Maggie makes visual essays about programming, design, and anthropology.
Designer, anthropologist, and mediocre developer
Currently design engineering at
Normally
The Garden
Essays
The Dark Forest and Generative AI
Proving you're a human on a web flooded with generative AI content
Tools for Thought as Cultural Practices, not Computational Objects
On seeing tools for thought through a historical and anthropological lens
A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden
A newly revived philosophy for publishing personal knowledge on the web
A Short History of Bi-Directional Links
Seventy years ago we dreamed up links that would allow us to create two-way, contextual conversations. Why don't we use them on the web?
Notes
Aesthetic Command Lines with Hyper, Spaceship, and Oh My Zsh
Leaving Elicit
Faking William Morris, Generative Forgery, and the Erosion of Art History
On Opening Essays, Conference Talks, and Jam Jars
The Finest Narrative Non-Fiction Essays
Spinning Worlds, Seasickness, and Dealing with Vestibular Neuritis
A Collection of Design Engineers
Gathering Structures
Speculative Calendar Events
Language Model Sketchbook, or Why I Hate Chatbots
Neologisms
Teenage Skeuomorphic Desktop Designs
Patterns
Ambient Co-presence
Creating a subtle, peripheral, and synchronous sense of shared space and context on the web
Computational Notebooks
Shareable, browser-based documents that can compile and run code
Command K Bars
Command line bars you can quickly summon with a keyboard shortcut
Folk Interfaces
People reappropriating existing software to solve their own unique problems
Daily Notes Pages
Daily notes as a frictionless default input for personal knowledge management systems
Assumed Audiences
Naming your invisible audiences to free yourself from unspoken obligations
Epistemic Disclosure
Providing clear metadata on the epistemic validity of content
Algorithmic Transparency
Algorithms that make their reasoning visible
Library
Empire of Pain
Seeing Voices
Eve: How The Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution
Annals of a Former World
Our Babies, Ourselves: How Biology and Culture Shape the Way We Parent
Being You: A New Science of Consciousness
Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness
The Weirdest People in the World