Sixian

Building vibes is a different kind of work from specializing. You’re not just demonstrating expertise and competence but compatibility.

Maria Puig de la Bellacasa argues that caring involves an “ethico-political commitment” to the neglected and oppressed and a concern with the affective dimensions of our material world. We care for things not because they produce value, but because they already have value.

Meeting magicians is the first step to becoming one – when you are attempting to learn implicit knowledge that by definition you don’t understand, it is important to have a bunch of examples in front of you to feed your brain’s pattern-recognition systems.

To have deep knowledge about something is to have a rich inner world built around that subject’s orbit. How, then, does knowledge come to exist in the world beyond an individual’s private mind?

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

If a player gets time-sucked by the game, there’s certainly less time to actually put feet to pavement, look someone in the eye, feel the endless heatwave. Wilson wrote that we are “terribly confused by the mere fact of our existence,” and god games appear to mitigate that. But we do play against ourselves during that “private time” of reverie,... See more

We and them is built into the logic of the Stream. In blogging, each person gets to define who they believe is in the conversation they are having. That’s what blogging/twitter/facebook is, by definition.

Morality might pose the question of “what should we do?” but ethics is about “what comes to matter?” And what comes to be excluded in a mattering of what comes to matter.

It is the book itself, the physical fact of the bound object, that has to be one place, and if it's one place, it can't also be in another place. And this in turn means that a book has to be declared to be about some main thing. A book which is equally about two things breaks the 'be in one place' requirement, so each book needs to be declared to... See more