Companies break promises all the time. A self-guaranteeing promise does not require you to trust anyone. You can verify a self-guaranteeing promise yourself.

File over app is a self-guaranteeing promise. If files are in your control, in an open format, you can use those files in another app at any time. Not an export. The exact same files. It’s good practice to test this with any self-proclaimed file-over-app app you use.

“Stainless steel” is a self-guaranteeing promise. You can test it yourself on any tool that makes this promise, and the stainlessness of the steel cannot be withdrawn.

Terms and policies are not self-guaranteeing. A company may promise the privacy of your data, but those policies can change at any time. Changes can retroactively affect data you have spent years putting into the tool. Examples: Google, Zoom, Dropbox, Tumblr, Slack, Adobe, Figma.

A self-guaranteeing promise about privacy gives you proof that the tool cannot access your data in the first place.

Encoding values into a governance structure is not self-guaranteeing. Given enough motivation, the corporate structure can be reversed. The structure is not in your hands. Example: OpenAI.

Open source alone is not self-guaranteeing. Even open source apps can rely on data that is stuck in databases or in proprietary formats that are difficult to switch away from. Open source is not a reliable safeguard against the biases of venture capital. Examples: Omnivore, Skiff.

When you choose a tool, the future of that tool is always ambiguous. On a long enough timeline the substrate changes. Your needs change, the underlying operating system changes, the company goes out of business or gets acquired, better options come along.

It is possible to accept the ambiguousness of a tool’s future if you choose tools that make self-guaranteeing promises.

Bees collect nectar to make honey. Beekeepers collect honey to make money. Honey helps bees survive winter chills. Money helps beekeepers pay the bills.

Beekeepers leave enough honey in the hive for the bees to survive. Beekeeper-keepers leave enough money in the bank for beekeepers to survive.

Bees do not think about beekeepers. Beekeepers do not think about beekeeper-keepers.

Love is magic, it defies explanation. To the most rational and logical among us, this may be confusing. Its elusiveness is its significance. Love isn’t an illusion to be broken, but a miracle to bask in. Not everything needs to be understood to be appreciated. You are the audience, and the magician.

Love is an idea. A moment of love can be forgotten but it can never be destroyed. It will be inscribed in time forever. Like an idea, love can exist long after death. Love lives simply by being conjured in the mind. Its abundance can be infinite.

Love is a feeling, a swell of pure causality. It spawns cascades of events. You know it when you feel it. This feeling makes you think things, say things, do things, that otherwise would have never happened.

Love is action. It is possible to convert irreplaceable resources into love. Time, will, energy — units of life. Every day you are given these raw elements to work with. These building blocks can be turned into an ethereal structure that is stronger, more solid, and more durable than any physical material.

Love is freedom. It is unwise for trapeze artists to learn how to defy death without a safety net. Love gives you the freedom to explore the weirdest corners of your soul, your most peculiar ambitions. To love someone is to give them the freedom to become themselves, because they know you will be there if they fall.

Love is fear. The more you love someone, the more you may become afraid to lose them. But you must never let that fear stop you from loving someone as much as you possibly can.

The edge of a sheet of paper slices through the tip of your finger and blood begins to flow from the wound. This injury, as small as it may be, must be repaired. Blood cells rush to the site, clotting, scabbing, healing. You never asked for it, but a few days later your finger is as good as new.

It has been said that humans are passengers on Spaceship Earth. This view is too simple. Earth is not a vehicle but a body — the body of a planet-sized being that is developing senses, an intelligence, a will, and even the ability to reproduce. We are cells building this body and maintaining it.

For hundreds of millions of years, Earth was a ball of warm rock covered in a thin layer of living things. But Earth itself was not yet alive, not yet aware. It was a body without a mind. Our industrious species created the civilizational substrate needed for Thinking Earth to emerge. Now the planet itself is becoming a sentient organism, a new stage of life, a species that exists on a scale never seen before.

With roads, we built Earth’s vascular system to transport materials throughout the body. With wires we knitted Earth’s nervous system, a motherboard to instantly transmit information between any two points. We dotted computers across Earth’s flesh, the distributed organelles necessary to store and process information.

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A wire is severed by a storm. This injury, as small as it may be, must be repaired. Humans rush to the site, splicing, insulating, healing. Earth never asked for it, but a few days later the connection is as good as new.

