The web is forcing our hands. And this is fine! Many sites will share design solutions, because we’re using the same materials. The consistencies establish best practices; they are proof of design patterns that play off of the needs of a common medium, and not evidence of a visual monoculture.

I believe every material has a grain, including the web. But this assumption flies in the face of our expectations for technology. Too often, the internet is cast as a wide-open, infinitely malleable material. We expect technology to help us overcome limitations, not produce more of them. In spite of those promises, we typically yield consistent design results.

The awe goes—time takes it.

The speed with which Twitter recedes in your mind will shock you. Like a demon from a folktale, the kind that only gains power when you invite it into your home, the platform melts like mist when that invi­ta­tion is rescinded.

The amount that Twitter omits is breathtaking. More than any other social platform, it is indif­ferent to huge swaths of human expe­ri­ence and endeavor. I invite you to imagine this omitted content as a vast, bustling city. Scratching at your timeline, you are huddled in a single small tavern with the journalists, the nihilists, and the chaotic neutrals.

sometimes, looking back at an accounting of it all, i’m disappointed that it doesn’t add up to quite as much as i thought it would by now. it’s not a clean narrative. i had always believed that i was a certain kind of person: decisive, confident, brilliant, glamorous, empathetic. these days, battered by the reality of going up against the world, i’m more tired and less sure.

sometimes, looking back at an accounting of it all, i’m disappointed that it doesn’t add up to quite as much as i thought it would by now. it’s not a clean narrative. i had always believed that i was a certain kind of person: decisive, confident, brilliant, glamorous, empathetic. these days, battered by the reality of going up against the world, i’m more tired and less sure.

As a deeply lonely teenager, I learned that I could earn others’ regard and become valued in a community by “doing cool stuff on the internet.” So, even today, my automatic response to these fears is to switch to an activity which produces some kind of visible output. Make a prototype, write up some notes, sketch a concept. These are appropriate behaviors at times, of course, but not when pursued as fearful substitutes for what I’m actually trying to do.

Why is this so hard? Because you’re utterly habituated to steady progress—to completing things, to producing, to solving. When progress is subtle or slow, when there’s no clear way to proceed, you flinch away. You redirect your attention to something safer, to something you can do. You jump to implementation prematurely; you feel a compulsion to do more background reading; you obsess over tractable but peripheral details. These are all displacement behaviors, ways of not sitting with the problem. Though each instance seems insignificant, the cumulative effect is that your stare rarely rests on the fog long enough to penetrate it. Weeks pass, with apparent motion, yet you’re just spinning in place. You return to the surface with each glance away. You must learn to remain in the depths.

My favorite aspect of websites is their duality: they’re both subject and object at once. In other words, a website creator becomes both author and architect simultaneously. There are endless possibilities as to what a website could be. What kind of room is a website? Or is a website more like a house? A boat? A cloud? A garden? A puddle? Whatever it is, there’s potential for a self-reflexive feedback loop: when you put energy into a website, in turn the website helps form your own identity.

Design is the process of taking the available data and coming up with its representation. The outcome is reasonably well specified and understood.

Discovery is about the transformation (usually expansion) of that input. It’s the evolution of the design. The uncovering of new states and new ideas throughout the process itself.

We used to have a map of a frontier that could be anything. The web isn’t young anymore, though. It’s settled. It’s been prospected and picked through. Increasingly, it feels like we decided to pave the wilderness, turn it into a suburb, and build a mall. And I hate this map of the web, because it only describes a fraction of what it is and what’s possible. We’ve taken an opportunity for connection and distorted it to commodify attention. That’s one of the sleaziest things you can do.

And you know, these little animations look awfully similar to animated GIFs. Seems that any time screens appear, some kind of short, looping animated imagery of animals shows up, as if they were a natural consequence of screens.

Just like any material, screens have affordances. Much like wood, I believe screens have grain: a certain way they’ve grown and matured that describes how they want to be treated. The grain is what gives the material its identity and tells you the best way to use it. Figure out the grain, and you know how to natively design for screens.

