“Hell is other people. But hell is also loneliness. Artificial intelligence gives us the Malkovich Malkovich Malkovich reality we really crave. Endless novelty, but safely unsurprising, the entertainment sweet-spot. Propaganda from our own secret selves — selves so secret that they aren’t even ours. Narcissus’s reflected view was eclipsed by his own head, but now, with postpostmodern digital refraction, we can overcome ego and annihilate bias and see through the backs of our own heads like gods.”

Update:

“My interest is dissolution and recrystallization of selfhood and along with change of what is obvious to us. In other words, I’m interested in conversion events.

Human-centered design demands that its practitioners undergo conversion events, usually minor ones, but not always. We designers must transform ourselves from people who cannot understand how others think, feel and behave to people for whom these thoughts feeling and behaviors make perfect, obvious sense. This can be a terrifying, painful process.

An ideology is a fortified circularity, dedicated above all to prevention of conversion — to exposure to what might trigger a conversion. Ideologies condone, even encourage, suppression and silencing and intimidation and ostracism of whatever triggers dread of conversion.

By now most people have become ideologues of one kind or another. Ideologues cannot change, so they cannot design. Ask a random designer what they care most about. You’ll always get variations on the same answer. Today’s designers do research with extreme thoroughness and rigor, but this research is always a knowing-about exercise that leaves their ideology intact. The findings are extraordinarily detailed and boring. When is the last time you felt inspired by design research findings? The research makes sense, but it is epiphany-free. It was conducted in a way that precludes epiphanies and conversions.

When the design industry dedicated itself to serving the one true and just ideology, it lost what matters most. This is my hostility to progressivism. It wants to be God, but it’s just another shitty little mass-autism — a solipsistic egregore. It killed design.”