Introduction

The rise of social media has turbocharged global materialism and consumer culture, and nothing reflects this more than the incessant and unending chatter from the fashion industry. Fast fashion in particular is not only a challenge to our society but also a detriment to our ecology. As my awareness has grown around the challenges of fast fashion, I've found myself engrossed in a blog called The Fashion Law. One fine day, I saw the blog stand up for a small designer in Scotland who had her design stolen by Chanel. A few weeks later Chanel apologized, and I became a fan of this fair-minded blog. I wrote an email to the editor of the blog — Julie Zerbo — and mentioned that I was going to be in New York and would like to get together to talk about the fashion industry. We met at Happy Bones in the Little Italy/Soho area and talked for hours. This is an edited version of our conversation.

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Introduction

Chris Young is a rare combination of inventor, entrepreneur and chef. He is the co-author of Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking and the co-founder of ChefSteps, a Seattle-based company that invents appliances and develops cooking methodologies befitting the postindustrial society.

ChefSteps recently introduced Joule, a small and easy-to-use sous vide tool, the first of many of the products planned by Young and his team of over 50 chefs, scientists, photographers, writers and engineers. “One of the things that makes the kitchen such an interesting challenge from a technological standpoint is that it's not enough to move bits around, you need to push around some atoms too if you want to make people happier in the kitchen,” he wrote to me in an email. “So we decided we were going to have to take the lead on building some new tools for the kitchen if we wanted to see the kitchen get reinvented in a useful way.”

It was enough for me to get interested. We met for a chat in my office in San Francisco and ended up talking for hours about the future of restaurants, Munchery, Soylent, fancy Michelin-star restaurants and, most important, the future of food. This is one of my favorite conversations. I hope you get a chance to read and enjoy it.

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Introduction

I was introduced to Joshua Allen Harris a few years ago by friend and photography enthusiast Bijan Sabet. I had admired Harris’ work on Instagram: His reductionist style of visual storytelling was something that spoke to me on a deep level.

Harris told me about a project he had been focused on: taking photos of Broadway, a street in Brooklyn. He wanted to chronicle the story of the street. He recently released his visual narrative essay in the form of three books: Tahoma, Belmont and Broadway.

As soon as they came out, I ordered the books and asked Harris to chat again, this time for pi.co. We ended up talking about his journey, the concepts behind the trilogy and the changing concept of photography, from art to language.

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Introduction

In Nov. 2014, I hosted a design conference in San Francisco, and one of our keynote speakers was K.K. Barrett, the production designer for the Spike Jonze movie Her. Deeply unsettling and yet so believable, the movie pointed to a compute-intensive future with an invisible interface. Her was a peek into a world where invisible computing machines and artificial intelligence act as surrogates for some of our human connections.

K.K. and I were hanging out backstage and started talking about a whole bunch of things, many of them too abstract to remember. Fortunately I recorded some of our conversation on my iPhone. Here we are talking about Her, design, dating and the business of modern life and why it isn't that important. This is a quick read!

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