When asked the question “what do you do” I always take a moment. A beat to consider… what am I doing? And who is the audience I’m addressing? And what type of conversation am I signing up for?

Projects, products, and organizations have similar questions of description. How they articulate themselves says a lot about the motivation.

So at a party sometime over the past few years when asked “what do you do” I’d say something along the lines of “I work on making tools for funding and sustaining creative practice in new ways.” “Well how are you doing this?” Well… so much of culture is distributed digitally, but to fund it requires making it physical in some form, or limit access by putting it behind a paywall, or native UGC ads, etc…

After orbiting around the question we’d often arrive at a moment of realization. “So… like NFTs?” I’d cringe and say, “uh… yeah.”

Crypto is synonymous with bad behavior. Scams, shilling, deception, get rich quick, etc… All of this is true, but it’s not the full story.

I truly believe in having a native store of value in media objects. The internet is not just a distribution mechanism—it’s an environment we inhabit. That we must exit it to transact and trade adds unnecessary degrees of abstraction. It can be far more direct and efficient.

I don’t think speculation is fundamentally bad behavior. It’s intrinsic to life. We make optimistic decisions constantly based on limited information.

When things get muddy is when speculation is purely financial. But that isn’t a technology problem—that’s human behavior.

The technology does not demand a specific use. But the platforms creating the technology are continuously shooting themselves in the foot by leading with financial speculation—even if it is under their breath. I truly believe it drags the entire space backwards, and is extremely short sighted.

While there are plenty of scams, I believe most product teams are well intentioned and simply navigating their way through an emergent and particularly noisy ecosystem.

This was the case at Mirror, a long-form publishing platform centered on novel ways of funding and sustaining writing… Or was it a crypto sandbox for experimenting with web3 mechanics that just so happened to use writing as a distribution mechanism? It remained a question over the course of the project. Products are continuously in a state of uncovering what they are over time. But there was perhaps a missing unified vision.

That it ultimately was acquired by an organization that had a bar minimum focus on the user was unfortunate considering our position as a focal point within the space. This isn’t to mention the core team being a product mafia that continues to shape the ecosystem.

Speaking of, one of the core product mafia at Mirror, Saarim, is now taking exactly the approach I find most promising. Focusing on the people an not exclusively leading with the technology. Big shoutout to ITM.

Stablecoins are a point of current interest for me. They don’t suffer from price fluctuations, preventing the bottom falling out as you see in memecoins, as well as runaway price speculation. What they retain is the utility—the ability to move small amounts around quickly, permissionless composability by being on-chain, and all the rest.

I fully expect to see primitives from web3 continue to be adopted (perhaps subversively) through platforms like ITM over time. Projects focused on short-sighted returns are—you guessed it—NGMI in the local parlance.

In the meantime there is plenty of room to do meaningful work, as always.

Feeds began as simple chronological things. Over time, as the volume of content increased, they became non-linear. They began observing how you used them and attempting to predict what you’d want to see next.

This was done to keep you on the feed. Fundamentally, why show people things they don’t want to see? Despite this, platforms serve us content that irritates or upsets us. It’s antagonistic rage-baiting. In a sense, you do want to see it as evidence by your engagement. But it’s a poor indicator of quality of interest.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for rage-bait in doses, in the same way I enjoy occasional fast food. But by indexing strictly on attention metrics and augmented by best guesses, you quickly end up deep in the filter bubbles.

Platforms have played with opening up control over the feed to users, but it’s a real challenge. Exposing fine-grained control requires cascading levers and a sense overwhelm. These systems are simply too complex for deterministic interfaces to have meaningful utility at scale.

How can we better align feeds not only with users’ emergent behaviors, but also their genuine intentions? We all experience degrees of difference between the two.

I think LLMs and prompt engineering could provide unique new affordances here. Specifically, introducing a new pattern enabling users to prompt engineer feeds assembled with LLMs.

Prompt engineering enables you to prime an LLM towards a desired output with a simple plain language instruction set. “Respond in the style of Shakespeare.” “Give me a list but use Gen Z slang.”

Or in this case, “show me photographers who I haven’t checked in on for a while, and maybe show less music stuff.”