The interfaces we build are where we put the padding. You give a user something to grasp onto when you make a metaphor solid. In the case of software on a screen, the metaphors visually explain the functions of an interface, and provide a bridge from a familiar place to a less known area by suggesting a tool’s function and its relationship to others.

Today’s internet is largely shaped by a dialog between two ideas. One position considers personal data as a form of property, the opposing position considers personal data as an extension of the self. The latter grants inalienable rights because a person’s dignity - traditionally manifested in our bodies or certain rights of expression and privacy - cannot be negotiated, bought, or sold.

What remains explicitly clear is the fact that folks are not gathering in the digital equivalent of parks and town squares, they are gathering in online centers of commerce. Our digital public spaces, often called “platforms,” are really purpose-built shopping malls.

I believe this is because the comparison to films misses a central property of interfaces that is so constitutive that it outweighs the other similarities: Agency — it is human action that is indispensable to an interface. Like visitors to a building, users of an interface are given the agency to choose their own path, to move through it at their own speed and discretion: to wander and to linger, to move swiftly and purposefully, or to explore. Another striking similarity is that interfaces are, like buildings, never experienced all at once, but piecemeal: screen by screen, or room by room. Only in the user’s mind are they shaped into a coherent entity, are seen as a uniform whole.

Even traditional user interfaces are fundamentally three-dimensional — the third dimension in this case being time — and in this regard, they are similar to films.

this year, i hope to come to trust myself more. i hope to know when i need to love my work deeply, and when i need to be able to set myself free. i hope to find more balance and more quiet—in the world around me, yes, but especially in the recesses of my mind. i hope to love people for exactly who they are, knowing that a person's strengths and their flaws are often two sides of the same coin. i hope to want more for myself—and not the kind of wants manufactured for me by brands on instagram or thought leaders on twitter or microtrendsetters on tiktok, but the ones for which my soul hungers, the ones that replenish and renew me. little wants and big wants, but my own wants. i hope to think less and do more. i hope to grow stranger. i hope to get better at hoping against hope.

it's hard, living in such persistently unprecedented times, to know what is the natural process of aging and what's the specific peculiarity of aging in this time.

there's a running joke (is joke the word?) on twitter that we're all still stuck in 2020, or that we're about to begin year eight of 2016. in my own life, at least, that has felt true. 2016 is the last year i can recall feeling deeply optimistic about what the new year would bring, for me and for the world at large. since then, the fragile hopes i bore for each new year have been flattened again and again into the formless sameness of a world where time means nothing and yet somehow everything manages to keep getting worse.

This is truly a core guiding methodology to how I approach the web: as a composable, iterable, resilient thing. Something that invites creation, play and generative exploration.

Over the phone, Susan tells me all kinds of things. That she used her social engineering skills to sneak past military checkpoints and into Area 51. That she went dumpster diving with a young Charlie Sheen. That she figured out how to set off US missiles from a phone booth—a feat Kevin Mitnick was once accused, famously, of being capable of pulling off. That she once sprang an accomplice from jail over the phone, posing as a clerk from a different precinct.

“Whether I… perform some kind of ruse to gain access, or whether I just go seduce the guy and blackmail him afterwards… if I want to get into that computer, I’m going to get into it,” Susan said at the conference, as her almost entirely male audience laughed nervously. “That’s one advantage women hackers have over you guys,” she added, “if you’re willing to use it.”

She and her new friends cruised the city at night, searching for unsecured dumpsters outside of phone company offices. The manuals and interoffice memos they pilfered from the trash were maps to the parts of the phone network that were hidden from view. By leveraging the information they found dumpster diving — everything from internal jargon to access codes and employee names — they were able to pull more complex and ambitious scams.

She claims to be one of only three women to have slept with all four Beatles, securing the trickiest, Paul McCartney, through an elaborate pretext that involved having his wife Linda whisked away in a limo for a staged photoshoot. When she was still underage, she hitch-hiked to Vegas with Johnny Thunders (no relation) from the New York Dolls. In a 1979 tabloid tell-all, she’s pictured with Andy Gibb, Donny Osmond, and Ringo Starr. Once, tearing down the Pacific Coast Highway in a convertible Mercedes, “flying on coke” with Mick Ralphs, the guitarist for Bad Company, she decided she must be immortal — a theory she’d test with enough overdoses that she considers herself lucky to be alive today.

