Sixian

Not only is any sufficiently advanced technology indistinguishable from magic; any sufficiently advanced technologist seems like a magician. In order to write the new version of this life description, I need to imagine a version of myself who, by definition, I cannot understand. If I understood her she wouldn’t be magical.

5. Data Is Central to Customer ValueNetflix’s core product value, it turns out, is content licensing and content production. Recently, they have even dropped the long tail of titles they used to match you to. The data network effect they thought they had turned out to be peripheral to the real value of the product.

Thinking about the two opposed theories, it struck me that between the carrier bag story and the hero’s journey, there is a third kind of story that is superior to both: the boat story. A boat is at once a motif of containment and journeying. The mode of sustenance it enables — fishing, especially with a net, a bag full of holes — is somewhere... See more

You could say that our current technological arrangement has spread out too far, and it is starting to look and feel wrong. Fortunately, we can treat this over-expansion just like everything else I’ve mentioned. We can draw a line, and create a point of reassembly for what we’ve made. We can think about how to shift, move, and resize the pieces so... See more

This world of permissionless identities flips responsibility for your career, your job description and your identity - it’s shifted from external gatekeepers to the individual themselves.

A quick reflection on the way that most of us answer emails can shed more light on the issue. In addition to being a form of communication, emails are guided by strict rules. They, too, are a ritual of imitation.

Throughout time, humans have sought out ways to translate our private knowledge-building experiences into more public forms. At the most basic level, we do this through language. Ever since we learned to communicate through words (or grunts) some 100,000 years ago, we’ve been pushing our knowledge-sharing techniques further.