Sixian

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

Whereas the garden is integrative, the Stream is self-assertive. It’s persuasion, it’s argument, it’s advocacy. It’s personal and personalized and immediate. It’s invigorating. And as we may see in a minute it’s also profoundly unsuited to some of the uses we put it to.

Citizens will embrace the network economy and not cling to the scale effect economy of the industrial world, so our governments shouldn’t either. The scale economy will not go away, but it’s going to become a smaller part of life and the economy, like agriculture did in the industrial era.

This approach intends to produce what Donna Haraway calls “situated knowledges,” or “views from somewhere.” The “somewhere” is important because, Haraway writes, no single view is complete: you can only begin to know a subject by reading many views from many somewheres. No writer works in a vacuum, and no writer is without motives; by the same... See more

Governments and other traditional forms of hierarchical power are ill-equipped to understand the network economy and evolve the new social contract...they live in a hierarchical world of scale, and we live in the networked world. Different technologies lead to different mental models, different languages, different tools for making positive... See more

The opportunity space must be somewhat legible, and seen to be correlated enough to inspire cooperation, but if you can see it too clearly, and especially see its limits too clearly, cooperation will break down. At the edges of visibility the opportunity space must dissolve into myth.

So “we” need to do something about this, “we” are all in this struggle together, and “we” need to get our act together. That “we,” it's a mess, right? It's a monolithic heap of a “we,” because it kind of lumps the United States, for instance, together in the same boat with Zambia, as if they were equally complicit. That's one way of looking about... 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