Tapestries-38 | "Must read"
Describing the tools we carry with us to interpret the world.
Lots of you asked me to provide an audio version of Tapestry pieces, so here’s my first attempt. Let me know whether the extra format is useful, cringeworthy, or both! Here we go.
This piece considers a model for how we filter information in a noisy world. I’ve called this model the "personal information universe." I can’t tell if it’s really clever, or simplistic and obvious to the point of being dumb. I trust you’ll help me decide.
Here’s what I’m talking about. We live in a world of chaotic information flows. In response to this chaos and noise, all of us have constructed—whether consciously or not—our own “information universes.” These are virtual spaces that act as a gateway to the topics and subjects we deem interesting or important. Put simply, they are the filter we rely upon to make sense of the world.
I’ve been thinking about this as a concept to help me understand how others see the world, and to try chart where our relationship with information is headed. With this context in mind, in this piece I will cover what an "information universe" is, state why I believe they exist as standalone entities, make a guess at where I think we're headed, and finish with a broader comment on why this conversation is important. It'll be fun. Let's go.
What is a "personal information universe" (or "PIU")?
Whether you realize it or not, you have a PIU. I have a PIU. We all have PIUs. They are the universes of information we live within and carry around with us; they are our curated information-scapes. And we need them, because they are our refuges in this perfect storm of information.
To begin the introduction to PIUs, take a moment to think about where you get your information from. Who makes sense of the world for you, and where do you consume or discover that content? Bring to mind the characters and publications of your digital information landscape, across your inbox and feeds, and on your computer and your phone. As you’re considering the characters and publications in this thought exercise, picture two different axes: subject matter and source. It is these two axes that form the high-level structure of our PIUs, and we’ll cover each here.
The subject matter of our PIUs is entirely dependent on our individual interests, and form the boundaries of our respective PIUs. The subject matter of my PIU looks something like the following: finance, politics, sports, cultural commentary, science, philosophy, and memes of all of the above. Yours may include a combination of these, with the addition of design, parenting, fashion, education, wellness, or whatever else interests you.
Having determined our areas of interest, the second axis of our PIUs revolves around deciding where we go—or who we turn to—to find the "best" or "most nuanced" or "most informed" content relating to our specific areas of interest. So where the areas of interest form the boundaries of our PIUs, the sources are the entities that populate the space. My PIU is populated by a collection of newsletters (both from individuals and organizations), people I follow on Twitter (generally individuals), digital publications, and my bookshelf. Friends and peers are clearly a critical part of our PIUs, but they’re a human and analog medium, with different and complex considerations, so I'm leaving them out of scope for this piece.
A PIU is therefore an ecosystem of subjects and sources that spits out qualified and curated content for our consumption. The people we entrust to keep us informed on our topics of interest are selected for a range of reasons, including: their proximity to the source content (i.e. news and events relevant to the topic), their alignment with our personal values, the power of their intellect, the signaling value they bring (and therefore provide us with), and the potential balance they contribute to our viewpoints, to name just a few.
The PIU is a digital concept, but one I believe is so powerful that it takes on a physical quality. I visualize it as a sphere we carry around with us; it is the informational lens we view the world through and the most important tool we have to make sense of our reality. I know the process of creating a PIU is nowhere near as deliberate as that described above, but that makes it all the more powerful; it is a subconscious mental framework or entity we've refined to deal with an information-rich world.
With the concept hopefully clear enough, let me convince you it’s real.
How do I know PIUs exist?
I’m going to try show PIUs exist by describing the role they play in our relationships, in this case the modern-day threesome between ourselves, information, and our peers.
Our PIUs serve two purposes in this informational orgy. First, they project informational strength and fertility (“I read this incredible article about…” or “this person I follow said…”). And second, they filter what we allow in, ensuring we’re discerning about the type or origin of information we’re willing to consume. Let’s look at how we “share” information or content for a practical example of this “filtering” function.
