This substack is a way to gather up my research scraps and share my lab notebook with you every Friday. This first post is mainly trying to explain what I’m working on and my goals for that work. Subscribe to crawl into my brain and reply to any email to give feedback. I’d also love to talk about your thoughts live!
What I’m working on
I left my job in July to spend some time thinking about “work as the new religion.”I care about the future of “meaning making” in technology work, and how corporations play a role. I’m interested in exploring how technologists think about work and identity, how organizations contribute to or detract from that pursuit, and how big forces like automation might change that landscape.
I don’t want my “future thinking” to be prognostication: I don’t want to make predictions on how AI will change software development and our relationship to work. Instead, I want to paint a specific vision of what it *should* look like, deeply rooted in an understanding of the problems of the past and present. Here’s some of the questions I plan to investigate:
What is the current relationship between work and identity?
For example, what’s the thesis of German philosopher Josef Pieper on “total work”, or the idea that human beings are transformed into workers and nothing else?
How do organizations and structures support that relationship? How have they changed over time?
E.g. Freelance work versus corporations? Who’s happier?
E.g. How did purpose and mission work at early Microsoft, early Meta, Stripe, Google, and more? What were some of the artifacts created? How did employees view them? What did they do differently?
How should they evolve, as AI and remote work take hold, in the future?
I’m especially interested in this idea of “software localism”, or the concept that 1) we deserve to find more meaning in work 2) this meaning is often lost because of large organizations perverting incentives and 3) AI tools might make it possible to have smaller firms that build more local products, thereby eliminating many of these problems. What could that world look like?
Crawl into my brain and debate with me?
I spent this summer researching this topic, and put a capstone on my research with a “gallery exhibit” and a talk about work, identity and meaning. Now that it’s over, I want to use that initial summer’s work as a spark to produce a meaningful piece of writing on this topic — maybe a book!
But the more I research, the more I realize that it’s a huge endeavor that requires some help. I’d like to use this substack as a way to send out my research notes — everything I’ve read on this topic, the discussions I’ve had, and the state of my ideas that week — in hopes that you’d reply and start a discussion. I want to make my ideas better. As a very extroverted thinker, that happens for me whilst in conversation. My hope is that I can get 20-30 people to “work with me” on my working assumptions — engage with what I have here in my lab notebook to make ideas better.
Academics congregate in universities for a reason: big ideas take refinement. I am asking for your help in creating that research community for myself. Nobody can say it better than the physicist Richard Hamming:
If you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don't quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance. He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important.
My ask to you: an open door
Would you be willing to learn and think about this topic with me? There’s nothing nicer than a group of people who can rock tumble ideas together. If so, please do subscribe! I plan to send a Friday-post of annotated research notes. If you have suggestions for additional people I should meet who are smart in this space, let me know.
One of the best ways to rock-tumble these ideas is to also discuss them live. If you’re open to a fortnightly check in or a quarterly one, please reply to this email: I’d love to talk to you!