25: Reggie James - Our Infinite Mirrors (Live at FWB Fest)
Reggie James (Substack, X) is a designer, writer, and entrepreneur. Reggie previously founded Eternal and recently edited and published Hardware 2024, a book highlighting recent attempts at creating a different hardware future. This conversation happened live on stage at FWB Fest 2025 in Idyllwild, CA.We explored Reggie's frame of technology as a mirror and the Kevin Kelly-inspired notion that technology has an agenda of its own. Reggie has a fresh perspective on brand and "feel" as they relate to technology products, why friction can create meaning, and a Naoto Fukasawa-influenced view that design is about communicating values. The latter, for Reggie, originates with writing.We dipped into a discussion about how hardware and how it shapes our software cultures, and what a world with more basic luxuries like the iPhone might look like. We also discussed "loaded" technologies and the current narratives that are working in crypto vs. what might be idealized.The conversation concludes with a zoomed out meditation on myth, American western idealism, personal history, and what type of vision is required to create something radically new.
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Speaker A: Welcome to Dialectic Episode 25 with Reggie James. This is a fun one. It was my first ever live episode done on stage at FWB Fest in Idlewild, California. FWB is a crypto thing, a DAO, a Discord, a center of cultural production, and lots more. And every year they throw a fest, one part crypto conference, one part music festival in a really special place in California called the Idlewild Arts Academy. I've been to FEST all 4 years, and FWB is important to me in part because it was started by my friend Trevor McFedries and run for a long time by friend and Dialectic guest Alex Zhang.
This year I was given the opportunity to do Dialectic on stage, which was quite a treat, and there was nobody better than my friend Reggie James to both be the guinea pig for a live episode and cover just a wide range of topics that felt relevant for FWB, whether that be technology, hardware, culture, brand, crypto, and more. I introduced Reggie in the live recording. So with that, here's my conversation with Reggie live on stage in Idlewild. As always, if you enjoy Dialectic, please share it with a friend. Okay, let's kick things off.
Speaker B: Maybe you can share what Dialectic is. Speaker A: First things first, uh, I'm Jackson. I host a podcast called Dialectic. I think what I'm aiming for with Dialectic, or at least my tagline for it, is conversational portraits of original people. Um, and people ask me what my podcast is about, I basically just say I find people who are interesting to me and I interview them, um, or have conversations with them. I think another way to think about it maybe that would set the stage for today is like getting to know people by way of their ideas, and that sort of is a selection criteria for who I talk to.
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