We’ve reached the "bill-paying phase" of the dopamine economy, and AI is about to bankrupt the brands that rely on outrage. Here is why decency is quietly becoming the ultimate market advantage. www.mediapost.com/publications...

Not every brand needs to be cool. Most brands don’t. It is what it is. The brand is bigger than your portfolio. Sucks but true.

My latest essay is out in @designobserver designobserver.com/the-identity...

The problem with AI anymore isn’t hallucination, it’s temporal flattening.

We need an upside down American flag emoji.

Feels appropriate.

The identity industrialists - DesignObserver As synthetic actors become more lifelike, the people who create them will become the new power players

designobserver.com/the-identity...

“Someone will design the voices we follow. Someone will shape the characters we empathize with.
And when that happens, we’ll still call it culture.

But it won’t be built on human expression anymore. It will be built on whoever owns the factory.” 🔗👇

A 1941 illustration of Uncle Sam choking South America

From 1941.

The Wizards, the Prophets, and the Accelerationist Divide: Our Future Technocracy Originally published February 2025

From a year ago. Quite prescient. open.substack.com/pub/davidjsn...

Comfort with not knowing” is no longer a virtue in Design. AI doesn’t “know” and answers anyway. And we share it.

What matters now is the refusal of fake knowing. That refusal costs speed, status, and certainty.

Expertise is knowing when orientation is premature.

A culture that can’t tolerate being laughed at can’t tolerate being wrong.

We’ve become a memetic monoculture where replication outpaces meaning.

You don’t see cool quarterly earnings call posters very often (ever). Not sure who made these but very bueno. @quartr.com

“LinkedIn is down. What are we to do?” Said no one ever.

Air Loom - 3D Flight Tracker Real-time 3D visualization of aircraft flight paths. Watch live flights with stunning ribbon trails across the sky.

Very cool realtime webGL visualization objectiveunclear.com/airloom.html

If design is strategy made visible, decency is ethics made measurable.

Stop playing janitor in someone else’s disaster. Power doesn’t reward competence—it rewards a narrative. Write yours before someone else does. Ignore everything else. 💡
#fridayprovocation

The light just now. Bueno.

👀

Thanks for the share!

Whoa! Thanks for the feature.

The compound interest of design: what not to build - DesignObserver Veteran designer Dave Snyder says the secret to lasting products isn’t hype or clever features. It’s restraint, craft, and solving one core problem so well that the benefits compound over time.

Good design isn’t about adding more. It’s about knowing what not to build. @davesnyder.bsky.social argues for restraint: solve the one core problem, put in the craft, and let time and user behavior do the work. Read the full story:

The goal isn’t to go viral — it’s to be impossible to replace.

🙏

The compound interest of design: what not to build - DesignObserver Veteran designer Dave Snyder says the secret to lasting products isn’t hype or clever features. It’s restraint, craft, and solving one core problem so well that the benefits compound over time.

Wrote an article for @designobserver.com on this idea I call “the compound interest of design” which is all about knowing what NOT to build. And that is hard. designobserver.com/the-compound...

Desirability outlives usability.

Evening provocation: AI won’t democratize leadership, it will calcify oligarchy.

Dune aesthetics.