Welcome to technopoetic
Software, society, and soul
Technologies are not mere exterior aids, but interior transformations of consciousness… the use of a technology can enrich the human psyche, enlarge the human spirit, intensify its interior life.
Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy
Through this blog, I’m excited to explore the socio-cultural artifacts of AI: how modern systems reshape work, relationships, and meaning-making. I will also directly share investing themes and some learnings from the venture industry.
Here are a few curiosities I am exploring
Multiplayer Interface of AI Applications — in a fragmented world, technologies that maintain collaborative consistency are vital for proliferation and consistency of shared idea and thought. One might think of how Figma used different types of CRDT (Conflict-free Replicated Data Type) to create a new landscape for design collaboration. What does the future collaboration interface look like when the system of record becomes an interstitial layer between different parties? What network effects can be built?
Agency and Recommendation Systems — Beyond the prescient warnings in works like M.T. Anderson's Feed, artificial intelligence has already cut into certain parts of what it means to be human. I’m interested in how we maintain autonomy and sense-making when our choice architecture is increasingly shaped by recommendation systems. Can we license out trust? How much of our taste is already outsourced? How do we define our preferences and seek them out effectively?
Pattern Languages in Software — the perseverance of recurring patterns dictate our experience of a place, a product. From architectural theorist Christopher Alexander: beautiful architectural patterns give places a distinct sense of aliveness. Similarly, thoughtful product design can give software a sense of intuitive elegance. How do we create design principles that remain meaningful from individually delightful features to deep product ecosystems? AKA: How do we make software feel fun and alive?
Bio
My name is Nicole. I’m working at a venture firm based in San Francisco. My current focus area at work is AI Applications for Healthcare. More broadly, my firm leads rounds from pre-seed to Series A in enterprise software, including cybersecurity, fintech, applied AI, national defense and infrastructure.
To end my bio, here are some select books that affected my internal model of the world. If you share a few of these favorites, perhaps we’d get along. As someone once told me, the world of elected affinities is truly small:
John Williams (Stoner, Butcher’s Crossing)
Christopher Alexander (The Timeless Way of Being, A Pattern Language)
Lawrence Weschler (Seeing Is Forgetting The Name Of The Thing One Sees)
Jorge Luis Borges (Labyrinths)
Walter Ong (Orality and Literacy)
Stephen Zweig (Beware of Pity, World of Yesterday)
Shirley Hazzard (The Transit of Venus)
Ted Chiang (Stories of Your Life and Others)
Virginia Woolf (To The Lighthouse, Mrs Dalloway)
Jeanette Winterson (The Passion)
Greg Egan (Axiomatic)
Benjamin Labatut (When We Cease to Understand the World)
Hugh Eakin (Picasso’s War: How Art Came to America)
Elaine Scarry (On Beauty and Being Just)
Robert Hass (Apple Trees at Olema - Poems)
Cixin Liu (Three Body Problem, Dark Forest)
Brian Eno (A Year with Swollen Appendices)
Simone Weil (Gravity and Grace)
Hayao Miyazaki (Starting Point, Turning Point)
Magda Szabo (Abigail, Hungarian)
Other interests include architecture (Le Corbusier, Olmsted, Alexander), painting (watercolor), and fitness. I am trying to watch more films this year! I also write an alter-ego blog on literature, craft, and what we can mean to one another in this brief lifetime.
“There's an ancient saying in Japan, that life is like walking from one side of infinite darkness to another, on a bridge of dreams. They say that we're all crossing the bridge of dreams together. That there's nothing more than that. Just us, on the bridge of dreams.”
— Feed, M.T Anderson
