Resilience Through Complexity

Explores how complex adaptive systems—biological, digital, and social—achieve robustness and evolution through messiness, parasitism, arms races, and organic growth rather than top-down legible design.

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Posts (390)

2024-08-17 Truth-Seeking Modes
2024-07-14 Imagination vs. Creativity
2024-06-14 Covid and Noun-Memory Effects
2024-05-14 Arbitrariness Costs
2024-05-12 Decision Brownouts
2024-04-16 Stack Map of the World
2024-03-14 Protocol Entrepreneurship
2024-03-08 My Post-AI Writing
2024-03-07 Matter and Life
2024-02-15 The Dark Forest Marketing Agency
2024-02-14 Mediocratopia: 13
2024-02-06 A Tale of Two Kits
2024-02-02 Thoughts on XMTP
2024-01-24 Unknown Knowns
2024-01-23 Can Robots Whittle?
2024-01-17 Universal Kit Template
2024-01-11 Accretive Growth Logics
2024-01-10 Knowledge Management
2024-01-09 Does AI Have Buddha Nature?
2023-11-09 Touching Transistors
2023-11-02 The Future of the Blogosphere
2023-10-23 Vastness
2023-09-07 Worlds in Waiting
2023-05-04 Life After Language
2023-04-05 Permissionless Research
2023-03-30 Tessellations for the End of History
2023-03-09 Summer of Protocols
2022-12-07 Worldwinds
2022-09-22 Tangle Logic
2022-09-16 ε/δ Thinking
2022-08-10 Narrative Slipstream Effects
2022-08-04 A Dreaming World
2022-07-28 Tubeworld
2022-05-26 Infirmity
2022-05-18 Crisis Mindsets
2022-05-05 The Map
2022-04-21 The Ribbonfarm Lab
2022-03-30 Fermi Estimates and Dyson Designs
2022-02-23 Divergentism
2022-02-10 Tools
2022-01-06 Random Acts of X
2021-11-09 Jumping into Web3
2021-11-03 Ghost Protocols
2021-10-27 MJD 59,514
2021-10-20 Mediocratopia: 12
2021-09-20 Mediocratopia: 11
2021-08-10 MJD 59,436
2021-07-29 Mediocratopia: 10
2021-07-22 The Retiree
2021-04-08 Here's why we don't understand heavier-than-air flight
2021-03-18 Kinds of Potential
2021-03-11 Elderblog Sutra: 12
2020-12-02 Pascal's Market
2020-11-16 MJD 59,169
2020-11-10 MJD 59,163
2020-10-29 MJD 59,151
2020-10-23 MJD 59,145
2020-10-14 Clockmaking: 2
2020-09-16 Notes: The Starship and the Canoe by Kenneth Brower
2020-08-26 The Stack: A Love/Hate Story
2020-08-19 Convergent Evolution
2020-07-30 Elderblog Sutra: 11
2020-06-25 Mansionism 1: Building-Milieu Fit
2020-05-26 Through a Glass Lightly
2020-05-07 Leaking into the Future
2020-04-02 Pandemic Dashboard: 2
2020-03-23 Pandemic Dashboard: 1
2020-03-09 Plot Economics
2020-03-03 The New Uncanny Valley
2020-02-24 A Text Renaissance
2020-02-18 Weirding Diary: 11
2020-01-24 How To See Voids
2020-01-07 MJD 58,855
2019-12-11 Predictable Identities: 22 - The Entropic Brain
2019-12-03 Automontage
2019-11-13 Mediocratopia: 9
2019-11-12 AI And Human Digitization: When Seeing Is Not Believing?
2019-11-08 Spatial Intelligence: Architecture as a Giant Computer
2019-10-08 Becoming the Internet
2019-09-10 Elderblog Sutra: 8
2019-09-04 Worlding Raga 7: Worlds of Worlds
2019-08-16 Multitemporality: 1
2019-08-15 Meaning as Ambiguity
2019-08-01 Mediocratopia: 7
2019-07-22 Domestic Cozy: 6
2019-07-17 Weirding Diary: 9
2019-06-18 Worlding Raga 6: World To Live
2019-04-25 Worlding Raga: 5 -- World How?
