Sixian

But the most famous familiar one is the story where things fall apart, and how this culturally stable setting with your coherence and just the attempt of the protagonist trying to live true to those moral demands on his person creates trouble, which tells me, and I think, to any other reader, that the world is imbued with irony and paradox and... See more

In a 1970 interview, Marshall McLuhan foreshadowed this situation and described what it might do to our minds: “We live in post-history in the sense that all pasts that ever were are now present to our consciousness and all futures that will be are here now. In that sense, we are post-history and timeless. Instant awareness of the varieties of... See more

My thought is more about relative slowness. What is a healthy pace for your own personal use of the internet, relative to the pace of the internet you have been conditioned to expect?

One important lesson here is that engagement matters to network effects. A first level understanding of network effects is that they occur when more users = more value for existing users. That’s true, but go one level deeper, and you realize it’s actually the amount of usage that matters.

It's all dependent on human context. This is what we're starting to see with del.icio.us, with Flickr, with systems that are allowing for and aggregating tags. The signal benefit of these systems is that they don't recreate the structured, hierarchical categorization so often forced onto us by our physical systems. Instead, we're dealing with a... See more

Male storytelling is a sublimated hunting narrative, female storytelling is a sublimated gathering narrative. One is born of brags, the other is born of rumors. One kind of writing throws a metaphorical spear at a metaphorical beast, attempting to kill it and bring back the carcass. The other kind puts relatively unresisting things into bags, and... See more

Data Network Effects, 6 Elements

Critics and activists have validated a greater range of (re)productive activities, to include all the mental, manual, and emotional work necessary to “maintain existing life and to reproduce the next generation.” 34 Maintaining life — that’s a big job.

"It’s so strange how we’re able to carry forward this mystery of personal identity even when our present selves are so different from our future selves and from our past selves most of all. I think a lot about this question of, what is a person? Am I the same person as my childhood self? Sure, we share the same body, but even that body is so... See more