Sixian

Suspended in the Long Now, we are paralysed between an overhanging past and the supposedly limitless opportunities before us. We are preoccupied with surviving today, while disappointment and crushed “prospects” abound, inhibiting our ability to dream beyond tomorrow.

Critically the world has ended many times to make room for whiteness – the world-performing imperative that enlists bodies of all kinds to perpetuate secure arrivals and safety. Even more critically, there isn’t one world – one dominant already-made world. The world has never been coherent or okay for many of us. And endings are plentiful – often... See more

Unlike the clocks of Old Media, the subjective time zones of internet subcultures are a de-centralized creative expression that reflect the idiosyncrasies of many different reality tunnels. Whereas geographic time zones sit next to each other in a very orderly fashion, internet time zones are kaleidoscopic and multi-layered — they allow you to look... See more

At some point, the erotics of music crossfade into something more onanistic. At its worst, communication equipment becomes a fetish, as when Jodi Dean describes the communicative capitalism of the internet, which, instead of facilitating democracy, becomes its substitute. Counters for likes and retweets are not unlike the specifications sheet for a... See more

Networks such as Twitter, Reddit, and Snapchat also have usernames that differ from people’s real names, but they’re still around. This is because their user identities, in contrast to the dead anonymous/pseudonymous networks discussed earlier, are persistent over time and partially tied to real-world identities (e.g. handles like... See more

Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified.

Historian Scott Gabriel Knowles proposes that we think of the “deferred maintenance” of public infrastructures as slow-motion disasters, which sustain the oppression of marginalized and underserved populations. 23 Summers, meanwhile, emphasizes the “debt burden on the next generation,” since the cost of fixing the world compounds over time.

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.