Sixian

Historian Scott Gabriel Knowles proposes that we think of the “deferred maintenance” of public infrastructures as slow-motion disasters, which sustain the oppression of marginalized and underserved populations. 23 Summers, meanwhile, emphasizes the “debt burden on the next generation,” since the cost of fixing the world compounds over time.

Part 2: How to cultivate a point of view

What would happen if we stopped treating the web like a blank canvas to paint on, and instead like a material to build with?

Illegibility comes from complexity without clarity. I believe that the legibility of the source is one of the most important properties of the web. It’s the main thing that keeps the door open to independent, unmediated contributions to the network. If you can write markup, you don’t need Medium or Twitter or Instagram (though they’re nice to... See more

The middle class and poor too, have exit options. To the extent it is real, the “Great Resignation” (and the similar “laying flat” trend in China) is something like an exit from formation flight.

Data Network Effects, 6 Elements

In a 1970 interview, Marshall McLuhan foreshadowed this situation and described what it might do to our minds: “We live in post-history in the sense that all pasts that ever were are now present to our consciousness and all futures that will be are here now. In that sense, we are post-history and timeless. Instant awareness of the varieties of... See more

Narrative formats enable one person’s hard-won wisdom to be translated into an accessible experience. Rather than storing knowledge as a series of facts in a CMS or in another type of productized, collaborative tool, narrative enables a writer or storyteller to simulate a knowledge-growing experience in the mind of a reader. And with a little... See more