Sixian

Nonetheless, smartphones remain intensely skin-like on a metaphorical level: we stroke, and they are minutely responsive. Our fingertips enjoy the ultra-smoothness of their Gorilla Glass screens, velvety like a youthful cheek. Silicone cases add a body-equivalent degree of friction.‘From the classical (and even the cybernetic) viewpoint, technology... See more

The assumption that my desires are all my own—this story that I tell myself—is what the French social scientist René Girard calls “The Romantic Lie.” The Lie is that I want things independently, or that I choose all of the objects of my desire out of some secret desire chamber in my heart. I know a good thing when I see it; I know what’s desirable... See more

In my own life at least, burnout was not about trying to give too much, it was about trying to give things that I didn’t really have to give. It involved what I came to think of as a ‘high artificial ethic’ about what I ought to be doing in the world rather than an ethic that grew up from my natural giftedness and my place in the ecosystem of my... See more

I think an important part of imagining this version of yourself is forgetting it.

Illegibility comes from complexity without clarity. I believe that the legibility of the source is one of the most important properties of the web. It’s the main thing that keeps the door open to independent, unmediated contributions to the network. If you can write markup, you don’t need Medium or Twitter or Instagram (though they’re nice to... See more

Governments and other traditional forms of hierarchical power are ill-equipped to understand the network economy and evolve the new social contract...they live in a hierarchical world of scale, and we live in the networked world. Different technologies lead to different mental models, different languages, different tools for making positive... See more

Girard taught that all desire is fundamentally a desire for being. In other words, all desire is metaphysical—it seeks a kind of inner transformation, a transfiguration of identity, which we desperately seek but even more desperately deny.