Sketches of the enemy

The first dispatch in the Lightpage Chronicles

Sup homies! Welcome to the first installment of the Lightpage Chronicles, where I'm documenting the messy process of writing a spicy manifesto for Lightpage in real-time.

Manifestos gain their emotional power from the interplay of three ingredients: the old story (what's broken), the new story (what's possible), and the bridge (how can we, as imperfect humans, move from one to the other). These will all get fleshed out more as we go, I promise.

This past week, Kasra and I kicked things off by digging into the old stories of tech, productivity, self-improvement, and human flourishing. We’re looking to answer to questions like: How does the modern world hold us back from being fully human? What systemic forces or trends are we standing against? Who/what’s the enemy in the larger story we’re telling? The goal is to articulate what’s broken about the world that Lightpage is entering, framing this status quo in a way that makes it feel both undeniable and unacceptable.

In other words, the old story is about tapping into challenging emotions—pain, frustration, anger, fear, hopelessness, etc—and trying to put words to them. So I went into our first convo hunting for emotional triggers and polarities, those places where Kasra himself gets riled up at the state of the tech industry or wider world. But nope. What I found instead was a dude who’s remarkably grounded, thoughtful, and committed to seeing nuance in every situation. What a scoundrel!

Despite that curveball, the conversation was still full of potential old story ingredients. So my next step was combing through the transcript while paying close attention to my own emotional reactivity. I was looking for things that stirred up my felt sense of frustration, anger, or despair. There are problems my intellect gets excited about, and there are problems that feel like a tight clench in my chest, and that make me want to hide. For manifesto-writing purposes, the latter tend to have an order of magnitude more power.

After highlighting the moments that got me activated, I wrote out a few initial "sketches" around what Lightpage might stand against. I say "sketches" because that's all these are meant to be. Not commitments, just possible directions that we could use as jumping off points. We'll likely weave elements from all of them into something more cohesive later.

Anyhow, here are some quick sketches of what Lightpage is fighting back against:

Sketch 1: The subtle hostility of our digital environments

We’re inevitably shaped by our environments, and the digital environments we inhabit systematically undermine our humanity. They…

• reward and amplify our most reactive, fearful impulses while atrophying our capacity for presence, nuance, and compassionate action.

• position themselves as tools of personal liberation while nudging us into predictable consumer patterns in a thousand barely noticeable ways.

• become the default places we retreat to when anxious, which usually just inflames said anxiety even more.

• promise connection but deliver shallow, commoditized substitutes that leave us more isolated.

• channel the human experience into separate apps, feeds, and interfaces, which leaves us feeling compartmentalized and less aware of the interconnected ecology of everything.

Sketch 2: The memetic virus of extremist thinking

Our chaotic information landscape makes simplistic, binary thinking increasingly seductive. This pattern of extremism...

• provides the comforting illusion of control and certainty in confusing times, while actually narrowing our perspective.

• gradually seeps into our inner dialogue, reducing our capacity to hold multiple truths simultaneously, and making “the war within” far more violent.

• makes saying "I don't know" or "I'm still figuring this out" feel increasingly vulnerable in a world demanding instant certainty.

• follows us into our relationships, where we categorize, label, and dismiss rather than connect with full humanity.

• drives us to swing violently between extremes in our personal growth journeys rather than finding sustainable middle paths.

• transforms us into unwitting hosts for extreme ideas that replicate through us, leaving us feeling hollowed out and used up once they've spread.

Sketch 3: The ideology of human optimization

We've all inherited a worldview, born of the industrial revolution, that treats humans as machines to be improved, upgraded, and optimized. This mindset...

• frames messiness, inefficiency, and uncertainty as problems to be solved rather than essential aspects of being human.

• teaches us to distrust our bodies, intuition, and personal experience in favor of culturally-prescribed "best practices"that rarely seem to work.

• encourages us to chase wellbeing through abstracted metrics, KPIs, and data points rather than through the depth of our connections, contributions, and care for what’s in front of us.

• subtly communicates that we are broken or inadequate in our default state, especially if we’re feeling any type of negative emotion

• creates the persistent feeling that we're falling behind, and that there's always some better version of ourselves just around the corner that will finally be contented.

These sketches aren’t the full story, of course. The real magic happens once we start juxtaposing all of this against a resonant vision of what we're moving toward—rather than just railing against what’s broken.

What’s been emerging in our convos so far, both with each other and with the AI in Lightpage itself, is a vision where Lightpage isn’t viewed as another app for self-optimization, but as a kind of dojo—an environment designed to counteract these hostile old stories, where we can practice a more integrated way of being human. More about what that might look like coming your way next week.

For now though, I'm curious if any of these sketches hitting close to home for you? Would love to hear about how you experience these problems, or if they’re not clicking in the way they’re framed now. Drop a comment or shoot me a message. Your input will def help shape where we go next.

Thanks for reading and catch ya next week! 🫡

Rob