Media theory pioneer Harold Innis saw it 70 years ago:
Some cultures and ideas are built to spread across SPACE.
And some spread across TIME.
It’s the tension between space and time that lead to the rise and fall of societies and cultures, and they’re worth understanding.
Clay tablets, household traditions and local governments persist over time. But they don’t travel widely.
On the other hand, newspapers, radio broadcasts and memes are ephemeral. They’re fast, they go wide, and then they often fade away.
The Greeks were an early culture that used both, which Innis argues is part of their longevity. And the Bible and Quran are books (time based) that were propelled by cultural forces to also be space based.
As you’ve probably guessed, TikTok is the speedball of moving ideas across space. The ideas are often as long-lasting as a hot pizza, but they can reach millions.
Innis would argue that many of the dislocations and painful collisions of modern culture are being caused by the abrupt shift to space-focused ideas. We’re starting on a second generation of people, worldwide, who are day trading their emotions and confronting ideas that have no past and little future.
Systems under stress expose themselves, and when you feel the stress, it’s worth looking for the juxtapositions that are causing it. In this case, it’s worth asking whether the idea that’s changing things was built to last or built to spread.
And what about the biggest shift of our lifetime–how does AI fit into this? Does a platform like Claude deal in time or space?
Claude and I discussed it, and my theory (Claude is giving me full credit) is an LLM of this sort is not a communications medium at all. There’s no way for a human to put a new idea directly into it and no way to send that message to another human. Instead, my take is that Claude brings us everything it knows, and that its function is to help us go within, not across.
This gives people a different sort of agency than the manipulative algorithms at TikTok or the manipulated ones on social media platforms.
Innis (like Doctorow) was very clear about the perils of media monopoly. If a communications medium has a middleman, that middleman will seek to create short-term profit, often at the expense of the users of the system. The phone company doesn’t care what you say on the phone, but modern media platforms are optimized to push the ideas that will spread to spread, regardless of their cost to the rest of us.
We’ve been indoctrinated from a young age to avoid agency, even in our media consumption. To wait and accept the next idea when it arrives. To not change the channel, to go to the big movie of the moment, to listen to the top 40, to parrot the talking points of the boss.
And now, perhaps for just a brief moment, there’s a chance to take back agency and go within.
The self-publishing revolution gave everyone a chance to write a blog, publish a book or record a song. A few took advantage of this to build ideas optimized to go across space or time. Most people, though, sank back into long-trained rhythms and simply became consumers instead, sheep with more grass.
I’m not sure how many more moments of maximum agency will present themselves, but right now we have a rare chance to go within, to discover and connect and lead, and then to publish. To publish not just across space for the quick hit of a like or a view, but for the long-haul benefit of changing our culture over time.
[Thanks to my friend Cory Doctorow for introducing me to Harold Innis. All errors are mine.]
March 4, 2025
Our instincts might not be as good as we hope.
Going with your gut is thrilling. It’s personal, vulnerable and brave. And if it’s getting you what you seek, keep at it.
But often, our instincts are a way of hiding, undermined by a lack of knowledge. If you haven’t done the reading and can’t see what the alternatives might be, instincts might be all you have left. And if you know the best way and persist in going with a hunch, it might be Resistance, a trap put in place by the part of you that feels like an imposter and is hesitant to do too well.
If ‘my way’ isn’t helping you get to where you’re going, it could be that the highway is a more direct route.
March 3, 2025
This is how we learn.
An apple is a lot like an orange, but you can eat the skin and it’s not as sweet. If you know what an orange is, you’re most of the way to understanding an apple.
But the indoctrination of school pushes us to be literal. When people talk about apples and oranges, good students imagine that they’re talking about apples and oranges.
Even when something is labeled as a metaphor, it’s a common instinct to simply focus on the details, not the ideas. If you can make a point with three very different examples, you’ll begin to see how powerful metaphor can be.
The hard work is to shift our default. To imagine that every incident, story or example is actually a metaphor, and only eventually coming to the conclusion that the specific details are what’s on offer.
Logic is symbolic. Learning requires handholds to help us understand the symbols, but it’s the logic that remains.
March 2, 2025
January feels like the start of the year, but there’s always a hangover from the holidays. In the northern Hemisphere, February is dark and dreary and we’re mostly hunkering down waiting for the short month to end.
But March? Around the world, March can be a chance to get down to the work we committed to do.
Invest 31 days into outlining, discussing and fleshing out the strategy you want to bring to your career or your project. It doesn’t matter how fast you’re going if you’re headed in the wrong direction.
Here are two resources to consider:
Purple.space is a worldwide community of more than 1,000 people supporting each other as they seek to do the work. It’s not a social network, it’s a community of practice, worth more than it costs. It also includes access to many of my video workshops, best done as a team. Find the others.
This is Strategy, my latest book, is available in print, audio and as a deck of cards that make it easy to dig ever deeper into what needs to be done and what’s holding you back.
Better is possible.
March 1, 2025
- When you assemble something for the second time, it will be easier than the first time.
