Sixian

Browse versus search is a radical increase in the trust we put in link infrastructure, and in the degree of power derived from that link structure.

And so that certainly helped a little bit with demand, but it didn't solve this more monetization issue that consumers seem to have, which was why do I need to pay every new piece of content I want to consume? ... The consumer proposition wasn't fully resolved. It was just a step by the industry in the direction. It also wasn't great for the... See more

These examples suggest that a grand narrative produces a slipstream capable of sustaining cohesion in large societies if it satisfies the following conditions:

1. It produces benefits today 


2. It promises an afterlife where heaven >> hell 


3. There is a consolation prize even if we don’t get to heaven

In the digital age, everything from the evening news to the 9 – 5 workday has been freed from the cage of industrial era timekeeping. As long as you have an internet connection, you can march to the beat of your own second hand.

Thinking about the two opposed theories, it struck me that between the carrier bag story and the hero’s journey, there is a third kind of story that is superior to both: the boat story. A boat is at once a motif of containment and journeying. The mode of sustenance it enables — fishing, especially with a net, a bag full of holes — is somewhere... See more

Stretch wrap illustrates one of the fundamental stories of the twentieth century. On the one hand, cities and industries are constructed on an epic and hyper-visible scale from steel, wood, glass, and feats of engineering. On the other hand, within the interior spaces of the warehouse, the factory, and the distribution center, plastic expands and... 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

Note how different this sort of meaning making is from what we generally see on today’s web. The excitement here is in building complexity, not reducing it. More importantly note how meaning changes here. We probably know what the tweet would have “meant”, and what a blog post would have “meant”, but meaning here is something different. Instead of... See more

1/ Lemme do a 1-slide presentation since I'm feeling job sick. Title: How to Actually Manage Attention Without Smashing Your Phone and Retreating to a Log Cabin