Music can bring back memories, reminiscent of a time or a place. Those rememberings often take you by surprise, when a song comes on the radio. When I recently came across a playlist compiled and shared years ago by a former colleague, I was transported back to those days of late spreadsheet nights.
Perhaps inspired, I recently decided to give my audio diary a little more structure, and started compiling the songs I listened to or encountered into weekly playlists of my own. A mixture of old favourites revisited and new discoveries, from friends, chance encounters, Hype Machine, Spotify. I have enjoyed bringing a bit more consideration and curation to my listening.
Unrelated, I was discussing a jam-related side-project with my sister, who suggested that there might be an opportunity for a musical tie-in. For my sins I enjoy a play on words. Next thing you know, I sent out an email with my latest weekly playlist with accompanying notes – SweetChilliJams was born.
If you want new tunes with accompanying words in your inbox on a hopefully weekly basis, please subscribe! At the very least you get to witness me trying to articulate why I think different songs are good, which turns out to be difficult when you can’t just sing along, dance, mime instruments or say things like “that bassline”. Musical criticism → actually quite hard.
If your question is “what kind of music will it be?”, I don’t know quite yet but hopefully good music?
I wrote a few months ago about how books might evolve as a medium. Since then I have found myself reflecting more on some of the new mediums of communication the internet has afforded us.
Twitter looms large in public discourse, serving as a President’s soapbox, a VC Café philosophique and a placeto dojokes, among others. The form itself is real menagerie, from banal one-liners to threaded diatribes. It feels ephemeral and is hard to search or organise; it is unstructured. It is highly contextual, to be experienced in the moment, rather than after-the-fact. A conversation, not a historic record (though surely Tweets will become cited artefacts soon enough). Twitter is perhaps the platform these confused times deserve (one might posit that the blue bird had a causal role, but that is best left for another time).
Email newsletters feel like quite an old format, but I find myself subscribing to more and more these days. Also a real mixed bag of content, from professional organisations’ weekly updates to the idle wonderings of creative minds. I enjoy newsletters because people seem able to be themselves – Yancey Strickler describes newsletters as part of the dark forest of the internet.
“These are all spaces where depressurized conversation is possible because of their non-indexed, non-optimized, and non-gamified environments.”
There is something private about a newsletter, not just read in your browser but invited into your inbox, placed on your implied to-read list. I find that there are some I archive almost automatically (I should unsubscribe), while there are others I look forward to, just as I look forward to the bi-weekly arrival of Private Eye.
The third form I have been thinking about is by far the most niche, but is also the one which led me to write this post – blogchains. Described and invented at Ribbonfarm:
“A blogchain is longform by other means. Containerized longform if you like. A themed blog-within-a-blog, built as a series of short, ideally fixed-length posts (we’re trying to standardize on 300 words as one container size).”
Distinct from a series, more improvisational, responsive and evolutionary. In writing this blog, I have developed a few larger ideas that I want to build out, but I haven’t felt I have the will (or the audience) to write a big old essay. So maybe I will try blogchains on for size, with this the first one, inspired by James Blake – Assume Forms, on internet mediums.
The internet has transformed our relationship with the physical world. We are no longer confined to our immediate surroundings, in terms of what we are aware of, what we can do, and who we can interact with.
As drastic as it has been, that transformation is not done. I am interested in the ways in which technology facilitates even greater connection, between our atoms and the internet’s bits. I am sure that we will interact and communicate in ways that feel like science fiction today.
But I am also interested in the internet as a place unto itself, as we become more able to create substantive worlds online (a start). Whether we detach ourselves from our physical forms, and have a meaningful existence in bits or qubits. Whether we will be able to do that. Whether we will want to.
“Going online” sounds like you are there, and not here. It can feel like that, when you are engrossed in your smartphone. We should be thoughtful about the worlds we make, and how we choose to visit them.
Product Lost by @HipCityRegis consistently excellent on this topic in particular. You should subscribe.
I’m going to break the fourth wall here for a second, or whatever the equivalent is for writing. I have a working list of “things I might write about”, which I keep in Notion (of course). One thing that has been on that list since March 11th is the topic of Crypto Spring – the idea that we might be recovering from the bear market of 2018 and early 2019, into the next cycle of crypto ebullience. Indeed Fred Wilson decided to call the same thing in May. I can’t remember why I didn’t get round to writing about it in March, but I do remember the reason I was thinking about it, as the ecosystem seemed to worry less about the price of things, and focus more on building things. For me, the excitement around Austin Griffith’s burner wallet was emblematic of the new wave of optimism.
In the last couple of months the market seems to have noticed as well, and this week the price of Bitcoin once again surpassed $10,000 (update: $12,000), so perhaps I am too late already, and Crypto Spring has sprung.
