🏡 One of my observation following my latest US trip was: “In both NYC and SF people were defining themselves and thought on a 'neighborhood-basis'.” Ava and Phil demonstrated this perfectly in their discussion about the importance of picking your neighborhood.
All this to say, my neighborhood choice has really affected my experience of San Francisco. So when I started chatting with Phil Levin, who founded Live Near Friends and Radish, a multigenerational compound in Oakland with 20 adults and six children living across 10 homes, and he mentioned that picking your neighborhood is more important than picking your city, everything clicked into place.
✍️ I’ve always felt attracted to this notion of ‘obsession’. Of course, Nix latest post resonated deeply: obsessive.
When you’re obsessed with an idea or problem, you can go deeper into the thing you’re working on despite no external motivation. […] The world is a museum of obsessions.
💻 What an extremely interesting presentation Maggie gave last month in Berlin: Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers, the emerging golden age of home-cooked software, barefoot developers, and why the local-first community should help build it.
🖼 David published his part 2 of Culture is an Ecosystem: A Manifesto Towards a New Cultural Criticism.
Culture's positive effects on the brain: Aesthetic experiences enhance the quality of human life through (1) providing a cure for boredom, (2) broadening an individual's ability to perceive the world, and (3) preparing the individual to deal with future contingencies.
🎵 I really enjoyed this discussion between Ted and Rick; 10x more interesting that the title suggests:
about culture cycles
about the danger of caring more about the past rather than the future [are you holding rights? or are you creating what’s next?]
the battle between macro-culture and micro-culture — and while the former is declining, the latter might thrive
“you can’t reduce things to formula”
the difference between art and entertainment
we need mind-expanding experiences
there is a real danger in going full-passive consumption; which is bad for the culture
“i spend more time reading than i do writing” => “any process you have in the world, your output depends on your input”
fluid intelligence versus crystallized intelligence
now being similar to 1800’s: back then, power went from the industrialists to the creative people
you get luckier if you force yourself out of your comfort zone
what Internet allowed is: direct contact with your audience, your people