Sixian

Just as the goal of desire is to extinguish itself, audiophilia’s object is a kind of intimacy and immediacy that can be achieved only when one purchases a technology sophisticated enough to disappear itself, allowing creators and listeners to comingle in its transparency. 

We’re building edgeless environments of divergency. Things are added in chaos, then if successful, they expanded further and further out until they collapse and rearrange. This is probably why responsive design feels so relevant, maddening, and divisive: its patterns mimic the larger patterns of technology itself.

Perhaps gathering stories is radical because it refuses to give the gatherer all of the credit. The collector-collection dynamic is deliberately broken. The person who puts it together is only one of many parts.

When contemplating these questions, it’s easy to get carried away into a techno-utopian dream world where all wisdom is neatly catalogued into accessible bits, so any problem could be easily researched and overcome. While that vision may or may not be attainable, it does feel quite possible to imagine a world in which all people treat their own... See more

A quick reflection on the way that most of us answer emails can shed more light on the issue. In addition to being a form of communication, emails are guided by strict rules. They, too, are a ritual of imitation.

It’s hard to see which parts of your experience and opinions are distinctive and resonate without sharing them. In my experience, it’s rarely the big grand vision that people are attracted to but rather something more mundane and grounded - something that has a clarity and weight about it that is distinctive.

In his 1985 essay “To Shrink,” philosopher Vilém Flusser attributes the interest in the discovery of worlds within the infinitesimal to a kind of revulsion for the body, a contempt for physical size that, he argues, “represents a regression, a distancing.” It was a sign of how we were becoming “less solid,” diminishing the importance of the... See more