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The structure of games is not that the points are valuable, but that the attempt to get those points, the attempts to win the game and the game’s term

"games as agency"...what does this say about human "free-hood”? Free-hood seems a more apt word than “freedom”. I mean that the essence of human being

𝙁𝙧𝙚𝙚𝙝𝙤𝙤𝙙 & 𝙘𝙤𝙣𝙨𝙩𝙧𝙪𝙘𝙩𝙚𝙙 𝙨𝙩𝙧𝙪𝙜𝙜𝙡𝙚𝙨 More from C Thi Nguyen » “And Suits offers the following definition of what it is to play a game. He says, “To play

How could gaining knowledge amount to anything other than discovering what was already there? How could the truth of a statement or a theory be anythi

That we can write the prompt or query is not an emblem of our freedom but of our surrender. We give up on what we think the words mean and let the mac

That is, they understand the purpose of chatbots and generative models to be the ability to force other people to see a particular version of reality.

creating conditions for collective intelligence to thrive.

the desire to connect things together

At its core, sensemaking is the art of regulating attention. This is a fancier way of saying that you must know what to ignore. And then you must have

"Every product in the world, the quality at the end of the day is simply a reflection of how much the people who created it gave a shit about the prod

we have a world where friction gets automated out of experiences, aestheticized in curated lifestyles, and dumped onto underfunded infrastructure and

Long-tail users of user-centered design are not given the degree of control necessary to adapt the design object or tool to their unique needs, and de

Quick thread on coincidences, synchronicity and magic. I think it was Gordon White who defined magical practice as working to maximize the number of m

The man we call an adventurer...is one who remains indifferent to the content, that is, to the human meaning of his action, who thinks he can assert h

When Times New Roman appears in a book, document, or advertisement, it connotes apathy. It says, “I submitted to the typeface of least resistance.” Ti

As part of its purpose in slowing news down (hence the name), and taking time to make sense of what’s really going on in the world rather than just re

It is misleading then to argue that cultural circulation has been democratized. The means of circulation are algorithmic, and they are not subject to

The true influence of Post Internet People on general internet socialization was both more subtle and more important than simply a shiny new social ne

You can use algorithms to surface new things. But algorithms are not nearly as good as human curators yet. Whatever pattern matching is going on insid

That is, be systematically ascetic or heroic in little unnecessary points, do every day or two something for no other reason than that you would rathe

Traumatisation is most usually presented as anunassailable, concrete fact, and this is where I need to be respectful. If someone brings a firmconvicti

when the trauma label has been appliedby outside mores – when an event like an explosion, an assault or a sexual event has taken place andour culture

I feel like there’s something so soulless about our culture—something deeply, deeply missing in people’s experience of life, a kind of superficiality.

“It is not easy to convince people that I am not dealing with ideas but with perceptions, not concepts but observations. It is easy to disseminate ide

Although still using the language of tools, in 1988 Illich explained, “I would like to get together a certain number of people to think about what too

Digital capitalism does not pose the same kind of threats as industrial capitalism, in part because it does not act on us through straightforward inst

Advice I would give to a college freshman: These next four years, one of your main goals should be to figure out how not to have the rest of your lif

In a digitally decentralized world where generative AI can lower the barriers of creation even farther than ever before, and bots can be trained under

When we spoke with Ruby Justice Thelot, cyber-ethnographer and adjunct professor of design and media theory at NYU, he referenced his now-published pi

In a model, agents are interchangeable. Consumer A and Consumer B have different preference curves, yes, but they respond to the same incentive struct

This is the part most debates about tech and democracy miss. The real question is whether the underlying architecture creates incentives that concentr

And you have to offer it sustainably. Sustainability isn’t a thing you think about after you’ve designed a product. Your product’s business model is a

A room is not just a data structure. The moment you draw a boundary around a social space and say “these people are in, these are the rules,” you have

People withdrew into smaller spaces where trust could once again be accumulated rather than continuously spent. Communities became increasingly bounde