SpaceXponential

The pressure to perform and live up to the expectations of others is not a new social phenomenon — nor a bad one. **^^But the way it manifests at the internet’s global scale increases its intensity tenfold — especially for young people. The goal is no longer to simply live up to the high expectations of your parents and peers — online you could be... See more

What we need most are temporal structures that stabilize life. When everything is short-term, life loses all stability. Stability comes over long stretches of time: faithfulness, bonds, integrity, commitment, promises, trust. These are the social practices that hold a community together. They all have a ritual character. They all require a lot of... See more

Del.icio.us made us realize the importance of archiving casual web (and other) research. That process has a lot of positive effects that are hard to explain until you’ve built a habit out of it. For one, there’s a self-discovery that happens when you revisit things you’ve accumulated over a period of time. You look back and begin to recognize... See more

Now, though, I realize that this confusion stems from making the same mistake I did in that old analysis of Facebook: I was looking to the real world as a guide to understanding the Internet, when it was in fact inevitable that the Internet would, over time, come to impact the real world. Some of that impact will be fleeting, like many of the... See more

In a way, crypto only magnifies or exposes the historically intimate ties between art, status and money. When we are in the thick of operating in the art system, it’s easy to forget how the aesthetic value, historical value, monetary value are actively negotiated for each art object. What web3 did was simply render art as a literal currency.