Hybrid #9
周期、 人人都不开心、 AI+个人>公司、 买回过去的一部分
© AMOUAGE
摘录
Cycles are so hard to predict, because it’s easier to forecast in straight lines. What’s almost impossible to detect in real time is the same forces fueling public opinion plant the seeds of their own demise. When times are good, people get complacent and stop caring about good governance. When times are bad they get fed up and say, “Enough of this.” And I think we’re not far from that today.
I have a theory about nostalgia: It happens because the best survival strategy in an uncertain world is to overworry. When you look back, you forget about all the things you worried about that never came true. So life appears better in the past because in hindsight there wasn’t as much to worry about as you were actually worrying about at the time.
⤷ A Few Things I’m Pretty Sure About, Morgan Housel
Why strive for pleasure? Why long for it? Because – contra the Bryan Johnsons of the world – we will die. “A counted number of pulses only,” Pater writes, “is given to us of a variegated, dramatic life.” Like Johnson, like the humanmaxxers, Pater counts his pulses. “Our one chance lies,” he writes, “in expanding that interval, in getting as many pulsations as possible into the given time.”
How different Pater’s pulse-counting is from that of the biometric ascetics. Against the pressure to optimise life, decadence issues a different command: feel it.
⤷ Why does everything feel so joyless? Welcome to the age of decadence without pleasure, Michèle Mendelssohn and Charlie Tyson
Explain that, because I think I see what you’re saying, but people would usually conflate them — creativity and design.
DF: The even bigger question, for the philosophers and art-theory folks, is, “What’s design?”, “What’s art?”, how do you differentiate design versus art? It’s muddy, but design has an aspect of problem-solving, it also has creativity. Art, I think, is a lot of things — you can get endless definitions of design and art — but I think of it as trying to take an emotion, idea, or concept and communicate it to someone in a way that really affects them. That’s not best framed as problem-solving, whereas design is.
How about this definition: art is an expression that it’s meant to be consumed by the end user, and design is meant to serve the end user.
DF: Well, I don’t even know if you should define art as being for an end user.
Yeah, good point.
DF: For me, one of the definitions I lean on is that design is where problem-solving meets creativity. Figma has always had people using the platform for creative use cases. But now you fast-forward to 2026, and design, creativity, media, in some ways art and in some ways not, and advertising — it’s all kind of merging together, it’s all one thing in a way I wouldn’t even have said in 2025. If you believe we’re in an attention economy — you experience this every day — and you believe you have to have a differentiated voice and really have a point of view in your work to stand out, and you think the way people judge software is the design, that’s the differentiator, but you also have to grab someone’s attention, design and brand are so connected. It’s all really coming together in such an interesting way, because of these second-order effects of more creation happening in the first place.
A phrase you’ve mentioned, you said it earlier in this conversation, you’ve said it plenty of times elsewhere, is that AI draws from the middle of the distribution, and to be differentiated you need to be at the tails. That makes sense, but it’s funny because it conflicts with — go back to that user comment that’s deleted from the Internet, “Collaboration is the death of design”, do you see any tensions there? You talk about Adobe, creativity, tied to single-player, the genius of one person, versus, “We’re a group of people collaborating to get a design out the door”. How does that not end up in the middle of the distribution too?
DF: It’s more of a mindset thing for any design team are they trying to do the safe thing, are they tryigng to go for the least common denominator where everyone agrees it’s a good idea? Or are they trying to be daring and bold and take risk? What we’re going to see over the coming years is the market rewarding the risk-takers. And I wouldn’t say it’s enough to be at the tail of the distribution — I think you have to be out of distribution.
[…]
That sort of leads to my question, which is, is the real Figma danger not that AI becomes multiplayer, but that individuals with AI disrupt multiplayer companies? And that’s why you still have to be relevant to the individual as well.
DF: I think it’s kind of a dark future if that happens, it’s one where folks are probably feeling pretty lonely — it’s also one where the tunnel vision you have when you’re building with AI is really becoming a problem for teams, I’m hearing this from design leaders everywhere.
