Sixian

One of my heuristics for growth is to seek out the magicians, and find the magic. Often without noticing, your progress in aspects of life or all of it unconsciously becomes linear. You made a certain amount of money last year, so you aim to make some ‘reasonable’ proportion more this year. But you are largely using the same tools to get 2x as you... See more

And even when we’re not being provoked, it still matters. We can choose not to respond in kind to the nonchalance and laziness that surrounds us—the mediocrity that cries out for transcendence, but which is all too easy to placate with little effort.

It kind of romanticizes the Indigenous, and this is why, you know, sometimes I find that in the recent upheavals and desire to center Indigenous realities, there is a romanticization of those Indigenous technologies that kind of instrumentalized them for modern anxieties, like, grabs them by the scruff of their necks and says, “here's climate... See more

God games invite us to peer at human society like it is an ant farm. In playing god games, we replay the systems that have failed us, in shrunken-down, simplified form. The repetition of these systems at miniature scale sustains the notion that they are natural, the infinite complexity and incalculable possibility that characterizes human society... 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

One human question, in particular, haunts me: What effect will Twitter’s decision to ban Trump have on the mimetic escalation of desire? On the desire to use violence in other to vanquish the “Other”? The most eye-opening and throat-swallowing part of that first hour after the ban was hearing how many thoughtful people on both sides had a shiver go... See more

So let's use video because I just think it's a great example. If you think about music and how you consume music, you actually consume catalog product a lot. I certainly do. And I think most consumers do. Songs that I've listened to once, I will listen to again and again, and again, at some point. With video, that's less the case. Once I watch... See more

But moral stabilities are also indebted to larger territorial flows. So even the concept of good and accountability and evil is also indebted to other things, the river, the libidinal flows, and the archetypal algorithms that make us are constantly migrating, and in those moments good could become incarcerating.