Sixian

Fobazi Ettarh argues that librarians are conditioned to accept low pay, low status, and expanding workloads because librarianship is regarded as a calling — a care-centric vocation that is “inherently good and sacred, and therefore beyond critique.” Yet historians have shown that libraries, for all their goodness, are built upon protocols and... See more

Up to a point, swapping autonomy for ease is a pretty good trade: who wants to run the math on their accounting books or call the restaurant to place a delivery order? But if taken too far, convenience becomes a Trojan Horse. We cede too much control and become dependent on something we can no longer steer. Platforms that promised to bring... See more

A new generation will arise who does not need things explained to them in this way. They will not wonder at a slogan like 'futurity now', because they will have never known anything different.

Artworks don’t manage knowledge—they channel it. It takes time and attention to understand an artwork’s meaning. Each piece demands a process of reconciliation, and a merging of two contexts: the artwork’s own history and the viewer’s private knowledge network. When it’s placed in a new context, its meaning evolves and expands elastically. It... See more

To blog you need to move. You need to sail in the Zeitgeist Sea to where the memefish are biting, find the there there, and capture things while they still have thingness. You need to have been there, done that, and tell tall tales about it. You need to play ironic, Quixotic hero, tilting at windmills (premium mediocre dragons).But you also need to... See more

God games invite us to peer at human society like it is an ant farm. In playing god games, we replay the systems that have failed us, in shrunken-down, simplified form. The repetition of these systems at miniature scale sustains the notion that they are natural, the infinite complexity and incalculable possibility that characterizes human society... 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.

One result of all this attention to e-waste and supply chains is that examples of non-Western improvisation are now often adapted, appropriated, or fetishized in the West. Designers and artists express fascination with “informal” and “entrepreneurial” design practices, or with favela “bricolage” and marginalized “maker” cultures. This can lead to... See more