“Season your work with the physical”

Brilliant words from Robin Sloan in his latest newsletter:

Consider the printer!

There’s a reason they are the eternal bane of computer users. It’s because, in most systems, they are the bridge between the digital and the physical: the place where a stream of symbols collides with dust, moisture, friction, obstruction … welcome to the real world!

Engineers have been toiling for many decades to perfect the printer, and still, it jams. After all this time, the printer remains, notoriously and hilariously, the weak link.

But it’s not the printer’s fault that it sits across a step-change in complexity; visualize wild vortices, brutal turbulence. The digital, no matter how hard it tries — and it does try — cannot match the gnarl of the physical.

Brilliant in part because, yes, printers. Who among us has not done battle. It’s like the bits actively resist becoming atoms.

(I’ve found the same thing with 3D printers, laser cutters, Cricut machines).

In the same newsletter Sloan writes about magic circles (canonical magic circle video introduction), and includes what amounts to career advice that I would happily offer to anyone:

Think about your work and your interests. If they are fully inside the magic circle of “symbols, in, symbols out”, then your world is changing, and will soon change faster, and it’s probably time to get creative about what you might do differently, and how you might “season” your work with the physical.

“Season your work with the physical,” that’s what Sloan has been doing lately, and it’s at the heart of what I’ve been doing for as long as I can remember.