The natural can never be inferior to the artificial; art imitates nature, not the reverse.
– Marcus Aurelius
Confession: Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle fascinates me, but I never managed to read the whole thing - I always stall when Guy shifts into second gear, and I feel it’s out of my league.
A more approachable concept he developed is the dérive (French for drift):
If you live in a city, walking is mostly a transactional exercise from point A to point B - commute, shopping, entertainment - backed up by Google Maps to make it as efficient as possible.
The dérive is the opposite; you make your walk as deliberately random as possible, without any other goal than to be aware of how it makes you feel.
You can think of it as a political act, a way to become conscious of psychogeography (how the city affects your moods and thoughts), or simply as a great opportunity to upgrade your next digestive walk.
Kudos to Randonautica, which took inspiration from Debord’s Theory of the Dérive to build its app. It uses a quantum random number generator to send you a GPS coordinate for your drift… bringing a 20th-century intellectual theory into playfulness and community building.
This discussion
It’s hard to compete against someone who’s just there to have fun.
I want to have fun, and have impact.
I stopped my car to note it. How refreshing to listen to Peter Steinberger, creator of the autonomous AI agent OpenClaw, reminding us to have fun, stay human, weird, and playful.
I love his take on AI slop as well:
I much rather read your broken English than your AI slop. You know, of course there’s a human behind it, and yet they, they prompt it. I’d much rather read your prompt than what came out. Um, I think we’re reaching a point where I value typos again.
and on AI replacing programmers:
Programming is just a part of building products. So maybe, maybe AI does replace programmers eventually. But there’s so much more to that art. Like, what do you actually wanna build? How should it feel? How’s the architecture? I don’t think agents will replace all of that.
I want to have fun, and I want to have impact. In that order.
That take
on optimisation, rules, and resilience titled The Goal of Sailboat Design.
The conclusion triggered me: ‘Any change in the rules would render them useless’.
Interlude
Last month, I worked in one of those fancy co-working places, and I’d like to share a glimpse into the future of engineering that I had the chance to experience. Sit down:
Talking about progress, I also learnt that supertrawlers can catch jumbo jets and Eiffel towers.
This article
Mastering the art of deep listening in Japan explores the subculture of kissas.
Kissa became a trendy ‘vinyl records x big wooden speakers’ aesthetic that we now see popping up everywhere… but before that:
Early kissas served a practical purpose: Few jazz artists toured Japan until the 1960s, and imported LPs were prohibitively expensive. Owners curated collections and became educators— senseis —introducing jazz to a new generation.
There is a peculiar magic to experiencing music in a kissa, an atmospheric attention that imbues a piano solo with imminence and surprise, like watching fireworks together. A 2022 study in the journal Brain Sciences described the phenomenon as “musical synchrony,” suggesting that collective listening “decreases the experience of self-other distinction, and can relate to a sense of communal identity.”
I’ll be in Japan in April: please share your best kissas and other gems in the comments! (teamLab Tokyo AND Kyoto are already booked)
These pieces of advice
How to prepare for the next decade
No better advisor to teach you how to cope with the current hysteria than an ex-VC who helped build it.
Scott Barker went from:
co-founding & building one of the hottest new venture capital funds on the planet. I optimized my entire life for acceleration and outcomes.
to share that…
The skills that will matter in the future will be things like judgement, taste, the ability to make connections across disciplines, story telling and moral/ethical reasoning.
He brings some solid reflection, advice and exercises, like this one, to separate signal from noise:
This nudge
In some countries, you can get an organ donor card for free. I’ve had one in France, and now I have one in Australia.
Let your friends and family know your wishes as well, as organ transplants must occur within hours of a donor's death to ensure viability - only 6 hours for the heart and lungs.
Fun fact: In Singapore, people who opt out of being organ donors are automatically given lower priority on the transplant waiting list than those who remain registered donors.
Fair enough.
It feels appropriate to close this one with that amazing, dramatic DJ Shadow track:
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