Extended Mind Reorganization
January 11, 2023
Current location: Milwaukee, WI, USA
Reading: Butts by Heather Radke
Listening: Zero hosted by Akshat Rathi(if you have a moment, reply with your own 3-item status—via email or in the comments)
Extended Mind Reorganization
A flurry of new organization-, optimization-, communication-, and consolidation-focused tools have been announced and released over the past few years.
Some are slightly upgraded versions of earlier options (a somewhat better calendar, a project organizer with a more complex or simple interface, an email inbox that has more tags, categories, and a novel approach to conversation threads), while others are truly innovative and unique to the point that contemporary use-cases are unclear.
Almost all of these offerings can be loosely categorized as “extended mind augmentations,” referring to the thesis that we use materials beyond our literal brain organ to process and think.
Calculators help us do math, writing helps us remember and process, contact lists help us remember phone numbers, and search engines allow us to reach out into the internet ether and fetch facts on the fly.
Other people can be components of our extended minds, but so can our technologies and environments.
This collection of beyond-our-body resources enhances our ability to function and parse and make, and that’s part of why this is such an appealing focus for folks looking to make useful things (sufficiently useful that other people are willing to pay to use these things).
I love seeing what creative people and companies come up with in this space, and my default policy is to take a look at the product pages for these sorts of tools and imagine how their widget might fit into what I do or improve upon how I do things by replacing a current (but perhaps now outdated) paradigm.
Sometimes I’ll play with sample offerings or download trial versions, if the quality of what’s available isn’t clear from the screenshots and animations.
At times I’ll even try to incorporate their thing into my collection of existing things, and on rare occasions, after a trial period, I’ll swap out a long-used tool for their snazzy new tool.
I’m careful when making such swaps because many new tools are essentially just old tools with a fresh coat of paint, and adopting them could entail the rewiring of processes and systems and habits (alongside a higher price tag) in exchange for crisper icons and more refined transition animations.
There’s also a chance that an upstart offering will disappear if it fails to achieve sufficient economic traction, its shape or cost radically changing after I’ve adopted it into my extended mind network, necessitating that I make another big (perhaps cumbersome and unpleasant) change just to reset things back to where they were.
I’m also careful because (to borrow from Churchill) we shape our tools and then our tools shape us—and to further borrow from Stewart Brand, then we shape our tools again.
In other words, it’s not just work rhythms and routines that can be upended by the tools we use, it’s how we think, how we store information, how we process and behave and approach the lives we live and work we do (including how we invent the tools that come next).
There are consequences to reorganizing our external brains, and those consequences can be immense or minute, positive or negative (often a bit of both).
Adopting a new RSS reader (and pouring all my existing reading and organizing habits into it) or swapping out my main note-taking software for a more sophisticated, AI-augmented version of the same might not seem like major overhauls.
But such adjustments can rewire, at a fundamental level, the way I engage with information, process that information, and then continue to think about and utilize what I’ve learned over time.
That, in turn, can shape my perception of what I know and come to know, my sense of myself and the world and reality.
There’s a powerful bias toward (current) normalcy that encourages us to stick with the familiar over the unfamiliar, and I think it’s important to challenge that psychological friction by enthusiastically experimenting with and genuinely considering new options for this and other aspects of our lives (and periodically adopting them, too).
But it’s also prudent to maintain a sense of the ripple effect small decisions that touch our extended-mind infrastructure can have on everything else we think and do.
If you found value in this essay, consider buying me a coffee :)
My Work, Elsewhere
Aspiring Generalist / Brain Lenses (podcast) / Climate Happenings / Let’s Know Things (podcast) / Never Not Curious / Notes On the News / One Sentence News (podcast) / You Probably Don’t Need
Might I suggest reading:
Interesting & Useful
20 Years of the Top Trending Google Searches
This…made me feel very old. But also fun to reminisce?
Identifying Generational Gaps in Music
Another fun interactive experiment from The Pudding! You’ll need your volume on for this.
The web was invented for projects like this (turning a Commodore 64 into a functioning accordion, with images and video).
Outro
So I somewhat randomly received a handful of postcards and letters to my PO Box (which I use for business purposes, and for the official “address of record” for my various projects) this holiday season (thanks so much to those of who you mailed me something—I loved everything I received), and that was so much fun that I’d like to formally invite you, if you’re feeling it, to send me a letter, a postcard, a drawing, a Polaroid of your pet tucked into an envelope, and anything else you think would be interesting (and non-hazardous and family-friendly) to this address:
Colin Wright
PO Box 11442
Milwaukee, WI 53211
USA (for those outside the US)
I’ve got some video things on my agenda over the next few months, and I’ve installed a little cork board behind where I’ll be recording and hosting those things. My thinking is that I’ll tack the postcards, drawings, etc to that board for the videos I shoot and streams I host (alongside small pieces of art acquired from independent artists, which was my original intention for that cork board).
I have no idea if this is an interesting and fun idea to anyone but me, but I’d love to get a tangible piece of mail from you if you’re looking for an excuse to say howdy and maybe find a weird or beautiful postcard to send to a stranger from the internet :)
You can also send me a message and just say hello, tell me something about yourself, or share something about what you’re working on, looking forward to, etc. I reply to every email I receive, and you can reach me by replying to this newsletter or by writing to colin@exilelifestyle.com (you can also leave a comment if you’d like to share something with other newsletter readers).
You can also communicate via the usual methods: Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, or list of visualization lists.
Loved reading this. I’ve definitely fallen into the tool-swapping trap all too much. To me it feels like creativity comes first and I only feel comfortable swapping tools to support that goal.