Ribbonfarm Studio
28 episodes - English - Latest episode: over 3 years ago - ★★★★★ - 10 ratingsThinking out loud about the future of the world, as shaped by technological serendipity
studio.ribbonfarm.com
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Episodes
Welcome to the World of Tomorrow
April 07, 2021 00:40 - 15 minutesIn this episode of Breaking Smart podcast, I want to explore what it means to say that Covid has accelerated everything. If so, it means we’ve done some time travel relative the old timeline. As the cryogenic lab tech said to Philip J. Fry on Futurama, when he landed in the year 2999, welcome to the world of tomorrow! 1/ Let’s set the stage a bit. We’re now in the early days of post-Covid for at least some people, in some parts of the world. We don’t yet know how costly the endemic manageme...
Demiurgical Businesses
March 12, 2021 22:41 - 15 minutesIn today’s episode of the Breaking Smart podcast, I want to discuss a concept I call demiurgical businesses that I think goes beyond the 3 kinds you may be familiar with: lifestyle, customer-driven, and product-driven. 1/ In the discourse around tech, both on the tech side and the techlash side, you’ll often hear the term “real problems” which should make you wonder what “unreal” problems are. 2/ When the term is used, it’s usually used by socially conscious people, whether builders or cri...
Mars and the Meaning of Money
February 20, 2021 00:52 - 11 minutesSpace exploration has an unusual side effect: giving us a sense of the value of money on earth. 1/ The Perseverance rover, shown touching down on Mars in the photo below, cost about $2.2 billion to design and build, and about $243 million to launch on an Atlas rocket. 2/ Now that it is on the ground, if all goes well, and it is able to operate, it will cost another $300 million to operate for two years. So that’s at least $2.7 billion overall, or about 54,000 bitcoins. Hopefully more, if...
Anti-Network Effects
January 23, 2021 00:30 - 14 minutesIn this first 2021 episode of the Breaking Smart podcast, I want to talk about something that’s been on my mind a lot lately that I call anti-network effects. 1/ As I am recording this, governments around the world are working out the logistics problems of distributing billions of vaccine doses. It feels like a symbol of the times we are entering into, times that I think will be defined by anti-network effects. 2/ Vaccinations and mask-wearing are examples of anti-network effects. I’ll def...
Complete 2020 Roundup
December 25, 2020 19:42 - 10 minutesWell, I guess 2020 is a wrap. I’m going to do a quick round-up of everything I published on Breaking Smart this year, and try to tease out the larger themes, but obviously no look back at the year can begin without acknowledging the 800lb virus in the room. To quote J. Peterman on Seinfeld, in the episode where he takes back the reins of his company from Elaine after she mismanages it during his absence, kudos to all of us on a job…done. It’s a reference I’ve used before, in my 2018 annual ...
Involvement Capitalism
December 05, 2020 01:24 - 26 minutesWelcome back. The Breaking Smart newsletter and podcast is starting up again after a very refreshing 6-week break. I want to kick off the post-break programming with a podcast on a big question: if we are headed at least partially towards a post-scarcity world, as we seem to be, does it look more like the Star Trek universe, or the universe in Iain M. Banks Culture novels? Both are varieties of something I call involvement capitalism, which I think it’s going to emerge in the next decade o...
Fifth-Generation Management
September 25, 2020 21:56 - 34 minutesIn today’s episode, I want to talk about an idea I call fifth-generation management. 1/ Fifth-generation management is an emerging style of management we don’t know much about because it doesn’t actually exist yet. But it is guaranteed to emerge post-Covid because historically, big sharp disruptions have reliably triggered discontinuous changes in management culture, and it is already clear that this one is doing that. 2/ The idea of generations in management, in the form I’m going to lay...
The State of (Business) Play
August 21, 2020 23:57 - 35 minutesFor today’s episode, I want to share an out-take from my consulting work, something I think might be interesting for anyone working in the technology industry. It’s a set of 20 questions that can help you uncover the current state of play in your business. The questions are mainly useful for technology companies for reasons I’ll get to, and are probably of limited value to non-technology businesses, but you’re welcome to try using them for non-technology businesses. A caution: The only per...
Thinking Out Loud: Year One
July 24, 2020 20:42 - 31 minutesA special episode, an audio roundup/summary of the last year’s podcasts. I cover the 19 episodes I did starting in June last year. A year of thinking out loud. * The inaugural episode riffing on the like-new ethos of the industrial age and the transience/aging based ethos of the digital age. June 21, 2019: A Wabi-Sabi Technological Age. * On the problem of how to repeatedly break into technology scenes. July 5, 2019: Following the Scenius. * Plotting vs. pantsing, and setting the stage ...
