Sixian

The value of objects is not objective—it’s subjective. And that subjective value is determined mimetically, based on our relationships with others. We could say that value is intersubjective: we assign value to things (and therefore desire them) according to what other people want.

"My site is really a record of my becoming who I am. I started so early in my 20s. I didn’t know who I was. I wasn’t doing that much reading then. And it eventually became that. Right now, I rarely read the internet at all. I spend most of my days buried in book piles and letters and diaries and old philosophy books and what not. There’s this term... See more

Instead, that sense of alienation is a product of the fact that the internet as it is serves what Sharma has identified as a dominant temporal order: one that locks each person into their own individualized time-scale, making them feel fully responsible for their success or failure to adhere to the particular temporality that is assigned to them.

The positive thing is that once you solve the first and second sale for one large corporation, you often have enough demand to solve the chicken-or-egg problem and attract supply because the company should represent 100’s or 1,000’s or 10,000’s of buyers. This lets you methodically build toward critical mass and start benefiting from a network... See more

But what Joan is calling for is this notion that the more you get close to how human beings are relating and how human beings are understanding, the harder it is to replace all of that with a fancy algorithm. And one thing about librarians is they know their local context and they understand the different constituencies that are involved. All of... See more

"Doing the work that your parents then do for your spirit or for your character. But there’s an aspect of it that I like: It led me to think about what I do as a kind of two-way, generational reparenting. On the one hand, caring for these bygone thinkers, while at the same time imbuing the present generation with their hand-me-down wisdom and their... See more