way that says, "Yes! Your art is valid!"; that says, “Yes! Your music is valid!”; that says “Yes! Every hobby, every interest you have that capitalism has told you isn't a real job is the most real thing you could be doing”.

That's what this spring is going to be about: inventing new mythologies for our civilization that says “your art is valid”; that say “your art, is not only real work. It is the realest work that you could do”.

And we’re creating a culture in which we celebrate and support people to do the things that they are here to do.

Afterword

If you follow my work closely, you may have already seen the NFT of the audiovisual version of this piece on Zora a few weeks ago. Yaniv Tal was the first person to own the NFT, and I want to thank him for his ongoing support of my work.

Recently I've been tweeting a lot about NFTs representing a paradigm of Private Patronage of Public-Enjoyed Work. We are used to property being a private resource, and early media narratives around NFTs suggest that they represent a kind of "artificial digital scarcity". Instead, I believe in the inside-out notion that by being a patron of an NFT you're enabling everyone to enjoy it. Rather than a contrived constriction on the flow of information, interdependent patronage allows for communal abundance.

This exploratory format of audiovisual essays has a tradeoff: they're not inclusive for folks who are hard of hearing or can't understand my accent. I'm a musician and want to experiment with this new format for my words, and yet providing inaccessible content is unacceptable for me.

I didn't write any notes before I recorded the spoken word piece, and cheap, AI-powered transcription services don't understand my voice. Providing inaccurate computer-generated captions (as on YouTube and other websites) doesn't feel like a benefit to me, yet doing them by hand is very time consuming. Instead of spending hours of creative time transcribing this piece myself, Yaniv's patronage allowed me to pay for a high-quality human transcription. I happily used the time I saved to make art instead, and with the publishing of the text version I am satisfied that there is now an accessible alternative for people who can't listen to the audio version.

There are many more implications of Private Patronage of Public-Enjoyed Work which I intend to experiment with in all of my work across the metaverse, & write about here. For now, I am grateful for Yaniv's contribution in providing the transcription for everyone, and for freeing me up to make more art instead of typing it myself. At a meta-level I hope this inspires your own experiments with patronage; I am excited to read your own findings on the process.

Lastly: at the time of writing, Yaniv is the current owner of this piece on Zora, but if you appreciated either the piece itself or what it represents as a public experiment in patronage you can make Yaniv an offer for it and I get a portion of the sale. We can talk more about how Zora works and why it's cool at a later time: for now I want to offer this as another example of sustainable, ongoing, communal patronage.

With so much gratitude,
Jon