Sixian

The other kind of model is an internal mediator of desire—one who mediates desire from inside the subject’s world. I like to call this world Freshmanistan for short.

What would happen if we stopped treating the web like a blank canvas to paint on, and instead like a material to build with?

God games — made specifically to be abstract, simplified, and ambiguous — invite this sort of loss as a kind of mastery.

Our relation to god games is like this: straddling between the wonderment of the small that makes us feel powerful and the knowledge that we do not (and might not want to) wield that power in the world outside the frame.

Because I'm going to have the hottest new songs. The problem is the consumer wants more than that. They want the old stuff to. So all of a sudden the power in that relationship moves from the distributor who can create new content and also has the consumer relationship to who owns the IP that the consumer wants, the IP that consumer wants a lot of... See more

Data is not inherently valuable. Most data doesn’t produce a real data network effect, and most data network effects aren’t that powerful even once established. Consider the idea that your data strategy, in terms of value creation, is overrated. It can be powerful, but it’s typically not.

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

These memes are extremely dense cultural talismans that accumulate layers and layers of meaning/allusion over time. Like the jargon of academia, memes look like nonsense to outsiders but facilitate deep communication between members of a subculture.Unlike offline communities, these subcultures aren’t always neatly labeled, and people don’t... See more