The Next Experiments in Elitism
July 10, 2020 22:23In today’s episode, in honor of Bastille Day next week, and Fourth of July last week, I want to talk about the ongoing evolution in elitism, and the problem of how the emerging new elites can be better than the old ones being toppled. 1/ Elites are a constant and arguably necessary presence in history. Political revolutions that try to do away with elites invariably seem to either fail quickly, or install new elites without meaning to. So the question for me is not how to get rid of elites,...
Big Moods, Little Moods
June 19, 2020 21:55 - 19 minutesToday I want to talk about big moods, a phrase you may have seen on twitter, and also a related concept I made up called little moods. 1/ You may have seen the phrase “big mood” on twitter over the last few years, especially used when expressing resonance with a mood someone else has expressed. But it’s gone well beyond social media now, and things that look like big-mood dynamics are now showing up in corporate America as well. 2/ The basic memetic pattern is: someone might post a gif of...
From Story to Setting
May 29, 2020 22:52 - 23 minutesIn today’s episode, I want to talk about a new phase in the pandemic, marked by a shift in the role of the pandemic itself from foreground story, to background setting of other stories. I also have a couple of interesting announcements at the end. 1/ So this week, several non-pandemic things are dominating the headlines, the big one in the US of course being the death of George Floyd at the hands of the police in Minneapolis. Now this is of course a familiar type of story by now, except tha...
The Medieval Future of Management
May 08, 2020 23:10 - 20 minutes1/ Today I want to talk about an idea I’ve been developing, which is that the future of the business world, post-Covid, and post software eating the world, looks surprisingly like the High Middle Ages, between about 1000 to 1250 AD, rather than like any more recent historical era. Which of course leads to the question, how do you operate in this world? 2/ I also want to talk a little bit about the first ten decade of my life as an independent consultant, what I’m looking forward to in the n...
How, What, and Where to Build
April 24, 2020 21:35 - 18 minutesIn which I shamelessly draft off Marc Andreessen’s It’s Time to Build essay and suggest an approach to how, what, and where to do the building. I also have a framework I call the builder’s cone to think about it in a useful historical context. 1/ If you’re in tech, you’ve probably read Marc Andreessen’s essay It’s Time to Build (ITTB). It’s the first serious public thing he’s written in nearly a decade, after his 2011 WSJ op-ed, Software is Eating the World (SWEW). 2/ As most of you know ...
Defaults and Defaults
April 03, 2020 22:01 - 8 minutesThe word default has two meanings: failure to fulfill an obligation, and a preselected option. We are finding out the hard way exactly how they are related. Key points: * A complex system can be defined as one where every feature has a default setting, and lots of corner cases that must be taken into account. * A complex system can also be defined as one where a default of one kind — failure to fulfill an obligation, triggers a default of the other kind — a preselected contingency respons...
Beyond Optimism and Pessimism
February 21, 2020 21:17 - 9 minutesHello and welcome back to the Breaking Smart podcast. In this episode, I want to pick up where I left off in my December 6 podcast, where we talked about the idea of inventing time. In particular, we talked about how to understand Alan Kay’s line that it’s easier to invent the future than to predict it, and William Gibson’s line that the future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed. We talked about how to develop your instincts around recognizing when you’re living in a growing tim...
Inventing Time
December 06, 2019 20:03 - 10 minutesToday I want to talk about time, which is a subject I’m researching quite a lot these days. In particular I want to talk about two of the most-quoted lines in technology conversations that are about time. The first one is Alan Kay’s, famous line: it is easier to invent the future than to predict it. Alan Kay is a famous computer scientist who was at PARC. And the second line is from William Gibson, the pioneering cyberpunk science fiction writer, who is famous for the line: the future is...
Spacewalks and the Species
October 18, 2019 21:47 - 13 minutesTwo things happened this week. Last Friday, Alexey Leonov, the first human to walk in space (in 1965), passed away. And this morning, Christina Koch and Jessica Meir went on the first all-women spacewalk on the ISS. So two historic events. And they got me thinking about the meaning of we in its most universalist, species-level sense. Let’s take them in order. Alexey Leonov was the first human to walk in space. He was also on the crew of one of the earliest experiments in international spa...
Charisma Neutrality
October 04, 2019 20:15 - 17 minutesToday I want to talk about a possible emerging successor to net neutrality, which I call charisma neutrality, which I think is a plausible consequence of a very likely technological future: pervasive end-to-end encryption. (17 minutes) Now net neutrality of course, was part of a very important chapter in the history of technology. Though the principle is now pretty much down for the count, for a few decades it played a hugely important role in ensuring that the internet was born more open t...
