How Tools Shape How We See the World

Was this newsletter forwarded to you? Sign up to get it in your inbox.

---

Over the past weeks we’ve looked at the dominance of the old Western worldview and where it reached its limits. We’ve talked about the potential of language models to help usher in a new worldview, and how this new worldview changes how we might approach science, business, and creativity. We’ve talked about the importance of connectedness and context, participation and paradox, and to close the series, I want to elaborate a bit on the core premise, that our tools shape how we see the world.

But first, I want to share more of my own personal context.

---

As a teenager, the one place I felt the most myself was in my room.

I could go to my room and write, or code, or run experiments, and no one could tell me what to do. It’s from this room that I started my first internet business in high school, called Convenience Software, selling Blackberry and iPhone apps. I coded at night and spent lunch at school in the library answering customer service emails. That’s how I paid for gas and food.

My room is also where I fell in love with writing. When I wrote something—diary entries, short stories, little essays—I could pin down the world. I could know what was true about myself.

That desire to pin things down, to make them permanent and knowable, continued as I got to college. I studied philosophy, and each week I was enchanted by a famous system of thought, like Plato’s forms or Descartes’ mind-body dualism, and felt sure that it explained everything. Then the next week, I would encounter a thinker who came just after them—Aristotle or Hobbes—and find that they effortlessly tore down the previous system, which had seemed so perfect, and replaced it with their own. But I kept reading anyway, hoping to find a philosophy that would last.