Sixian

Browse versus search is a radical increase in the trust we put in link infrastructure, and in the degree of power derived from that link structure.

• The Industry/Reality Gap

Looking at successful examples of 20% beef we see that there’s a common theme of analyzing the gap between theory and industry. The unique vantage point that the consultant has is the vantage point across multiple clients - sometimes across multiple industries too.

In the stream metaphor you don’t experience the Stream by walking around it and looking at it, or following it to its end. You jump in and let it flow past. You feel the force of it hit you as things float by. It’s not that you are passive in the Stream. You can be active. But your actions in there — your blog posts, @ mentions, forum comments —... See more

In Ursula K. Le Guin’s Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction (1986), Le Guin posits the first human tool as the basket, not the spear, thereby recasting the first protagonist as a gatherer, not a hunter. Not only did this address the deeply gendered roles of these two parts, it also changed the singular hero to the plural collective, from he to we. “Before... See more

It’s curious to want to call an advert ‘objectifying’, because of course it is: its function is to promote an object. Yet this nonetheless feels like the right word, not only in reference to the object of the ad’s intentions, but the kind of gaze that is filming it. The camera, the eye, is fixated on the phone’s ‘thing-ness’: not what it can do,... See more

The moment when the fiction changes the reality, when the story you are telling has real effects. You might not have begun with yourself in mind, but at this moment you come into sudden, astonishing contact with your “I.”I wanted to provide points of realization akin to what I experienced in the roleplay, and which I also experienced while writing:... See more

The list of factors making ontology a bad fit is, also, an almost perfect description of the Web -- largest corpus, most naive users, no global authority, and so on. The more you push in the direction of scale, spread, fluidity, flexibility, the harder it becomes to handle the expense of starting a cataloguing system and the hassle of maintaining... See more

"It’s so strange how we’re able to carry forward this mystery of personal identity even when our present selves are so different from our future selves and from our past selves most of all. I think a lot about this question of, what is a person? Am I the same person as my childhood self? Sure, we share the same body, but even that body is so... See more

Sharma writes: “Capital invests in certain temporalities — that is, capital caters to the clock that meters the life and lifestyle of some of its workers and consumers. The others are left to recalibrate themselves to serve a dominant temporality.” Some float in the lazy river, and others clean it.