Our environments shape us.
We are the first species on earth with the power to shape our environment.
So, what do we want to become?
Kasey Klimes · Systems Designer · Brooklyn
Founder of Primitive
If English is a programming language, then why isn't your codebase in English?
Every gift you give this holiday season will (most likely) be disposable garbage. Most likely, so will every gift you receive. That’s not your fault or the f...
people making tools for people
I try my best to give my students practical non-obvious advice they can use to jumpstart their careers upon graduation.
What happens when we combine inclusionary zoning with a land value tax?
This is the village in Germany where my parents met in the 1980s. It is called Imsbach, population: 971. The longest walk you can take...
Nor should they.
Over the weekend, Scott Alexander wrote a post titled Change My Mind: Density Increases Local But Decreases Global Prices.
What do grey wolves have to do with economic policy?
There's just one thing missing.
For years, I’ve heard some variation of the following lament from clients, collaborators, and friends with startups:
Despite Christopher Alexander’s notable application of complexity theory in design during the 60's and 70's, the two fields have mysteriously grown apart. ...
It's easy to watch the unraveling of our political discourse and believe that, somehow, people have simply lost the moral character they once possessed. But people haven't changed. What's changed are the environmental rules that govern our interactions...
In 1945 Vannevar Bush proposed the Memex, a machine that would provide an "enlarged intimate supplement to one's memory" by compressing and storing all of on...
In March I attended the RadicalxChange conference in Detroit, where “data as labor” was celebrated as a core tenet of a nascent social movement. This idea ga...
A strange thing happens when human systems grow. They have a tendency to be guided less by relationships between humans and more by relationships between cap...
It’s not me. There’s nothing I can do. I’ll lose my job if I don’t do it. And look – suppose you kill me? They’ll just hang you, but long before you’re hung ...
Thoughts are exogenous. What we think about from moment to moment is influenced–consciously or subconsciously–by our job, our friends and family, our educati...
I attended Montessori schools as a kid. For those unfamiliar with the teaching philosophy, it’s less about “teaching” in any formal sense and more about prov...
I have an admission to make: I can’t keep up with politics.
Imagine two households. The first household, the Millers, make a combined income of $100,000 a year–decent, livable, but modest compared to many of their n...
Land is a strange commodity. The economic relationship between taxes and supply is usually very simple; increased taxes are registered by the market as incre...
