Sixian

A simple interaction with a stranger at a cocktail party who doesn’t reciprocate our handshake can leave us sour all night. We may even respond with aggression when we are introduced to that person via email a week or two later.

But for the things you care about most, or are causing you the most suffering, there is probably a nonlinear strategy that you will miss if you pay too close attention to the linear strategy you current have or that people recommend.

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

Network effects are about adding value and defensibility to your product. A network effect is when every customer of your product adds incremental value to all the other customers of your product so that it becomes difficult for customers to find any alternative product which gives them as much value.

Across the many scales and dimensions of this problem, we are never far from three enduring truths: (1) Maintainers require care; (2) caregiving requires maintenance; and (3) the distinctions between these practices are shaped by race, gender, class, and other political, economic, and cultural forces. Who gets to organize the maintenance of... See more

Four Attributes Of A Successful EGM 1. EGMs have a Gateway, a single point of access for many buyers. 2. Getting inside, get approved.3. Create trust in supply through data.4. Help vendors comply.

"Doing the work that your parents then do for your spirit or for your character. But there’s an aspect of it that I like: It led me to think about what I do as a kind of two-way, generational reparenting. On the one hand, caring for these bygone thinkers, while at the same time imbuing the present generation with their hand-me-down wisdom and their... See more

Tools break and containers change, but the urge to tell stories remains. Containers and content can be used to mutually inform the shape of their counterparts, expressing a tender, anti-heroic, communal, and present side of storytelling in place of our received understanding of historical material as heroic, individual, disconnected, and past. As... See more

How could any self-aware person who works in technology not start to organize their disappointment? It’s gotten to where several of my peers are floating half-hearted speculations about their next careers. This isn’t good: you want the talented and mindful people to stick around, not get husked out, then leave frustrated, exhausted, and conflicted.