Collaborate
This is an open project. Below are the questions I'm sitting with, the people I've been thinking with, and the reading that shaped the work. Click a sticker, finish the sentence, hit send.
Open questions
You should read ___
Book, paper, article, blog post — anything that shaped your thinking on attention or technology.
You'd find ___ interesting
A project, product, person, or community working on related ideas.
You should talk to me — I’m ___
Introduce yourself. Tell me what you work on and where to find you.
The thing you're missing is ___
Constructive criticism welcome. What's the blind spot?
I have a skill that could help: ___
Developer, designer, researcher, writer, filmmaker, organizer — all useful.
I'd use this if it ___
What would make this real for you? What feature or framing would make you pay attention?
People I've been thinking with
A small thank-you to the people who've been generous with their attention while I've been figuring this out — arguing with the idea, sharpening it, and keeping me company in the questions.
@louisvarge, Jack Styles, @alexkrusz, @feral_eyes, @ascetic_shadow, @dnsosebee, @bashu_thanks, @joespurpleshirt, @vincent_yc_li, …and many others.
Intellectual lineage
The shape of this project owes a lot to a handful of recurring sources. Natasha Dow Schüll's Addiction by Design is the clearest account I've read of how environments — slot machines, casinos, and now feeds — get engineered to absorb attention, and David Foster Wallace's E Unibus Pluram names the recursive trap where a medium swallows the very critiques aimed at it. Both sit underneath the diagnostic half of the work.
For the constructive half, I keep returning to QRI's logarithmic scales of wellbeing as a way to think about skills of well-being as something measurable and trainable rather than vibes; to Forethought.org's Design Sketches: Angels on the Shoulder as the closest existing vision of what an AI-powered supportive layer could feel like; to Amber Case's Calm Technology for the periphery as a design surface; and — only half-jokingly — to Marie Kondo, for the idea that the right relationship to your stuff is something you can learn.