flâneur

Andrei Stoica

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on the atlas — 5

highlights — 26

  • While state-issued formal identities (e.g. SSN number) and corporation-issued informal identities (e.g. a Facebook login) entail severe security risks through centralization and a high decree of artificiality, decentralized identities promise persistent pseudonymity, while enabling economic cooperation and a greater expression of individuality through the collection of digital cultural objects and participation in DAOs.
    How Identity Emerges in Crypto Networks — Mirror
  • And the thing is, it often takes my friends to remind me that who I am is worth something at all
    I Miss it All
  • Through helping each other, we, simply, find value in each other.
    I Miss it All
  • I used to get sad at parties and make people stand outside with me while I smoked.
    I Miss it All
  • The beauty of people is that you become beholden to the fragility and waywardness of others, just as they are beholden to you.
    I Miss it All
  • how it was about us. And how that was hard.
    I Miss it All
  • I browse various online communities and feel at once enthralled and alone. I read.
    I Miss it All
  • When I’m running with my friends, I often think of how incomprehensible it is that we are friends. I’m a teacher who wakes up early to read. One of my friends hasn’t read a book in years. And yet, because of how often we have moved together through inconveniences, how often we have breathed side by side, or how often one of us has paused while the other has tied a shoe or sprinted into a bathroom or stopped for a drink of water, we have learned the value of connection brought on by vulnerability, the love required to go by the same stopwatch while moving, sometimes, at different speeds, each o…
    I Miss it All
  • he writes about how he loves “just wandering,” before adding the sentence: “Maybe you’re with a friend, and maybe the inefficiency will make you closer.”
    I Miss it All
  • A community where, if you don’t want to, you just don’t have to deal with the other people in the community?
    I Miss it All
  • Highlighting a difference between living and existing is central to the commodification of everything. It used to be the case that if you did not buy a certain singular product — the newest iPhone, for example — you were simply existing, not living. Now, it’s not just about product. It’s about community. If your experience of community isn’t individualized, fine-tuned to generate success on your terms, are you really living?
    I Miss it All
  • What remains, after all of this, are the only things Peloton deems a community good for: encouragement, competition, and independence.
    I Miss it All
  • I’ll be blunt. Each day, we are losing one another. And by one another, I mean: everything. And by everything, I mean: in a world where it sometimes feels we have to jerry rig into our lives both what we love to do and who we love to do it with, where we have to apologize for the excesses of personality that are not the same as the excesses of production, where we have to somehow — I did not know this was possible, tell me if it’s possible — make time, we lose the possibilities of connection that make up so much of the inherent value of a life.
    I Miss it All
  • There is a way that exercise machines enact the endless, grueling task of being alive in late capitalism. They feel almost Sisyphean, like how Hillary Leichter, in her novel Temporary, writes: “the world is infinite, and the work is, like, endless.”
    I Miss it All
  • Everything felt like something to be endured rather than loved.
    I Miss it All
  • Why do I feel, in a world that consistently, without fail, automates and compartmentalizes my time, like I have to do the same for myself? By structuring myself in such a way, do I lose grace?
    I Miss it All
  • what kind of human do I want to become? How will I keep humankind top of mind, and do my part to ensure that technology augments humanity rather than burdening it?
    To be a Technologist is to be Human - Letters to a Young Technologist
  • Let's ensure that the technologies of our lifetimes will be remembered, like these, as enriching humanity.
    To be a Technologist is to be Human - Letters to a Young Technologist
  • This process of imagining things differently and acting on it to modify the world in a methodical, informed way is a particular trait of the human animal. We act to change our world on a scale and with a systematicity and permanence that has allowed us an unprecedented level of mastery over our environment.
    To be a Technologist is to be Human - Letters to a Young Technologist
  • In fact, more people are technologists than ever before, insofar as a “technologist” can be defined as someone inventing, implementing or repurposing technology.
    To be a Technologist is to be Human - Letters to a Young Technologist
  • To quote Marx, “The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist.”
    To be a Technologist is to be Human - Letters to a Young Technologist
  • In turn, the perceived coldness of the machine is projected onto its maker; many of us distance ourselves from our identities as technologists, for fear of identifying with a dehumanizing persona.
    To be a Technologist is to be Human - Letters to a Young Technologist
  • As a result, the page can only point the reader to a list of highly specific and mechanical job titles, peddling entries on “cardiovascular technologist” and “architectural technologist” rather than providing a unified overview of what these jobs have in common.
    To be a Technologist is to be Human - Letters to a Young Technologist
  • We are part of Trust, a knowledge-community that lives on a member-restricted Discord. The focus over the last year has been on producing online events which take shape as Collective Reading Groups, Sandbox (a combined voice and chat presentation format) and publicly available streams and talks on Twitch.
    Moving Castles: Modular and Portable Multiplayer Miniverses
  • We construct self-identity as a necessary part of existing in a social world
    How Identity Emerges in Crypto Networks — Mirror
  • We construct self-identity as a necessary part of existing in a social world.
    How Identity Emerges in Crypto Networks — Mirror