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but no victory is so complete that it can not be undone by a handful of careless middle managers who don’t grasp the importance of the system they have been charged with maintaining.

I think we exist to bring new things into existence. If you ask me, to the extent there is a meaning of life, that’s it. We exist to create. It lights us up in a way nothing else does, putting something new into our world—and in doing so, fundamentally changing it, in whatever way, however big or small.

The real work is to remain capable of seeing the full humanity of people who do not see my full humanity in return, and to never forget that I am here only as long as I can remember to think about the people I love who are not loved by this Technical system, and to not lose my heart in the process.

Tech is intensely hierarchical and demands performance of flat culture

It is therefore not very difficult for me in this system to understand why software looks at me and gets surprised when I know what code is, and then gets angry when I don’t care about code all that much and instead care about the people so much more. Caring about the code is supposed to be what you do to earn being here and I refuse that. I cannot be Technical because I put my caring, my hope, my love, and the center of my universe somewhere else.

In a museum, the curator doesn’t paint the paintings. She decides which paintings belong in the same room, and why that room tells a story the individual works cannot tell alone.

The link – the Web’s most fundamental building block, the thing that connects one human’s work to another’s – is quietly being erased from the experience of finding things online. The search engine no longer says “here, go read what this person wrote.” It now says “here, I’ve already read it for you.” The contract is broken.

What becomes valuable is someone you trust, saying: This is worth your time. Here’s why. That’s curation. And it’s not new.

In 1994, two Stanford students named Jerry Yang and David Filo started keeping a list of their favourite websites in a directory. They called it “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web.” That list eventually became Yahoo! – one of the biggest companies of the early internet. Its foundation was nothing more than two people picking links they found interesting and organising them into categories.

While it is important to put good content out and into the world, you can only improve through the process of creating.