2019-04-22 Infinite Machines: 3 -- Turking Interfaces
2019-04-15 Mediocratopia: 4
2019-04-08 Weirding Diary: 7
2019-04-01 Weirding Diary: 6
2019-03-28 What If We Already Know How to Live?
2019-03-25 Infinite Machines: 2 – Plasticized Erotica
2019-03-14 Worlding Raga: 3 -- Slouching with God
2019-03-11 Infinite Machines: 1 - An Introduction
2019-03-07 Mediocratopia: 3
2019-03-05 Worlding Raga: 2 - What is a World?
2019-02-28 Markets Are Eating The World
2019-02-14 Breaking Smart Season 1 Online Workshop
2019-02-08 Mediocratopia: 1
2019-01-17 Stack Luck
2018-12-20 Why We Slouch
2018-11-02 Treasure Hunting
2018-10-18 Unflattening Hobbes
2018-10-11 Pack Experience
2018-09-20 Dodo Thoughts
2018-09-11 Think Entangled, Act Spooky
2018-09-02 Refactorings Roundup 08/26/2018 09/1/2018
2018-08-23 Flying Blind into the Anthropocene
2018-08-09 Tarpits and Antiflocks
2018-08-02 Boilerplate
2018-07-19 Quiver Doodles
2018-06-12 The Well-Being Machine
2018-05-03 The Art of Longform
2018-04-24 Survival of the Mediocre Mediocre
2018-04-19 Symmetry and Identity
2018-04-06 Deep Laziness
2018-03-13 Justifiable AI
2018-01-25 Glitches, uh, find a way
2018-01-18 The Unapologetic Case For Bullshit
2017-11-30 Prolegomena to Any Dark-Age Psychohistory
2017-11-09 CEOs Don't Steer
2017-10-10 The Blockchain Man
2017-10-05 Rectangle Vision
2017-09-28 The Internet of Electron Microscopes
2017-09-07 The World As If
2017-07-18 From Monkey Neurons to the Meta-Brain
2017-06-27 Been There, Done That
2017-05-25 Blockchains Never Forget
2017-04-18 Entrepreneurship is Metaphysical Labor
2017-04-11 Zorba, Spock, or Voldemort?
2017-04-04 Cloud Viruses in the Invisible Republic
2017-03-30 Nobody Expects The Mongolian Earthship
2017-03-21 The Winter King of the Internet
2017-02-28 A Brief History of Existential Terror
2017-02-23 The Strategy of No Strategy
2017-02-21 Prescientific Organizational Theory
2017-02-14 Caring and Reality
2017-02-02 After Temporality
2017-01-31 The Throughput of Learning
2017-01-24 Lies, Caffeinated Lies, and Operating Systems
2017-01-12 Cannon Balls, Plate Tectonics, and Invisible Elephants
2017-01-10 Rolling Your Own Culture and (Not) Finding Community
2017-01-05 Tendrils of Mess in our Brains
2016-11-23 When Tools Shape You
2016-11-03 A Bad Carver
2016-10-19 The Future of Compromise
2016-09-29 Overpowered Metrics Eat Underspecified Goals
2016-09-27 Mapping Organizational Realities
2016-09-22 Speak Weirdness to Truth
2016-08-25 The Liminal Explorer of the Adjacent Possible
2016-08-04 The Quality Without a Name at the Betsy Ross Museum
2016-07-28 Fat Thinking and Economies of Variety
2016-07-07 The Systems of the World
2016-07-05 Refactor Camp 2016: Weird Political Economy
2016-06-29 The Daredevil Camera
2016-06-16 Meta-Skills, Macro-Laws, and the Power of Constraints
2016-06-09 Goodhart's Law and Why Measurement is Hard
2016-06-02 The Theory of Narrative Selection
2016-05-26 How to Take Your Brain Off-Road
2016-04-21 A Framework of Experimental Habit Formation
2016-04-07 Business as Magic
2016-03-31 Human-Complete Problems
2016-03-24 The Holy Grail of Self-Improvement
2016-03-17 Go Corporate or Go Home
2016-03-03 Inequalities
2016-02-25 The Epic Struggle between Good and Neutral
2016-02-04 Free Money
2015-12-10 Field Theory of Swords
2015-12-03 An Ecology of Beauty and Strong Drink
2015-12-01 Can You Hear Me Now?
