Sixian

Now, anyone who deals with categorization for a living will tell you they can never get a perfect system. In working classification systems, success is not "Did we get the ideal arrangement?" but rather "How close did we come, and on what measures?" The idea of a perfect scheme is simply a Platonic ideal. However, I want to argue that even the... See more

In a 1970 interview, Marshall McLuhan foreshadowed this situation and described what it might do to our minds: “We live in post-history in the sense that all pasts that ever were are now present to our consciousness and all futures that will be are here now. In that sense, we are post-history and timeless. Instant awareness of the varieties of... See more

Up to a point, swapping autonomy for ease is a pretty good trade: who wants to run the math on their accounting books or call the restaurant to place a delivery order? But if taken too far, convenience becomes a Trojan Horse. We cede too much control and become dependent on something we can no longer steer. Platforms that promised to bring... See more

It’s not just about the experience of control, though. The minuscule provokes both awe for its mechanisms — the technical means by which it was brought into existence; the details of its structure — and the distortion of time. In On Longing, Susan Stewart argues that the miniature is a space unattached to “lived historical time”: diminution... See more

1. Executive sponsors: senior people with decision-making ability.2. Legal, compliance, procurement, and security: gatekeepers. You need to earn their trust before an enterprise will onboard to your platform.3. Employee users: Your product has to be user-friendly and provide a lot of value to end-user employees, especially as SaaS adoption... See more

Secondly, your strengths to distribution increasingly get fragmented. So in the early days of streaming Spotify as the leader was the dominant platform, but we've seen not only other large leading streaming platforms develop and we can get into that dynamic because that's a very interesting part of the market as well, but we've now started to see... See more

It seems to me that, through the way Reddit and YouTube and social media work, there’s such an emphasis on creating distinctions and communities, and it’s just created an explosion of interest in ideological sub-groupings that had been completely forgotten. I started in politics in the early ‘00s, and it just didn’t have this flavor. If you were a... See more