Sixian

Transparency Creates A Steep Power Law James: And so we’re back to the power-law problem. Which is that some people are very charismatic and other people just aren’t. Some people are really fast, and smart, and interesting to listen to and some people aren’t... And these attention systems we have today — and this identity of the individual with the... See more

Historical narrative, it is simply no longer mapped onto the objective facts of the decade. The maps in our hands don't match the territory, and that's why we are upset.

If social change is a push-pull process “in which a society is at once pulled forward by its own magnetic images of an idealized future and pushed from behind by its realized past,” without a magnetic pull from the front, how are we to move out from the stagnation? The mass phenomenon of the burnout directly reflects the troubles of our cultural... See more

The value of objects is not objective—it’s subjective. And that subjective value is determined mimetically, based on our relationships with others. We could say that value is intersubjective: we assign value to things (and therefore desire them) according to what other people want.

Having an opinion is like having taste. It demonstrates a sensibility and way of thinking that is key when a senior client is considering a consultant for a project.

This approach intends to produce what Donna Haraway calls “situated knowledges,” or “views from somewhere.” The “somewhere” is important because, Haraway writes, no single view is complete: you can only begin to know a subject by reading many views from many somewheres. No writer works in a vacuum, and no writer is without motives; by the same... See more

But clock time was not always viewed as being this organic. The accusation that is today leveled against the internet — that it distorts natural rhythmicity and turns the human body into a machine — was once leveled against clock time itself.