There are different phases of AI adoption at these companies, the first phase is often, “We’ve got to use AI, let’s figure that out”, the second is like token-maxxing leaderboards — some extreme behaviors. The third, after they get people to adopt, is often “Okay, here’s your token budget”. In that second phase especially, where people go really wild with AI, it’s hard to get them to change their behavior after. A lot of people have this total tunnel vision of, “I’m building this one thing”, and they get really attached to it.
That’s the opposite of the breadth of what a great design process offers. If you’re going through the design process, it’s not that you should slow down necessarily, but you should go broader, and you should think. It’s essential that you actually think — not just wear a thinking cap, you need to be able work through yourself and have a mental model not only of the user and the experience you’re creating, but also cultural impacts, the broader system you exist in, what the user is expecting, all sorts of things. Going fast in the wrong direction is not progress, it’s a dead end, and it’s even worse if you’re collaborating, trying to bring five designers together and each one is viscerally attached to their one direction — now you’ve got design gridlock and you’re talking past each other.
So it’s imperative that we move away from this tunnel vision and toward the openness the Canvas represents. Maybe there are other ways too, but we’ve got to get away from tunnel vision.
⤷ An Interview with Figma CEO Dylan Field About Design and AI, Stratechery by Ben Thompson
Homeownership is part of the American Dream, and both of my parents worked to help other people realize it. My father advocated for Davis to adopt land-use policies that would have led to the creation of more affordable housing. The average cost of housing was so high that people who worked blue-collar and service jobs in Davis had to live elsewhere, in small towns nearby, or in neighboring Sacramento County. The leaders of the supposedly liberal city government in the seventies wanted to keep it that way, too, warning of the dangers of uncontrolled residential growth. In 1980, the population of Davis was overwhelmingly white, with few Black, Hispanic, or Asian residents. I was always aware that my family was different. My parents were a mixed-race couple, and, because of our lower-middle-class status, we didn’t have things many other families had: a microwave, a color TV, ski trips to Lake Tahoe.
When I was a teen-ager, my mom, who had taught junior-high-school history and typing for much of my childhood, began working toward a real-estate license. She was interested in houses and architecture and, as a newly single mom in the economic boom of the mid-eighties, she thought there might be an opportunity to make more money. Real estate proved to be somewhat more lucrative than teaching kids to memorize the layout of a typewriter keyboard, but it was, of course, commission-based, and that meant some months were leaner than others. Add to that the fact that my mother was not a born saleswoman—she was neither a natural at socializing nor aggressive or cutthroat—and she rarely got her hands on the half-a-million-dollar-plus listings that were starting to pop up in the Sacramento area. What that meant was that she did O.K. Not well, just O.K.
My mom didn’t talk about her job much, except to express anxiety when she was waiting on a check, or to find out if she’d scored a listing. I also didn’t take much interest in it, probably because I understood that our over-all financial situation was often precarious, and that my mother sometimes took money out of her line of home equity in order to pay bills. I didn’t want to know any more than I already did.
[…]
In 2024, my sister texted me that the house on Baja was up for sale. “I wish we could buy it,” she said. I did, too, though I wasn’t entirely sure why. My sister was moving back to Davis to take care of our now elderly father, but I had no plans to return. I considered e-mailing the real-estate agent in charge of the listing to see if I could schedule a viewing the next time I came up north. Would I bristle at the ways the current owners had changed the property? Would I inform the agent that I used to live there? Would I explain that the idea of owning a portion of my past is part of a fantasy of a secure future? Would I tell her, “Hey, listen, a girl can dream”?
With Baja, my mom got a chance to start over, to make a house a home. In the course of three decades, she removed weeds and planted soft ground cover in the front yard, where, during the winter holidays, she would place an animatronic deer that slowly moved its head up and down, as if grazing. She had the exterior of the house repainted and put new windows in two of the small bedrooms, including mine, where I spent much of my adolescence listening to U2 and thinking about boys. A skylight was installed in a bathroom and, eventually, a gas fireplace in the living room. The back yard got landscaped, with a patch of grass and some bushes. I remember my mom sitting outside, reading, in a wicker chair with a padded seat, next to a trellis with climbing vines. What she didn’t get out of Baja financially, she got out of it in the satisfaction of a job well done.
⤷ On Not Being a Homeowner, Anna Holmes