Monoliths & Mosaics

Not an origin story. Kinda.

Jan 05, 2025

In moving my blog and thoughts to Substack, I was presented with the tedious task that all engineers and designers dread: what to call the thing.

A more pragmatic mind might not bat an eye, resolving it to a simple "Andrew Paxson" and calling it a night. But on this night, the programming masochist within me won. Like countless times before, when I frivolously refactored my code, the ghost of Shakespeare reached through time and space to whisper the meaning of the name away.

If you were to stumble into my office and pick up one of my sketchbooks or notebooks from the past five years, you would see two phrases on the first pages:

"It's not what we made. It's how we made it, who we made it with, what we learned, and—who we made it for."

"See Mosaics, not Monoliths."

The former is a phrase deserving of its own discussion, but the latter is a foundational philosophy I strive to internalize in everything I do. On a dreary night in December, this philosophy crystallized into a name, pushing back the specter of Shakespeare: "Monoliths & Mosaics."

Monolith | noun

A large and impersonal political, corporate, or social structure regarded as intractably indivisible and uniform.
Monolithic architecture: a traditional software development model in which a single codebase executes multiple business functions.

Mosaic | noun

A picture or pattern produced by arranging small colored pieces of hard material, such as stone, tile, or glass.
A combination of diverse elements forming a more or less coherent whole.

While these definitions are cherry-picked, they felt apt for the context. But while these are novel the foundational philosophy behind them requires us to stray from the familiar waters of engineering and design into the world of cognitive behavior, business, society, and politics.

Fast and Slow

The research and findings of the late Daniel Kahneman, have left a lasting impression on me and changed the way I approach everything I do. In his seminal book Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman describes human thinking in terms of two systems. The first, System 1 ("Fast Thinking"), is intuitive, automatic, and effortless but prone to bias and errors. The second, System 2 ("Slow Thinking"), is deliberative, analytical, and used for more complex reasoning but requires immense effort.

Kahneman’s insights are profound, but most notable is this utilizing our System 2 thinking is so costly (in effort) that humans unconsciously avoid it, favoring the easier System 1. This reliance on cognitive shortcuts amplifies biases, stereotyping, categorization, and groupings—and, most worryingly, fills us with misplaced confidence in those thoughts.

Our Mosaic World

"System 1 is radically insensitive to both the quality and the quantity of the information that gives rise to impressions and intuitions."

Dan Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

We live in a pluralistic world, full of brilliant and creative people with diverse ideas and ways of thinking. Yet to cope with this growing complexity, we often are reliant on intuitive associations and categorizations to make sense of it.

In modern Information age, in a most human of moves, we’ve built a hyperconnected ecosystem that our brains themselves cannot fully process. We have taken the already massive engine of information and poured jet fuel into it. Our poor, primitive brains struggle to cope with the overwhelming assault of information and decisions we’re forced to handle and fallback to utilizing our intuitive thinking which is more than willing to enforce erroneous monoliths.

This onslaught of information drives us to become hyper-reliant on System 1 thinking, and this tendency fractals outward into every aspect of our lives.

The Monolith at the Speed of Light

"A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth."

Dan Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

The magic of modern technology is built on 0s and 1s, true and false, off and on. It’s truly amazing how a bunch of glorified light switches shape our world. But those 0s and 1s do more than power our ability to take grainy brunch photos.

The modern economy and political systems have evolved to harness these bits with great impact and efficiency, but at the cost of creating monoliths at the speed of light. I am referring, of course, to the backbone of the modern internet: Ads and Algorithms.

Nearly everything you click, touch, look at, or linger on becomes a data point used to categorize you into buckets that can be sold for access to your next interaction. This creates a vicious cycle:

Large data streams saturate you, forcing you to rely on System 1 to process them intuitively and naively.
Those intuitive, biased decisions are captured and reinforce the algorithms and categorizations.
The algorithms feed you content that aligns even more closely with those initial biases making them stronger.

The result? An echo chamber that’s both too tough to engage with and too tough to walk away from.

"See Mosaics, not Monoliths"

This long rambling about society and the world might not seem germane to creating things, but it is. As makers in this modern world, it’s important to remember that our natural instinct leans toward monolithic thinking—it’s just easier.

Seeing and engaging with the mosaic of the world and its problems is critical for making things that really matter. While we may not change this tendency globally, we can shift our perspective in our everyday lives and maybe avoid encoding them into the things we build.