…but like so much else, the disappearance of the real thing ensured that massive demand for idealized simulations of it would follow. If pure wilderness represents a baseline authenticity, everything humans have done since, from agriculture onward, has added layer upon layer of artifice to our environment.
Fashion is a mode of display that enriches public space and a culture’s shared meanings, but as it enters the culture, it ceases to strictly belong to anyone. It can be observed and often copied without having to pay anyone for the privilege. That is, it creates positive externalities… Great counter in this back and forth, https://twitter.com/poliwop/status/1417503523705606146 Hmm, I guess it depends on whether you see fashion as an industry of people using their skills to make stuff look/feel nice (a public good!), or an industry of people facilitating yet another channel for the wealthy/connected to play status games.
I don’t really play video games anymore but I’ve become increasingly fascinated by speedrunning in recent years. A speedrun, if you’re not familiar, is the practice of beating a video game in the shortest possible amount of time (the current record for completing the original Super Mario Brothers game, for example, is just under 5 minutes, and
Chenoe Hart observed that the common critique of suburbia as placeless can be reframed as “visiting the same place in multiple different locations Robin Sloan recently defined content as “the specific kind of media designed for platforms and algorithms,” media for which the form is determined by the platform
…the physical world can accommodate emptiness and silence, or at least acknowledge them; online, those voids are just filled by other people’s content, and thus vanish instantly.
The current pattern, however temporary, of withholding more personal and subcultural information from the Internet, despite its unpleasant cause, might accidentally reintroduce a bygone paradigm that the Internet itself is structurally incapable of encouraging, one of silence and even mystery. That sounds a bit like a Dark Age, yes, but hasn’t the world become a bit overilluminated?
Even if offices vanished entirely, that would only make room for new urban functions that would probably be more vital, further consolidating the city’s relevance.
There’s a saying, “You aren’t stuck in traffic, you are traffic.” Similarly, the unrest occurring right now isn’t something that is happening to anyone, but a phenomenon that everyone is a part of, even if they haven’t left home or directly participated at all.
Danny Hillis once defined technology as “everything that doesn’t work yet,” prompting the following corollary from Kevin Kelly: “Successful inventions disappear from our awareness.
The exterior urban environment has unintentionally decoupled from the economy, and to spend time outdoors in these conditions is to re-establish a more direct relationship to space that normally extracts value from us at every turn.
Thinking about the future, at its best, is really just another way to process the present, and there’s never been a better time to do that. but what’s increasingly obvious to me is how this crisis will decisively divide the world in two along many different axes. Some of those fault lines are obvious, and were already splitting open: at-risk or healthy; hourly or salaried; manual laborer or knowledge worker.
The pandemic has fractured the discourse, exposing how many layers of assumptions formed the bedrock. Under quarantine conditions, there is less opportunity to physically signal one’s participation in a culture, so clothing and conspicuous consumption matter less. Knowledge tooling will be extremely important to this new set of online cultural formation. We’ll see a dramatic acceleration of the exodus from clearnet that began a few years ago. Cities will need to put incentives in place for small businesses to take over these spaces, and stem the blight of banks and pharmacies that have eaten ground floor retail, have genericized walkable cities in the last decade. People who left the city due to safety concerns or simply for affordability reasons may not return. Combined with the increasing viability of remote work and zero-hour contracting, we may see further evacuation of the city and a new wave of suburbanization. The increased availability of urban space relative to demand that results from this will create new opportunities for communities and cultural production to manifest themselves in the physical world. in the second, that same realm is reinvigorated and returned to its true stakeholders, the people who live there. Breathe. Read the air. The real knowledge work begins
I spent last week relatively offline in Mexico, which became an interesting experiment in how the internet shapes perception: During the vacation, alarm about coronavirus in the United States escalated, but I didn’t really know because nothing in my offline environment reflected that sentiment. Since returning to the US and resuming my normal internet intake, it feels like my panic instinct missed a formative period in its development. As of now, I’m still less concerned about coronavirus than others seem to be, and while I feel a vague need, if not a civic duty, to step my worry up, I’m mainly just thankful to care less about something than I’m supposed to, for once. Regardless of how I feel, though, the coronavirus discourse is providing an interesting lesson in how these two different layers of reality can handle certain information so differently, and either amplify or suppress it: Usually the internet seems to overamplify things, but right now it seems to be properly amplifying something (although there’s nothing to check that against).
Now we walk in straight lines because we have to, not because we know where we're going. Far from an expression of certainty, the urban street grid simplifies, removes choices, and reflect's nobody's direct route exactly. We eagerly provide data about ourselves to platforms so they can help us learn what we want; our unique personal desires are mere inputs for systems that channel them into a narrower range of outputs.
