Sixian

In his book The Container Principle, author Alexander Klose writes that “it is, above all, this image of a frictionless, well-ordered organization through standardized containers that makes containers so attractive as a structural metaphor. It evokes the image of a neutral medium, a pure movement of units of information, production, and consumption... See more

More than just trust however, ambiguous work requires a specific kind of energy. Consulting is about changing clients. You’re often an outsider, brought in to catalyze some kind of change that the client has been unable to change on their own.

From the author of Oval, a collection of “fan nonfiction” that proposes new possibilities and genealogies for weird fiction in the age of extinction.

This collection is about love, death, plants, and weird fiction. It takes its title from a Margaret Atwood story in which an adolescent girl seems to turn into a tree. It examines works by Doris... See more

2. Product ValueIt’s easy to collect data to make product improvements or find one or two key insights from a data set. These add value, but it’s not a network effect... With a true data network effect, you see direct, constant increases in product value with new usage and thus new data.

As Kei Kreutler points out, conventional calendars and time lines seem awfully out of date now that we are lost in a multi-temporal garden of forking memes. This dissonance between felt time and measured time gets more confusing by the day, and it’s beginning to feel unsustainable. Amidst the unsettling chaos, it’s tempting to crawl back to the... See more

On the other hand, networks with profiles that allow for more anonymity often grow more easily at the beginning because of the lower commitment required. Long term, however, we’ve seen them burn out and produce less value on average.

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

In many academic disciplines and professional practices — architecture, urban studies, labor history, development economics, and the information sciences, just to name a few — maintenance has taken on new resonance as a theoretical framework, an ethos, a methodology, and a political cause.

Critics and activists have validated a greater range of (re)productive activities, to include all the mental, manual, and emotional work necessary to “maintain existing life and to reproduce the next generation.” 34 Maintaining life — that’s a big job.