Sixian

(S)pecialization doesn’t lend itself well to novelty and surprise.

The middle class and poor too, have exit options. To the extent it is real, the “Great Resignation” (and the similar “laying flat” trend in China) is something like an exit from formation flight.

Historically, luxury was expressed in the soaring vaulted ceilings and dazzling stained glass of a cathedral; now, luxury is in a piece of technology so perfect that it seems human hands cannot possibly have created it. Luxury is the market equivalent of feathers on a bird. It’s irrational and sexual, and it easily overwhelms the killjoy, rational... See more

Using technology to solve the problems it causes is as futile as cleaning a grass stain by rubbing grass on it. More technology only amplifies the problems created by an abundance of it. This leads to the most pressing question: How far out will technology grow? And when does it cross the line of comfort?

Modern epistemologies are forward-facing; they centralize the knower. And they often thrive on what some philosophers would call representation nihilism. That is, the presumption that the world is outside, external. And our work is to adequately represent it, right? In our ideas, in our language, and our concepts, to bring it in, so to speak, to... See more

The problem then is not exactly the prioritization of intimacy over remoteness, but rather the disqualification of remote intimacyTherefore, in relation to the sensing layer more generally, positive biopolitics must collapse the dichotomization of interpersonal and infrastructural modes of sensing. We must see them instead as mutually reinforcing.

Our internet, on the other hand, tends to be in quite the hurry. The pace and fervor found online like to keep anxiety company. The internet we are marketed to use is a perfect storm of interface design in the service of an attention economy. It’s dialed-in. Basically, the “feed” as an interface works. “Pull-to-refresh” as a serotonin booster... See more

Critically the world has ended many times to make room for whiteness – the world-performing imperative that enlists bodies of all kinds to perpetuate secure arrivals and safety. Even more critically, there isn’t one world – one dominant already-made world. The world has never been coherent or okay for many of us. And endings are plentiful – often... See more

To look at a container ship is to see the world as a set of modular units. The ship itself: a gigantic rectangle. Steel containers form an improbable stack of colorful bricks atop the deck, held together with twist-locks and lashing rods. Inside the shipping containers square wooden pallets subdivide the space, a nesting layer of modularity that... See more