Sixian

..unlike specialization, strong opinions don’t narrow down your options or grind against your identity as a generalist. Strong opinions allow for divergent, generative futures.

We and them is built into the logic of the Stream. In blogging, each person gets to define who they believe is in the conversation they are having. That’s what blogging/twitter/facebook is, by definition.

We’re lost in the garden of forking memes, and the idea of linear progress along a single historical time line seems like a quaint artifact from a much simpler era. Grand visions of the future are few and far between; the pop cultural landscape is littered with post-apocalyptic dystopias. If we want to make sense of how we got here, we have to... See more

Li: ...I think the internet uniquely unlocks this opportunity for the next generation and all subsequent generations.  This is different from just “be your own boss.” You can do that in the gig economy. But with a gig, you’re doing really rote commoditized, kind of repetitive work, where the platform is telling you exactly what to do.  Whereas in... See more

By adding the interaction of completed and noncompleted time into the time-flow equation of the historical process (and thus to its relation to the future), Polak introduces the idea of social change as 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... See more

One is it was trying to solve a consumer problem with the industry and then two, is technology was enabling this digital consumption of music and the industry just was not forward on that. iTunes was a reaction, if you will, to the ripping services, whereas you could have argued actually it should have been what drove the consumer to the digital... 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.

I also appreciated that the Towercam’s output reinforces the 24-hour cycle of a day. You can’t log on to the Wilson portal at 2 a.m. and get “fresh content;” you’ll get a black frame. And you’ll continue to get a black frame until the sun rises. Beyond that, the image changes by the season. Further still, we’re watching mountains—ever-shifting and... See more