Sixian

The other kind of model is an internal mediator of desire—one who mediates desire from inside the subject’s world. I like to call this world Freshmanistan for short.

And this is the idea then, that if you perform knowing (and notice I said, perform), and knowing is always a corporal, embodied, tactile relating with the world - that is always risky. That is always speculative. That is always experimental. And it's always political. When we know the world in ways that centralized us as prime knowers, one of the... See more

1. Data CaptureIn general, however, you want to try and design your product to collect data automatically to:

• Be the place the data is generated, if you can, like Waze does.


• Reduce cycle time and thereby put distance between you and potential competitors.


• Reduce marginal cost of data by avoiding the expenses and operational complexity of collecting

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Looking toward a post-pandemic politics, the problem of over-individuation within the systems we use to model ourselves is compounded by the physical isolation each of us experiences in extended rhythms of lockdown. The situation has brought new cultural and interpersonal realities, many of them unfamiliar and uncomfortable, such as the tense... See more

Fandom, on the other hand, pins you in your body, because it disallows you from pretending you are “nowhere” in relation to your subject. Fandom admits care, attachment, and dedication. For Fisher, as for me, fan-love might take up the traditional tools of intellectual critique—say, exposition and analysis of a text—but the writer herself is always... See more

knowledge and wisdom are hardly “manageable.” They may be channeled, yes, but never fully captured. To capture is to kill. Keep the energy flowing.

In the past, our timekeeping systems were synchronized with the systems of the earth. The rhythms and seasons of nature help us orient and make sense of when we are. Digital media has warped our subjective sense of time and thrown us into a state of atemporal confusion. Aside from surface-level features like “dark mode,” digital temporality is... See more

The non-stop comparison game that Maximizers play usually makes them miserable. We could say that maximizers are more driven by mimetic desire than the “Satisificers”—those who are satisfied with finding “the right fit” rather than needing to maximize every outcome.We not only want the things that we can’t have; we don’t want things unless other... 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.