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Jun 03, 2021

what are we building? (3/10)

by: Jon Borichevskiy

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What are we trying to build?

The word “build” implies an act of bringing something into existence from scratch with a predefined conception of how it should be. What we are doing feels more like guiding and coaxing something into being, leaving space for delight and messiness. We don't have a clear picture of what the end result should look like, only hints of what using it should feel like.

The patterns we are trying to emulate already exist in the offline world: we relate to one another in speech as effortlessly as breathing. Conversations grow and evolve over the course of a night. We meet friends and introduce them with those ideas our other friends find most intriguing. We reference conversations from months or years ago - with no more than two or three words and a description of where we were.

How do we do all of this and more, in digital space? To enable ideas to be weaved, reflected, and remixed with one another. Even when the ideas aren't neatly associated to a specific book or author or podcast or wikipedia article or a pair of coordinates, but in fact are in related to all of them at once.

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