Sensoria: Thinkers for the Twentieth-First Century

Even just as common words, zany, cute, and interesting seem intuitively right as keys to what many people want to look at, laugh with, sigh over, and share with others. If you want to make a meme, in the general sense of a unit of media that will be shared by others, those three all work.

The interesting also assembles the social, but what is sociologically interesting also has an aesthetic aspect. It measures the tension between understanding and wonder.

What might be novel is the ownership and control over the entire value chain through command of the information vector itself.

“The future is a much better guide to the present than the past.”

The cute: The word derives from the word acute. The word itself is a cute version of an edgier word. The zany is to be held at a distance; the cute is intimate, domestic. We have powers over cute things, and yet they still seem to make demands of us. The zany is about production; the cute is about consumption. The zany is about the worker; the cute

The aesthetic is still with us, but in banal form, lacking religious solemnity. You can cuddle up to it at night or glance it in a museum. “Hey…”, it says. It can be awesome but never inspire awe. It has no higher power to appeal to and not much up its sleeve.

The second is a historical transformation in the internet that began in the mid-nineties, which went from being military and scientific (with some creative subcultures on the side) to a vast commercial complex.115 This led to the waning of the early nineties internet subcultures, some of whom thought of it as a utopian or at least alternative media

The interesting is a moving target, tracking along with the difference between norms and anomalies.

The zany: it’s a performative aesthetic that is hot and sweaty, anxious and excessive. It is physical and sometimes libidinal. It is about activities where play becomes a job or work gets too playful.