Sixian

And as Apple’s marketing material demonstrates, this is no accident. iPhone adverts are strange: they make the phone a body. They borrow a visual language less from sci-fi or action movies than from erotica. Devices are shot in extreme close-up, almost always dimly lit. A beam of light traces across a surface so smooth that it occupies a space... See more

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

What is an  Enterprise Gateway Marketplace (EGM)? EGMs are a variant on the traditional 2-sided marketplace model. They are marketplaces tailored to help big enterprises (2,000+ employees) on the demand side coordinate with 1,000s of outside vendors on the supply side. To do this, EGMs have to solve unique workflow and compliance challenges on both... See more

Suspended in the Long Now, we are paralysed between an overhanging past and the supposedly limitless opportunities before us. We are preoccupied with surviving today, while disappointment and crushed “prospects” abound, inhibiting our ability to dream beyond tomorrow.

Over the course of a six-hour simulated vampire rave in a disused Berlin factory decorated to look like a nightclub in Bristol, I forgot I was an interloper. I even forgot to be embarrassed. Nobody cares whether you’re a journalist once the fake fangs are on. There I was, pretend-partying with seventy other people in costumes and acting out vampire... See more

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. 

Thinking about the two opposed theories, it struck me that between the carrier bag story and the hero’s journey, there is a third kind of story that is superior to both: the boat story. A boat is at once a motif of containment and journeying. The mode of sustenance it enables — fishing, especially with a net, a bag full of holes — is somewhere... See more

Just as the goal of desire is to extinguish itself, audiophilia’s object is a kind of intimacy and immediacy that can be achieved only when one purchases a technology sophisticated enough to disappear itself, allowing creators and listeners to comingle in its transparency.