Sixian

The story ends when enough people stop believing in it, not when the opportunity space actually dries up.

To look at a container ship is to see the world as a set of modular units. The ship itself: a gigantic rectangle. Steel containers form an improbable stack of colorful bricks atop the deck, held together with twist-locks and lashing rods. Inside the shipping containers square wooden pallets subdivide the space, a nesting layer of modularity that... See more

The web also needs diligent people so that the idea of what the web is and what it does remains legible to everyone. This applies to being able to read the systems and social environments the web creates so we know what’s real and what’s not, but the call for legibility should also humbly apply to writing legible code and designs systems that are... See more

The assumption that my desires are all my own—this story that I tell myself—is what the French social scientist René Girard calls “The Romantic Lie.” The Lie is that I want things independently, or that I choose all of the objects of my desire out of some secret desire chamber in my heart. I know a good thing when I see it; I know what’s desirable... See more

(S)pecialization doesn’t lend itself well to novelty and surprise.

...a lot of people make businesses to compete with tools where people are already making money. I know in marketplaces, we often see people design marketplaces to try to intermediate or digitize transactions that are already happening.  But the big mental breakthrough is to say, “Can we create something that creates new transactions that aren’t... See more

“It’s sort of like: ‘What do you want to be in life?’”, Thiel tells me. “And the answer, more often than not, is ‘I want to be an entrepreneur.’”

Post-activism is always a matter of disability. Not so much spanking new capacities but disability: where something breaks, that agency becomes distributed. That's why in a sense, post-activism means or suggests that the territorial, agential, humanist, dissociated self - the citizen is dead. And suddenly, we are all exposed to these immersive... See more