Sixian

One of the primary anxieties of the digital age is that an online life is a kind of half-life; that time spent on the internet is wasted time rather than lived time. Temporality and rhythmicity is the most popular way to differentiate between the live and the inanimate, the natural and the artificial, even if it is not the most accurate

Each subculture has an implicit understanding of its “ideological conversion funnel”. This phrase, borrowed from digital marketing, refers to the stages that people go through on the way to becoming a True Believer, from first contact with a mysterious meme to full-on understanding of a grand narrative. The conversion process is known to the in-gro... See more

I also appreciated that the Towercam’s output reinforces the 24-hour cycle of a day. You can’t log on to the Wilson portal at 2 a.m. and get “fresh content;” you’ll get a black frame. And you’ll continue to get a black frame until the sun rises. Beyond that, the image changes by the season. Further still, we’re watching mountains—ever-shifting and ... See more

These aluminium and glass contours may be a considerable distance from the organic forms of the human body, but nonetheless there’s shared DNA: Apple is, somehow, more organic than other tech brands. This most abstract of bodily resemblances is part of where its sexiness originates.

Morality might pose the question of “what should we do?” but ethics is about “what comes to matter?” And what comes to be excluded in a mattering of what comes to matter.

The Passion Economy Demands Creator-Format Fit

Barnes reports that Egyptian farmers in the Nile Valley maintain irrigation ditches not just to keep the water flowing, but also to “sustain communal ties with other farmers.” 20 Similar protocols prevail in Nikhil Anand’s Hydraulic City, in which the anthropologist shows how the maintenance of water infrastructures binds residents, plumbers, engin... See more

In his 1985 essay “To Shrink,” philosopher Vilém Flusser attributes the interest in the discovery of worlds within the infinitesimal to a kind of revulsion for the body, a contempt for physical size that, he argues, “represents a regression, a distancing.” It was a sign of how we were becoming “less solid,” diminishing the importance of the corpore... See more