Cyber cities, habit factories, and deep house

Hi nerds -

I salute you today from Philadelphia, the latest stop in a road trip I’m doing through the East Coast with my family. As always, my favorite part of these trips are the cute local bookshops and the green spots to picnic we find along the way.

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3 brain farts

Cyber cities: Rather than starting with a physical territory, the cities of the future will begin with digital communities.​

Making friends online makes sense because we’re able to meet people with whom we share interests beyond our geographical limitations. These are people who have reached the same conclusions we have, on the other side of the planet, who maybe haven’t found people as similar within their 10 mile radius.

We follow each other on social media, then we meet 1:1 on Zoom, then decide we want to meet IRL (in real life). We build an online space to connect, attract others like us, and eventually decide we always want to be surrounded by these people every day. At first we'll be scattered around town wherever we can, like ethnic diasporas, but as time goes by, we start moving in closer. Add crypto into the mix and we may get ourselves a Network State.​

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Talking to computers: Coding is an incredibly humbling experience because it requires you hitting your head against the wall over and over.

Computers are smart in the sense that they execute complex commands and go through large databases faster than humans can. But, they're dumb in that they will only do exactly what we tell them to do - nothing more, nothing less. This means, then, it’s our job to be extra clear on the instructions or nothing will work.

When I first started programming, I used to always think “my computer was crazy”, because it was tough on the ego to realize it was me who was sending her the wrong commands. Now I know it’s always my fault.

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Habit factory: Our internal habit factory deals with both building new habits and changing old ones.

Most of the habits we practice in life are an unconscious trigger-behavior-reward cycle. That's why a big part of changing and building new habits is merely becoming aware of the habits we currently hold.

​The moment we become aware of them though, we start recognizing which trigger causes which behavior and what reward we innately gift ourselves. The powerful thing is that tiny changes in lifestyle can compound to incredible results. The more aware we are of our unconscious behaviors, the more we can turn them into purposeful acts that compound over time.

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2 intellectual goodies

"Make stuff you love and talk about stuff you love and you’ll attract people who love that kind of stuff. It’s that simple."

~ Austin Kleon​

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“The art of debugging is figuring out what you really told your program to do rather than what you thought you told it to do.”

~ Andrew Singer

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1 funky audio

​This playlist is for those of you who like to work with deep house on the background. Imagine a hippie festival meets jazzy beats meets a deep, electronic base on the background.

Thanks for reading.

As always, feel free to connect by hitting reply and sharing a juicy thought 💡.

We all help the curious community grow.

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Best,

Jules 🤸🏻‍♂️