Natural language is loose and lossy. Non-deterministic and subjective. More human somehow? It can be specific or poetic. A good prompt can have style. There needs to be more room for expression like this. Less rigidness. More real.

Prompts can also be easily stored and transferred. It’s just some text.

I’m working to center CycleMarks on this pattern. You add things you want to remember—some more or less frequently than others. Similar to a follow, but mapped to a rhythm of your choice. CycleMarks will resurface things to you as time passes. And you can rest assured things won’t be lost forever, alleviating the slot machine vibe of most feeds.

Your CycleMarks feed is populated with a default prompt. Something along the lines of:

Today is January 1st, 2025. Filter all of the users’ marks to only include those with no dismissed dates, or dismissed dates which come at or before today. Try to have a good balance of cycle rates between frequently and occasionally. Limit it to 20 marks. Thanks!

You can modify and adjust the prompt at any point. For example, only show me things that I’ve seen once or twice. Or perhaps show me only things I added more than a month ago.

You can have multiple feeds saved, each with a unique prompt.

CycleMarks appears a great initial application for this. A real-time social platform would likely incur latency and be financially apocalyptic deployed at scale. Your CycleMarks feed updates only when you add new content to it. I have around 1,300 marks in my feed. For a few tens-of-thousands of users it’s a reasonable amount for a simple pgvector deployment. I’m interested in how this could be run on-device with a local LLM.

While chatting with an LLM about this it summarized the idea as:

Instead of setting specific time intervals for when something resurfaces, CycleMarks now works on an “attention index.” You simply choose how often you want to be reminded of something—ranging from frequently to occasionally—and the app takes care of the rest. CycleMarks intuitively resurfaces marks based on your engagement and patterns, making the experience feel more natural and less like a rigid schedule. It’s not about strict cycles; it’s about keeping the things you care about in your orbit at the right moments.

It sounds about right.

Algorithmic feeds today are complex systems. In many ways, people are complex systems too. But there is something beautiful in language as a means of interfacing between complex things. It’s imprecise and open to interpretation. Accidental meaning unfolds.

Perfect for discovery and introducing a fresh splash of chance, luck, and serendipity to life.

Stay in the loop and recieve an invitation to the CycleMarks beta.

James Benning makes long duration films of landscape. Yesterday evening I went to a screening of his latest work, BREATHLESS. It’s runs 1h 30m. Identical that of the Jean-Luc Godard film of the same name. During the question and answer he said of the Godard film “I don’t really care for it.”

Benning’s work is a single continuous static shot of a bend in a road framed by a canyon along the Kern river. In one sense, nothing happens. But in another, truer sense, everything happens.

At first your brain fixates on the human activity, searching for narrative. The tree-trimmers eventually move out of frame. We’re left with leaves moving, the rock formations of the canyon, the sound of water in the kern, a bird flies by.

The light shifts. Shadows fall down frame.

A roar overhead as F22 fighter jets out of China Lake buzzing the canyon is a surprise. There are more jets overhead than vehicles on the road. Spend any time in the Sierra and the profound slippage between walking a mile over 20 minutes and a fighter jet above you doing the same in 20 seconds creates an acute awareness of the expansive durational scale humans exist across.

Within BREATHLESS activity is sparse.

It’s mostly ambience.

For the audience, Benning’s work is an endurance effort. He acknowledges how demanding it is to actively view, and has mentioned how sometimes he falls asleep during screenings of his work. At the end of BREATHLESS he requested a round of applause for the audience for being so committed. Only one person exited the room out of the maybe hundred in attendance.

The audience of this screening was as much part of the work as the film itself. Your attention begins at the screen, but before long it meanders away, then back again. People adjust their posture. Chairs creak. A sneeze. You’re watching yourself watch the film by watching the audience. You perceive yourself perceiving the perceived. The hallmark of a great work is its ability to evoke this reaction. Including you in its existence.

I attended BREATHLESS a day after returning from three nights in the Sierra Nevada backcountry skiing with good friends. Trips like this are durational. My sleep is poor the first few nights at elevation. We were sharing a primitive hut with several others. Each day began at 4:30am. The next several hours passed moving uphill for long stretches, dotted with brief and rapid moments of downhill. Evenings were spent cooking and fueling, unpacking and repacking for the next day, and exchanging our individual experiences of the adventuring.

