Hello from the middle of September. I’m Diana Kimball Berlin, a partner at Matrix leading pre-seed through Series A rounds in B2B SaaS and AI startups.
I’ll be in Cambridge, MA briefly next week and I set aside a day for open office hours in Harvard Square—focused on current students and recent grads, but open to all. If you or a friend will be around, I hope you’ll reach out. (Related: some reflections from 2022 on what it means to me to be from Boston.)
And now, five fragments that stuck with me last week…
One thing noticeably missing in old pictures of people writing are wastepaper baskets; paper was much too valuable to be thrown away, and a writer had to edit in his head. In that sense we have come full circle, for the word processor has done away with the crumpling of paper. Instead, I press a button, the screen flickers, and the deed is done; the unwanted words disappear into an electronic shredder. It has a calming effect.
– Witold Rybczynski, Home: A Short History of an Idea, 1987. Found in this reading list from the user manual for The Sims—“Here are some titles that might enhance your understanding of some of the background and social issues entertained in The Sims. Warning: all are filled with provocative ideas; Maxis disavows any responsibility for encouraging deep thought.” I always appreciate sensory descriptions of encountering software, anchored in time.
I was skeptical at first. Who would want to listen to four hours about one company? Yet after powering through the epic retelling of the Nike story the two released last year, I bought into their description of the product as like an audiobook. An Acquired episode is so deep, patient, and analytical that it’s much more like listening to a book than consuming an ephemeral piece of journalism.
– Adam Lashinsky, “Why Acquired Is Your Boss’s Favorite Podcast,” September 13, 2024. Last week’s live show was so fun, but it was interesting to me that part of me wanted to retreat into my own mind as I listened closely—just as I do when listening to the podcast. Relatedly, I’m generally interested in the blurring between podcasts and audiobooks; the “deeply researched” podcast genre is definitely somewhere in between.
Cyberspace gains much of its immersive power from spectacular effects—arresting visuals like the fast-moving, pulsating explosions of the videogame, the flashing billboards of the World Wide Web, and the hallucinatory apparitions of virtual reality landscapes. This visual pageantry links computer culture to ancient forms of entertainment. Spectacle has traditionally marked the descent into a gathering of ordinary mortals of a godlike being—Dionysus, a Hopi kachina, the pope during a papal procession, a royal bride and groom, or Santa Claus rolling down Broadway to Macy’s department store every Thanksgiving Day. Spectacle is used to create exultation, to move us to another order of perception, and to fix us in the moment.
– Janet Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace, first published in 1997—nearly thirty years ago. Reading this gave me the thought that the helter-skelter progress of LLMs over the past few years has been lacking in spectacle. It’s hard to fully absorb progress when it mainly looks like better and better text. (Picking up the Murray thread from July.)
The artistic problem with generative AI, to me, is not that it’s not real enough yet. The problem is that very few people are creating AI imagery that people want to believe in. People will participate in fantasies that are sufficiently evocative and enchanting—erasing, if necessary, the “unreal” parts to make the fantasy more complete.
– Celine Nguyen, “good ai artists copy, bad ai artists _____,” August 26, 2024. Returning to this post and thinking about the power of visions worth believing in. This dynamic shows up in Hamlet on the Holodeck, too; of a moment in a Star Trek computer game that hinges on clicking on a tricorder and transporter to unlock a solution, Murray writes, “As the digital art medium matures, writers will become more and more adept at inventing such belief-creating virtual objects and situating them within specific dramatic moments that heighten our sense of immersed participation by giving us something very satisfying to do.”
my new hobby is going to random parts of video podcasts and looking at a still frame and trying to see into the soul of the person speaking. now that I know what's possible I want to learn, but I feel like a vibe abacus knowing vibe GPUs walk among us
– Nick Cammarata on X, September 10, 2024. Part of a thread that starts “my gf can see more of someone's soul via a 64x64 pixel avi than I can from a twenty minute conversation with them, sample size dozens of people.” “I feel like a vibe abacus knowing vibe GPUs walk among us” is just one of those all-time great sentences.
Until next time,
Diana
https://dianaberlin.com