2015-11-23 Artisanal Hand-Crafted Electrons
2015-11-05 Ritual Epistemology
2015-10-29 Quasiparticles and the Miracle of Emergence
2015-10-15 Climate Change Op-Ed
2015-10-08 LCD Curtains
2015-10-06 Alice and Bob Discover Capitalism
2015-10-01 Meaning and Pointing
2015-09-29 What is the Largest Collective Action, Ever?
2015-09-24 Samuel Beckett's Guide to Particles and Antiparticles
2015-09-03 Cartographic Compression
2015-08-18 Extraordinary Laboratories
2015-08-04 The Four Forces for Sociology
2015-07-28 Breaking Smart
2015-07-21 Inbox Zero versus Flow Laminar
2015-06-23 Where do Electric Forces Come From?
2015-06-18 The Boydian Dialectic
2015-05-28 The Amazing, Shrinking Org Chart
2015-05-20 Pretending to Care, Pretending to Agree
2015-05-07 Weaponized Sacredness
2015-03-12 The Art of Agile Leadership
2015-03-04 Gardens Need Walls: On Boundaries, Ritual, and Beauty
2015-02-25 The Mother of All 2x2s
2015-01-16 On the Design of Escaped Realities
2015-01-01 Black Mirror as Hell-Is-Other-People Futurism
2014-12-18 Learning from Crashes
2014-11-16 When Monitoring a Behavior Makes it Worse
2014-11-14 The Design of Crash-Only Societies
2014-10-29 Crash-Only Thinking
2014-10-12 I Will Not Rest Until...
2014-10-08 The Adjacency Fallacy
2014-09-03 How to Fall Off the Wagon
2014-08-26 The Creation and Destruction of Habits
2014-08-20 The Veil of Scale
2014-07-30 The Heirloom Lounge
2014-07-23 Structure Follows Context
2014-07-16 Close Encounters of the Missing Kind
2014-07-09 A Koan is not a Riddle
2014-05-29 Artistic Forestry: 2014 Annual Letter
2014-05-19 Frustration Effects and Curse of Optimality
2014-05-15 Power Gradients and Spherical Cows
2014-04-30 Replaceability and the Economics of Disequilibrium
2014-04-09 The Legibility Tradeoff
2014-03-26 Love Your Parasites
2014-02-27 Demons by Candelight
2014-02-12 From Cognitive Biases to Institutional Decay
2014-02-10 Running Lean, Running Fat
2014-02-07 An Information Age Glossary
2014-01-28 Technical Debt of the West
2014-01-21 The Poor Usability Tell
2014-01-15 Resident Bloggers for 2014: Sam, Jordan, Kartik, Keith
2014-01-10 Consent of the Surveilled
2014-01-01 Free, as in Agent
2013-12-17 Morality for Exploded Minds
2013-12-09 Our Diurnal Civilization
2013-12-09 The Three Clocks of Trial and Error
2013-12-01 Algorithmic Governance and the Ghost in the Machine
2013-11-25 The New Human Wilderness
2013-11-07 UX and the Civilizing Process
2013-10-31 On Staying Grounded
2013-10-24 On Lifestyle Rigidity
2013-10-11 The Mother of All Disruptions
2013-09-18 Freedom in Smooth Space
2013-08-20 I and Thou and Life in Aspergerstan
2013-08-14 An Archetypes Map
2013-08-08 On Freedomspotting
2013-07-31 The Quality of Life
2013-07-25 The Networked Narrative
2013-07-23 Inside the Miscellaneous Folder
2013-07-10 You Are Not an Artisan
2013-07-01 Consciousness: An Outside View
2013-07-01 Coincidences and Correlations
2013-06-24 Lagrangian and Eulerian Decision-Making
2013-06-19 War and Nonhuman Agency
2013-06-06 On the Unraveling of Scripts
2013-05-23 Civilization and the War on Entropy
2013-05-21 Schleps, Puzzles, and Packages: Solving Complex Problems the Iron Man Way
2013-04-29 Sensitive Dependence on Paperwork Conditions
2013-04-25 Branches and Roots: 2013 Call for Sponsorships
2013-04-08 Overtake on the Turn, Overwhelm on the Straight