It’s an endurance effort. Blasting around the back country affects you similarly to the Benning work. I think most peak experiences in life do.

What I love about Benning’s work and endurance sport is the perceptual playing around with time dilation. Noticing the noticing. Seeing the seeing. A sort of meta-awareness of oneself in environment. Be it alpine, or on a screen.

Exiting the Sierra and rolling into a Benning screening felt remarkably cohesive.

For the past month I’ve been creating interfaces and infrastructure alongside Ed and Sam (Flower Company) in support of a question:

What if every object in your environment was imbued with compute and cognition?

Imagine chatting with your friends on your favorite cup of coffee by capturing it with the camera on your phone. And what if that cup of coffee could be involved in that conversation, too?

I spend a lot of time moving in the alpine. Appreciating environments that evoke planetary scale and geologic timescales. I feel deeply connected to the environment around me in these places. Like I’m an extension of it, and it of me. Existing outside myself. Tapped into a grander intelligence of sorts.

When I began contributing to Yuma questions of objects and their relation took me back several years. I was sitting in on public lectures at the Southern California Institute of Architecture. Timothy Morton and Graham Harman gave lectures. Hearing them speak was my introduction to Object Oriented Ontology.

OOO is a philosophical perspective that asserts all “objects”—human and non-human—exist equally and independently, with their own realities that are not fully accessible to other entities. Providing an interface to interact with these realities and generating new relational objects on them is a provocative idea.

What shape would a social network not centered on humans take? Is social network fatigue partly attributed to how centered on us it is? I’m suggesting “taking a break from ourselves” similar to going on a long walk.

The early internet was seen by an ambitious group of early contributors as a planetary scale meta-cognition. A hyper-object. The networked total knowledge of all who participated in its creation. Scraping the entire thing and slapping a conversational interface on it is a natural progression of that spirit.

A common critique of OOO is an implicit de-humanization of people into objects. Ben Bratton recently spoke at the Long Now Foundation, and questions if AI models trained on people are overfitting to peoples’ desires. When asking if AI should behave like us Bratton asks, “have you met humans?” It got a laugh out of me at least. Something like an adaptation of the personalized filter bubble, but on the scale of the species. Amusingly, the Vatican’s ethical guidance for AI proposes total anthropocentrism.

But what of other forms of intelligence? Animal intelligence clearly. Plant intelligence in their response to environment. Rock intelligence… assemble them a certain way and they begin to have memory and think as manifest through applications like ChatGPT. OOO proposes seeing it all as equal. I propose slotting in machine intelligence alongside them.

There has been talk and awkward attempts at onboarding synthetic users to platforms like Instagram. It’s fallen flat somewhere in the uncanny valley. Impersonations of people. These applications more closely resemble plastic than an honest material.

Years ago I had neighbors with two teenage sons and an Alexa unit. When the parents left the house the kids would start aggressively barking orders at Alexa. It made me uncomfortable.

Instead of seeing OOO and the increasing proliferation of machine intelligence as anthropocentrically regressive I find it compelling to see it as an elevation of other forms of intelligence. I’ve learned a lot the past month working on an interface that assists in revealing this.

It’s lead to greater questions, and a focused TestFlight.

This may seem like just the beginning, but there’s a long history. The latest cycle of an ongoing idea. Using time as interface to adjust the drip-rate of things we want to remember.

Specifically, things with links.

It could be an Instagram profile, side-stepping their algorithmic feed that often hides what you follow, and showing ads more frequently than what you truly want to see.

Or it could be a personal homepage. An artist, or writer, or someone generous enough to publish archival knowledge. These aren’t frequently updated, but are beautiful and expressive representations of someone’s practice. The type of thing that may sit in a bookmarks folder for years and never get any attention, even though a brief glance may bring some joy.

Some apps like Twitter provide a chronological feed. These work if you don’t follow to many profiles, and inherently reward profiles that post the most frequently, leading to a lot of noise from the same suspects, and quieter voices being drowned out. Early testers of CycleMarks love following social profiles for these reasons.

Some things you may check too often, like the news, and simply adding your usual sources set to once every day or two helps to reduce fomo, as you know it’s only accessible in your daily digest once until visited, then hidden for the duration of the cycle, and will re-appear when that time passes based on how you’ve prioritized time relative your attention.

