Sixian

The antithesis is that collectivist coordination is its own reward; that we “formation fly” because we simply like mutuality and interdependence more than isolation and independence, and any collectivizable rewards for doing so are simply gravy.

Note how different this sort of meaning making is from what we generally see on today’s web. The excitement here is in building complexity, not reducing it. More importantly note how meaning changes here. We probably know what the tweet would have “meant”, and what a blog post would have “meant”, but meaning here is something different. Instead of... See more

To blog you need to move. You need to sail in the Zeitgeist Sea to where the memefish are biting, find the there there, and capture things while they still have thingness. You need to have been there, done that, and tell tall tales about it. You need to play ironic, Quixotic hero, tilting at windmills (premium mediocre dragons).But you also need to... See more

Society’s Social Contract with Its Citizens

1. You will give up your privacy.


2. If you’re willing and able, you will have a job.

There are two major types of models with whom we have different kinds of relationships. Mimetic desire works differently in each of the two situations. If the model stands at a great distance—not physically, but socially and existentially—then the model is an external mediator of desire. The model is external to the subject’s world. This means that... 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

When Peter Thiel says that he sees a Cargo Cult-like phenomenon play out in startups, he is referring to this kind of metaphysical desire.

In the field of creativity, shared knowledge and wisdom have historically been hard to come by. This may be due to the house-of-cards structures upon which many creative industries are built. Or, perhaps it’s due to the fact that industries that seem to reward buttoned-up, ego-driven practices do not tend to generate great knowledge-sharing... See more

Data Isn’t Always Valuable