Sixian

Tools break and containers change, but the urge to tell stories remains. Containers and content can be used to mutually inform the shape of their counterparts, expressing a tender, anti-heroic, communal, and present side of storytelling in place of our received understanding of historical material as heroic, individual, disconnected, and past. As... See more

Up to a point, swapping autonomy for ease is a pretty good trade: who wants to run the math on their accounting books or call the restaurant to place a delivery order? But if taken too far, convenience becomes a Trojan Horse. We cede too much control and become dependent on something we can no longer steer. Platforms that promised to bring... See more

Nonetheless, smartphones remain intensely skin-like on a metaphorical level: we stroke, and they are minutely responsive. Our fingertips enjoy the ultra-smoothness of their Gorilla Glass screens, velvety like a youthful cheek. Silicone cases add a body-equivalent degree of friction.‘From the classical (and even the cybernetic) viewpoint, technology... See more

And so it helped, but we didn't see a major reaction in terms of return to growth and monetization in the market. That really started to change around 2014, 2015 as streaming came to the market and streaming, to me, solves not only the first point, which is around the UX and the digital experience, but it solves the monetization point too.

What happens online often shows up in the headlines weeks, months, or even years later. The internet has become the petri dish of culture — the soil in which new movements and novel conversations find root.

The Garden is the web as topology. The web as space. It’s the integrative web, the iterative web, the web as an arrangement and rearrangement of things to one another. Things in the Garden don’t collapse to a single set of relations or canonical sequence, and that’s part of what we mean when we say “the web as topology” or the “web as space”. Every... 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.