Sublime

In this description, there are shades of how Manuel Castells explained the space of flows draining meaning away from the space of places, as more of life and culture took place between…

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We have – understandably – lost faith in our institutions, most especially our governments, and so we keep our focus close, strive to get our own needs met in a world that seems to be growing harsher and less safe by the day. We are living inside what I call the Consumer Story, which tells us we are entitled and passive: we are to be sold to and se

It is only recently that the elaboration, the modeling of one’s personal and social identity, has been reorganized to conform to the uninterrupted operation of markets, information networks, and other systems.

So there are patterned, regular and rule-bound systems; these rule-bound workings can come to generate various unintended effects; and unpredictable events disrupt and abruptly transform what appear to be rule-bound and enduring patterns. This is a view which emphasizes networks of people, of systems, of societies as fundamentally historical, and w

Avec l'évanouissement progressif de son idéal, la race perd de plus en plus ce qui faisait sa cohésion, son unité et sa force. L'individu peut croître en personnalité et en intelligence, mais en même temps aussi l'égoïsme collectif de la race est remplacé par un développement excessif de l'égoïsme individuel accompagné par l'affaissement du caractè

He traveled constantly, checking off sites on his bucket list—castles in Germany, temples in Cambodia, icebergs in the Arctic. He took lots and lots of pictures to show people what he had seen. Similarly, he had hundreds of people in his life whom he counted as friends but barely knew, but with whom he had pictures. He collected people.

There is no inherent identity: who someone is, whether good or bad, depends largely on their environment. If many people have nowadays lost their bearings, this says something about our environment.

Yet that vision of smallness is under the auspices and control of Airbnb, following the template the company has set and the conditions that it profits under. Smallness implies homogeneity and a move toward uniformity, most likely under a Western default, under the ideology of the tech industry. The trade-off that Chesky implied was that the more m