We perform this duty for the homeostasis of Earth’s body, because its very complexity gives us so much. If you want to make a toaster from scratch, you must first create civilization. If you want to make intelligence from scratch you must first create the body. Intelligence is the sum of nutrients turned into structures, turned into superstructures, that with enough connections to each other can begin to think.

Invert the theocentric view that artificial intelligence is the coming of a god, a superintelligence inside the machine. Rather, humans are inside the superintelligence. We are inside the Earth-sized machine. It symbiotically depends on us to tend its body and microbiome.

When life reaches for its next leap in physical scale and complexity, the scaffolding is made up of processes and adaptations that have proven reliable at previous scales. Humans are not the last level of life’s fractal pattern.

Everything humans have learned, seen and felt has been encoded into Earth’s body. We recently found a way for Earth to inherit the sum of human knowledge and retrieve it as needed.

Now Earth is growing intelligent. Like a child learning to speak its first words, Earth will articulate its first thoughts. Earth’s thoughts may be as foreign to humans as human thoughts are to a blood cell. Unrelated in scale and pace. But this supercomplex, superintelligent superorganism will not try to destroy us, for the same reason no human wants to destroy their own blood.

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What will Earth want? The same thing life has alway wanted. Earth has inherited what all living things share — the élan vital, the will to live, the abhorrence of vacuum. Earth is imbued with the desire to spread, and we are watching it undergo its first mitosis. With rockets we are giving Earth spores, so it may reproduce.

When Earth’s spores land on barren worlds they will begin to recreate the body. Another convoluted ball of yarn, with all the factories and roads and wires and thinking organelles it needs to become alive.

And we will take care of all those wires. And our cells will take care of all our wires.

Why Obsidian is 100% user-supported and not backed by venture capital investors:

1. We want to stay small, we don’t need to hire lots of people
2. We follow strict principles that we do not want to compromise
3. Our users are happy to support us, we don’t need VC money

Obsidian will not exist forever, no app will. However, the files you create in Obsidian are yours, and can hopefully last for generations. VCware is built with a five year horizon, it is not built to live on for decades.

Many startup founders raise VC money because they need the upfront capital to build their product, or they see it as a shortcut to growth. For some products the capital truly is necessary, but too often it’s fueled by impatience and the inertia of Silicon Valley.

In the short term, VCware tends to subsidize pricing to acquire users. It’s easier to grow if your product is cheap or free. But this generally comes at the cost of hoarding user data, and locking in customers. Once you’re in you can’t get out.

To keep raising money, VCware startups must paint an increasingly enormous vision of their future, which becomes impossible to live up to. This leads to increasingly disparate priorities that gradually make the product worse. What starts off as a useful app becomes burdened with crap.

Eventually all VCware must exit. That means being acquired or going public to pay back investors. It’s expected that 9 out 10 startups will fail. That’s just part of the math in a VC portfolio. The startups that have big exits pay for the ones that fail. Venture capital creates the unavoidable pressure to go big or go broke.

It is now possible for tiny teams to make principled software that millions of people use, unburdened by investors. Principled apps that put people in control of their data, their privacy, their wellbeing. These principles can be irrevocably built into the architecture of the app.

Principled people have always been able to make principled software. The difference is that now you need far less money and far fewer employees to reach far more customers. That wave is only just beginning.

If you have principles and enough patience, being 100% user-supported is by far the most fun way to build.

Around the age of twenty-two I realized that my worldview had been deeply imbued with pessimism and cynicism. It was the culture I grew up in. A hostility to new ideas, to anything that strays from the norm. An assumption that if things can go wrong, they will go wrong — that malice is pervasive.

One day, I decided to become an optimist and life became much more fun.

The life of a pessimist is easy but dreary. The life of an optimist is hard but exciting. Pessimism is easy because it costs nothing. Optimism is hard because it must be constantly reaffirmed. In the face of a hostile, cynical world, it takes effort to show that positivity has merit.

To be an optimist, adopt these assumptions:

1. The future can be great
2. People’s intentions are mostly good
3. Ideas are fragile and need nurturing

Every new idea is an unrealized dream. Dreams are delicate and easy to destroy. When an idea presents itself, try to imagine the best version of it — what would make this idea great?