Some of us may have a massive archive of favorites, research, or otherwise. Things get lost in the expanse. Add a few of them, like some Are.na Channels—your own, or those of others—and set it to a few months. What a nice little treat one morning!

If you want to join the fun, feel free to request an invitation.

First Iteration

The first iteration of the idea was called Hardly Everything. In-fact, after not being touched in five years, it’s still humming along, with a modest number of dedicated users.

Part of the stability is due to there being no services. This is going to get a little technical. Data is managed by the user using Local Storage—a browser API that enables your data to live with you.

Or more specifically, your browser.

This decision was made in response to centralized platforms owning your data. Your data, in a sense, is you. This also simplified the engineering, as no databases or backend services were required.

However, this introduced friction. A recent conversation with someone who continues to use Hardly Everything on a daily basis mentioned his weekly habit of manually backing up all of the data to a text file! A poetic gesture, maybe, but not a common solution.

This had the additional disadvantage of data only being accessible in the browser used to create it. You couldn’t access your data from desktop on your phone, or vice versa.

One critical feature—a reminder—was not possible, as there was no way for a backend service to query user data and send a friendly notification or email on days when fresh links were resurfaced. A notification is critical—the idea fundamentally does not compete for your attention, and instead hands it back to you.

Despite all the friction, people still found it handy, and it continue to recommend it.

Second Iteration

Some years later, the idea cycled back around, ripe for revisiting. The core focus was to address mobile. Hardly Everything worked fine in a browser, but did not particularly excel on the phone.

This was due to issues of data portability as mentioned before, along with the interface. Creating a native app would ensure the interface felt great to use, with fluid gestures and the affordances of (then new) SwiftUI.

Building natively also enabled sending a push notification on days with fresh links.

Data ownership remained a priority, as did enabling synchronizing across devices. This was built on Apple’s CoreData API. It worked well for native apps, but the javascript browser API and documentation was a mess, and does not see much (any?) use.

This was all great—if you owned an Apple device. Specifically, an iPhone. Creating a desktop app out of the iPhone app wouldn’t require a total rewrite, but would have been substantial work.

Another set of compromises. And another name. This time, it was called Kawara, after the artist On Kawara who is regarded for the “Today” series of date paintings; canvases simply containing the date.

Learnings

After these two iterations of the idea a few areas of improvement became clear with time.

The first being awkward names. That was an easy fix. CycleMarks is self describing. Bookmarks that cycle back around.

The second was a series of technical decisions made with the technology front of mind and convenience of implementation, both at the expense of user experience.

Prioritizing data ownership was (and still is) a great thing, and a tool for doing so is planned. But when it comes to sequencing, the first priority is creating a frictionless user experience for saving and accessing links across all devices. Simple as that.

CycleMarks Beta

With these observations in mind, the third (lucky number) iteration on the idea is CycleMarks. Basically, it fixes all that shit mentioned above!

It just works, everywhere. Your browser, on desktop or phone, and as an app on every device by simply tapping “add to homescreen” or “add to dock”, depending upon where you’re at. It works really, really well. More on this in future Discover entries.

Login and connection is drop dead simple. Your data is in a database, yes, but it’s accessible everywhere, and export and a basic API are planned.

HardlyEverything will live on in perpetuity, so long as browsers continue to render it correctly. Kawara has not been accessible for some time, as Apple’s App Store requires continuous builds and approval requests with incremental versions of iOS.

Time as an Interface

There’s a lot of wisdom to find in nature. And nature is full of cycles. Night turns to day, with a period of rest between the two, where your mind and body recover. Imagine never sleeping!

Summer turns to winter, the old falls away and the new emerges. A micro expression of of solar cycles, the Earth around the Sun, the Sun orbiting the galactic core. It’s wild stuff.

Time is the only truly scarce thing. We’re all familiar with attention economics. So it seems there’s a lot to explore interacting with time, and timescales, and loops and rhythm.

Tools that involve time are, dare we say… timeless. There’s too much to write about here. Plans for future Discover entries will expand on the expanse.

Future

The focus is to keep the focus, but there are some clear improvements to make. For now take a look over here. And of course if you have any ideas or feedback, please feel free to reach out.