2013-04-01 Why Habit Formation is Hard
2013-03-27 The Wave of Unknowing
2013-03-26 Allowing Personality to Flow
2013-03-22 Social Dark Matter: On Seeing and Being Seen
2013-03-13 The Dead-Curious Cat and the Joyless Immortal
2013-02-05 Machine Cities and Ghost Cities
2013-01-28 Jailbreaking the City: Announcing Refactor Camp 2013
2013-01-17 Data is Eating Clocks
2013-01-02 Schumpeter's Demon
2012-11-27 Patterns of Refactored Agency
2012-11-19 Notes on Spatial Metaphors for Social Systems
2012-10-23 Navigating the Holey Plane
2012-10-15 Economies of Scale, Economies of Scope
2012-10-04 The Abundances of Ages
2012-08-23 Waste, Creativity and Godwin's Corollary for Technology
2012-08-16 Realtechnik, Nausea and Technological Longing
2012-08-13 Breakout Moves and Exponential Outcomes
2012-07-24 Happily Almost Ever After: Towards a Romantic Account of Détente
2012-07-16 Positioning Moves versus Melee Moves
2012-07-13 The Generalized Hawthorne Effect
2012-07-09 Stress Failures versus Decay Failures
2012-07-03 Five Years of Blogging
2012-07-02 Not Important, Not Urgent
2012-06-25 Fertile Variables and Rich Moves
2012-06-13 Getting Ahead, Getting Along, Getting Away
2012-06-11 Appreciative versus Manipulative Mental Models
2012-06-05 Towards an Appreciative View of Technology
2012-05-31 The Art of Refactored Perception
2012-05-09 Welcome to the Future Nauseous
2012-04-18 Hacking the Non-Disposable Planet
2012-04-16 Hacking Grand Narratives
2012-04-10 Trigger Narratives and the Nuclear Option
2012-03-22 Can Hydras Eat Unknown-Unknowns for Lunch?
2012-03-19 The Fundamentals of Calendar Hacking
2012-03-08 Hall's Law: The Nineteenth Century Prequel to Moore's Law
2012-02-16 Glimpses of a Cryptic God
2012-01-27 Peak Attention and the Colonization of Subcultures
2012-01-19 Steer, Ready, Fire
2012-01-18 The World is Small and Life is Long
2011-12-15 How the World Works: Part II
2011-12-07 What Really Happened Aboard Air France 447
2011-12-01 How the World Works
2011-11-21 The Towers of Priority
2011-11-11 Technology and the Baroque Unconscious
2011-11-02 A Pilgrimage through Stagnation and Acceleration
2011-10-26 Three Deep Videos and a Roundup
2011-10-25 Thrust, Drag and the 10x Effect
2011-10-04 The Stream Map of the World
2011-09-23 The Milo Criterion
2011-09-22 Forgivable Sloppiness: The Art of Epoch-Driven Time Management
2011-08-19 The Calculus of Grit
2011-07-31 On Being an Illegible Person
2011-07-22 Tempo and OODA: The Backstory
2011-07-21 Houseboats, Containers, Guns and Garbage: the 2011 Ribbonfarm Field Trip
2011-07-07 The End of the Parade
2011-06-24 Semi-Annual Roundup 2011 and Highlights for New Readers
2011-06-16 The Las Vegas Rules II: Stuff Science
2011-06-08 A Brief History of the Corporation: 1600 to 2100
2011-06-02 The Las Vegas Rules I: The Slightly Malevolent Universe
2011-05-18 How Clock Time Replaced Narrative Time
2011-05-09 Time Travel for Ghosts
2011-05-08 Peak Oil and the Tempo of the Earth
2011-05-07 My Experiments with Introductions
2011-05-07 Talking Temporal Illegibility in Montreal
2011-04-21 The Russian Fox and the Evolution of Intelligence
2011-04-07 Extroverts, Introverts, Aspies and Codies
2011-03-10 The Return of the Barbarian
2011-02-02 The Disruption of Bronze
2011-01-19 Boundary Condition Thinking
2011-01-06 The Gollum Effect
2011-01-01 How Leveraged are Your Resolutions?