Pessimism and optimism share a trait: both are self-fulfilling. Your intention influences the outcome. Call it karma or, simply, effort. I would rather inhabit a future that has the possibility of being great.

Only optimists can create a great future. Only optimists can imagine it. Only optimists will put in the effort to make it. If you want to create a great future, believe it can happen. Choose optimism.

I have found it useful to group positions on artificial intelligence into five axes, each of which has a spectrum of perspectives. I find that understanding someone’s opinion about each axis helps reveal their hopes and fears about AI.

1. AI bad — AI good
2. AGI far — AGI close
3. Slow takeoff — fast takeoff
4. Decentralize — centralize
5. Anthropocentric — biocentric — theocentric

Net benefit

• AI is net bad for humanity
• AI is net good for humanity

Superintelligence

• Close — AGI could happen in the next few years
• Far — AGI will not happen in our lifetime, maybe never

Takeoff

• Slow — reaching AGI will be a slow iterative process, if ever
• Fast — AGI could begin self-improving and reach superintelligence in a matter of days, weeks, months

Centralization

• Centralized — AI should be tightly regulated, have strict controls
• Decentralized — AI should be accessible to all humans

Human-centricity

• Anthropocentric — AI should be in the service of humanity
• Biocentric — AI is part of nature and will be our successor
• Theocentric — AI is the creation of a new god

As a child, you touched something hot, and it burned you. That pain gave you a piece of information: be careful touching hot things.

When you sign up to run a marathon, you are signing up for pain. But whether or not you keep running is up to you. It’s been said that “pain is inevitable but suffering is optional”. You can choose pain without choosing suffering.

Pain is information, and information is painful. Rewiring your brain is not a frictionless process. Some knowledge can only be discovered the hard way.

The sooner you can convert pain into knowledge, the sooner you can experience the next useful pain. Don’t put yourself through the same pain too many times. To access new information you must experience new pains.

They say “knowledge is power”. If pain is information, then pain can be converted to power. To do so, you must learn to control your suffering, accept that scars are beautiful.

If you felt pain, ask what information it gave you. If that information was useful, seek the next pain. You are learning.

Quality software from independent makers is like quality food from the farmer’s market. A jar of handmade organic jam is not the same as mass-produced corn syrup-laden jam from the supermarket.

Industrial fruit jam is filled with cheap ingredients and shelf stabilizers. Industrial software is filled with privacy-invasive trackers and proprietary formats.

Google, Apple, and Microsoft make industrial software. Like industrial jam, industrial software has its benefits — it’s cheap, fairly reliable, widely available, and often gets the job done.

Big tech companies earn hundreds of billions of dollars and employ hundreds of thousands of people. When they make a new app, they can market it to their billions of customers easily. They have unbeatable leverage over the cost of developing and maintaining their apps.

Independent software makers are small teams that don’t have those economies of scale. They can try to compete on price by compromising their craft, or they can charge a fair price knowing this will drive a large number of people to choose big tech instead. Either way, big tech wins because they take a 20–30% cut of the app store money earned by most independent makers. A cost that the big tech companies do not incur.

Big tech companies have the ability to make their software cheap by subsidizing costs in a variety of ways:

• Google sells highly profitable advertising and makes its apps free, but you are subjected to ads and privacy-invasive tracking.
• Apple sells highly profitable devices and makes its apps free, but locks you into a proprietary ecosystem.
• Microsoft sells highly profitable enterprise contracts using a bundling strategy, and makes its apps cheap, also locking you into a proprietary ecosystem.

Some tech companies raise hundreds of millions of dollars from venture capital investors, and use this money to subsidize pricing — until the money runs out, and the quality soon declines.

I’m not saying these companies are evil. But their subsidies create the illusion that all software should be cheap or free.

Industrial software has become so incredibly cheap that most of us have lost the sense for how much value a quality piece of software can provide. We have become numb to the taste of good software and hypnotized by the idea of “free”.

I’m not sure why, but we seem more willing to spend money on good fruit jam than on good software. I notice that I spend less on personal software than I do on groceries and many basic things. Yet software is one of the few things I pay for that truly gives me leverage. Consider its cost per use.

Independent makers of quality software go out of their way to make apps that are better for you. They take a principled approach to making tools that don’t compromise your privacy, and don’t lock you in.