The early days of this new run have some of the hallmarks of the last – news outlets reporting on it, people saying the institutions are coming, eToro adverts in my Gmail. And some things are different – certainly Facebook’s Libra announcement has thrown an interesting spanner into the works. I just hope that this time round a little more has been built when the dust settles. I hope there are more actual users or even customers on these new platforms. And I hope that excitement for building with the technology that I saw in March continues.
Needless to say, yes, it would have been smart to put everything I owned into Bitcoin on March 11th, next question please.
The quoted tweet is from 2015. What was a hilarious punchline four years ago looks like it may become our reality by the end of the year (give or take a ball pool). Certainly disquieting, in terms of where we are. But it is also kind of amazing – anything is possible, in the words of Kevin Garnett.
The second is this article by Tanner Green (hat tip to Matt Clifford), which sketches out a potential table of contents for an imagined history of our time, from 2004 until 2020, which Tanner anticipates will be a type of turning point. It is the coming of age story of my generation. Speculative for sure, and US-centric – I think the primary challenge is knowing which proposed chapters will stand the test of time, and which will simply be quirks of history. And the latter sections have quite a few question marks (“The Trials of Donald Trump, 2018-202? (? pages)”). But always sobering to try and see today through tomorrow’s eyes.
Market sentiment is tricky, particularly when it turns. You could argue that Tech (capital T, whatever that means) had a good run, but it has certainly stumbled in recent years, as the halo of promise made way for a shadow of uncertainty.
Is there a moment we can point to where the sentiment around the tech industry shifted to negative?
And yet I write mid-way through a banner year for tech IPOs, as stalwarts continue their strong 2019 and new direct-listing Slack closes its second day of trading to general acclaim.
One could argue that there are larger macro factors at play. But regardless, the financial markets at least are out of step with the popular narrative on Tech, and it will be interesting to see whether that divergence continues. There is a line of thinking that the industry still hasn’t taken ownership of the problems it faces; I wonder if a reckoning in the stock market would be required for Tech executives to take notice.
* I don’t know whether this phrase exists so please indulge me.
I responded with an old favourite of mine, “quite”:
I was at a session today where I came across another in “legacy”. Legacy has a general meaning, “something left or handed down by a predecessor”, which can obviously go one way or the other. But it also has some slightly more specific definitions.
In legal terms, a legacy is a gift of property, especially personal property, as money, by will; a bequest. Which is generally considered a good thing, both to leave and to receive.
However when you are talking about software or computing (which was the topic today), if something is described as legacy (“a legacy system”), that almost certainly means it is bad, but somehow still in use. That meaning is also invoked in more general settings (“legacy banks” are a particularly popular target in Fintech London-town).
It might be tempting to attribute this to simple neophilia, out with the old, in with the new. But I think it is actually that fundamentally human trait Jeff Bezos describes in a recent shareholder letter, describing human beings as…
“divinely discontent. Their expectations are never static – they go up. It’s human nature. We didn’t ascend from our hunter-gatherer days by being satisfied. People have a voracious appetite for a better way, and yesterday’s ‘wow’ quickly becomes today’s ‘ordinary’.”
We don’t appreciate the work and the sweat and the “of its time” imagination of these legacy things – they have been normalised, they are ordinary. And surely we can improve on ordinary.
It is humbling that the best case scenario for technologists is to create something that is ultimately considered ordinary. But maybe it should also give us a renewed appreciation for things we think of as “legacy” right now.
It is London Tech Week this week apparently. It was also CogX from Monday to Wednesday, which I think is unaffiliated. It all feels a little like a technology Valentine’s day, fabricated and promoted by conference organisers to extract money from startups and interested people.
I found myself in possession of some free CogX tickets, so went along to a couple of talks on Tuesday and had a bit of a wander about.
Being there with no specific agenda, I wondered what it was that my fellow attendees were hoping to get out of the conference.
As an attendee, a conference is ultimately about encounters, whether those encounters are with ideas, individuals or organisations. These encounters can be formal (i.e. part of the agenda of the conference), or they can be informal (enabled by the structure of the conference, but not part of the agenda). They can be anticipated and planned by attendees in advance (“I really want to go to that talk”, “I want to meet that person”), or they can be serendipitous (“I wonder what’s happening in that tent”, “what brings you to the conference?”). Then the outcome of those encounters can be learning, selling (yourself or your business), or just enjoyment (god forbid).
Reflecting on it, I was at CogX to encounter some new ideas via the formal talks, not really feeling like networking that day (shudders). There was one talk I wanted to attend as I knew all the speakers, but the others I picked as the mood took me, so I suppose I erred on the side of serendipity. And my intended outcome was somewhere between learning and enjoyment. By contrast, I had breakfast with someone who was there largely to meet individuals informally and serendipitously, to recruit people for their business (so a “selling” outcome).