The Direction of Maximal Derangement
September 27, 2019 19:21 - 16 minutesIn the original Breaking Smart essays, we used the idea of moving in the direction of maximal interestingness, or DOMI, as a way to advance boldly towards the future, and be on the right side of history as software eats the world, and avoid retreating timidly towards the past. In this episode (16 minutes), I want to update that rule. In the Great Weirding, you need to move in the direction of maximal derangement. Note: the text below is not a transcript, but the rough script I mostly stuck ...
Like Riding an AI Bicycle
September 20, 2019 23:07 - 19 minutesToday’s episode (~20 minutes) is about the idea of skills being like “riding a bicycle” and what that means when we are dealing with AIs. 1/ The idea of things being “like riding a bicycle” is an important one. It refers to a class of skills that never degrade under normal human lifestyle conditions. 2/ So long as you’re physically mobile and doing other things like walking or lifting things, your bicycle skill will stay maintained without explicit maintenance efforts. 3/ But what happen...
Technological Charisma
September 06, 2019 23:12 - 21 minutesIn this episode (21 minutes) I talk about the idea of technological charisma. What it is, how to create it, and the upsides and downsides of pursuing it. 1/ There are technologies that are like charismatic megafauna. We pay disproportionate attention to them, and tend to overindex on them in forming broader views of technology trends. 2/ There are pluses and minuses to pursuing technological charisma, and people tend to have strongly ideological responses to the idea of technological chari...
Investing in Your Ordinary Powers
August 30, 2019 18:53 - 15 minutesThis week’s Breaking Smart podcast (15 minutes) has to do with tapping into the things that make you ordinary. If that’s not enough, here’s me on the Village Global podcast with Erik Torenberg from last week, where I rambled like a grumpy old man for 2 hours. 1/ The personal growth world is somewhat obsessed with strengths and weaknesses, or more generally, things that make you different from others, whether you view those things as gifts or curses. 2/ But a great deal of your nature is ...
Towards Subtractive Social Media
August 23, 2019 19:33 - 17 minutesThis week’s podcast episode is on an idea I call subtractive social media. I didn’t do a transcript, just a few bullet point notes. The workflow for creating usable transcripts is still just too cumbersome. I’m going to be lazy and slouch along posting these low-production effort single-take things with just a few summary notes for the text part, until a better native playflow for transcripts is available here on Substack. This episode, I hit 17.5 minutes. Looks like I’m building up stamin...
Memes, Brands, and Missions
August 02, 2019 23:19 - 10 minutesToday’s topic is brands vs. memes. I made a transcript as well, using Descript, which you can find below. Apparently I spoke 1751 words in ~11 minutes. Wow, this is a high-leverage way to do “writing”. Also, I begin thoughts with “So…” a lot apparently. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Breaking Smart short-format podcast. So today I want to do a little bit on the relationship and connection between brands and memes. So brands and memes are somewhat similar concepts. They both r...
Planning to Start, Planning to Finish
July 26, 2019 20:30 - 12 minutesThis week’s podcast (12 minutes) is on a crucial difference, between planning to start, and planning to finish. * We talk a lot about the difference between more and less planning, on the spectrum between full waterfall and full agile, and like most of you, I share a bias towards less planning. * It is a difference that goes beyond software. In novel writing, for example, people talk of a difference between plotters and pantsers, people who work out detailed plots versus those who make up...
Following the Scenius
July 05, 2019 20:50 - 9 minutesHello from my new home in Downtown Los Angeles! This is another short, unrehearsed, unscripted, unedited, single-take 10-minute podcast episode. I think I’m going to be experimenting with this format for the rest of the summer at least. Some of you prefer text and have asked for transcripts, and I’ll figure out a low-effort way to do that eventually, but until then, you’ll have to make do with brief tldr show notes if you don’t want to listen to audio. 1/ Breaking smart often means breakin...
A Wabi-Sabi Technology Age
June 21, 2019 17:57 - 10 minutesSince many of you have been suggesting for years that I do a Breaking Smart podcast, I figured I’d do a little experiment and try out the podcasting widget in Substack. If this works well, I’ll start mixing things up a bit and do a mix of text posts and podcast episodes. This is an unrehearsed, unedited, live 10-minute recording. Apologies for the 15 seconds of siren noise outside my apartment at around the 6:22 mark. I’m not sure exactly how you’d get the podcast into your listening app, ...