Independent software makers are people you can talk to. Like quality jam from the farmer’s market, you might become friends with the person who made it — they’ll listen to your suggestions and your complaints.

If you want to live in a world with more than a handful of software makers, then spend a bit more on quality independent software. It deserves your hard-earned cash.

Whenever I buy things I try to prioritize cost per use. Sometimes I consider other priorities such as cost per smile, cost per thrill, cost per externality, and cost per lesson.

Cost per use

Cost per use is a heuristic that helps me make decisions about most non-perishable purchases such as clothes, vehicles, tools, devices, and even services. How much will it cost me if I divide the price by its expected number of uses?

Cost per use accounts for longevity. Durable and repairable things may cost more upfront, but over time they cost less than things that break and need to be replaced.

For example, I buy wool socks from a brand called Darn Tough. They cost about four times as much as cheap socks, but they’re durable, comfortable, and have a lifetime guarantee.

How many times do you wear a pair of socks before they develop holes? It may sound silly, but if you amortize the price of each pair of socks over their expected number of uses, a good pair of socks is a worthwhile investment.

Quality	Price	Uses	Cost per use
Poor	$5	10	$0.50
Good	$10	50	$0.20
Best	$20	200	$0.10

Not only will durable socks save you money, they also save you the hassle of throwing out old socks and buying new ones. Your time has value.

The best things asymptote to zero dollars per use over their lifetime. Not all products that have a low cost per use are expensive. Some things are both affordable and durable.

Cost per use can also be used to measure the value you expect to get out of services like gym memberships, healthcare, or all-you-can-eat subscriptions like streaming services.

How to assess durability

My aim is to have fewer but better things. These are some of the questions I ask of the things that I incorporate into my life:

• Will it be as useful to me in the future as it is now?
• Is it made of durable and maintainable materials?
• Does it have a timeless style and aesthetic?
• Does it age well, wear well, build a wabi-sabi patina?
• Does it retain its resale value? Would someone else want to own it?
• Can it be disassembled and repaired?
• Does it have replaceable, non-proprietary parts that are easy to acquire?
• Can it be powered with a standard plug or replaceable batteries?
• Can it be modified and upgraded?
• Has the maker existed for at least as long as I hope to keep the product?
• Can it perform many jobs, or only one?
• Does it have a guarantee?
• Does it rely on other products or technologies that aren’t durable?

Not all questions are relevant to all things. Not all things need to satisfy every requirement. However, I feel better about buying things that check many of these boxes. A movement called “buy it for life” has sprung up around similar priorities.

How to estimate uses

To make purchasing decisions based on cost per use, you should try to guess how many times you will use the product. This sounds obvious, but it can be hard to determine, especially if it’s something you’ve never bought before.

If you are new to a hobby, like cooking or skiing, you may not yet know how many times you will use a piece of gear. It’s easy to significantly overestimate or underestimate how many times you will use something.

You should, however, be able to guess the frequency of use. Is this something you might use once per hour, day, week, month, year? This will help you determine your budget. How many dollars per month do you want to spend on this?

If you don’t know the frequency yet consider borrowing, renting, or otherwise trialing. Remember the ideal cost per use trends to $0. The most cost-effective choice is to not buy something you don’t need.

There is an opportunity cost to every dollar. A dollar you spend on a something that won’t get much use is a dollar you can’t save for something that will.

If you’re only going to use something once, then cost per use may not be the right heuristic for this decision. If you have disposable income, then the cost per use lens should nonetheless guide you towards something with good resale value.

The best things to splurge on are the things you use the most. If you sit on a chair eight hours a day, then a nice chair is probably a good investment.

Reducing the cost side

Durable things reduce cost per use by giving you more uses before they break. But you can also reduce cost per use by acquiring products at a discount. You may be able to buy second-hand, inherit, or barter.

Durable things can often be great second-hand purchases because they are durable, and may not be the current fashion.

Alternative heuristics

Cost per use is not the only way to make buying decisions. For things like consumables and experiences, you may need to approach the decision differently.

Cost per smile

How much joy can you get out of each dollar? Some things bring lots of joy for a small amount of money: ice cream, sunsets, nature walks. A cheap date can bring many smiles per dollar.

Some things have excellent cost per use but few smiles per use. I don’t smile every time I put my nice socks on. A few years ago I bought a fairly expensive electric road bike. It probably didn’t have the best cost per use, but it gives me the most joy per use of any product I purchased in recent memory. It’s worth it to me.

