Sixian

One of the recurring similarities from anecdotes of burnout is a sense of temporal inertia – a kind of suspension of that time passes both achingly slow (similar to the temporal experience of the depressive where “a day feels like a year”) and freakily fast (the month/s of prescribed “sick leave” from work flies by). This is a sort of hauntology... See more

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

The “conversational web”. A web obsessed with arguing points. A web seen as a tool for self-expression rather than a tool for thought. A web where you weld information and data into your arguments so that it can never be repurposed against you. The web not as a reconfigurable model of understanding but of sealed shut presentations. And a web that... 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?

Likewise, players lose hours inside god games. They are sometimes referred to as “time-sweep” games and noted for their addictiveness. Crucially, time moves faster in the god games. Years pass with one turn of Civilization or SimCity. One Sims day is equal to 24 minutes in our world. There is also a particular kind of time-abolishing focus required... See more

As a rule, twentieth century time was imposed on people from the top-down. Twenty-first century time is a bottom-up choose your own adventure story that allows people to make their own time machines and live anywhen.

What’s striking … is the apparent shift from a politics of reason to a politics of experience… In the eyes of many, personal experience has become the new way of being at home in the world. It’s like the bubble that holds the foam at a distance. Experience nowadays trumps reason… We’re led to believe that sensibility, emotions, affect, sentiments... See more