culture
I have occasionally been asked why I’m obsessed with brands. The answer is that brands are things made out of belief. They are amorphous *meanings* that structure our relationships; they are already the same sort of thing that a religion or a culture is. With the cultural production service economy, and now with cryptocurrencies, all of the... See more
Toby Shorin • Life After Lifestyle
In reality, Spotify was subject to the outsized influence of the major-label oligopoly of Sony, Universal, and Warner, which together owned a 17 percent stake in the company when it launched. The companies, which controlled roughly 70 percent of the market for recorded music, held considerable negotiating power from the start. For these major... See more
Liz Pelly • The Ghosts in the Machine
"The art market is neither a hero nor a villain but mirrors society’s evolving connections with art, value, and finance. Art can do many things; it can depict the irreconcilable and the absurd, whether loudly amidst the daily discourse of society or discreetly as insiders obscure the underlying allusions."
We can’t address the decline in empathy without addressing the decline in attention . Empathy requires a degree of sustained focus:
When we are fragmented and distracted , we simply can’t... See more
- Paying attention to an experience someone is sharing
- Recalling experiencing a similar emotional response
- Sitting with your own and the other person’s inner state
When we are fragmented and distracted , we simply can’t... See more
Home | Substack
“There’s no way to make these systems without human labor at the level of informing the ground truth of the data — reinforcement learning with human feedback, which again is just kind of tech-washing precarious human labor. It’s thousands and thousands of workers paid very little, though en masse it’s very expensive, and there’s no other way to... See more
Devin Coldewey • Signal's Meredith Whittaker: AI is fundamentally 'a surveillance technology' | TechCrunch
Your milieu is not the same as your sister’s. It is an ever-shifting, individual configuration of information flows. The Twitter feed you have curated is a milieu. Your friend group (which is not the same as the friend groups of the other people in that group!) is a milieu.
It is by changing your milieu that you change yourself.
It is by changing your milieu that you change yourself.
Henrik Karlsson • First We Shape Our Social Graph; Then It Shapes Us

“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
