Sixian

Just as the goal of desire is to extinguish itself, audiophilia’s object is a kind of intimacy and immediacy that can be achieved only when one purchases a technology sophisticated enough to disappear itself, allowing creators and listeners to comingle in its transparency. 

When you look around at all the major candidates for wealth-production frontiers today — blockchains, AI, biotech, renewables — none of them seems capable of producing enough of a grand narrative slipstream to bind today’s complex and large modern societies. So I have to conclude that we’re in for a great deal of antiflocking and divergence.

How strong opinions create the kind of trust and visibility required for senior, ambiguous work.

This is why we say “start with the white-hot center” of your network and expand out from there. A dense, highly active network will outperform a larger but less active one every time.

One of the primary anxieties of the digital age is that an online life is a kind of half-life; that time spent on the internet is wasted time rather than lived time. Temporality and rhythmicity is the most popular way to differentiate between the live and the inanimate, the natural and the artificial, even if it is not the most accurate

The curators asked if ‘a sharp object could be an erotic object – or a square object or something that is not round, or that does not have a smooth texture?’ It seemed that the answer was generally no: curves were essential.

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

From a cultural perspective, Fisher contrasts the cultural energy of the 20th century with the languors of the 21st: While 20th century experimental culture was seized by a recombinatorial delirium, which made it feel as if newness was infinitely available, the 21st century is oppressed by a crushing sense of finitude and exhaustion. It doesn’t... See more