We’ve lost gradients of intimacy, a concept from architecture, the ability to loiter and meander through a space, engaging when we want in varying levels of expression. We don’t have any peripheral vision on the internet. We have to be in one place or the other. Simultaneously, we’re never really in any place—we can always blame connection issues a... See more

Open-ended meaning-making, shared world, scarce real-estate. These three properties are crucial. Every game with more than one player becomes a game about the interaction between those players. Without shared scarcity, there is no incentive to join our realities, and meaning-making becomes fork-only.

The story of a human retreat from this world, either to the stars above or the virtual realm within, can mask a disregard for or resignation about what is done with the world we do have, both in terms of the structures of human societies and the non-human world within which they are rooted. Put another way, we might say that imagining the digital s... See more

Instead, that sense of alienation is a product of the fact that the internet as it is serves what Sharma has identified as a dominant temporal order: one that locks each person into their own individualized time-scale, making them feel fully responsible for their success or failure to adhere to the particular temporality that is assigned to them.

You might wake up in the morning with your psyche firmly on the bottom of the tower, feeling like a lone individual. You head to work, where you brainstorm a project with five other people, becoming part of a six-person thinking machine. After work you join a political protest outside, losing your sense of self in the exhilaration of being a tiny p

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