Looking around the event and peering at some name badges, the attendees were a very diverse bunch, and no doubt had a wide range of goals (and therefore requirements for the conference). And even two attendees with the same generic goal might have very different requirements. For example if two people are there to learn about artificial intelligence, and one is a secondary school student while the other is a machine learning engineer, the same keynote presentation will struggle to serve them both.
I am therefore interested in how conference organisers think about maximising the utility for their attendees, as they run the risk of trying to please everyone, and ending up pleasing no one. And similarly how do conferences balance ambitions to grow attendance (and revenue) against the likely diminishing and potentially diluting returns as they expand beyond their initial audience.
When you buy food from the supermarket, you expect to be able to see what is in it. You don’t necessarily want to to check every item you buy for its percentage of sugar or unsaturated fat (or whatever), but you want to have the option. What if you are allergic to something? What if you are watching your weight? You might want to know what you are putting into your body before you eat it.
We don’t have the same expectation when we are choosing digital products. Sure, there are terms and conditions and privacy policies, but nobody reads them, and in any case do they even contain the salient information? We don’t know if we are exposing ourselves to ad-based monetization, or an infinite scroll attention-vortex, or addictive gamification. We don’t know if our activity is being mined for future recommendations, or how our data is being stored or shared, actually. But we wilfully let these applications into our minds and our lives, even though we don’t know what’s in them.
I’m not saying regulation is required. But I do think technologists should think carefully about what they are putting into their products, outside one-eyed KPIs. And I think as users we should be thoughtful about what we eat. So to speak.
A foundational premise of this blog post is that jokes are better when you explain them in excruciating detail, so can we all get on board with that please.
If you are denizen of tech Twitter, you have probably heard of Superhuman. For those of you fortunate not to spend time on the Hell website: it is an email client, self-proclaimed “the fastest email experience ever made”. It has achieved its Twitter fame through a combination of invite-only exclusivity, high profile advocates and admirers (mostly proclaiming via Twitter), some noteworthy quirks (one-on-one onboarding, a $30 per month pricetag, beautiful pictures when you hit inbox zero), as well as what is apparently a genuinely transformative email experience.
I say apparently because I wouldn’t know – I am an Android user for my sins, so even though I managed to wangle a coveted invite (I know right), I was rebuffed at the final hurdle: there isn’t an Android app yet. My email signature will not indicate that I am Superhuman, at least not for a while.
In a fit of pique, I wondered whether maybe, just maybe, $30 was a bit much for just, like, sending email? Did I even want to see nice pictures at inbox zero? Why would I want an onboarding where someone else critiqued my emails? Was it actually all just about getting a golden ticket, and telling the world about it?
And thus, NormalHuman was born: the email experience you already have, just with a sprinkling of exclusivity.
I know what you are thinking: this is kind of weird, why are you explaining this quite shoddy attempt at satire? Cool your jets, I’m getting there. Because this post is actually an ode to the internet.
Everyone knows that the internet has revolutionised and democratised access to information blah blah blah. All manner of entities, from individual hackers to not-for-profits to big corporates have brought us products and services that are almost like magic, achieving a mix of fortune and fame along the way.
What I think is less well understood is how easy it is in 2019 for a person with an idea to bring that to the world at speed, with internet scale (even if that idea is a half-baked internet parody), thanks to a mix of tools, community and a little bit of luck. Let me break this thing down for you.
The tools
I’m not suggesting that Normalhuman.net is a groundbreaking thing. It is actually quite simple: it is a single page website, with a sign up form, some nice pictures and transitions, a $5 card payment option, and some analytics tracking in the background. I guess what is significant is that ten years ago, that would have been quite an undertaking, requiring a chunk of time and at least some custom development. Today, it took a couple of hours of messing around with some user-friendly point and click tools.
The hub of the whole thing was built on Carrd. For those who don’t know it, Carrd is the world’s simplest one-page website builder, by one-man powerhouse AJ. I have been using it for a couple of years, and I have huge respect for how the platform has developed in that time – it has added some great new functionality, but it has done that while remaining incredibly simple, staying true to its core use-case (easy to make single-page sites). If you have never made a website before, and want to put something of your own on the internet, I can’t recommend a better place to start – it was my first port of call, and I was off the mark.
I wrote some slightly irreverent copy. But a few word jokes does not a good satirical website make. I needed to beef that sucker up.
Superhuman has an access request form, so Normalhuman had to have one too. The act of a couple of minutes in Carrd, linking up a dusty old Mailchimp account I once set up. The internet doesn’t need another wax lyrical about bootstrapped Mailchimp, so I will simply say: it was easy to do.
