Making Sense of Culture Amidst Contradiction

The irony is that the hard parts, like writer’s block and openness, is where there’s self-examination, progress and growth.

And if we’re not pursuing creativity for that, then why are we? The clicks?

Our moment is a war of competing myths.

The future belongs to those who write it — as always — for better or worse.

Do the dichotomies of reason vs. feeling, objectivity vs. subjectivity, man vs. machine, and physics vs. metaphysics still make sense?

MK: This is the computer-thinking speaking. These are binaries . 0’s and 1’s are for computers, and arguably should only be for computers.

I thoroughly believe, alongside thinkers like Douglas Rushkoff, that we must ... See more

Acknowledging this bias or incompleteness is perhaps the most important part of the work.

Answers are mere theory.

these “cultures” are ever-evolving . (Latin ‘cultura’ = grow, tend, cultivate, to care)

Brian Lange puts it brilliantly: “Transaction is identity exchange.”

Consumers exchange capital for identity, and makers exchange their time, labor and expression for the goods or services they sell. Commerce is a continuous exchange of identities.

Culture is an ecosystem.

Each component from climate, biology, and institutions, to technology, policy and leisure, are all reacting to and informing the next.

For every push, there’s a pull, and for every action, a reaction. And more often than not, contradictions or polar opposites in culture are related to one another.

That we’re currently experie... See more

Overtime we’ve begun to treat this nuance and ambiguity as friction and something to program out. Computers don’t like it. Algorithms can’t categorize it. So we remove it.

Yet we so desperately need this “in between” and neither “yes” nor “no” thinking.

There is no one “singular culture.” Personal perception is the other key variable here.