Sixian

The problem with a carefully crafted positioning is that it typically makes the wrong part efficient - it makes it easier for clients to hire you for well defined work. It allows greater legibility, trust and expertise around work which is well defined.

The pacemaker-style app attempts to bring an experience of communality back to the highly individuated temporal flow of the online experience, playing on nostalgia for an age when media had a more predictable temporal structure.

One is it was trying to solve a consumer problem with the industry and then two, is technology was enabling this digital consumption of music and the industry just was not forward on that. iTunes was a reaction, if you will, to the ripping services, whereas you could have argued actually it should have been what drove the consumer to the digital... See more

Meeting magicians is the first step to becoming one – when you are attempting to learn implicit knowledge that by definition you don’t understand, it is important to have a bunch of examples in front of you to feed your brain’s pattern-recognition systems.

All Senior Work is Ambiguous.

How could any self-aware person who works in technology not start to organize their disappointment? It’s gotten to where several of my peers are floating half-hearted speculations about their next careers. This isn’t good: you want the talented and mindful people to stick around, not get husked out, then leave frustrated, exhausted, and conflicted.

As Kei Kreutler points out, conventional calendars and time lines seem awfully out of date now that we are lost in a multi-temporal garden of forking memes.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

Sharma writes: “Capital invests in certain temporalities — that is, capital caters to the clock that meters the life and lifestyle of some of its workers and consumers. The others are left to recalibrate themselves to serve a dominant temporality.” Some float in the lazy river, and others clean it.