The Gray Area with Sean Illing6 Sep 2016

Stewart Butterfield on creating Slack, learning from games, and finding your online identity

If you came by the Vox office, you would find it oddly quiet. That's not because we don't like each other, or because we're not social, or because we don't have anything to say. It's because almost all our communication happens silently, digitally, in Slack.Slack is Stewart Butterfield's creation, and it's the fastest-growing piece on enterprise software in history. But here's the kicker: he didn't mean to create it, just like he didn't mean to create Flickr before it. In both cases, Butterfield was trying to create a new kind of game: immersive, endless, and focused on experiences rather than victories. The story of Butterfield's pivots from the game to Flickr and Slack have become Silicon Valley lore. But in this conversation, we go deep into the part that's always fascinated me: the game Butterfield wanted to create, the reasons he thinks gaming is so important, and the ways in which his philosophy background informs his current work. We also talk a lot about the nature of status, identity, and communication in online spaces, as Butterfield's company is now revolutionizing all three.This is a deep, interesting, and unusual conversation — we went places I didn't expect, and I left thinking about topics I'd never really considered. Butterfield is as thoughtful as they come, and I hope you get as much out of this as I did. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Det här avsnittet är hämtat från ett öppet RSS-flöde och publiceras inte av Podme. Det kan innehålla reklam.

Avsnitt(764)

Halfway there: a philosopher’s guide to midlife crises

Philosophy often feels like a disconnected discipline, obsessed with tedious and abstract problems. But MIT professor Kieran Setiya believes philosophical inquiry has a practical purpose outside the c...

21 Apr 202550min

Whatever this is, it isn’t liberalism

What exactly is the basis for democracy? Arguably Iiberalism, the belief that the government serves the people, is the stone on which modern democracy was founded. That notion is so ingrained in the ...

14 Apr 202553min

A new way to listen

We have an exciting announcement! Vox Members now get access to ad-free podcasts. If you sign up, you’ll get unlimited access to reporting on vox.com, exclusive newsletters, and all of our podcasts — ...

11 Apr 20251min

The beliefs AI is built on

There’s a lot of uncertainty when it comes to artificial intelligence. Technologists love to talk about all the good these tools can do in the world, all the problems they might solve. Yet, many of th...

7 Apr 202550min

Stop comparing yourself to AI

Why do we keep comparing AI to humans? Jaron Lanier — virtual reality pioneer, digital philosopher, and the author of several best-selling books on technology — thinks that we should stop. In his vie...

31 Mars 202555min

Democrats need to do something

American government has a speed issue. Both parties are slow to solve problems. Slow to build new things. Slow to make any change at all. Until now. The Trump administration is pushing through sweepi...

24 Mars 202550min

How to live in uncertain times

Humans hate uncertainty. It makes us feel unsafe and uneasy. We often organize our lives to avoid it. When it's foisted upon us, we don’t always know how to act. But writer and journalist Maggie Jacks...

17 Mars 202548min

How to sink into silence

How often do you find silence? And do you know what to do with it when you do? Today’s guest is essayist and travel writer Pico Iyer. His latest book is Aflame: Learning From Silence, which recounts h...

10 Mars 202546min