SpaceXponential

This is hardly a profound observation. It has been clear for many years that the Internet made it possible for new communities to form, sometimes with astonishing speed. The problem, as Zeynep Tufekci explained in [Twitter and Tear Gas](https://www.twitterandteargas.org/), is that the ease of network formation made these communities more fragile,... See more

Scenius is like genius, only embedded in a scene rather than in genes. Brian Eno suggested the word to convey the extreme creativity that groups, places or “scenes” can occasionally generate. His actual definition is: “Scenius stands for the intelligence and the intuition of a whole cultural scene. It is the communal form of the concept of the... See more

Curation means making arguments through objects as well as words, images, and sounds. It implies a spatialization of the sort of critical and narrative tasks that, while not unfamiliar to historians, are fundamentally different when carried out in space—physical, virtual, or both—rather than in language alone. It means becoming engaged in... See more

In our reality, Ted Nelson served as a muse rather than the Internet’s architect. Legend has it that he conceived of Xanadu as an antidote (or amplifier) for his attention deficit disorder. He dreamed of a word processor that allowed users to surf through and freely explore associations, related material, and alternate contexts of any given piece

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There’s art that I consider art, and there’s other things – things that could be beautiful, but too superfluously so. The intention behind their creation is the desire to please the eyes. They want to be fashionable. But true art is disinterested. True art doesn’t care to be appreciated, obsessed over with, or owned. It holds a certain self-respect... See more

Wisdom from @david_perell's Monday musings. Infrastructure is philosophy made visible.

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