Brian Sholis

* “It’s lack of awareness to lossiness that dooms most conversations to miscommunication, not the lossiness itself.”

- "Our algorithmic self may or may not be faithful to how we see ourselves, but it has just as many dimensions and secrets."

- “There were different types of people at Oxford, no doubt, but what they had in common was that they were all part of a nascent elite. Elite colleges produce elites. Sociologically speaking, that is their function.”

- "To exist on platforms is to be subject to this kind of continual identity reconstitution, to fluidity. Self-branding attempts to hide this inevitability by claiming agency over it, as though by choosing to turn our identity into capital, it becomes a free choice. Self-obfuscation, on the other hand, effectively embraces it through a kind of acce... See more

* "[Writing] should feel like work rather than labor."

Sometimes you find ideas for the future in stories from the past. This book is the best survey I know of covering adult education, which is pretty much what all education was in many of the decades it covers. The description:

- “It seems like the quantified self movement is about our relationship with time, about the fact that we don’t know how much we exercised or what we ate, we can’t really perceive ourselves mechanically and in a world where there are so many units of time all at once, where there are so many timeframes. It’s really easy to lose track of when you ar... See more