In the past, when my PIU would spit out an article that resonated with me, I would often send the link to others I thought would also find it interesting. I shared, but more often than not, the recipients never read the article. The same is true of this publication; in its early format (emailed PDFs), people I thought would read my posts, didn't. And I get it. In reverse, when others would send something to me, subconsciously I’d either be skeptical of the level of signal or feel burdened by the need to consume something from somebody else's PIU; I can barely keep up with the content my own PIU surfaces; am I going to use up some of that bandwidth on what someone else thinks is good content? How do I know that they've been as discerning with the entities in their PIU as I have? Will I appreciate the piece if I don't have context as to where it sits in their PIU? These are subconscious calculations we make that result in us not consuming content people send us. "Must read" is therefore very much in the eye of the beholder.
The fact we identify with “our” information—the content surfaced by our PIU—suggests the PIU isn’t just an abstract concept, but really is a model or entity we construct and carry around with us. And I think it makes intuitive sense. One way to describe our day-to-day existence is to say it’s simply a series of thousands of tiny choices about what content we will allow through the filter. The content we actually consume probably comprises less than 0.1% of the content we’re exposed to, so we should place a high value on it! The PIU is simply the mechanism we’ve built to help us qualify and filter.
Where is this all headed?
I think PIUs will be a consumer product in the not-too-distant future. In the same way one can follow an individual on Twitter, or subscribe to an individual's newsletter, one will also be able to subscribe to another individual's PIU; they are simply an abstract form of intellectual property.
Consumer media products have evolved to give us greater access to information at the source, whether politicians on Twitter, celebrities on Instagram, or artists on TikTok. We’ve shortened the distance between ourselves and information by increasing our access to people, because we’re ultimately interested in people, whether it’s what they’re doing or thinking. This is where PIUs gets interesting. Let's take two well-known commentators: Kara Swisher and Sam Harris. We can say they arrive at their particular viewpoints through engaging with their own PIUs. We also know their PIUs would be entirely useless in most of our hands, because we don't have the necessary expertise to digest and synthesize the “specialized” content they consume that informs their views. And that's what we follow them for: the output of their PIUs, which in this case, is what they’re thinking about topics in their respective domains. And once you reframe the reason for following somebody as the desire to access their PIU output, you begin to see the potential for a meta-PIU product.
My contention is we will also start following people for their PIUs where the PIU represents a spectrum of views across a specific question or topic, not a specific, specialized viewpoint. In other words, I think we will follow people for who they follow, not what they say. Examples of PIU products could include “young woman at the forefront of emerging digitally-native creative trends” or “millenial male across the scale of, and emerging practical solutions to, our climate emergency.” I believe we'll “subscribe” to different people’s PIUs for a number of reasons:
The task of discovering and then curating a group of thought leaders on a particular topic is hard; we would rather outsource that curation to a person who can perform that complex and involved task on our behalf.
Where a person performs this task, they can overlay their own personal values and worldview in the curation exercise; to the extent their values align with ours, their topic-specific PIU becomes more attractive.
The best sources exist across platforms: social, email and website themselves; the most information-rich PIUs therefore have to exist cross-platform, meaning an algorithm native to one of the platforms will struggle to effectively perform the task; nuance and human flexibility are strengths here.
The people whose PIUs we may follow are those we look up to not because they are subject matter experts, but because we value their ability to navigate the information landscape on our behalf. I believe we all ultimately want to create balanced and informed viewpoints on the issues and topics of importance to us. Creating a balanced and informed PIU is hard, so why not eventually outsource it? I’d get around that.
Bringing it together
So yeh, I think we have PIUs and that one day soon we’ll subscribe to other people’s PIUs. To this point, I’ve spoken about why we have PIUs and what opportunities they present. And to finish, here’s a comment on the lessons they hold.
In this piece I’ve described the overabundance of information as a technical problem to be solved, but it’s also a philosophical problem. The lens or filter or sphere I’ve been describing can also be considered a “veil” that obstructs our view of the world. The “veil of perception” was a concept invoked by empiricists 400 years ago, and it is one we have to address again today given the evolution of the informational landscape. We have to actively and consistently acknowledge we live in a highly mediated world.
If exploring the concept of the PIU has taught me anything, it’s the importance of combining awareness, humility and critical thinking to existing as a thoughtful, sovereign individual. Awareness to understand that our views on any one particular topic represent but a snapshot of the complexity it probably entails; humility to understand that there are elements of a topic we likely will not and cannot comprehend; and critical thinking to ensure we constantly query and challenge those we’ve entrusted with helping us make sense.
