Culture

Crypto was really avant-garde here, because they had to argue with everyone, “Onchain isn’t in the front end or the back end, it’s this new third thing”, that was hard for us to put into words, especially for practical app-building purposes. Culturally speaking, the proposition remains: “for every piece of content, there is now a publicly viewable... See more

How early or late you are to something is now an essential component of your relationship to that thing. The timelines and reels that represent “what is going on” are increasingly about a single meta-topic: are you predicting it, or is it predicting you? This has become the main thing that you feel. And it is a complete break from the postmodern... See more

If you asked me what the function of humans is after AGI, It is to handle the transcendent with this same fine disregard for the rules. To look at what is great and what serves us, to play with it, to riff on it, to hold it loosely, and to orient towards it in a way that lets us co-create with it.

Christ was a carpenter before he was a teacher.... See more

This is what the taste thesis gets exactly backwards. The patron who built the cathedral was not exercising taste. He was exercising will. He was exercising worship. And that will was devoted to something beyond himself — towards God, towards the city, towards a future he would not live to see.

Strip the transcendent out and what remains is... See more

Strip the transcendent out and what remains is raw consumption. You are no longer participating in a project that exceeds you. You are furnishing a room. The judgment may be exquisite. The room may be beautiful. But the activity has no telos. It is not pointed at heaven. It is not even pointed at the future. It is pointed at a living room wall.

This is the thing the taste discourse never wants to say out loud: the collectors did not have taste in their own right. They had a social network that told them what taste was, and they performed it. Sound familiar? The only difference today is that the Bohemia now are twitter anons.

This is taste in its most terminal form. The collector doesn't look at the painting and judge it. The collector reads the critic, then looks at the painting through the critic's eyes. The painting is not an object in its own right but a theory to be validated. The taste is not in the looking. The taste is in knowing which theory is fashionable to... See more

So when did taste arrive?

It arrived when we eliminated the transcendent and the patron left the room.

If you pressed me, I would date it to somewhere in the eighteenth century. Roughly the emergence of the modern art market. The park ave armory exhibition, the Parisian Salon, the rise of the collector as a social type — all representations of the... See more

He, of course, was not choosing from a menu of generated options. He was creating the conditions under which something none of them could have imagined alone could emerge. The word is not taste. The word he might have used was provocation . The word, if you want to be precise about it, is patronage in its original form: capital and labor and the... See more