hyperreality
We need to replace irony, sarcasm, and cynicism—which have contributed to our self-debasement—with softer, gentler attitudes. Cynicism is useful in criticizing, but is impotent when we need to build something better. Irony only destroys, never builds.
That’s why the age of irony (in TV, comedy, etc.) coincided with decline and degradation. The... See more
That’s why the age of irony (in TV, comedy, etc.) coincided with decline and degradation. The... See more
David Foster Wallace Tried to Warn Us About these Eight Things
When you can pay someone else to deal with the grocery store rush, when you can buy access to a highway lane without traffic, when you can skip urgent care and book a concierge doctor, you’re probably not going to invest in improving our broken systems. You’ve, “found a way to route around collapse. Life still works, but only in zones that are... See more
We’re Desperate For Potency
we haven’t completely eradicated friction, only in small expensive zones
What we’re starving for is intensity, and that’s hard to admit because it means the ease we’re so precious about has also made us numb.
We’re Desperate For Potency
bringing back the full textures of living IRL, a subversion of everything the internet had bestowed upon us: immediacy, abundance, hyper-connectivity and entertainment
What people really want is permission to feel and act in ways that ordinary life doesn't allow, and this is the right time to start pushing your experiences into uncomfortable territory.
We’re Desperate For Potency
• post-tragic (meaning and agency on the other side of despair)
• post-extrinsic (driven by new societal purposes)
• post-rational (open to ways of knowing that transcend and include the intellect),
• post-exploitation (reflective about the uses and abuses of power)
• post-tribal (whole-hearted togetherness in a world of love and power; an expansive
... See moreCreative Destruction • Rabbit Holes 🕳️ #40
These things are the opposite of scalable and replicable. Live culture is finite. It exists in the moment and then it’s gone, except perhaps for the artifacts of digital content it leaves behind, spun off into TikTok, relied on to advertise what already happened and convey the aura of realness, building hype for next time. (Substack held a reading... See more
Kyle Chayka • 🟧 Temporal realness is the hottest commodity
The internet used to be an escape from reality.
Now, reality is an escape from the internet.
This urge might be semi-subconscious, a drift toward the real-time (or the appearance of such) and a slow dismissal of the pre-made. Livestreamed video is hard to fake, and a live interview is, on some baseline level, authentic. The spoken language of a three-hour podcast episode is messy, meandering, and often internally inconsistent, but it has... See more