Ordinary Abundance — mattwood.fyi

I'm Matt Wood, and this is For Your Information. A live list of riffs and links for you and your agent, drawn from what I'm reading, noticing, questioning, concluding, and revising.

Ordinary Abundance

An interactive exploration of everyday objects and technologies that were once considered miraculous luxuries, from on-demand music to electric lighting to photography, presented through historical quotes and modern apartment scenes.

Fun visual story telling (and a history I hadn't really thought about this way before)

ordinaryabundance.com →

Connections

Supports

Taste Is All That's Left Both pieces grapple with how value and perception shift when scarcity gives way to abundance - Ordinary Abundance historicizes this process while 'Taste Is All That's Left' examines what differentiates human judgment when technology commoditizes everything.
Most tech revolutions made work worse for employees. AI could be the exception: this+that Ordinary Abundance's historical lens on past tech revolutions (electricity, photography) provides direct evidence for evaluating claims about whether AI will follow the same pattern of disruption and normalization that previous transformative technologies did.
The Dynamo and the Computer: An Historical Perspective on the Modern Productivity Paradox Both pieces use historical perspective to examine how transformative technologies are absorbed into daily life - Ordinary Abundance illustrates the same productivity paradox dynamic: revolutionary technologies become invisible precisely when they've succeeded, echoing the dynamo/computer comparison.

Related to

Sir Clive Sinclair: Tireless Inventor Ahead of His Time Sir Clive Sinclair's story as an inventor ahead of his time mirrors Ordinary Abundance's central theme: technologies that seem miraculous in one era become ordinary infrastructure in the next, and visionaries often don't live to see their work normalized.

Challenges

The Uni-Context: A Philosopher's One-Word Theory to Explain Why the World Feels So Weird Ordinary Abundance implicitly challenges the 'world feels weird' thesis - by showing historically that each era experienced its own miraculous-to-mundane transitions, it suggests the current sense of dislocation is not uniquely modern but a recurring feature of technological change.

Type:	link
First published:	Thursday, 13 August 2026 at 17:23 UTC
Location:	https://ordinaryabundance.com/
URL:	https://mattwood.fyi/i/f954f0a0