Sixian

Our relation to god games is like this: straddling between the wonderment of the small that makes us feel powerful and the knowledge that we do not (and might not want to) wield that power in the world outside the frame.

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.

How did Facebook get people to use their real names when people weren’t yet comfortable putting real-name profiles out in the open (unless it was a resume)? By launching in a constrained environment of perceived safety where it already made sense to show your real name: college. Working within the college niche, they built up a full head of steam e... See more

Fandom, on the other hand, pins you in your body, because it disallows you from pretending you are “nowhere” in relation to your subject. Fandom admits care, attachment, and dedication. For Fisher, as for me, fan-love might take up the traditional tools of intellectual critique—say, exposition and analysis of a text—but the writer herself is always... See more

At some point, the erotics of music crossfade into something more onanistic. At its worst, communication equipment becomes a fetish, as when Jodi Dean describes the communicative capitalism of the internet, which, instead of facilitating democracy, becomes its substitute. Counters for likes and retweets are not unlike the specifications sheet for a... See more

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.

In many academic disciplines and professional practices — architecture, urban studies, labor history, development economics, and the information sciences, just to name a few — maintenance has taken on new resonance as a theoretical framework, an ethos, a methodology, and a political cause.

It's not a perfect explanation, it's a contingent explanation for contingent times.