Sixian

Girard taught that all desire is fundamentally a desire for being. In other words, all desire is metaphysical—it seeks a kind of inner transformation, a transfiguration of identity, which we desperately seek but even more desperately deny.

Data Isn’t Always Valuable

It's not a perfect explanation, it's a contingent explanation for contingent times.

It’s always badly defined. There is a vague desire to be a certain kind of person. Yet entrepreneurship begins when someone attempts to solve a specific problem in the world—and when starting a business just happens to be the best way to do it.

To use a post-modern turn of phrase, the Stream is “inhospitable to strangers.” If the Garden is exposition, the stream is conversation and rhetoric, for better and worse.

It's about listening, more than just restoring an image.

The Hidden Price Ceiling of Specializing Good specializing is hard, because if you don’t do it well, you can end up trapping yourself. By creating a narrow positioning or specialization you make yourself more legible and understandable - you’re essentially optimizing for well-defined work. And well-defined work is less senior, less well paid and le... See more

Historically, luxury was expressed in the soaring vaulted ceilings and dazzling stained glass of a cathedral; now, luxury is in a piece of technology so perfect that it seems human hands cannot possibly have created it. Luxury is the market equivalent of feathers on a bird. It’s irrational and sexual, and it easily overwhelms the killjoy, rational ... See more

Our relation to god games is like this: straddling between the wonderment of the small that makes us feel powerful and the knowledge that we do not (and might not want to) wield that power in the world outside the frame.