Sixian

In societies, unlike in goose or vehicle formations, there’s no natural or designed rotation in the higher-energy-cost leader position. Instead, you have dissipative generational wealth-transfer mechanisms, and slow social churn and vertical mobility “rotating” the formation.

Historical narrative, it is simply no longer mapped onto the objective facts of the decade. The maps in our hands don't match the territory, and that's why we are upset.

...we learned how much less important viral effects are to long-term value creation than defensibilies like network effects.While viral effects are a useful attribute of products to reduce the expense of acquiring new users, network effects remain the key driver of value creation for startups in the digital age by keeping people using them.

This is why most of us spend our lives on a never-satisfied search for the next object of desire. There is always another model somewhere making us wonder if what they want, we should be what we want, too.

A quick reflection on the way that most of us answer emails can shed more light on the issue. In addition to being a form of communication, emails are guided by strict rules. They, too, are a ritual of imitation.

History written by the victors offers glimpses of marginalized figures, for whom we need to “fabulate” stories to “strain against the limits of the archive” and “represent lives… through the process of narration.” Building relationships between things is a form of authorship too.

all the signal loss is in the collapse, not in the expansion

This “ecosystem of distribution, repair, and disposal” is, Burrell argues, a “fact of life in everyday places marked by scarcity.”