I feel that as designers and within the Western world, we’re slowly shifting into this fetishization of homogeneity. We like things that don’t have that much personality or decoration — things that are minimal, clean, bright, white, always on. iPhones, flat design, Uniqlo, all those grey condos sprouting up in Williamsburg (or whatever part of your city is gentrifying). Maybe it is because these things are cheaper to mass-produce, but maybe there’s some comfort in a literal blank slate as a sort of emotional respite from the world’s instability. There is an absurdity in this, but also it contains some honesty in a weird way.

Sometimes social media even determines exactly what I want to eat at a restaurant. I’ve seen an alluring image of a specific dish on Instagram, for instance. Sometimes this feels really evil. There’s no pleasure in discovery. If I were to be nostalgic, that’s what I would miss. Meg: In lamenting restaurant websites’ disappearing, what might their ideal future be? Jasmine: I would like to see restaurant websites operating more as publishers. Similar to how Kajitsu does with their archive of seasonal menus. Maybe it means that restaurant websites simply start blogging instead of having parked websites. Becca: Maybe a restaurant is really just a physical blog.

When it comes to the internet, trust is something easily lost and difficult to regain. In a sense, every time a giant of the internet surveillance economy is revealed to have sold out its customers in some innovatively horrifying way, the ensuing chaos almost serves as free advertising for DuckDuckGo. “The world keeps going in a bad direction, and it makes people think, ‘Hey, I would like to escape some of the bad stuff on the internet and go to a safer place,’” Weinberg says. “And that’s where we see ourselves.”

A conversation with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey can be incredibly disorienting. Not because he’s particularly clever or thought-provoking, but because he sounds like he should be. He takes long pauses before he speaks. He furrows his brow, setting you up for a considered response from the man many have called a genius. The words themselves sound like they should probably mean something, too. Dorsey is just hard enough to follow that it’s easy to assume that any confusion is your own fault, and that if you just listen a little more or think a little harder, whatever he’s saying will finally start to make sense. Whether Dorsey does this all deliberately or not, the reason his impassioned defenses of Twitter sound like gibberish is because they are.

I guess you could say that good games are made from “good lies”.