Given the wonderful aesthetics of Superhuman, I had to make sure my stock photo game was up to scratch. I hadn’t come across Unsplash before, but their photos were beautiful so I snagged a few for Normalhuman, plus their simple embedding API was just what I needed. I got some nice transitions going, and the whole thing started to look kind of professional. We were cooking on gas.
I wasn’t sure what to do about the endorsements from high profile people, a compulsory component of every wannabe unicorn website – I didn’t feel like I could put real people’s faces up there. Fortunately I was reminded of the slightly chilling thispersondoesnotexist.com, an endless stream of AI-generated faces. I could put a face to a quote with impunity (sorry computers).
I talked to a friend of mine, who said I should add a card payment option in there. Carrd of course has a seamless payment integration with Stripe. I thought why not? And added a $5 widget (proceeds to go to Wikimedia). It was my first time using Stripe. Having worked on a couple of payment integrations for bank wires and credit cards in a previous job, it was kind of uncanny how easy it was to go from no Stripe account, to accepting payments. Truly a wonderful user experience.
Then, in a moment of optimism, I added Google Analytics tracking. Needless to say this was also very easy to do in Carrd.
Not going to lie, I kind of gave up when I got to designing the logo. It is the number eight. Don’t ask me why.
The community
Having made a joke website, it could have gone the way of some of my previous satirical efforts – URLs passed on to like-minded friends, otherwise largely forgotten. But I thought I might as well prod it out into the world, so I did two things. Firstly, I created a Twitter account, and secondly I posted it on Product Hunt.
I’m by no means an active Product Hunt user, but I think it is an interesting community which surfaces some cool stuff (I read their daily email). I’d never “hunted” anything before, but thought it might get some attention if I was lucky – the VC Starter Kit (a masterpiece) had done pretty well on Product Hunt, so there was some precedent for joke websites. I Hunted it, pushing it out into the void.
Back to Twitter, where I have only recently started engaging and posting things on my personal account, having spent a decent chunk of time lurking. While I have some issues with the platform (not for now), it does spark some really interesting conversations, and I have really appreciated the fact that you can engage directly with people a world away. It was in the hope that I tweeted my Product Hunt page, and tagged @Superhuman.
A little bit of luck
So NormalHuman got lucky a couple of times. The Superhuman team saw my tweet, and they seemed to get it. A couple of them followed my Normalhuman account, and retweeted or liked or whatever it is one does on Twitter. The site got some traffic over a few days (~4K people!), some people gave me their email address to apply for access. I got a nice feeling that some people had seen the thing I did, and thought it was ok. Which is about all one can reasonably hope for. I was pretty happy with how it had all gone, and was trying to explain to my family what it was (“so if you follow Tech Twitter…”), when I checked Google Analytics – about 1,000 people were concurrently on the site.
Interesting.
To Twitter!
It became apparent that Benedict Evans had included the link on his weekly newsletter, which goes out to >100K people, which explained the sudden influx of traffic. As a reader of said weekly newsletter, it was kind of cool to see my joke website included. I emailed Benedict, who informed me that it was one of the most-clicked links that week. Still not sure what to do with that one.
But I am sure that it totally obliterate my previous metrics, with a halo lasting for a little while as some other people picked it up. As of writing, >17K people have visited the site, >2.5K people have applied for access, and, in the most miraculous outcome of all, 18 people paid $5 for lifetime membership, with all profits to go to the Wikimedia foundation.
Spot the moment the newsletter landed
So that was all good fun.
Some miscellaneous thoughts I may unpack a bit more later: Twitter is an incredible place to spread information (or disinformation). Newsletters with large readerships are a powerful tool. People are pretty willing to give out their email address. People are mostly up for a laugh.
To people who visited the site: I hope it made you smile (I know it’s not like ha-ha funny, we’re in wry smile territory here and that’s ok).
To people who applied for access: I am sorry that I don’t (currently?) have an email client to offer you. GDPR mandates that I let you delete that data if you want, just hit me up if that is the case @GetNormalhuman.
To the people who paid $5: you are absolute angels. I will be making a payment to Wikimedia forthwith.
To team Superhuman: kudos for being cool about it. If you will still have me, I’d love to give the service a try, even just on my old Macbook Pro.
To Benedict Evans: thanks for the boost, that was fun.
To AJ and all the people who made the tech I used: thank you for the leg up. Keep doing what you do.
I am conscious of course that this kind of wide-eyed one-eyed optimism has lead to all sorts of issues for technology companies big and small. There is much more nuanced and thoughtful reflection to be done. But I had an enjoyable micro-experience of the positive power of the internet, and I wanted to share it here.
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