The task of hypertext is not to manufacture connections, but to discover where they have always been. Hypertext researchers before the World Wide Web built systems to support this endless, sacred hunt for entanglement and hidden structure, as inherent to thought as ecosystems are to the natural world. Judy and Cathy marveled at their oddly linked lives, but we are all connected. Difference is only the unknown. For a database poet and a hypertext researcher, that much was obvious. Links are what is waiting to be found, by those with the patience to pull the threads: backwards, forwards, anywhere.

Cathy gave up on the map, and the pair settled on a hypertext interface design drawing elements from Judy’s earlier work. In published form, the screens appear one at a time, driven by three functions: forward, anywhere, or lines. Forward moves through the screens in the order they were written. “This type of navigation simulates the process, and captures the mystery,” Cathy wrote. Anywhere calls up a screen at random. Cathy observed that this revealed their interconnectedness even more; “through new juxtapositions, the Anywhere function reveals unintended connections at the merging of our voices.” The final function, Lines, is an interactive tool for building new screens based on keywords, from a database version of the text. In each new composition it generates, the lines link back to their origins, creating paths through the work neither linear nor entirely random. These functions, which Judy had been exploring in literary “narrabases” and hypertext works like Uncle Roger, my name is scibe, and l0ve0ne since as early as 1986, resulted in a highly interactive text. Of the Lines function, Cathy writes, “this function adds a third voice to the work,” meaning the reader.

I had become completely obsessed by Apple and its online community: from indie developers like Panic and Loren Brichter, exciting designers in the space like Tim Van Damme and Jessica Hische, to bloggers and podcasters like Gruber, Siracusa, etc… I had never felt so consistently excited about a world and community like this one, and I desperately wanted to be a part of it.

When your platform organization is running three different generations of solutions to the same problem with no clear plan to remove any of them, and your customers are both confused by the offerings and dissatisfied with them, you have a serious product failure on your hands. The migration strategy must be a primary part of the product planning.

When platform teams build to be building, especially when they have grand visions of complex end goals with few intermediary states, you end up with products that are confusing, overengineered, and far from beloved.

This is how we restore the old internet — not in its original form, but in its glorious, fragmented essence. People call Twitter an indispensable public space because it’s the “town square”, but in the real world there isn’t just one town square, because there isn’t just one town. There are many.

On the old internet, you could show a different side of yourself in every forum or chat room; but on your Facebook feed, you had to be the same person to everyone you knew.

Interfaces, incentives, emergence, and second-order thinking constitute the biggest differences between platform and application design.
Interfaces are the points of contact between elements, where simplicity and flexibility can lead to efficiency at scale.
Incentives drive the motivation of both platform- and end- users. By designing incentives, we can re-invest users’ energy, amplifying desired outcomes
and preventing undesired results.
Emergence is the open-ended feedback loop that platforms can create and maintain. By designing for emergence, not against it, we enable users to
discover applications we never imagined.
Second-order thinking lets us plan for, and potentially tame, the complexities that threaten to turn platforms into dead ends — or worse.

Second-order thinking requires creativity. Platform designers have to ask: how will interfaces and incentives create emergent behavior? How will those
behaviors change the incentives? What can we build to channel these feedback loops towards our goals?

Emergence presents a unique opportunity in design. When behavior is predictable, we design tightly-tuned experiences (“happy paths”) to realize the best
outcomes for users. When behavior is emergent, users’ creativity becomes a multiplier on top of our own, exponentially increasing the best outcomes for
both users and business.

Platform designers have to understand and plan experience APIs: interfaces both in space (how elements appear beside each other, in front of or behind
each other, inside or surrounding each other) and in time (how elements or entire screens appear before or after each other, how to communicate causal
relationships).