Brian Sholis

* “The most impactful mitigation strategy is to accept that lossiness exists.”

* “What changes your life is your peers… The people you rise up with. They’re your power base. Not the person who’s already done it.”

- “In arguing that faculty radicalism is often illusory I do not mean to suggest that it doesn’t matter. On the contrary, it probably matters more than we generally think, just because elites probably matter more than we generally think.”

- “Workflows, not data, are the subject of product innovation now. And the subject is easier to study, to compare, to share and extend, when it’s concrete and durable, not an organic, ephemeral series of actions.”

- “The way we talk about relevance suggests that it is a quality a work possesses, something an author has engineered or achieved, an accomplishment. This, too, seems wrong to me. Relevance may have more to do with the audience; it is a quality of our reading at least as much as an attribute of what we read.”

A thoughtful essay about how our online identities—even when our default mode is misdirection or obfuscation—are visible to the platforms we use, and by extension to capitalism and its prerogatives.

- “Textual interfaces are everywhere in the modern workplace. Slash-commands in Slack and Discord and Notion, hash-tags for channels and tagging, special syntax for searching and querying data across applications, @-mentions in social media and team work environments, and so on. We’re training ourselves to be more savvy users of the textual... See more

- “Perhaps our biggest time error is near bias—caring too much about what’s about to happen, and too little about the future.”

- “In a just world, a college like Swarthmore simply wouldn’t exist. The mere possibility would be regarded as obscene.”