Sixian

"Doing the work that your parents then do for your spirit or for your character. But there’s an aspect of it that I like: It led me to think about what I do as a kind of two-way, generational reparenting. On the one hand, caring for these bygone thinkers, while at the same time imbuing the present generation with their hand-me-down wisdom and their... See more

1. Data CaptureIn general, however, you want to try and design your product to collect data automatically to:

• Be the place the data is generated, if you can, like Waze does.


• Reduce cycle time and thereby put distance between you and potential competitors.


• Reduce marginal cost of data by avoiding the expenses and operational complexity of collecting

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People have been freaking out about the virtuality of data for decades, and you'd think we'd have internalized the obvious truth: there is no shelf. In the digital world, there is no physical constraint that's forcing this kind of organization on us any longer. We can do without it, and you'd think we'd have learned that lesson by now.

Entire cultures, ideologies, and schools of thought—the very bedrocks of our societies—are built upon the notion that as one person grows more wise, so can the whole community. However, the idea that knowledge’s evolution happens privately and individually presents us with a problem: how do we manage knowledge and wisdom collectively?

So I decided to take fandom as my methodology for writing the book. To write as a fan, guided by enthusiasm, need not mean exalting every topic (art, books, movies, people) with the lust of a pubescent girl spreading saliva over a low-quality image of John Mayer’s face. But it allowed me to admit an appetite, affection, and relationship to my... See more

But in many ways, it felt like we were moving in a spiral, building up new sets of knowledge just to orbit the same ideas from a slightly more advanced perspective. We expected the satisfaction of linear knowledge growth, yet despite all the tools at our disposal to expand and archive knowledge, the more we learned, the more we seemed to forget.

We are in a period which I think is dominated by two great cultural signifiers. An analog system that belonged to our parents, which has been shot full of holes. It is the symbol of the ruined castle. "Gothic High-Tech." The ruins of the unsustainable. And the other symbol is the favela slum, "Favela Chic," the informalized, illegalized, heavily... See more