Curiosity & Wonder
Pebbles on the beach
An affection for words
Humility
Don’t Play It Like the Flute
Eulogy for Steve Jobs
The five dimensions of curiosity
Ignorant, but curious
Pointing at things
Looking Closely is Everything
An Essay by Craig ModKambara, detail by detail.
I’d say that that huh is the foundational block of curiosity. To get good at the huh is to get good at both paying attention and nurturing compassion; if you don’t notice, you can’t give a shit. But the huh is only half the equation. You gotta go huh, alright — the “alright,” the follow-up, the openness to what comes next is where the cascade lives. It’s the sometimes-sardonic, sometimes-optimistic engine driving the next huh and so on and so forth.
How am I doing, wonder?
A Quote by Louis KahnForm comes from wonder. Wonder stems from our 'in touchness' with how we were made. One senses that nature records the process of what it makes, so that in what it makes there is also the records of how it was made. In touch with this record we are in wonder. This wonder gives rise to knowledge. But knowledge is related to other knowledge and this relation gives a sense of order, a sense of how they inter-relate in a harmony that makes all things exist. From knowledge to sense of order we then wink at wonder and say How am I doing, wonder?
Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web
We are quietly replacing an open web that connects and empowers with one that restricts and commoditizes people. We need to stop it.
A fly in the spider's web
We're very good at talking about immersive experiences, personalized content, growth hacking, responsive strategy, user centered design, social media activation, retargeting, CMS and user experience. But behind all this jargon lurks the uncomfortable idea that we might be accomplices in the destruction of a platform that was meant to empower and bring people together; the possibility that we are instead building a machine that surveils, subverts, manipulates, overwhelms and exploits people.
It all comes down a simple but very dangerous shift: the major websites of today's web are not built for the visitor, but as means of using her. Our visitor has become a data point, a customer profile, a potential lead — a proverbial fly in the spider's web. In the guise of user-centered design, we're building an increasingly user-hostile web.
If you run a website
If you run a website and you put official share buttons on your website, use intrusive analytics platforms, serve ads through a third-party ad network or use pervasive cookies to share and sell data on your users, you're contributing to a user-hostile web. You're using free and open-source tools created by thousands of collaborators around the world, over an open web and in the spirit of sharing, to subvert users.
I chose out
What I'm against is the centralization of services; Facebook and Google are virtually everywhere today. Through share buttons, free services, mobile applications, login gateways and analytics, they are able to be present on virtually every website you visit. This gives them immense power and control. They get to unilaterally make decisions that affect our collective behavior, our expectations and our well-being. You're either with them or out. Well, I chose out.
You see, the web wasn't meant to be a gated community.
What do we want the web to be?
Do we want the web to be open, accessible, empowering and collaborative? Free, in the spirit of CERN’s decision in 1993 or the open source tools it's built on? Or do we want it to be just another means of endless consumption, where people become eyeballs, targets and profiles? Where companies use your data to control your behaviour and which enables a surveillance society—what do we want?