hyperreality
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
What disappeared along the way was not just trust, but also the micro-doses of potency that came from navigating everyday risk. Choosing a restaurant without a thousand reviews, booking a room in an unfamiliar city - these were small but vital leaps of faith. They required us to extend ourselves beyond certainty, and in doing so they injected... See more
We’re Desperate For Potency
On the flipside of hyperfantasy, there also lies hyperreality. Borne out of our desire to return to what’s fundamentally human in the age of AI and our growing distaste for the distraction economy that’s predicated on entertainment imperative and seamlessness, we are seeking realness in what we consume and do. Honesty and friction triumph.
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
The internet used to be an escape from reality.
Now, reality is an escape from the internet.
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
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
Kyle Chayka • 🟧 Temporal realness is the hottest commodity
A humanism that responds to the collapse of Big Authenticity will be sexier . As Magdalene Taylor recently wrote, “Real things and actual human experiences are hot, even in the written form. They have a libidinal energy that’s been drained from us in the current technological era. And we’re going to want to get that energy back.”