Ian Vanagas

The more I examined these efforts at sedentarization, the more I came to see them as a state’s attempt to make a society legible, to arrange the population in ways that simplified the classic state functions of taxation, conscription, and prevention of rebellion. Having begun to think in these terms, I began to see legibility as a central problem... See more

5) Are the claims in the paper falsifiable?

One thing that sets these intensely creative individuals apart, as far as I can tell, is that when sitting with their thoughts they are uncommonly willing to linger in confusion.To be curious about that which confuses.

The amount that Twitter omits is breathtaking; more than any other social platform, it is indifferent to huge swaths of human experience and endeavor. I invite you to imagine this omitted content as a vast, bustling city. Scratching at your timeline, you are huddled in a single small tavern with the journalists, the nihilists, and the chaotic neutr... See more

It is a bad sign when a large percentage of members are declaring information bankruptcy. It means the community is providing too much information members don’t care about. They aren’t helping members make sense of that information.

Today all the gold in the world is worth $12 trillion, while global equities are worth $115 trillion. In 1980, the ratio was one-to-one, with all the gold in the world and global equities having the same value of $2.5 trillion.

Twitter’s only conclusion can be abandonment: an overdue MySpace-ification. I am totally confident about this prediction, but that’s an easy confidence, because in the long run, we’re all MySpace-ified. The only question, then, is how many more possibilities will go unexplored? How much more time will be wasted?

When things are innovative, nobody really cares what they look like.