Swimming in lightbulbs
2018 is a blank check of time I’ve been gifted by the gods, a gift I don’t want to squander. My plan so far is simple: explore a few decks of this wondrous, chaotic, many-many-many-decked spaceship of a thing that is current human technology. I want to understand how tech is working (and not!) for people of all sorts, along a few arbitrary themes that just get me excited. I hope to eventually hone in on whatever feels like the highest leverage use of my talents to steer some tiny part of the ship in the right direction. (It’s an awkward metaphor but a delightful journey. Thanks for coming along.)

First theme: Place
For April and May, and maybe beyond because it is proving very shiny indeed, my explorer’s theme has been: place.
I’ve been reading writing, and even doing some hacking on increasingly wild home automation ideas as I try and scratch an itch to understand what current hardware and software is doing to our sense of where we are and where we belong.
Space is physical, it exists in the world, you can quantify and model and manipulate it directly.
Place is not something intrinsic to the world, but rather one of humanity’s foundational technologies that has been under constant but often slow revision since we first came back to the same cave and called it ours.
Place is separate from architecture or construction. Place, or the many genres of place, are as much technology as physical and social networks.
Many of place’s component technologies don’t have clear names. The Room I write this in decomposes into Walls decompose into Drywall and J-bead. Going up a layer, you have Apartment and up a layer from that Real Estate and up from that Private Ownership and on and on. The end result of all these technologies messily bundled together is rather profound: a shared understanding that this is my home.
These technologies are being rearranged around us at a shocking rate. Place is being cleaved from space, from physical locality at all.
Not a bad area for tinkering. And as I tinker, I write to understand and guide myself and hopefully share something useful of what I find.
My recent writing
Home Automaton Will Automate Us Right Out Of Home – Matt Hackett
I took a long detour in the history of the first multi-user computers and came back with an idea about where smart homes are taking us.
Instagram Makes Me Like New York Less – Matt Hackett
Social media is planning our cities, and I think I’m okay with that.
A thing to subscribe to
I’ve been using some of my puttering time to aggressively unsubscribe from email lists. We’re talking thousands of companies and individuals machete’d from my inbox. One that will never get cut is Laura Olin’s weekly email of links she finds “lovely and/or meaningful.” It’s thoughtful, positive, nourishing stuff for those of us that (for professional or addictive reasons) spend a little too much time on Twitter.
A thing to listen to
John O’Donohue — The Inner Landscape of Beauty | On Being
An Irish poet on how landscape defines humanity. His metaphors are so powerful and useful, like “stress is a perverted relationship to time.”
A book to read
How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built - Stewart Brand
An uncategorizable book about the built world as messy, living, relentlessly modified, but predictable. To a systems engineer’s eye, this is like the missing guide to understanding how real buildings run in production.
By Matt Hackett
I'm an entrepreneur and engineer, currently in exploration mode. Subscribe to follow along.
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