- personal updates
- what i’ve been up to (1-3 sentences)
- Hi all, hope everyone had a restful holiday season despite the fact that the craziness of 2020 is following us into 2021. As much as the weight of the feeling that the world is actively crumbling around us, I’ve been trying my best to be fully present to enjoy time with family at home, stay focused at work with 2 new engineers joining my team, and, as an escapist mechanism, consuming trash tv (Schitt’s Creek, although it actually has some noticeable character development which is nice). I just got back to San Francisco after being away for almost 2 months, and the sudden shift from the bustling, normal-like ambiance of Houston to the ghost-town-esque streets of downtown SF is dizzying. It almost feels like nothing has changed since a year ago when we first began the lockdown: empty streets dimly lit by rows of street lamps, wisps of light forming apparitions of the mind showing the Saturday night bustle of a different lifetime. I’m hoping for the best with the vaccine rollout and getting the virus under control to a point where life can start to feel less suffocating and a constant decision between what is right or wrong.
- what I’ve been thinking of (1-3 sentences)
- I’ve been thinking a lot about the phenomenon of people have different identities with different groups, with community as the medium through which these changes occur. There seems to be a universal tension between the principle of including everyone, which involves bringing any group dynamic to the most common denominator of “eligible” topics and the principle of authentic expression, which involves allowing anyone to fully express their identity even if it means topics that not everyone will understand (a form of exclusion). In some cases, we feel ourselves transforming into a version that hides our authentic, at-rest (what I’ve come to start calling null self, in a play on the null hypothesis) identity. If you’ve ever felt an internal conflict returning to your high school environment and home or the pressure to stop sharing a personal experience as an acquaintance walks into the room, you’ve experienced this pressure to conform to the “normal” standards of society (Interior Chinatown, a book I’ll expand on below, gives a great example of this). We see this play out at a larger scale across America in how recent public turmoil (the BLM protests, the riot at the Capitol) where each instance represents some segment of society that is fighting against the pressure to conform that they experience (a society that has been structured to mistreat black and brown people vs. a society that is becoming diverse and globalized). However, within the segment, there’s an overwhelming pressure to conform to the segment’s dogma, especially if it’s all you’ve ever known (the election being rigged can seem not very far-fetched if that’s what everyone around you is saying). There are certainly domestic terrorists and other instigators, who will try to deliberately manipulate a crowd into doing what they want, that were part of the mob on Wednesday, but it’s just as certain that there are a significant amount of others that followed along because they saw themselves as defenders of liberty. What’s the right balance of adapting your identity to your environment and maintaining your null self? What’s the happy medium for societal norms where we can promote self-expression while giving opportunities for people to connect at a fundamentally human level? How can we change the default environments of society so that people grow up appreciating diversity and wanting to understand others? What are the defaults that we want society to instill in people? ^j1cMyuC0c
- Mosaic, people were good at all the things they thought they wouldn’t be good at, intentionality around energy and diversity of passions, opening it up to the broader community, how having a community does not mean never being lonely, it may actually mean being lonely mosaic - community house
- Building community intentionally for business purposes (Substack conference) the science of building community substack on - conference
- Friends the kinds of friendships you’ll have, the transient nature of friendships
- the overwhelming pressure to conform from a community, Interior Chinatown and kung fu guy
- Society as a community and how its changed over the years via The Unwinding
- The capitol riots, BLM protests,
- conversation with nagle on context and dominant paradigm ^-2mGXOyGf
- I’ve also been enjoying a lot of fiction writing lately and thinking about how it involves weaving a story in order to demonstrate some principle (conventionally referred to as the “moral of the story”). Fiction is crafting stories that blend enough elements of reality with a compelling narrative to demonstrate some belief in an understandable and sympathetic manner, a subtle shifting of readers’ perspectives towards that of the principle. Ted Chiang, author of one of my favorite books, The Paper Menagerie, calls this writing stories that literalize metaphors. It reminds me of a philosophy in product development of building prototypes that demonstrate an extreme point of view in order to smoke-test the underlying assumption or principle for how the product should behave and how it influences users to act.
- I’ve also been thinking about the creator economy / creator economy and how it’s going to evolve moving forward. The thesis is that our economy is increasingly moving towards one that encourages people to be financially independent from a company through their personality and creative pursuits. We saw this originally happen with platforms like Youtube and Instagram, although the dynamics of those platforms produces superstars, people who were known to all users of the platform. Now, we’re seeing smaller players emerge with sustainable lifestyles without having to win over millions of users, just 1000 true fans. This phenomenon plays out on platforms like Twitch, Patreon, OnlyFans, etc. There’s less of an emphasis on needing to appeal broadly to a massive audience; instead, you are rewarded for focusing on a very specific niche that will appeal strongly to a small audience. We see this also in the rise of media sites that are deliberately catered to a specific side, ex: breitbart and nowthis. And here at Coda, it’s something we’re banking on too, that catered niche software will always work better than one-size-fits-all general software. Li Jin from a16z posits the idea of creating a middle class for the creator economy and what is needed to get more and more creators to achieve the 1000 true fans needed for sustainability rather than shooting for a million fans. One structural problem that emerges in my mind that requires a novel solution for this world to work is information overload. As of now, there’s already so much content and content creators that one can consume and subscribe to, that we mostly let the algorithmic feeds of social media and content platforms serve us what they think we want to see. How can we solve the problem of discoverability for an exponential increase in creators while ensuring that people aren’t overwhelmed with options (free choice paradox).
- what I’ve been consuming (1-3 sentences)
- a sun: a gripping, emotional, and powerful Taiwanese movie that is available on Netflix
- Interior Chinatown: as my hastily written goodreads review states, “Wow this book left me speechless. It took my breath away with its hypnotic style intermingled with poignant commentary and an ever-blurred line between what’s real and what’s imaginary. Yu conveys his point about the blurred line between performance and real life perfectly through the medium and style while doing proper justice to the very complicated story of the vast variety of Asian Americans”
- The Opposite of Addiction - Your Undivided Attention: an intriguing frame on how we can fight addiction (specifically to social media) with connection. The podcast frames the problem in that social media promises us the appearance of something that we desperately crave (meaningful connection), but in reality, gives us none of the substance of that with the infinite feeds and the shallow content.
- writing updates
- background on new piece + CTAs (3-6 sentences)
- wrote about my commitment to 2021 to trusting myself to take risks, in other words, to gamble. Would love to hear tips for what has worked or stories of similar undertakings in order, just reply to the email :)
- gambling
- the fun box