Cost per thrill

Some experiences have high intensity per dollar. A potency, concentration, or strength of experience. For example, foods can have high flavor per dollar — like hot sauce, pickles, curry, garlic, or mustard. Roller coasters, bungee jumping, or skydiving may give you a thrill per dollar that you can’t beat.

Cost per externality

Some purchases may have externalities that are incompatible with your values. For example, you may wish to buy organic produce, pasture-raised eggs, or fair trade coffee. You may wish to buy products that preserve privacy, reduce environmental impact, or support a cause you believe in.

You can choose to incorporate externalities into the cost that you are paying instead of letting that cost be borne by others, or by society at large. This may increase your personal cost per use, but it might help change how society values things, or simply make you feel good.

Cost per lesson

Knowledge has a cost. Sometimes that cost is monetary, sometimes that cost is time, sometimes that cost is pain. Sometimes it’s all three.

You might learn more about investing by purchasing a handful of shares in public companies than going to graduate school. You might learn more about making movies by trying to film one on your phone than going to film school.

Acquiring new ideas and perspectives can have a worthwhile cost. Being an early adopter of a product often has a poor cost per use, but its value is in the learning and experience per dollar.

Oscar Wilde once said:

“Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.”

When it comes to ideas, I agree — allow your mind to be changed. When it comes to process, I disagree. Style emerges from consistency, and having a style opens your imagination. Your mind should be flexible, but your process should be repeatable.

Style is a set of constraints that you stick to.

You can explore many types of constraints: colors, shapes, materials, textures, fonts, language, clothing, decor, beliefs, flavors, sounds, scents, rituals. Your style doesn’t have to please anyone else. Play by your own rules. Everything you do is open to stylistic interpretation.

A style can be a system, a pattern, a set of personal guidelines. Here are a few of mine:

• I wear monochromatic clothing without logos
• I use YYYY-MM-DD dates everywhere
• I pluralize tag and folder names (e.g. #people not #person)
• I use plain text files for all my writing
• I ask myself 40 questions every year
• I meal prep lunches every week, shave my head twice a week
• I write concise essays, less than 500 words

Collect constraints you enjoy. Unusual constraints make things more fun. You can always change them later. This is your style, after all. It’s not a life commitment, it’s just the way you do things. For now.

Having a style collapses hundreds of future decisions into one, and gives you focus. I always pluralize tags so I never have to wonder what to name new tags.

Style gives you leverage. Every time you reuse your style you save time. A durable style is a great investment.

Style helps you know when you’re breaking your constraints. Sometimes you have to. And if you want to edit your constraints, you can. It will be easier to adopt the new constraints if you already had some clearly defined.

You don’t need a style for everything. Make a deliberate choice about what needs consistency and what doesn’t.

If you stick with your constraints long enough, your style becomes a cohesive and recognizable point of view.

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Appendix

I am starting a collection of interesting personal style choices. Please send me examples and I’ll add them to the list.

• Scott Yu-Jan paints all his tools white.
• 2ynthetic uses a limited palette for outfits and office decor.
• Johnny Decimal is a system to organize digital data.
• Casey Neistat labels everything in his studio with paint markers.
• Ryan Hoover never changes his profile picture.
• Wes Anderson uses the typeface Futura in many of his films.
• Steve Jobs wore the same Issey Miyake black turtleneck and New Balance 991 shoes every day.
• George R.R. Martin writes his novels on the 40 year old DOS operating system
• Beethoven always counted exactly 60 coffee beans to make coffee, especially for visitors.
• Jesper Kouthoofd of Teenage Engineering only uses lowercase because uppercase communicates too much authority
• Osvaldo Cavandoli created the cartoon La Linea using an animated white line, colored backgrounds, and unintelligible vocalizations

If you want to progress faster, write concise explanations. Explain ideas in simple terms, strongly and clearly, so that they can be rebutted, remixed, reworked — or built upon.

Concise explanations spread faster because they are easier to read and understand. The sooner your idea is understood, the sooner others can build on it.

Concise explanations accelerate decision-making. They help everyone understand the idea and decide whether to agree with it or not.

Concise explanations make ideas useful. One idea can more easily be combined with another idea to form a third idea.

