culture
The prestige recession
ystrickler.com
Instead, art and culture have been safely neutralized as interchangeable commercial objects just like everything else.
At its best, cultural criticism is love and art that exists to give love to other expressions of art. It’s beautiful in its indulgence. A positive feedback loop that gives everybody exactly what they desire. Gods, scribes, muses, an audience, a culmination. This is what we want out of art. Something that feels grand, meaningful, connected to the ages. That doesn’t happen on its own. It needs context, dedicated space, deeper knowledge, appreciation.
Luxury surveillance is a phenomenon where "some people pay to subject themselves to surveillance that others are forced to endure and would, if anything, pay to be free of." You might buy a GPS bracelet to track your biometric data (which will be used by other firms), while others might be forced to wear one (and still pay for it) as part of their... See more
Super Apps Are Terrible for People—and Great for Companies
Who doesn’t love a good manifesto? A manifesto is a form of magic. You take mere words, mere gushes of air, mere lines and curves, mere tokens, and you alchemize them into something tangible. Manifest, manifold, manumission—from the Latin manus, meaning hand. Hands point and hold. Hands waive. According to Derrida, we cannot use our hands and look... See more
Zohar Atkins • Lightning: A Manifesto
The Antitrust Division will hopefully respond with “No, your search engine was awesome, but it’s increasingly ad-filled crap. You’re too powerful, you’re too lazy, and America needs some real competition.”
Matt Stoller • The First Big Antitrust Trial of the Century Is About to Start
“If we’re going to change our culture, we have to change our narrative. That’s what it comes down to. We have to change the mental model that our brains are using to make sense of the world.”
—Trabian Shorters, founder of @bmecommunity
Find a link in our bio to listen to Trabian’s full On... See more
instagram.comKrista Tippett x Trabian Shorters
How did a magical, spiritualist, mesmerized Europe ever convince itself that it was disenchanted? Josephson-Storm traces the history of the myth of disenchantment in the births of philosophy, anthropology, sociology, folklore, psychoanalysis, and religious studies. Ironically, the myth of mythless modernity formed at the very time that Britain,... See more
The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences (University of Chicago Press, 2017)
There’s also an almost unbearable sense of intimacy between author and reader — Céline famously said “what interests me is a direct message to the nervous system.” His total reliance on ellipses forecloses the cheap little tricks used to construct the artifice of what we are told is “good” writing: the strategic period, the melodramatic line break,... See more