technology

A couple of online things I’ve been enjoying lately:

❦ My friend Tim Brown’s latest project, Deep Hush. Deep Hush is a collection of thoughts, notes, and links about rebalancing one’s sense of perspective and finding a quieter space.

On a side note, I love the “status” posts with the pixel illustrations. Such a cool way of doing this.

❦ Kevin Kortum, who’s been doing a lot of interesting work, just redesigned his professional site. I like it.

I’ve always had a thing for text-based user interfaces—in particular those that mimic GUI windowing systems, like Microsoft’s DOS Shell or Borland’s Turbo Vision. Kevin’s site reminds me of the wilder designs from the more experimental days of the web: k10k, or those Flash-based sites¹ that adopted a futuristic starship-dashboard aesthetic.

❦ Soren Iverson. Iverson’s work belongs to a niche school of modern #art that I’m not sure how to name or categorize: darkly surrealist, design-centric art that’s inextricably specific to contemporary #technology products/culture. (Nanoraptor is another such practitioner.)

Iverson’s work centers on ideas for apps that don’t exist, and features for apps that do. These are (mostly) not good ideas; they’re ingeniously bad ones, concepts so creepy and dystopian that someone in the Bay Area will probably attempt them. The obvious comparison is Black Mirror, but to me, I’m reminded more of the Far Side for product design: one-panel jokes and commentary from a not-so-far future where every human need and impulse has been monetized, enshittified, and automated to a degree that is both blatantly ludicrous and still makes a diabolical kind of sense.

Iverson’s unfortunately gone silent, but I hope he gets back to these someday. (One has to wonder if this project landed him a job at Amazon, X, or one of those other companies that’s more likely to interpret these ideas as a portfolio rather than a satire. He’d be great at it. I hope for the sake of humanity that he turned them down.)