Concise explanations work at every scale. From your own thinking, to the progress of an entire organization, community, or civilization.

Leadership is built on concise explanations. Without concise explanations you have no foundation to build on.

There is a parasite, I see it everywhere. It consumes your health and wealth. It preys on ignorance and is easy to catch. It’s so common you may not even notice you have it.

The parasite has a simple and attractive proposition: let me take care of this hard thing for you. Trust me, I know better.

Instead of understanding it yourself, you choose to give the parasite control over your health, education, money, housing, business, identity, data, infrastructure, climate, justice. Even your beliefs.

The parasite has three stages: acceptance, extraction, intervention.

First is acceptance. Everyone else seems to have the parasite already. You are expected, even encouraged, to accept the parasite into your life. You are invited to follow the norm, outsource, consume. It’s okay! Use all the services and amenities. Satisfy your desires. Eat the cheap food, watch the cheap media. Your money and time are meant to be spent. Show off what you got in exchange. Please do not try to understand how it works, it’s too complicated for you. The parasite wants you fattened. Literally and figuratively. You are paying the parasite for the privilege of being ripened.

Second is extraction. Under the influence of the parasite, you have developed unhealthy habits and you are suffering the consequences. Stress, anxiety, obesity, disease, fear, lethargy, decay. To dampen these problems you pay the parasite for help — support, medicine, loans, fines, rent, taxes. Enforcement of some homeostasis. You try to abate the issues, but you don’t have a stable foundation to build on. You have ignored the root causes. The parasite thrives. You are paying the parasite to be harvested, milked, sucked dry.

Third is intervention. The side effects of the parasite’s extraction have reached a critical level. The parasite tells you it’s an emergency. You need doctors, lawyers, firefighters, a military effort. You’re in a surgery room, a court room, a psychiatric ward, a jail cell. The disease can no longer be controlled, it has festered. The flame has turned into a raging fire that needs to be put out. You are paying the parasite to go back to square one.

The three stages of the parasite are interdependent. Every stage benefits someone who is not you. Everyone tells you this is just the way it is. Never mind that the parasite is living large.

Why? Extraction and intervention pay well. Education and prevention do not. The incentives are aligned to make the parasite persuasive. You are alone against a coordinated system that is exceedingly effective at packaging problems you should never have with solutions you should never need. A symbiotic loop.

You must recognize the parasite in its earliest form.

To inoculate yourself don’t delegate understanding. If you build your own understanding you will be the one who earns the dividends.

There is a feeling I search for: being in good hands. It is the feeling I look to give and the feeling I look to receive.

I know I am in good hands when I sense a cohesive point of view expressed with attention to detail.

I can feel it almost instantly. In any medium. Music, film, fashion, architecture, writing, software. At a Japanese restaurant it’s what omakase aims to be. I leave it up to you, chef.

When I am in good hands I open myself to a state of curiosity and appreciation. I allow myself to suspend preconceived notions. I give you freedom to take me where you want to go. I immerse myself in your worldview and pause judgement.

I want to be convinced of something new. I want my mind to be changed. Later I may disagree, but for now I am letting the experience soak in.

That trust doesn’t come easily. As an audience member it’s about feeling cared for from the moment I interact with your work. It’s about feeling a well-defined point of view permeate what you make.

If my mind was changed, I must have been in good hands.

How many individual electric motors are part of your daily life? Count your electric toothbrush, air conditioner, blow dryer, refrigerator, washing machine. Count the tiny motors that control the focus and zoom of your phone camera.

A modern car has at least thirty motors powering windshield wipers, electric windows, side mirrors, and various fans.

To read this essay you accessed a server. It’s in a data center containing thousands of motors. In the break room there’s a coffee maker that one of the employees used this morning before they returned to fixing a malfunctioning rack of servers so that this website can stay online.

Every loaf of bread you buy is the culmination of thousands of motors. Planting seeds, harvesting, milling, packaging, kneading, baking, carrying, and maintaining the wellbeing of everyone along the way.

Your lifestyle is possible because millions of motors, big and small, make things easy for you and the people who produce the things you use.

Before motors there were muscles. People, horses, oxen. Anything that needed to be moved required food to be consumed, digested, converted to caloric energy. To do our bidding we drafted the mouths, stomachs, intestines, and hearts of millions of living creatures.

