Benedict Evans
Stepping out of the firehose
An Article by Benedict EvansIn 1800, if you’d said that you wanted something ‘made by hand’, that would be meaningless - everything was handmade. But half a century later, it could be a reaction against the age of the machine - of steam and coal-smoke and ‘dark satanic mills.’ The Arts and Crafts movement proposed slow, hand-made, imperfect craft in reaction to mass-produced ‘perfection’ (and a lot of other things besides). A century later this is one reason I’m fascinated by the new luxury goods platforms LVMH and Kering, or indeed Supreme. How do you mass-manufacture, mass-market and mass-retail things whose entire nature is supposedly that they’re individual?
...we keep building tools, but also we let go. That’s part of the progression - Arts and Crafts was a reaction against what became the machine age, but Bauhaus and futurism embraced it. If the ‘metaverse’ means anything, it reflects that we have all grown up with this now, and we’re looking at ways to absorb it, internalise it and reflect it in our lives and in popular culture - to take ownership of it. When software eats the world, it’s not software anymore.
COVID and cascading collapses
An Article by Benedict Evans
On online collaboration and our obligations as makers of software
Is it the notetaking system that’s helping you think more clearly? Or is it the act of writing that forces you to clarify your thoughts?
Is it the complex interlinked web of notes that helps you get new ideas? Or is it all the reading you’re doing to fill that notetaking app bucket?
Is all of this notetaking work making you smarter? Or is it just indirectly forcing you into deliberate, goalless practice?
Towards a crap decision
You have a thing. You would like to improve said thing. So, you ask a bunch of people what they think, giving more weight to those with relevant expertise. It’s a time-tested strategy.
The pitfall here is that if the participants are aware of each other’s contributions, they will almost always automatically switch to consensus-building instead of providing their honest feedback. Worst case scenario: the bandwagon effect gathers steam and drives you toward a crap decision.
So much knowledge not being applied
Most organisations have a lot of documents and data floating around that hardly ever gets revisited or used. They all have research, reading, and relevant information collecting dust.
Stuff that should be informing the decisions and strategies of the company. Some of it sits unread in a knowledge base or a wiki. Some of it lies in the drives of individual employees who don’t have a way to share it productively.
So much knowledge not being applied!
Except that’s not how we work as human beings. If you haven’t read it, experienced it, and contextualised it, then it isn’t knowledge to you. Knowledge is a quality that people possess, not documents, and the only way to transfer it from one place to another is for people at both ends to apply themselves and make it their own.