Sixian

We, however, are preoccupied and tormented by the haunting of what was and by the eternal Long Now.We are so burnt out from surviving the present (and the lingering past) that considering what could be seems but a naïve hobby – one that, ironically enough, few of us have time or energy for.

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.

“It would not be good news to learn that we are all roped together intellectually, droning away at some featureless, genetically driven collective work, building something so immense that we can never see the outlines,” biologist Lewis Thomas writes in The Lives of a Cell (1974). Humans understandably prefer to believe in their own agency, even if... See more

The “publish or perish” model that nudges people to rack up more followers is not the pinnacle of creative freedom; it’s indentured spiritual servitude.

Anyway, the point is: the hero’s journey and carrier bag are both about narrative models rather than gendered modes of storytelling, and the rise of the novel was a fall of the hero (whether male or female) from epic demigod figure to boy-with-toy. Or girl-with-toy as the case may be.

This period has been addressed by Franco Berardi, and later by Mark Fisher, as “the slow cancellation of the future.” Referencing Moishe Postone’s 1996 book Time, Labor, and Social Domination and Spencer Leonard’s 2009 essay, “Going it Alone: Christopher Hitchens and the Death of the Left,” Wolfe writes: The ceaseless proliferation of the new now... See more

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

Jean-Luc Nancy, commenting on “touch and touchlessness,” describes how all touch is ultimately and finally touchless, that touchlessness is the basis of our intimacies. As we view a grid of hundreds of viewers in a videoconference, where voices and images of faces surely touch all of our ears and eyes, he reminds us how even the most intimate... See more

This idea of relativity is what is often left out of the narrative that the internet has broken our relationship to “natural time.” It is presumed that if we could synchronize a perfect harmony between inner and outer time, we would rediscover a sense of belonging to the planet and to each other. We are haunted by the specter of an innate, perfect... See more