Sixian

The cataloguers first reaction to that is, "Oh my god, that means you won't be introducing the movies people to the cinema people!" To which the obvious answer is "Good. The movie people don't want to hang out with the cinema people." Those terms actually encode different things, and the assertion that restricting vocabularies improves signal... See more

We should always ask: what, exactly, is being maintained? “Is it the thing itself,” Graham and Thrift ask, “or the negotiated order that surrounds it, or some ‘larger’ entity?” Often the answer is all of the above. Maintenance traverses scales.

But that’s the crux of fidelity angst: if we take the promise of media immersion with the seriousness that technology companies encourage, we can’t help but break the spell by wondering if this is really it. The promise of immersion is thus self-negating.

The middle class and poor too, have exit options. To the extent it is real, the “Great Resignation” (and the similar “laying flat” trend in China) is something like an exit from formation flight.

Historian Scott Gabriel Knowles proposes that we think of the “deferred maintenance” of public infrastructures as slow-motion disasters, which sustain the oppression of marginalized and underserved populations. 23 Summers, meanwhile, emphasizes the “debt burden on the next generation,” since the cost of fixing the world compounds over time.

Big futures are permissioned. Little futures are permissionless.

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

Part 1: Strong Opinions