Sixian

But at the grand narrative level, everybody is getting off the big turnpike, and there is not going to be a grand narrative slipstream for a while. But smaller scale narrative slipstreams — from family to city-scale — may still be viable.

We often think making things for the web is a process of simplifying—the hub, the dashboard, the control panel are all dreams of technology that coalesces, but things have a tendency to diverge into a multiplicity of options. We pile on more tools and technology, each one increasingly nuanced and minor in its critical differences. Clearly,... See more

Throughout time, humans have sought out ways to translate our private knowledge-building experiences into more public forms. At the most basic level, we do this through language. Ever since we learned to communicate through words (or grunts) some 100,000 years ago, we’ve been pushing our knowledge-sharing techniques further.

Sharma argues that the contemporary relationship to time is characterized by “the looming expectation that everyone must become an entrepreneur of time control.” Each of us must “recalibrate” to temporal expectations that vary widely along lines of power and privilege.

From a cultural perspective, Fisher contrasts the cultural energy of the 20th century with the languors of the 21st: While 20th century experimental culture was seized by a recombinatorial delirium, which made it feel as if newness was infinitely available, the 21st century is oppressed by a crushing sense of finitude and exhaustion. It doesn’t... See more

Technology only adds more—it is never this or that; it is always this and that.

In his book The Container Principle, author Alexander Klose writes that “it is, above all, this image of a frictionless, well-ordered organization through standardized containers that makes containers so attractive as a structural metaphor. It evokes the image of a neutral medium, a pure movement of units of information, production, and consumption... See more

Success Key #2: Founder-Market Fit ... it’s really important for the Founder of those startups to have great founder market fit, to have really deep customer empathy, to be like basically one of them.

Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified.