OpenLoops.01

When I first moved from Paris to Barcelona halfway through 2024, there was a longstanding drought in the city and its surroundings. Fountains and ponds dried up as the city tried to ration its emergency water supply. Signs dotted lamp poles encouraging everyone to be mindful of their consumption because “water doesn’t just fall from the sky.”

Fast forward to today, and the city is lush with green. It rains in short bursts, and when it does, watch out. There will likely be flooding and possibly, probably, a bit of hail. Last year it was reported that in a single month it rained the most it had in an entire century!

In many ways, Barcelona reminds me of Montreal, the city I grew up in. Summer rain storms in Montreal always happen in a flash, and are equally intense. I love the smell of wet pavement after a downpour. It's such a distinct smell.

I got caught in one such downpour the other day, as I was running home from a favorite cafe of mine. The sky got so dark, lightning flashed, then thunder boomed. Suddenly a little drizzle of rain and then... the deluge began. Followed by, you guessed it, some thick-ass chunks of hail.

It often feels like quality is at odds with consistency, and it makes me uncomfortable. I've always found artists who do dailies really impressive, but as a practice to fold into my own life? Elusive. I've spent a lot of time trying to understand the how and when of it all.

Are they doing it first thing in the morning? I would never get anything else done. Are they doing it after they've delivered for the day? I'm exhausted. I can poke at a tiny bit of code for hours before it looks like anything I'd want to share, how do they make such beautiful captivating work every. damn. day???

I resigned myself long ago to the idea that my life is just too chaotic for dailies. I did briefly try ilithya's low-stakes #anydayshaders exercise which kept me going for a while! But I remember feeling disappointed upon learning that many of the artists I looked up to were actually creating in batches, and posting one per day. People planned this stuff as if it were a media strategy. Maybe it was, which is fine. It takes nothing away from the amazing work being shared.

A general rule for success online is consistency. Showing up on a schedule, same time, every day, or same day every week. I totally get that. But what does it mean to consistently create quality works within that kind of regularity?

There's something about the digital churn that sidesteps the more natural rhythms and rituals of life that I find jarring. Creative ritual and the act of showing up aren't things that guarantee the quality of outputs will improve with each iteration, let alone maintain itself. A practice is just that, a practice. Something we can return to, again and again. A practice is a mirror. It's OK if the reflection is a bit different each day. It would be weird if it wasn't!

I also feel quite stuck in the tension between trying to get something to such a perfect place, or to it feeling “finished” (does it ever???) and putting said thing out regardless, in the name of consistency.

Because what if it’s shit?

No, don’t roll your eyes. I’m serious.

Perfection is impossible. But my brain can be remarkably black and white about things sometimes. That tension, it tends to manifest as a very all-or-nothing approach for me. If I want to do something with any sense of regularity, I have to care less about it than I would if it was something I needed to be good. But then I get hit with the question: if I’m not interested in it being good, why am I even spending time doing it?

sigh

And there's the gentle but constant awareness of the sheer amount of work, ideas, creations that exist in the world already, and all the content created around those things. It's hard to ignore how many of us have confused saying something with actually having something to say.

So the urge, the need for things to be really-good-or-else-why-bother becomes all consuming. Because who wants to be the one to add fresh shit to the pile?

Spend to much time online and this loop speeds up. Head spinning, it’s near impossible to remember that there is a difference between the churn and the craft.

The churn has you going through the motions. The churn has you running after numbers and engagement and growth.

The craft has you tuned in, curious to what all this consistency you bring to your practice might reveal today. Tomorrow. Next week. Next year. It works on you as you work on it. People can feel it. The churn has a texture. So does the craft.

Welcome to my weekly note. A home for whatever loose threads happen to be dangling inside my head in a given week. Sometimes I’ll write more, sometimes less, and I promise never to share things that I haven’t consumed in full and truly loved.

Quote

Perhaps the issue with both artificial intelligence and the Cybernetic Factory is that we have been trying to entrap a brain within the machine, when the real brain – the oracle – is outside. The oracle is the world. We’ve got everything inside out. We think all the activity is on the inside – when we stick electrodes into the brains of chimps and fruit flies, or strip plants down to their roots and nodules, for example – but the real action is out in the world. That’s where everything arises and intra-acts. Life happens when everything is bouncing off everything else. — James Bridle | Ways of Being

Thoughts

· self-organizing systems or bust! Currently very obsessed with, and will accept nothing less. Over architectured personal knowledge management systems? Byeeeeee. Life dashboards? Ciaoooo. Productivity hacks? Adéuuuuu1. If you need a dashboard to manage your life, you might need to reevaluate. Fave new flex: how short my todo list is and how few context switches I need to make as I work throughout the day. Choose your tools wisely. I use two apps to keep track of everything right now, and neither of them is Notion.

· objects and relations > folders and boxes !! Let's stop over categorizing and tagging everything and instead look at how everything relates to each other. This one piggy backs of the first point. It's part of how self-organizing systems work. It extends far beyond data retrieval though. As a life philosophy in general, we'd be so much better off as a species if we spent more time looking at what connects us, rather than which box each of us fits into.

· something that I've noticed in talking to a lot of my more traditional developer friends versus artists and designer types is that AI is really confronting them with their true motivation for the craft: do I like coding because I like problem solving aka debugging, or have I tolerated debugging because I like what building with technology allows me to create? And I think for a lot of them, the answer is the former. Which means AI isn't threatening the craft, it's finally revealing what the craft actually was. Coding was just the vehicle.

Things

Sarah Faith Gottesdeiner’s most recent podcast episode about rejection beautifully re frames it as a most natural byproduct of everyday life. To choose something is to reject many other things. So why do we all take is so personally? A great reminder delivered in true SFG style, gentle but to the point.

Meritxell de Soto closed out Turbina last weekend, and I was reminded how much I adore her sets. She really never disappoints. She also has an incredible live show which I somehow always manage to miss due to travel. This amazing edit of the show landed in my inbox this week and I had to share. Meritxell is just iconic. Full stop.