In the post-Facebook era, which many of us are already living in, there is no single platform, or place, where we can even expect to find everyone we know, and it wouldn’t surprise me if there never is again in our lifetimes. The increasingly-maligned model of VC-funded, loss-leading hypergrowth in the pursuit of market dominance, understood another way, is a quest to create voids that matter, voids that will hurt if we let them emerge by rejecting the product currently filling them The residue of buildings and cities determines what gets built on top of them, and if we’re conscientious, we’ll build with a more distant future in mind.
If the ‘90s internet was a weird, largely unproductive place where you escaped from reality, today’s internet is where much of reality happens, and meatspace is where you escape from it. It barely even makes sense anymore to refer to “the internet” as an alternate domain. We’re all basically online all the time, passively if not actively.
but the thought experiment’s contrast with how shortages and surpluses are resolved in real life is the reason I think about it a lot. As an example, a chronological Twitter feed becomes chaotic once it comprises thousands of followed accounts, but Twitter restores order algorithmically, making that feed less crowded by regulating which messages actually appear in it.
The most durable role for humans in the near future that’s actually coming, then, involves a strange role reversal with software: Our job is to function as the interfaces between inscrutable automated systems of various scales whose internal operations proceed without our involvement, but can only extend their reach with our help. Instead of eliminating the middleman, digital platforms have solidified that as our permanent role—the most human job of all.
Stoller’s basic thesis is that private equity transforms corporations from institutions that make things and employ people into vehicles for extracting value, shifting that value toward a company’s owners, and then discarding whatever’s left. In this climate, value of any kind is hard to confine to bounded places, even though much of the infrastructure of our society is still set up to operate under that assumption.
Maybe, to a more advanced civilization, our trash and ruins would just be invisible, the way so much of what we call nature is invisible to us. The concept of nature, in a sense, is a way to describe or categorize what is outside the scope of human agency or immediate understanding, and that scope is always shifting, frequently in unintended directions.
listening to a podcast at a multiple of its intended speed goes against the grain of the medium, which is better suited to soothe, comfort, entertain, or saturate the environment than to impart knowledge. In this sense, using computers makes us act more like computers.
Now, we can admit, at sufficiently high resolution we’re all effectively homeless a lot of the time. Last week, I attended Ribbonfarm’s annual meetup in Los Angeles (which was fantastic). In Venkatesh Rao’s closing remarks, he observed that the audience wasn’t so much a community as an airport: a bunch of people on individual trajectories sharing the same physical space momentarily before dispersing again. If we can instead learn to design parts of the world for airport-like assemblages and the fractal nature of physical existence — the world we currently inhabit — we might actually find that we get more of what we’re seeking from communities.
What’s left, then, is “something I am” along with the increasingly important object that is also increasingly unusable by anyone but me, and therefore more a part of me than ever. No wonder it’s so hard to put it down.
AirPods foster a different approach to detachment: Rather than mute the surrounding world altogether, they visually signal the wearer’s choice to perpetually relegate the immediate environment to the background. AirPods, then, express a more complete embrace of our simultaneous existence in physical and digital space, taking for granted that we’re frequently splitting our mental energy between the two. AirPods have externalities — penalizing non-wearers while confining the value they generate to their individual users. Once everyone has earbuds that are always in, physical proximity will no longer confer a social expectation of shared experience. subordinate our in-person sociality to the privatized infrastructure of networked communication Now, the kind of space that suffices instead is a pleasant backdrop for solitary device usage, a relatively blank slate that doesn’t compete with the phone’s foreground — conditions that places like Sweetgreen and Equinox supply. A dominant aural information platform could have a similar effect, fostering a world where we might as well leave our headphones on because there’s nothing around us worth hearing.
Antarctica has become one of the most widely cited examples of how law enforcement might operate on other worlds Throughout history, frontiers have been where we experiment with innovative societal arrangements, but they are also where we most faithfully reproduce the most current version of our culture, unfettered by the historical customs that temper it back home. but it will also feel like where we came from.
Online writing is too didactic. Would like to recapture the feeling that not everything I read has to explicitly deliver information - feels like that's more frequently the case with stuff I've found offline
Online writing is too didactic. Would like to recapture the feeling that not everything I read has to explicitly deliver information - feels like that's more frequently the case with stuff I've found offline My hunch is that digital writing evolves to be more responsive to measurable engagement, so there's an ever-present incentive to optimize what's written for utility (why internet content also gravitates toward self-helpyness)
