Sixian

Playbooks for creating viral products

1.  Novelty/Entertainment


2. Instrumented

To paraphrase René Girard: we set out in search of the one thing we think we truly want, which we believe must be hidden under the one rock that is too heavy for us to lift. If we get something that we wanted, we believe we must have wanted the wrong thing. We go in search of a new model.

Transparency Creates A Steep Power Law James: And so we’re back to the power-law problem. Which is that some people are very charismatic and other people just aren’t. Some people are really fast, and smart, and interesting to listen to and some people aren’t... And these attention systems we have today — and this identity of the individual with the... See more

4. Asymptotic (Diminishing) Value of More Data

However in this world of permissionless identity we can (and must!) manufacture stability... One way to create narrative stability is through creating “narrative institutions” - these are projects, websites, businesses, side projects, hobbies or activities that you can lean on for stability. While formal things like career, job description or... See more

One of the primary anxieties of the digital age is that an online life is a kind of half-life; that time spent on the internet is wasted time rather than lived time. Temporality and rhythmicity is the most popular way to differentiate between the live and the inanimate, the natural and the artificial, even if it is not the most accurate

Instead of saying that any given tag "is" or "is not" the same as another tag, del.icio.us is able to recommend related tags by saying "A lot of people who tagged this 'Mac' also tagged it 'OSX'." We move from a binary choice between saying two tags are the same or different to the Venn diagram option of "kind of is/somewhat is/sort of is/overlaps... 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.