Sixian

The assumption that my desires are all my own—this story that I tell myself—is what the French social scientist René Girard calls “The Romantic Lie.” The Lie is that I want things independently, or that I choose all of the objects of my desire out of some secret desire chamber in my heart. I know a good thing when I see it; I know what’s desirable... See more

The thinking behind building network effects is less about emotion and more about the math for customers around getting value — utility. Giving the customer more value out of your product by getting your other customers to put value in it. Customers are not even usually aware that they are doing mental math around the value they are getting from... See more

How, when each of us is forbidden to touch, can a renewed sense of our biopolitical entanglement emerge? It may come through a recognition that societal care is not only a personal, face-to-face, and skin-to-skin experience, but something that also happens at a distance, through impersonal systems upon which each of us relies. These too are social... See more

These network effect winners, these new big firms, have power in a way we haven’t seen before, because their power also comes from us using them, not just from something that they do. 

God games invite us to peer at human society like it is an ant farm. In playing god games, we replay the systems that have failed us, in shrunken-down, simplified form. The repetition of these systems at miniature scale sustains the notion that they are natural, the infinite complexity and incalculable possibility that characterizes human society... See more

Both the harsh whispers of the Puritan work ethic and the desperation of children not to disappoint their parents (neither new nor insignificant) emphasize that in exploring their own future, humans have always been stalked by a sense of doing the forbidden.

Historical Inflection Points

Data Scale Can Give Your Startup Some Defensibility

Oral histories, like publications, bind people. After a conversation, all parties maintain ownership of what transpired, and they continue to hold ties to one another.