Sixian

The body is now presumed to have more in common with the segmented clock face — which at least approximated natural rhythms, even if it locked them into a standard compatible with the needs of capital — than it does with the “vapor” of internet time.

Post-activism is always a matter of disability. Not so much spanking new capacities but disability: where something breaks, that agency becomes distributed. That's why in a sense, post-activism means or suggests that the territorial, agential, humanist, dissociated self - the citizen is dead. And suddenly, we are all exposed to these immersive... See more

The spear and the bag. And then there’s the net. A bag with holes. That is carried around on a different kind of bag: a boat. Which is used to gather fish the way women once gathered yams while men sat around repeating their hunting stories from last month. Fish fight back more than yams, but less than dragons. A hero’s journey is sublimated... See more

One result of all this attention to e-waste and supply chains is that examples of non-Western improvisation are now often adapted, appropriated, or fetishized in the West. Designers and artists express fascination with “informal” and “entrepreneurial” design practices, or with favela “bricolage” and marginalized “maker” cultures. This can lead to... See more

Knowledge is slippery, leaky, and ever-shifting. When we spread out our learnings across an expansive, inconsistently used set of platforms, it oozes into multiple digital cracks and crevices. As this happens, the surface area widens, and the depth becomes shallow. In this way, networked technologies enable the evaporation of knowledge.

Collapsing under the pressure of time-flows between completed and noncompleted time, a person’s ability to imagine the future falls away. While wrestling with the past and dealing with the present, concern for the future – any future – pales in comparison to making it through another day.

One of the recurring similarities from anecdotes of burnout is a sense of temporal inertia – a kind of suspension of that time passes both achingly slow (similar to the temporal experience of the depressive where “a day feels like a year”) and freakily fast (the month/s of prescribed “sick leave” from work flies by). This is a sort of hauntology... See more

(S)pecialization doesn’t lend itself well to novelty and surprise.

Web 3 & When Platform Participants Become Platform Owners