Sixian

Given the degree of brokenness of the broken world (and the expense of fixing it), we need all maintainers to apply their diverse disciplinary methods and practical skills to the collective project of repair.

As Kei Kreutler points out, conventional calendars and time lines seem awfully out of date now that we are lost in a multi-temporal garden of forking memes.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

But I do think work can be a source of real meaning in life. But, we’ll only ever get out what we put in. And in the case of work life, it is kind of a collective decision. Once your neighbor starts signing off Slack at 3:30 consistently, it’s hard not to do the same. If your closest collaborators don’t turn stuff around quickly, why would you? If... See more

..strong opinions are what distribution is made of. Every independent consultant should be working in public in some form - it’s how you generate awareness, clients and visibility.

Whereas the garden is integrative, the Stream is self-assertive. It’s persuasion, it’s argument, it’s advocacy. It’s personal and personalized and immediate. It’s invigorating. And as we may see in a minute it’s also profoundly unsuited to some of the uses we put it to.

3. Data ThresholdHow much data do you need to make your product valuable to users? How hard is it to get that dataset — or a dataset like it? If you need a lot of data that is hard to get, that creates a barrier to others competing with you in the future... most Founders overestimate how unique and valuable their dataset is. 

Tools break and containers change, but the urge to tell stories remains. Containers and content can be used to mutually inform the shape of their counterparts, expressing a tender, anti-heroic, communal, and present side of storytelling in place of our received understanding of historical material as heroic, individual, disconnected, and past. As... See more

Both the harsh whispers of the Puritan work ethic and the desperation of children not to disappoint their parents (neither new nor insignificant) emphasize that in exploring their own future, humans have always been stalked by a sense of doing the forbidden.

History written by the victors offers glimpses of marginalized figures, for whom we need to “fabulate” stories to “strain against the limits of the archive” and “represent lives… through the process of narration.” Building relationships between things is a form of authorship too.