Sixian

These memes are extremely dense cultural talismans that accumulate layers and layers of meaning/allusion over time. Like the jargon of academia, memes look like nonsense to outsiders but facilitate deep communication between members of a subculture.Unlike offline communities, these subcultures aren’t always neatly labeled, and people don’t... See more

By adding the interaction of completed and noncompleted time into the time-flow equation of the historical process (and thus to its relation to the future), Polak introduces the idea of social change as a push-pull process “in which a society is at once pulled forward by its own magnetic images of an idealized future and pushed from behind by its... See more

3. Data ThresholdHow much data do you need to make your product valuable to users? How hard is it to get that dataset — or a dataset like it? If you need a lot of data that is hard to get, that creates a barrier to others competing with you in the future... most Founders overestimate how unique and valuable their dataset is. 

"It’s so strange how we’re able to carry forward this mystery of personal identity even when our present selves are so different from our future selves and from our past selves most of all. I think a lot about this question of, what is a person? Am I the same person as my childhood self? Sure, we share the same body, but even that body is so... See more

Two different approaches to finding your voice and point of view: “20% beefs” and the gap between industry and practice.

Just as the goal of desire is to extinguish itself, audiophilia’s object is a kind of intimacy and immediacy that can be achieved only when one purchases a technology sophisticated enough to disappear itself, allowing creators and listeners to comingle in its transparency. 

History books are ink on paper. They are linear narratives with beginning and ends. They are stories created from archival documents and from other books. Network culture, not really into that. Network culture differs from literary culture in a great many ways. And step one is that the operating system is an unquestioned given. The first thing you... See more

At some point, the erotics of music crossfade into something more onanistic. At its worst, communication equipment becomes a fetish, as when Jodi Dean describes the communicative capitalism of the internet, which, instead of facilitating democracy, becomes its substitute. Counters for likes and retweets are not unlike the specifications sheet for a... See more