SpaceXponential

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe once commented that: “When eras are on the decline, all tendencies are subjective; but, on the other hand, when matters are ripening for a new epoch, all tendencies are objective. Each worthy effort turns its force from the inward to the outward world.” 

One of the most pleasurable parts of learning a new domain for me is developing the language that accompanies the development of taste. This is this sort of chocolate, and I like that more because xyz, this sort of music. There is a delight in finally discovering the exact right label for one’s felt experience. Language facilitates higher levels of... 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

What Eno likes about 77 Million Paintings is that he has no idea what will appear on screen, nor what aesthetic effects will be produced. "That's pretty interesting. But what interests me more is the way people experience them. My shows are not narratives. Nothing much happens yet people come and stay for hours in a contemplative state. I thought,... See more

The key to Clubhouse’s rapid accession is that its social design makes it an ideal platform for cults at a time when the social internet is rapidly evolving away from organizing around communities and toward cults. Clubhouse’s rise likely signals major strategic shifts that several legacy social platforms are going to have to consider.

In a world of perpetual data overload, [curation] implies information design and selectivity: the channeling, filtering, and organization into intelligible and usable information; the digging up of new or long ignored cultural corpora. Most of these corpora are simply sitting in storage: less than 1% of the Smithsonian Institution’s permanent... See more

Most of what the crypto world calls art is entertainment, or fashionable assets. They snatch your attention. They care more about making a tweet or a headline declaring they SOLD OUT, they set a HISTORICAL RECORD, and they tell you this is the art’s value. But the value of what? Monetary value is not a good indicator of the aesthetic value, the... See more