Thread by @patio11

From a conversation with a friend:

Tech should build more cathedrals, less in the religious sense and more in the "Make a beautiful, physical space which is open to the public and will endure for hundreds of years to say This Is Who We Were And What We Hoped, 2021 Edition."

Will allow partial credit for "Our cathedral is The Internet" but I don't think that necessarily drains resources from doing it IRL, too.

If people are very wigged out by the word "cathedral" specifically I sort of feel that that's unfortunate but can I downsell you to "There should be a museum, not specific to any one company, with at least as much brainpower put into it as an N+1 reskinning of Gmail."

Though as someone who appreciates both cathedrals and museums a thing I appreciate a bit more about the cathedral model is the open invitation for you, the visitor, to participate not just experiencing the physical space/etc but in The Work generally.

"Is that the best thing in the world you can imagine spending the marginal dollar on?"

I mean if it's that competitive then make the cathedral a ~36 inch by 36 inch tungsten cube on which you inscribed what, in lieu of a cathedral, was the best possible thing to spend money on.

That's also a statement piece to schoolchildren, future generations, etc.

"Let the record reflect that, in 2021, the most transcendently beautiful thing we could imagine was to fund the following:"

"P.S. This block is tungsten because of a meme about cryptocurrency and if either of those concepts didn't survive to the future wow we sure screwed up those predictions, huh."