- The quality of the instructions and design determine how big a difference experience makes.
- If you’re only going to do it once, perhaps it pays to hire someone who has experience.
- All instructions could be better, and all design benefits from empathy.
That’s not what usually happens.
If there’s at least one unicorn in the world, it’s likely not the only one.
And if one can make a valid English word from seven Scrabble tiles, it’s likely that more than one word can be found.
“Impossible” is a very large set of situations. But once something is possible, it’s unusual for there to be only one way.
If you’re looking for an interesting project, a useful shortcut is finding someone who has already done something similar and then altering or improving it.
No extra points for being the one and only one in your category.
February 28, 2025
Tolerance is an engineering term. When the parts of a car are made to a low tolerance, that means that they fit perfectly. A modern Lexus is a better car than a 1976 Nova because relentless improvement means that the parts are more exact.
Tolerance is a design term. When a system can tolerate non-perfect users and interventions, the interoperability increases and so a high tolerance design is often seen as more successful.
Tolerance is a systems term. When we build a community that can thrive when everything isn’t exactly the same, the community is more likely to produce connection, health and well being.
Tolerance is a personal-interaction term. If our dealings with someone don’t go well, we’re still able to recover and even produce useful work or play together if our tolerance for frustration is high.
Tolerance is a disability term. When a user brings different skills, languages, boundaries and skills to a system, a tolerant solution allows them to thrive.
And tolerance is a climate term. When the built world becomes more resilient, it not only survives the unexpected, it doesn’t make things worse.
Low tolerance manufacturing takes dedication and skill. And it permits us to be high tolerance in the rest of our processes. An organization that tries to limit incoming participation and has rigid rules probably doesn’t trust the tolerance of their underlying stack.
It’s interesting to put all this together and think about Lego blocks.
For generations, Lego pieces have been made to low tolerances. They stick together and come apart with precision. This allows them to work extremely well with any other part the company has ever made. And because of their long-lasting simplicity, they can be used in ways the creators of the toy didn’t expect… to furnish an aquarium or to build life-sized sculptures, for example.
People aren’t toys, and the variations we deal with are a bit harder to predict. And changing systems and climate are less predictable than most toddlers, so there are surprising variations there as well.
The thing is, tolerance is achievable. And tolerance creates value. But it helps to name it, measure it and seek it out.
February 27, 2025
Getting to the conference in Santa Fe isn’t difficult. Someone will drive/fly you there. The hard part is deciding to go. And yet, it might take 8 hours to arrive.
If they invented teleportation and offered it for free, it would be very clear that where we went would simply depend on where we decided to go, not the mechanics, cost or time it took.
But physical presence is not the driving force in our world now.
In 2025, if you want to learn something, you can. Probably for free, and faster than ever before.
That statement has never been as true as it is now.
Beyond that… with an app like cursor, if you want to write computer code, you can. The hard part is deciding what to build.
But it turns out that deciding is only half of it.
In order to actually make a difference, we have to move no faster than the speed of trust.
Who is giving us the benefit of the doubt? Who have we earned enrollment with? Where is our agency?
Making good decisions with and for a group of people who believe us is called leadership.
We’re often afraid to lead. Afraid of the responsibility. Indoctrinated to let someone else take the wheel and to take the blame.
The easiest way to avoid leadership was to blame all the heavy lifting and resources required.
But in more and more ways, we can lead with nothing but judgment and trust.
If we care.
February 26, 2025
Whenever we make a choice, we do our best. We make a decision based on our interests. In other words, it’s selfish.
So what makes a choice a selfish act worth addressing?
There are two circles: the circle of us and the circle of now.
A selfish toddler keeps both circles very small. They care about right now, not later. They care about their parents or whomever is in the room. That’s it.
The toddler who draws all over the couch in black marker is having fun right now, and selfishly causing a problem for others, and for the future.
Smoking cigarettes is short-term selfish. The you of the future is unlikely to thank teenager-you for starting.
And raising parrots in your small apartment is a different sort of selfish. It’s not surprising that your neighbors will hope you stop.
You may have noticed that the world keeps getting smaller and it keeps going faster, which means we can see the circles we impact more clearly.
We admire adults who lead, who take the long view, and especially, who consider a larger circle. And thriving organizations and communities create the cultural conditions for people to choose to make their circles include more people and longer time frames.
Successful cultures embrace bigger circles.
February 25, 2025
But that’s not why it’s your project.
Lots of things are important. Countless problems need to be solved, people need to be connected, a living needs to be made.
But this work you’re doing now, the work you’re doing instead of everything else–it’s your project.
When we talk about whether this is the project for you, we’re not demeaning its importance or questioning whether it needs to be done. Instead, we’re discussing whether you’re the one to do it, whether it serves your particular needs and skills and assets. Priorities must be set, no matter how important each option might be.
We choose a project because our assessment of the situation leads us to believe our effort might pay off. Talking about our priorities with clarity celebrates our potential, it doesn’t diminish the urgency of what you were doing yesterday.
February 24, 2025
