i wonder if creating value implies the belief that humans do not, in their own nature, have value

On aesthetics of efficiency - or, why I'm leaving San Francisco*

San Francisco's aesthetic is less art, more design.

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futures

rhodes

deconfusing

everything

travel

progress

Mydora Myspace streaming service

Music Supply

writing

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boiled eggs

butter lemon grilled salmon for parties 

Butter Lemon Grilled Salmon - Healthier Customized for 1 person

Scrambled Egg Vegetable (carrot, green pepper and mushroom) Stir Fry

Oatmeal Breakfast

Easy Salmon Steak Recipes

Tomato Egg Soup

Egg and toasted bread breakfast

Sauteed Mushrooms with Garlic

Spices for Cooking Tasty Meals

Salmon Recipes By Metro

Breakfast or brunch: quick-and-easy-french-toast

steamed/pan fried baby bok choy

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How to eat kiwi

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sauteed bok choy with mushrooms

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Letter to Jasmine-20200229: Recovery, Love Relationship and Seeking Help

Letter toJasmine - Recovery, Love Relationship and Seeking Help

magic 

tender

Lifestyle Change

What I ate yesterday and have been eating

the first-generation immigrants and second-, third- generation children now making up the sino diaspora in north america

• other people from the diaspora who want to hear these stories told

• their sisters, brothers, cousins, and parents who also live variations on this existence

• the friends + significant others who want to understand this existence better

• this is what we have found to be true about ourselves and the world so far

we want to create spaces for those who are caught between worlds. this collective should capture the complexity of being part of the north american asian diaspora—the pressure, the magic, the disappointment, the wonder.

this is a celebration of stories from the sino diaspora in north america 💫

Sinostories

Yesterday I went through Epistemology** seated at an 

 staffed entirely by white people. I ate an overly greasy scallion pancake lined thinly with pork that I had ordered off a menu covered with pinyin in tech-adjacent Nimbus Mono. I mused about the tension I felt eating it. Why did I, a Chinese person, feel drawn to the gentrified version of my own food?

Sarah Constantin chooses to stay in the Bay Area for its aesthetic

, I laughed aloud. Yet here I was, mouth stuffed full of premium mediocre Asian food of the very aesthetic that she pointed out. I recognized that I had purchased this because it was 

San Francisco's aesthetic is one that is easy to use and inhabit. It's easy in several ways. It's the aesthetic that is pleasant to default to. It requires no choice. It's also easy to navigate and highly legible. When I go out to eat, I understand that I will be served premium mediocre food (that is, tasty but forgettable) after interacting with a premium mediocre checkout experience (that is, efficient and non-awkward, again forgettable). I can purchase clothes at Everlane that are functionally satisfactory, even attractive, but that I wouldn't feel any sort of sorrow about losing. Sadness is inefficient, after all. I understand how this or that app works, such that I can easily instrumentalize it, make use of it, and achieve my ends, whether that's arriving to work a few minutes earlier or 

optimizing my social time such that I don't need to schedule calls ahead of time or, worse, create some emotional burden on my friends

. The majority of apps on my phone are non-places, instrumental, anonymous in the sense that my self doesn't need to show up, not really.

San Francisco's aesthetic is less art, more design. It's as if an entire society asked itself, how might we make it easy and efficient to extract value out of, well, 

This is how you end up with a bunch of apps aimed at utility and not joy. Perhaps this is why Alan loves games? They are ends, entire worlds in and of themselves. They are 

This is how you end up in a city full of non-places - Amazon Go stores, Capital One cafes, Breathers, tech company cafeterias. 

In such a city, what are the ends, I wonder?

This is how you end up as a person spending your life optimizing yourself as a computer input.

San Francisco is the optimal city within which to self-optimize, in the sense that your metrics are highly visible. Your Strava score, the valuation your startup is raising at, the number of Twitter followers you have. I digress. This was just a meditation on aesthetics.

Can we hope that individuals in such a city will never eventually treat themselves as a resource to be extracted from as well? You dig and you excavate 

with the hope that there's a there there, that by simply doing this Herculean, Sisyphean task of 

you'll reach some exalted state of consciousness one day, but no, instead you look around inside yourself and see rubble and chaos and disarray and ugliness, or worse, yet another premium mediocre web app, where the breathtaking perfection of your starlight could have been, where it still is, if you were only to treat your self as an end, not a means, and thereby unlock the possibility, the next horizon in the infinite game, of treating others around you, the food that you eat, everything you interact with, this very moment in all its infinite glory, as ends.

What sort of city does that frame unlock? What sort of aesthetic? I don't know, but it's definitely not light-contrast, smoothly-minimalist elegance. 

All this to say that I am leaving San Francisco because of its aesthetic, and all that it implies. 

*a popular subgenre in the genre of Twitter thought leadership
**a collection of ten essays from LessWrong all 

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