Sylvan Rackham

What is a World?

We could say a World is something like a gated garden. A World has borders. A World has laws. A World has values. A World has dysfunction. A World can grow up. A World has members who live in it. A World gives its members permission to act differently than outside of it. A World incentivizes its members to keep it alive, often with ... See more

T hinking thought usually amounts to withdrawing into a dimensionless place in which the idea of thought alone persists. But thought in reality spaces itself out into the world. It informs the imaginary of peoPles, their varied poetics, which it then transforms, meaning, in them its risk becomes realized. Culture is the precaution of those who clai... See more

Worlding is the art of devising a World: by choosing its dysfunctional present, maintaining its habitable past, aiming at its transformative future, and ultimately, letting it outlive your authorial control.

Linus Torvalds's style of development—release early and often, delegate everything you can, be open to the point of promiscuity—came as a surprise. No quiet, reverent cathedral-building here—rather, the Linux community seemed to resemble a great babbling bazaar of differing agendas and approaches (aptly symbolized by the Linux archive sites, who'd ... See more

Reflection is the courage to make the truth of our own presuppositions and the realm of our own goals into the things that most deserve to be called in question

To think about beginnings, we have to go back to the moment before a World is born, to the moment of a curious creator looking at Reality — chaotic, meaningless, scary, but latent with potential — and wondering what to do with it. Philip K Dick said, “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” A World is conceived when ... See more

A cathedral is something we want to make perfect — intricately carve it over time. To make a cathedral, we lock ourselves away until the work is just right, then pull back the curtain to show the world what we’ve been working on. The dream of the cathedral is that after working in isolation, the world will celebrate the work and see us in whatever ... See more

A World is a reality you can believe in: one that promises to bring about habitable structure from the potential of chaos, and aim toward a future transformative enough to metabolize the pain and pleasure of its dysfunction.