Sixian

Over the course of a six-hour simulated vampire rave in a disused Berlin factory decorated to look like a nightclub in Bristol, I forgot I was an interloper. I even forgot to be embarrassed. Nobody cares whether you’re a journalist once the fake fangs are on. There I was, pretend-partying with seventy other people in costumes and acting out vampire... See more

Networks such as Twitter, Reddit, and Snapchat also have usernames that differ from people’s real names, but they’re still around. This is because their user identities, in contrast to the dead anonymous/pseudonymous networks discussed earlier, are persistent over time and partially tied to real-world identities (e.g. handles like... See more

From the author of Oval, a collection of “fan nonfiction” that proposes new possibilities and genealogies for weird fiction in the age of extinction.

This collection is about love, death, plants, and weird fiction. It takes its title from a Margaret Atwood story in which an adolescent girl seems to turn into a tree. It examines works by Doris... See more

The middle class and poor too, have exit options. To the extent it is real, the “Great Resignation” (and the similar “laying flat” trend in China) is something like an exit from formation flight.

The conflict between old and new media is in many ways a dispute over who gets to control the “clocks” we live by; who gets to set the pace; who gets access to the technologies that make it easy to synchronize (or de-synchronize) large groups people.Clocks may seem innocuous, but they’re never ideologically neutral. Timekeeping doesn’t just happen.

What we build is defined and controlled by its unresolvable conflicts. In responsive design, it’s the text and image conundrum I showed earlier. In other, more grand arenas, there is capital versus labor, or collective control versus anarchic individualism. In technology, I believe it comes down to the power dynamics of convenience. To create... See more

The relative invisibility of stretch wrap outside the warehouse or distribution center is echoed in the critical literature on the movement of cargo.

Likewise, players lose hours inside god games. They are sometimes referred to as “time-sweep” games and noted for their addictiveness. Crucially, time moves faster in the god games. Years pass with one turn of Civilization or SimCity. One Sims day is equal to 24 minutes in our world. There is also a particular kind of time-abolishing focus required... See more