Sixian

5. Data Is Central to Customer ValueNetflix’s core product value, it turns out, is content licensing and content production. Recently, they have even dropped the long tail of titles they used to match you to. The data network effect they thought they had turned out to be peripheral to the real value of the product.

...if you dig a little deeper, the reason indie labels and direct distribution have gained a bit of share is related to the fact that as we spoke about earlier, we've seen the barrier to creating and distributing music collapse.

Here’s the big change we all need to understand. The network itself is now the means of value creation, and thus wealth creation. Wealth, wisdom, power, and status all flow on the network...the big picture is that we can see each other and communicate about most things instantly and for zero marginal cost.

We are in a period which I think is dominated by two great cultural signifiers. An analog system that belonged to our parents, which has been shot full of holes. It is the symbol of the ruined castle. "Gothic High-Tech." The ruins of the unsustainable. And the other symbol is the favela slum, "Favela Chic," the informalized, illegalized, heavily... See more

One of the primary anxieties of the digital age is that an online life is a kind of half-life; that time spent on the internet is wasted time rather than lived time. Temporality and rhythmicity is the most popular way to differentiate between the live and the inanimate, the natural and the artificial, even if it is not the most accurate

As we’ve pushed past the dawn of this so-called creator renaissance, however, and the sun starts to loom high in the sky, I’ve found myself wondering where it all goes. 
I still think that the new models that have been, and continue to be, developed today can offer creators stability and financial freedom in a way that the gig life does not. But... See more

When you look around at all the major candidates for wealth-production frontiers today — blockchains, AI, biotech, renewables — none of them seems capable of producing enough of a grand narrative slipstream to bind today’s complex and large modern societies. So I have to conclude that we’re in for a great deal of antiflocking and divergence.