Sixian

There is a case that could be made here that history is in fact a series of convergences and divergences driven by the rise and fall of correlated opportunities on wealth frontiers. That the only reason we ever coordinate enough to form societies is to go after such frontiers, and that otherwise we’re not actually a very social species.

The other kind of model is an internal mediator of desire—one who mediates desire from inside the subject’s world. I like to call this world Freshmanistan for short.

The “publish or perish” model that nudges people to rack up more followers is not the pinnacle of creative freedom; it’s indentured spiritual servitude.

Note how different this sort of meaning making is from what we generally see on today’s web. The excitement here is in building complexity, not reducing it. More importantly note how meaning changes here. We probably know what the tweet would have “meant”, and what a blog post would have “meant”, but meaning here is something different. Instead of... See more

“People are good at learning by imitation,” Housel notes. “But the hidden nature of wealth makes it hard to imitate others and learn from their ways.” We can’t imitate many of the actions that lead to wealth because the most important action that leads to wealth—not spending every dollar we make—is an anti-action. Wealth comes, in part, from the... See more

And as Apple’s marketing material demonstrates, this is no accident. iPhone adverts are strange: they make the phone a body. They borrow a visual language less from sci-fi or action movies than from erotica. Devices are shot in extreme close-up, almost always dimly lit. A beam of light traces across a surface so smooth that it occupies a space... See more