2010-11-19 Ribbonfarm is Now Mobile-Friendly (Sort Of)
2010-11-16 What Entrepreneurs Can Learn from the Poor
2010-11-06 The World of Garbage
2010-11-05 Ancient Rivers of Money
2010-10-27 Warrens, Plazas and the Edge of Legibility
2010-10-07 How Good Becomes the Enemy of Great
2010-08-17 The Greasy, Fix-It 'Web of Intent' Vision
2010-07-26 A Big Little Idea Called Legibility
2010-07-13 The Eight Metaphors of Organization
2010-06-09 Digital Security, the Red Queen, and Sexual Computing
2010-03-07 An Infrastructure Pilgrimage
2010-02-11 Guest Post on VentureBeat on the iPad
2010-01-28 The Misanthrope's Guide to the End of the World
2009-12-13 Random Promotions and the Gervais Principle
2009-12-07 Social Objects: Notes on Knitting in America
2009-10-26 Fear of Improvisation (and Clunkers)
2009-10-02 A Brewing Storm in Psychology
2009-08-03 The Brain of the World
2009-07-29 The Book as a Social Signal
2009-07-21 The Crucible Effect and the Scarcity of Collective Attention
2009-07-07 The Epic Story of Container Shipping
2009-06-07 Zen and the Art of Google Wave Mechanics
2009-05-28 The Hunter-Gatherer Theory of Markets and Shopping
2009-05-21 Bay's Conjecture
2009-04-08 Design and Architecture
2008-11-05 The Cloud President, Obama
2008-11-03 The Corporate College and Other Election 3.0 Ideas
2008-10-29 Cloudworker Economics
2008-10-16 Mastering the Hype Cycle by Fenn and Raskino
2008-10-01 The 10 Immutable Laws of Nanoeconomics
2008-09-11 How to Measure Information Work
2008-09-06 Organizing to Disrupt
2008-09-01 The Bloody-Minded Pleasures of Engineering
2008-08-17 The Impossibility Triangle in Talent Management
2008-08-10 The Future of the Internet according to Jonathan Zittrain
2008-07-21 Towards a Philosophy of Destruction
2008-06-27 From Bubbles to Cloud: The Evolution of Enterprise 2.0
2008-05-18 Megacommunities and Macrotrends
2008-05-01 Jump Point by Tom Hayes
2008-04-23 Ronald Coase and Salvation from Anthropological Economics
2008-04-19 A Map of the World 2.0 Canon
2008-04-03 Against Clouds
2008-03-30 The NAE's Grand Challenges vs. Mine
2008-03-27 The Founding Fathers of Technology
2008-03-12 On Japan as a Robot-Loving Nation
2008-02-23 The Big Switch by Nicholas Carr
2008-02-04 How the Internet is Really Evolving
2008-01-22 Mousetrap 2.0: A Comicbook
2008-01-14 Coarse Actions, Fine Actions
2007-12-05 The Fine Art of Opportunism
2007-11-25 Clockspeed and Business Genetics Reconsidered
2007-11-22 Visual Thinking with Triangles
2007-11-19 The Deeper Meaning of Kindle
2007-11-05 The Age of Speed by Vince Poscente
2007-10-15 Meditation on Disequilibrium in Nature
2007-10-02 Is Jeff Bezos the New Jack Welch?
2007-09-24 Strategy, Tactics, Operations and Doctrine: A decision-language tutorial
2007-09-09 Digital Philosophy II: Are Cellular Automata Important?
2007-09-06 Seth Godin's Dip and Multi-armed Bandits
2007-08-22 The Twitter Zone and Virtual Geography
2007-08-16 Digital Philosophy - I: The Real is Unreal
2007-08-01 The Fifty-Foot Rule Reconsidered
2007-07-20 Harry Potter and the Cuaron Slam
2007-07-17 Visualizing the 2d World with Cartograms
2007-07-11 The Third Dimension is Not Simple
2007-07-08 Silos and the art of Empirical Theology
2007-07-04 Book Reviews: The Trouble with Physics, Not Even Wrong
2007-06-20 The Silo Reconsidered