Sixian

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

Forgetting is a feature, not a bug. It makes us feel like we’re moving forward through time, rather than standing still or running in circles. My grandmother and her ancestors knew this all too well. Artful forgetting, editing, and curation allowed them to craft narratives that helped their children understand the past and orient towards the... See more

If the container is what allows things to move from land to sea to land, and the pallet is what allows products to be moved from warehouses to containers to trucks to distribution centers, then stretch wrap is what allows diverse products to be bundled together and made anew as palletized cargo.

The antithesis is that collectivist coordination is its own reward; that we “formation fly” because we simply like mutuality and interdependence more than isolation and independence, and any collectivizable rewards for doing so are simply gravy.

Joan Tronto and Berenice Fisher define care as “everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair ‘our world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible.Who doesn’t care for care? Yet care, like maintenance, is easily romanticized. Historian Michelle Murphy argues that the “politics of care” promoted by 1970s feminists were “conditioned by... See more

“the viewer gets lost in [miniature] objects, and that in the process of projecting mental scenarios onto them they lose sense of themselves physically.” This disorienting disembodiment might account for god games’ lost-time effect, their inducement of compulsiveness. By entering that “private time,” a player is “disarticulated from embodiment and... See more

Here’s a new marketplace category: Enterprise Gateway Marketplaces (EGMs).   There is a white space opportunity for Founders in EGMs that combines SaaS embedding defensibility with the network effects defensibility of a marketplace.

Desire always needs something to latch onto; it can’t stay free-floating. In this sense, it operates like a bivalve that has to be attached to a substrate (a rock, or some other surface). As soon as it becomes detached from one thing, it immediately attaches itself to something else: another model.