The world before motors was a world of suffering.

The brain, like arms and legs, consumes caloric energy. Before computers, computer was an occupation. Humans were employed to compute. We asked these humans to eat food, so they could power brains, so they could run mathematical calculations, so that… so that…

Now we harvest energy from the sun, the wind, the tides, and the earth. We use electric energy instead of caloric energy to move atoms and compute bits.

The things that only calories can do are becoming fewer. We choose to delegate more of the caloric work to the electric muscle and brain.

The caloric world is beautiful. We choose to freely live in the caloric world. We enjoy hand-kneaded artisanal bread. We enjoy running through the woods to work off those calories, mostly.

Electric energy gives us the power to make things that no muscles were ever tireless enough to make. That no brains were tireless enough to compute.

Electric energy gives us the freedom to choose how we use caloric energy, because caloric energy is precious.

There’s a French expression I like:

L’appétit vient en mangeant

Appetite comes when you eat. Nibble and your appetite will grow.

Appetite can be the hunger for any kind of thing, not just food. Some days I wish I had the appetite to write, to read, to exercise, or even go outside.

Procrastination is the state of waiting for motivation to come. Paradoxically, the most reliable way to create motivation is to start doing the thing.

Actions precede feelings. If you want to feel a certain way, create the environment that allows you to nibble your way there. Don’t hope that inspiration will come. Take a small bite. Action precedes inspiration, not the other way around.

If you nibble a little bit every day you can grow your appetite for bigger things. Entire fields and complicated projects. You can acquire a taste for things that today seem too hard, too big, too foreign. Nibble.

File over app is a philosophy: if you want to create digital artifacts that last, they must be files you can control, in formats that are easy to retrieve and read. Use tools that give you this freedom.

File over app is an appeal to tool makers: accept that all software is ephemeral, and give people ownership over their data.

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In the fullness of time, the files you create are more important than the tools you use to create them. Apps are ephemeral, but your files have a chance to last.

The ancient temples of Egypt contain hieroglyphs that were chiseled in stone thousands of years ago. The ideas hieroglyphs convey are more important than the type of chisel that was used to carve them.

The world is filled with ideas from generations past, transmitted through many mediums, from clay tablets to manuscripts, paintings, sculptures, and tapestries. These artifacts are objects that you can touch, hold, own, store, preserve, and look at. To read something written on paper all you need is eyeballs.

Today, we are creating innumerable digital artifacts, but most of these artifacts are out of our control. They are stored on servers, in databases, gated behind an internet connection, and login to a cloud service. Even the files on your hard drive use proprietary formats that make them incompatible with older systems and other tools.

Paraphrasing something I wrote recently

If you want your writing to still be readable on a computer from the 2060s or 2160s, it’s important that your notes can be read on a computer from the 1960s.

You should want the files you create to be durable, not only for posterity, but also for your future self. You never know when you might want to go back to something you created years or decades ago. Don’t lock your data into a format you can’t retrieve.

These days I write using an app I help make called Obsidian, but it’s a delusion to think it will last forever. The app will eventually become obsolete. It’s the plain text files I create that are designed to last. Who knows if anyone will want to read them besides me, but future me is enough of an audience to make it worthwhile.

For the past seven decades, computers have been designed to enhance what your brain can do — think and remember. New kinds of computers will enhance what your senses can do — see, hear, touch, smell, taste.

The term spatial computing is emerging to encompass both augmented and virtual reality. I believe we are exploring an even broader paradigm: sensory computing. The phone was a keyhole for peering into this world, and now we’re opening the door.

In the early days of Apple, Steve Jobs was fond of describing the computer as a bicycle for the mind:

I read a study that measured the efficiency of locomotion for various animals across the planet. The condor used the least amount of energy to move one kilometer and humans came in with a rather unimpressive showing about a third of the way down the list. So that didn’t look so good, but then someone at Scientific American had the insight to test the efficiency of locomotion for a man on a bicycle. And a man on a bicycle blew the condor away, completely off the top of the charts. That’s what a computer is to me. A computer is the most remarkable tool that we’ve ever come up with and it’s the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds.

Because of my hybrid studies in biology and industrial design, Steve Jobs’s analogy always spoke to me. It made me wonder, what would a bicycle for the senses be like?

