Sixian

Our internet, on the other hand, tends to be in quite the hurry. The pace and fervor found online like to keep anxiety company. The internet we are marketed to use is a perfect storm of interface design in the service of an attention economy. It’s dialed-in. Basically, the “feed” as an interface works. “Pull-to-refresh” as a serotonin booster... 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.

But what Joan is calling for is this notion that the more you get close to how human beings are relating and how human beings are understanding, the harder it is to replace all of that with a fancy algorithm. And one thing about librarians is they know their local context and they understand the different constituencies that are involved. All of... See more

It’s curious to want to call an advert ‘objectifying’, because of course it is: its function is to promote an object. Yet this nonetheless feels like the right word, not only in reference to the object of the ad’s intentions, but the kind of gaze that is filming it. The camera, the eye, is fixated on the phone’s ‘thing-ness’: not what it can do,... See more

How, when each of us is forbidden to touch, can a renewed sense of our biopolitical entanglement emerge? It may come through a recognition that societal care is not only a personal, face-to-face, and skin-to-skin experience, but something that also happens at a distance, through impersonal systems upon which each of us relies. These too are social... See more

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

The truth is that we want most things according to how other people model the value of those things to us. These people are models of desire.

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.