SpaceXponential

Whereas the modern university segregated scholarship from curation, demoting the latter to a secondary, supportive role, and sending curators into exile within museums, archives, and libraries, the Digital Humanities revolution promotes a fundamental reshaping of the research and teaching landscape. It recasts the scholar as curator and the curator... See more

What you start to see is collaborative knowledge work that isn’t passive. You want to write code that you can put into production. You want to have ideas that drive towards action. Block referencing something from someone else’s graph is a pull request into each other’s minds.

One functional problem with organizing the world’s information is the... See more

I think we can date the fall of the tower to the years between 2011 (Gurri’s focal year of “nihilistic” protests) and 2015, a year marked by the “great awokening  on the left and the ascendancy of Donald Trump on the right. Trump did not destroy the tower; he merely exploited its fall. He was the first politician to master the new dynamics of the... See more

It is possible that art is nearer to the heart of creation than philosophy. It is therefore capable of letting something entirely new begin. The revolution can begin with as little as an unheard-of color, an unheard-of sound.  

Social scientists have identified at least three major forces that collectively bind together successful democracies: social capital (extensive social networks with high levels of trust), strong institutions, and shared stories. Social media has weakened all three. To see how, we must understand how social media changed over time—and especially in... See more

The upshot is this: Communities and cults are both valid and reasonable ways to organize social structures. Flat communities worked well in the early internet of high barriers to participation and limited people and content. Hierarchical cults work better today, when the internet has a plethora of content and people, and all those barriers have... See more