Sixian

The curators asked if ‘a sharp object could be an erotic object – or a square object or something that is not round, or that does not have a smooth texture?’ It seemed that the answer was generally no: curves were essential.

Developing a point of view is a long journey, and it’s not easy. But it’s a more forgiving path than specializing.

Knowledge is slippery, leaky, and ever-shifting. When we spread out our learnings across an expansive, inconsistently used set of platforms, it oozes into multiple digital cracks and crevices. As this happens, the surface area widens, and the depth becomes shallow. In this way, networked technologies enable the evaporation of knowledge.

“Cyberspace has no seasons. The virtual world is absent of night and day. Internet Time is not driven by the sun’s position, it is driven by yours — your location in space and time.”

Sharma writes: “Capital invests in certain temporalities — that is, capital caters to the clock that meters the life and lifestyle of some of its workers and consumers. The others are left to recalibrate themselves to serve a dominant temporality.” Some float in the lazy river, and others clean it.

The list of factors making ontology a bad fit is, also, an almost perfect description of the Web -- largest corpus, most naive users, no global authority, and so on. The more you push in the direction of scale, spread, fluidity, flexibility, the harder it becomes to handle the expense of starting a cataloguing system and the hassle of maintaining... See more

Because we can find algorithms in the universe, because everything can be broken down into bits, our technology is simply a matter-of-course pathway — linear, like the technology tree in Civilization. It suggests too that hard work can be found in nature: If ants labor tirelessly, mindlessly, then why wouldn’t human workers do the same, under... See more

We are living in an atemporal network culture, and I don't think that requires a moral panic. I think it ought to be regarded as something like moving into a new town.