Sixian

"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

When people typically talk about the attention economy, they’re referring to creators amassing the attention of an audience, and then, after they have the attention, they’re able to monetize that attention in all sorts of different ways...I think what’s really interesting about NFTs and some of the new creator economy products that are coming into... See more

How did Facebook get people to use their real names when people weren’t yet comfortable putting real-name profiles out in the open (unless it was a resume)? By launching in a constrained environment of perceived safety where it already made sense to show your real name: college. Working within the college niche, they built up a full head of steam... 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.

It’s by keeping our work legible that we keep the door open to the next generation of our co-workers. What works for them also works for us, because whether you are just out of school or have twenty years of experience, you’ll eventually end up in the same spot: your first year of making websites.

What we build is defined and controlled by its unresolvable conflicts. In responsive design, it’s the text and image conundrum I showed earlier. In other, more grand arenas, there is capital versus labor, or collective control versus anarchic individualism. In technology, I believe it comes down to the power dynamics of convenience. To create... See more

It's not a perfect explanation, it's a contingent explanation for contingent times.