The PIU is a response to the curation challenge, not a solution. The volume of information will continue increasing exponentially while our ability to process information remains relatively static. The filters we use to help digest the volume of information will evolve: individuals, institutions, peers, and PIUs. But what will remain constant is the space between our ears, where the interpretation and synthesis and testing must be done.
We must hold ourselves and each other accountable to the need to always think critically, because today, the greatest individual attribute is the ability to think for yourself.
In the spirit of this piece, I thought I’d share a few pieces of content my PIU spat out since my last post that really grabbed me. Per above, I understand if most people won’t read them, but if you’ve made it this far, maybe you’ll read further. If you find this interesting or useful, I might include it in future pieces as a regular section. Let me know.
PIU diaries
The One About Bibi Netanyahu’s Father and the Perils of Diaspora
This is a book review of a piece of historical fiction about Bibi Netanyahu’s (Israel’s recently ousted Prime Minister) father. The book review itself is interesting, but what really struck me was the impact review process had on the Jewish reviewer. His comment below captures what was a very lonely feeling I know many Jews felt in the last few weeks:
A thing they didn’t prepare me for in my own cheder — or maybe they did and I just didn’t hear it — was that the unique sadness and terror of anti-Semitism for the Jews lies not just in its violence, but in the people around you pretending that the violence doesn’t even exist.
IT IS OBSCENE: A TRUE REFLECTION IN THREE PARTS
This piece got a lot of coverage about three weeks ago. It is a well-known Nigerian author’s personal story about the backlash she received following comments she made that were disingenuously interpreted as transphobic. It is a powerful piece of writing, and I found the following paragraph the most striking in a piece full of piercing insights:
In certain young people today like these two from my writing workshop, I notice what I find increasingly troubling: a cold-blooded grasping, a hunger to take and take and take, but never give; a massive sense of entitlement; an inability to show gratitude; an ease with dishonesty and pretension and selfishness that is couched in the language of self-care; an expectation always to be helped and rewarded no matter whether deserving or not; language that is slick and sleek but with little emotional intelligence; an astonishing level of self-absorption; an unrealistic expectation of puritanism from others; an over-inflated sense of ability, or of talent where there is any at all; an inability to apologize, truly and fully, without justifications; a passionate performance of virtue that is well executed in the public space of Twitter but not in the intimate space of friendship.
Why Decentralization Isn't as Important as You Think
I’ve spent a lot of time with people in the blockchain community over the last year. I wrote about some of my learnings recently here. My conversations have revealed the importance of testing certain assumptions or principles that community members hold dear. One of these principles is the importance of decentralization. This piece, and especially the quote below, speak to the importance of challenging this principle:
Before we worry about decentralization, let’s worry about building things worth decentralizing in the first place. Let’s not forget, no one actually wants this stuff yet! No one knows what problems it will actually solve! It’s all still weird and complicated and impossible to use! I agree with Jesse Walden on this point: projects ought to progressively decentralize as they figure out product market fit—that is, once they figure out what’s actually valuable to build. But for most everything in this space, product market fit is still a long way away. Until then, I think we can obsess a little less about being perfectly decentralized. Our focus should be on innovating and building better infrastructure for the digital economy. That’s the real goal, if you ask me. Decentralization is merely, at times, the means to that end.
Hybrid workplaces
I think the death of the office has been greatly exaggerated. I’m sure there will be many companies that semi-permanently shift to hybrid work, but I believe the majority of companies will return to the office close to full-time soon enough. Even those parroting their flexible or hybrid work policies are spending hundreds of millions of dollars buying up or leasing staggering amounts of office space. Importantly, while juniors or younger cohorts claim to want remote work and flexibility, the reality is their training is suffering; their long-term development should actually incentivize them to get back to the office to learn from their colleagues. The office will be back as soon as anybody thinks they’re at a competitive disadvantage—personally or organizationally—by being remote. This tweet (from one of Facebook’s founders) captured the potential sequencing nicely:
Time will tell. Let’s see how this trend plays out.
As always, please respond with your feedback and suggestions. And thanks for making it this far!
Photo by Garrett Sears on Unsplash
Well Daniel, I actually listened to the audio version and loved it. Thank you for including your own personal PIUs which I have enjoyed reading and would welcome more of.