Sixian

i am very grateful everyone who came to my talk at fwb fest and those who helped me out with it recently. in some ways this talk took 6 years to put together. the basic theory of "lifestyles," identity, and brands was there by 2016, but i was missing a strong notion of culture

The other kind of model is an internal mediator of desire—one who mediates desire from inside the subject’s world. I like to call this world Freshmanistan for short.

Four Attributes Of A Successful EGM 1. EGMs have a Gateway, a single point of access for many buyers. 2. Getting inside, get approved.3. Create trust in supply through data.4. Help vendors comply.

So, the model of the major labels certainly has changed, but by the way, after 15 years of decline and pressure, we are now in a world where the major labels continue to be the dominant players in the market and so, a good question is why is that? What is their value today to the consumer and to the artist? Democratization of music has done some... See more

The conflict between old and new media is in many ways a dispute over who gets to control the “clocks” we live by; who gets to set the pace; who gets access to the technologies that make it easy to synchronize (or de-synchronize) large groups people.Clocks may seem innocuous, but they’re never ideologically neutral. Timekeeping doesn’t just happen.

In the past, our timekeeping systems were synchronized with the systems of the earth. The rhythms and seasons of nature help us orient and make sense of when we are. Digital media has warped our subjective sense of time and thrown us into a state of atemporal confusion. Aside from surface-level features like “dark mode,” digital temporality is... See more

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

You can't do it. You can't collapse these categorizations without some signal loss. The problem is, because the cataloguers assume their classification should have force on the world, they underestimate the difficulty of understanding what users are thinking, and they overestimate the amount to which users will agree, either with one another or... See more