Sixian

The problem with a carefully crafted positioning is that it typically makes the wrong part efficient - it makes it easier for clients to hire you for well defined work. It allows greater legibility, trust and expertise around work which is well defined.

What we build is defined and controlled by its unresolvable conflicts. In responsive design, it’s the text and image conundrum I showed earlier. In other, more grand arenas, there is capital versus labor, or collective control versus anarchic individualism. In technology, I believe it comes down to the power dynamics of convenience. To create... See more

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

Two different approaches to finding your voice and point of view: “20% beefs” and the gap between industry and practice.

These semi-pseudonymous networks have strong enough network effects to fend off the competition because they’ve given their users a persistent online identity to which they commit. As social creatures, people are emotionally invested in creating, building, and maintaining their reputations — even if that reputation is semi-virtual.

So much of how we build websites and software comes down to how we think. The churn of tools, methods, and abstractions also signify the replacement of ideology. A person must usually think in a way similar to the people who created the tools to successfully use them. It’s not as simple as putting down a screwdriver and picking up a wrench. A... See more

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

Fandom, on the other hand, pins you in your body, because it disallows you from pretending you are “nowhere” in relation to your subject. Fandom admits care, attachment, and dedication. For Fisher, as for me, fan-love might take up the traditional tools of intellectual critique—say, exposition and analysis of a text—but the writer herself is always... See more