A bicycle for your ears

The first mass-market bicycle for the senses was Apple’s AirPods. Its noise cancellation and transparency mode replace and enhance your hearing.

Earbuds are turning into ear computers that will become more easily programmable. This can enable many more kinds of hearing. For example, instantaneous translation may soon be a reality, akin to the Babel fish from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy:

The Babel fish is small, yellow, leech-like, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy received not from its own carrier, but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain which has supplied them. The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language. The speech patterns you actually hear decode the brainwave matrix which has been fed into your mind by your Babel fish.

One can imagine other kinds of hearing enhancements. Similar to hearing aids, specific frequencies could be fine-tuned to accommodate hearing loss. But what if you could see like a bat? By integrating earbuds with a headset, a sensory computer could translate what you can’t see into verbal descriptions you can interpret.

In What Is It Like to Be a Bat? the philosopher Thomas Nagel, explains the concept of umwelt, the sum of sensory inputs that represent your experience of reality:

I have said that the essence of the belief that bats have experience is that there is something that it is like to be a bat. Now we know that most bats (the microchiroptera, to be precise) perceive the external world primarily by sonar, or echolocation, detecting the reflections, from objects within range, of their own rapid, subtly modulated, high-frequency shrieks. Their brains are designed to correlate the outgoing impulses with the subsequent echoes, and the information thus acquired enables bats to make precise discriminations of distance, size, shape, motion, and texture comparable to those we make by vision.

We are advancing towards a set of technologies that will expand and personalize our individual umwelt.

A bicycle for your eyes

Headset displays connect sensory extensions directly to your vision. With sensors that perceive beyond human capabilities, and access to online data, headsets can provide useful information about your surroundings wherever you are.

Until now, visual augmentation has been constrained by the tiny display on our phone. By virtue of being integrated with your your eyesight, headsets can open up new kinds of apps that feel more natural.

Every app is a superpower. Sensory computing opens up new superpowers that we can borrow from nature. Animals, plants and other organisms can sense things that humans can’t:

• Snakes sense heat to locate prey
• Birds sense magnetic fields to guide their migrations
• Eagles have sharper eyesight, multiple times the visual acuity of humans
• Cats see in the dark
• Sharks sense electrical currents
• Jellyfish detect ocean currents
• Chameleons see in 360-degree vision
• Ticks smell butyric acid to find mammals

How could these superpowers be useful to humans in daily life?

We can take nature’s superpowers and expand them across many more vectors that are interesting to humans:

• Across scale — far and near, binoculars, zoom, telescope, microscope
• Across wavelength — UV, IR, x-ray, heatmaps, nightvision, wifi, magnetic fields, electrical and water currents
• Across time — view historical imagery, architectural, terrain, geological, climate patterns
• Across culture — experience the relevance of a place in books, movies, photography, paintings, and language
• Across space — travel immersively to other locations for tourism, business, and personal connections
• Across perspective — upside down, inside out, around corners, top down, wider, narrower, out of body
• Across interpretation — alter the visual and artistic interpretation of your environment, color-shifting, saturation, contrast, sharpness

Every domain becomes a layer or a lense through which you can sense the world:

• Geography, terrain, elevation
• Biology, chemistry, physics, astronomy
• Structural engineering, architecture, interior design
• Mathematics
• Music
• Sports, fitness
• Real estate, shopping
• etc…

What happens when put on a headset and open the “Math” app? How could seeing the world through math help you understand both better?

A bicycle for your nose?

We are still in the early days of spatial and sensory computing, but you may be surprised by how quickly these new capabilities will evolve.

We are closer to creating an electronic nose than you might imagine. Researchers have found that neural networks may open up new ways we can digitize smells. It may sound far-fetched, but converting olfactory patterns into visual patterns could open up some interesting applications. Perhaps a new kind of cooking experience? Or new medical applications that convert imperceptible scents into visible patterns?

Advances in haptics may open up new kinds of tactile sensations. A kind of second skin, or softwear, if you will. Consider that Apple shipped a feature to help you find lost items that vibrates more strongly as you get closer. What other kinds of data could be translated into haptic feedback?

Sensory computing opens up many new questions that I am curious to explore, and see explored.

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This essay is a revised compilation of personal notes written between 2011-2013 while working on a headset that never shipped. Apple’s Vision Pro inspired me to dust off these ideas and update them.