SpaceXponential

Perhaps the most admirable part of Bohm’s theory of dialogue—and one that influences how we think of Are.na as being used—is that he conceived of a very simple structure that allowed for emergent possibilities to develop. It’s so easy to treat technology as though it can prescribe a solution to a particular problem (now more than ever). Software

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... I realized I associate art with gifts. You don’t mark a true gift with a monetary value. You don’t predict the rise and fall of that value. If an art is important to you, you want to hold onto it, instead of trading it with others. And if an art is to initiate a spiritual experience for an audience, it should not involve itself with... 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

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

Centralized trust creates negative externalities even when those at the center remain trustworthy. As the market expands, a purely person-to-person approach breaks down and would necessitate the presence of intermediaries. Intermediation, on the other hand, serves many roles, but also imposes costs, especially when the intermediary is a private... See more

A university museum worthy of its name must become at least as much a laboratory as, say, a university library. An archive must become a place of teaching and hands‐on learning. The classroom must become a place of hands‐on engagement with the material remains of the past where the tasks of processing, annotating, and sequencing are integral to... 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

Political scientist Russel Hardin (2002) argues that trust is really about encapsulated interest, i.e., a kind of closed loop of each party’s self-interests. Like the real estate agent who sells a house at a reasonable price not because she cares about the client but because her commission is directly tied to the sale price, the drug dealer also... See more

The former CIA analyst Martin Gurri predicted these fracturing effects in his 2014 book, The Revolt of the Public. Gurri’s analysis focused on the authority-subverting effects of information’s exponential growth, beginning with the internet in the 1990s. Writing nearly a decade ago, Gurri could already see the power of social media as a universal... See more