Introducing Mundi

Welcome to the view from the center of the known universe! Glad you could make it. As you can see, you're standing smack dab in the middle of the Hereford Map, which is, of course, Jerusalem. Looking up "North" (which is East), you can glimpse the Red Sea, in vivid red ink. To the "South" (which is West) you can see the edge of the world, which, natch, is the Strait of Gibraltar. Way, way off in the distance, off the edge of map and beyond the mislabeled landmasses of Europe and Africa, you can make out the Garden of Eden. Pretty neat!

You're here on this map because I thought you could use an introduction to this newsletter, so you could judge for yourself whether it's worth your time (spoiler alert from a future edition: you're paying more than you think to read this right now, so judge wisely). Mundi is inspired by mappae mundi, Latin for world maps, now used as a catch-all term to refer to medieval European maps of the world. You might've seen these mocked, parodied, and referenced as antiquated, ill-informed, adventure-soaked (Here be dragons!), or goofy. All these medieval dumbasses were so na?ve, superstitious, and geography-challenged! LOL!

It can be easy to fall into the trap of being chronological snobs, assuming that because we have advanced in certain areas, that people of the past were less intelligent, or that their technology was intended to do the same thing as ours, only less effectively. It's important to keep in mind that at the time they were drawn, mappae mundi weren't meant to do the job that a modern map does. They weren't intended as accurate representations of geography, but instead as teaching aids to pass on principles deemed important to a mass of the people living in that part of the world at that time. The creators of the map didn't believe in a flat Earth, they didn't try for accuracy in distances, and their intent was maybe more like judgmental maps than ordnance surveys.

"To modern eyes, mappae mundi can look superficially primitive and inaccurate. However, mappae mundi were never meant to be used as navigational charts and they make no pretence of showing the relative areas of land and water. Rather, mappae mundi were schematic and were meant to illustrate different principles. The simplest mappae mundi were diagrams meant to preserve and illustrate classical learning easily."

Thanks Wikipedia!

I hope this newsletter carries the spirit and intent of these maps, both in how we moderns see them (primitive and inaccurate aka hot takes) as well as how they were intended by the olds (schematics illustrating principles aka memes). My takes are as informed as I can make them, but likely to be simplistic and missing things. They hopefully illustrate a principled point in a simple way, but are open to a wide range of different points of view. Heck, there might be a principle to learn from our na?ve view of these maps now, with implications for the design and development of technology today! More on that later.

I think my general approach to the world is best described as skeptical optimism. I try really hard to find and understand accurate data, put things in context of historical trends, focus on where we can and need to do better, and to avoid common traps in thinking and writing. I think those things also help to highlight the good (and there is a lot of it) amidst what feels like an overwhelming sea of apocalyptic, existential, major bummers. I try! But I'm confident I also fail on this front a lot.

That means I can also be a straight up huge pessimist with some things (I might bum you out!) and I am sure I am stubbornly just-plain-wrong about others (I might piss you off!). I try and take things in life with the level of seriousness I think they deserve, based on what I understand to be true and worthwhile. A lot of things deserve earnest effort, others deserve good-spirited mockery, and others deserve fiery passion (positive and negative). I think maybe that's Aristotelian? The "right" balance of virtues and vices, directed in "right" way in order to "flourish"? Maybe half-baked Buddha-teaching-derived?

Design is likely to frequently enter the picture in Mundi, as a frame for the entire thing, or at the beating heart of it, or as a get-the-hell-out-of-here-you've-made-things-worse kind of way. I've earned a living as a designer, doing lots of different types of design, for decades now. I've worked "in tech" for at least half of that time (I'll write more in a future about how woefully poor "in tech" is as a concept). Being closer to these technologies and how they are made has made me generally less impressed and excited about them, more cautious using them, and more likely to quickly jump to how things could go wrong. I think that maybe makes me better at my job?

This introductory edition is written at a very interesting time, during what feels like the early curve of development and adoption of Generative AI, and AI in general. It's very hard to predict what impact it will have (Star Trek? Battlestar Galactica? Some of each?) and what it means for humans. I have thoughts, but no special insight into the future – only a fair amount of confidence that we're bad at predictions and very unlikely to identify what ends up being historically important while we're in living in it.

With that in mind, I want to be clear that every word and every image in Mundi will be created entirely by yours truly with credit, attribution, and links to every source (to the best of my ability). Every mistake and foolish claim comes straight from me and I'm accountable for them.

I'm doing this intending transparency in a head-spinning time where it's hard to know how we will collectively react to this technology, and how we will judge its use in creative endeavors. I can also appreciate that this can be viewed very differently (snobbery, elitism, fear of the new), and I respect your takes on it!

I want to return to chronological snobbery and a particular type of ahistorical we-are-the-first-to mindset, which predisposes one to view a present circumstance as having no (or limited) historical precursor. Every generation thinks it has discovered drugs, or that music from their youth was revolutionary, groundbreaking, and objectively the best. I think of this as a distinctive cultural trait of the United States, though I think it's a thing elsewhere as well, to varying extents. This mindset, to some extent, may be necessary in some ways to motivate the design and development of new technologies.

The upside is a focus on the here-and-now and a motivation to do something that feels momentous because it is unprecedented. The downside is dismissal of even the very recent past as inadequate and without value in comparison. That's dangerous and limiting! In my view, in the world of tech design and development, it's a both benefit and an absolutely enormous, devastating blind spot. Our na?ve judgement of mappae mundi feels all too familiar in a pattern of collectively jumping to a shiny new thing, casually letting the old shiny, and its lessons, slip from our minds. A new problem without precedent!

In a twist, the most-used maps today might matter less for their geographic accuracy and more for their ability to convey concepts with schematics, and to illuminate the important things in our individual world bubbles (How far can I go without charging my car? What are some good sandwich shops near me? What are the steps to get from here to there?). We have our own mappae mundi easily at hand, tailored precisely to us. We have each individually supplanted Jerusalem as the center of our worlds.

Thanks for coming all this way, and for arriving here at the end. We're standing at the center in my Jerusalem and looking out across the world as I see it now, jam-packed with weird little opinionated notes and funny drawings, no doubt to be seen as antiquated and goofy meme fodder by my descendants, who are (their equivalent of) ROFLMAO-ing, if they bother to read this at all from the comfort of their MetAIverse? Soylent CastPods?. I hope you find it worth your while to subscribe and spend your precious attention capital, and battery charge, on reading my ramblings. Enjoy Mundi.

Final note: I practice what's called "jazz punctuation" in which the use of colons, parentheses, ellipsis, em dashes, quotation marks, and exclamation points is largely improvisational and vibe-based. If this bothers you, remember: it's all about the notes you don't play.