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On the Ambient Entertainment Industrial Complex “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Pascal’s observation from the 17th century feels less like historical philosophy and more like a diagnosis of our current condition. The discomfort with idleness that Pascal identified has evolved from a human tendency into a technological ecosystem designed to ensure we never experience it. Philosophers and thinkers throughout history worried about both the individual and societal costs of idleness. Left to our own devices — or rather, without devices — we might succumb to vice or destructive thoughts. Or worse, from society’s perspective, too many idle people might destabilize the social order. Kierkegaard specifically feared that many would become trapped in what he called the “aesthetic sphere” of existence — a life oriented around the pursuit of novel experiences and constant stimulation rather than ethical commitment and purpose. He couldn’t have imagined how prophetic this concern would become. What’s changed isn’t human nature but the infrastructure of distraction available to us. Entertainment was once bounded — a novel read by candlelight, a play attended on Saturday evening, a television program watched when it aired. It occupied specific times and spaces. It was an event. Today, entertainment is no longer an event but a condition. It’s ambient, pervasive, constant. The bright rectangle in our pocket ensures that no moment need be empty of stimulus. Waiting in line, sitting on the train, even using the bathroom — all are opportunities for consumption rather than reflection or simply being. More subtly, the distinction between necessary and unnecessary information has collapsed. News, social media feeds, workplace communication tools — all blend information we might need with content designed primarily to capture and hold our attention. The result is a sense that all of this constant consumption isn’t entertainment at all, but somehow necessary. Perhaps most concerning is what happens as this self-referential entertainment ecosystem evolves. The relationship between entertainment and experience has always had a push-pull kind of tension; experience has been entertainment’s primary source material, but, great entertainment is, itself, an experience that becomes just as affective background as anything else. But what happens when the balance is tipped? When experience and entertainment are so inseparable that the source material doubles back on itself in a recursion of ever dwindling meaning? The system turns inward, growing more detached from lived reality with each iteration. I think we are already living in that imbalance. The attention economy is, according to the classic law of supply and demand, bankrupt — with an oversupply of signal produced for a willful miscalculation of demand. No one has the time or interest to take in all that is available. No one should want to. And yet the most common experience today is an oppressive and relentless FOMO you might call Sisyphean if his boulder accumulated more boulders with every trip up and down the hill. We’re so saturated in signal that we cannot help but think continually about the content we have not consumed as if it is an obligatory list of chores we must complete. And that ambient preoccupation with the next or other thing eats away at whatever active focus we put toward anything. It’s easy to cite as evidence the normalization of watching TV while side-eying Slack on an open laptop while scrolling some endless news feed on a phone — because this is awful and all of us would have thought so just a few years ago — but the worst part about it is the fact that while gazing at three or more screens, we are also fragmenting our minds to oblivion across the infinite cloud of information we know is out there, clamoring for attention. Pascal feared what happened in the empty room. We might now reasonably fear what happens when the room is never empty — when every potential moment of idleness or reflection is filled with content designed to hold our gaze just a little longer. The philosophical question of our time is not how to fix the attention economy, but how to end it altogether. We simply don’t have to live like this.

CMC is one of the largest technology corporations in Vietnam. In the process of going global, CMC opened a branch...

And by LLMS I mean: (L)ots of (L)ittle ht(M)l page(S). I recently shipped some updates to my blog. Through the design/development process, I had some insights which made me question my knee-jerk reaction to building pieces of a page as JS-powered interactions on top of the existing document. With cross-document view transitions getting broader and broader support, I’m realizing that building in-page, progressively-enhanced interactions is more work than simply building two HTML pages and linking them. I’m calling this approach “lots of little HTML pages” in my head. As I find myself trying to build progressively-enhanced features with JavaScript — like a fly-out navigation menu, or an on-page search, or filtering content — I stop and ask myself: “Can I build this as a separate HTML page triggered by a link, rather than JavaScript-injected content built from a button?” I kinda love the results. I build separate, small HTML pages for each “interaction” I want, then I let CSS transitions take over and I get something that feels better than its JS counterpart for way less work. Allow me two quick examples. Example 1: Filtering Working on my homepage, I found myself wanting a list of posts filtered by some kind of criteria, like: The most recent posts The ones being trafficked the most The ones that’ve had lots of Hacker News traffic in the past My first impulse was to have a list of posts you can filter with JavaScript. But the more I built it, the more complicated it got. Each “list” of posts needed a slightly different set of data. And each one had a different sort order. What I thought was going to be “stick a bunch of <li>s in the DOM, and show hide some based on the current filter” turned into lots of data-x attributes, per-list sorting logic, etc. I realized quickly this wasn’t a trivial, progressively-enhanced feature. I didn’t want to write a bunch of client-side JavaScript for what would take me seconds to write on “the server” (my static site generator). Then I thought: Why don’t I just do this with my static site generator? Each filter can be its own, separate HTML page, and with CSS view transitions I’ll get a nice transition effect for free! Minutes later I had it all working — mostly, I had to learn a few small things about aspect ratio in transitions — plus I had fancy transitions between “tabs” for free! This really feels like a game-changer for simple sites. If you can keep your site simple, it’s easier to build traditional, JavaScript-powered on-page interactions as small, linked HTML pages. Example 2: Navigation This got me thinking: maybe I should do the same thing for my navigation? Usually I think “Ok, so I’ll have a hamburger icon with a bunch of navigational elements in it, and when it’s clicked you gotta reveal it, etc." And I thought, “What if it’s just a new HTML page?”[1] Because I’m using a static site generator, it’s really easy to create a new HTML page. A few minutes later and I had it. No client-side JS required. You navigate to the “Menu” and you get a page of options, with an “x” to simulate closing the menu and going back to where you were. I liked it so much for my navigation, I did the same thing with search. Clicking the icon doesn’t use JavaScript to inject new markup and animate things on screen. Nope. It’s just a link to a new page with CSS supporting a cross-document view transition. Granted, there are some trade-offs to this approach. But on the whole, I really like it. It was so easy to build and I know it’s going to be incredibly easy to maintain! I think this is a good example of leveraging the grain of the web. It’s really easy to build a simple website when you can shift your perspective to viewing on-page interactivity as simple HTML page navigations powered by cross document CSS transitions (rather than doing all of that as client-side JS). Jason Bradberry has a neat article that’s tangential to this idea over at Piccalil. It’s more from the design standpoint, but functionally it could work pretty much the same as this: your “menu” or “navigation” is its own page. ⏎ Email · Mastodon · Bluesky