shifting culture
Leo Nasskau and
shifting culture
Girard believes that this concept permeates every aspect of society. “Enlightenment concepts of the individual persist all the way into existentialist thought,” he argues. In espousing equality between all men, the Enlightenment propagated the belief that the individual should not be subsumed to another. Indeed, the individual should not be... See more
Leo Nasskau • René Girard, mimetic desire, and society's biggest rat race
Flatness is the reason the three jobs with the most projected growth in your country all earn less than $27,000 a year, and it is also the reason that all the secondary institutions that once gave structure and meaning to hundreds of millions of American lives—jobs and unions but also local newspapers, churches, Rotary Clubs, main streets—have been... See more
this year, and beyond, i will move with my own mutability as a gift and no longer search for performative one-dimensionality. being home has taught me this, as i have had to witness my own shapeshifting and reckon with the deep-rooted reasons for it. i remember one day hearing adrienne maree brown and bayo akomolafe ask each other, “so what if i’m... See more
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the stakes for preserving our relationship to things that cannot immediately be had have never felt higher. After all, yearning is a subset of authenticity––a specific type of authenticity that comes from wanting. It’s the thing that we turn to after too easily “having” causes us to lose our way. Yearning isn’t like wellness in the way Gwyneth Paltrow or Andrew Huberman would sell wellness because it often feels like unwellness, but then it also feels like healing.
In America, our culture has become anticipation.
At some point, there was a switch, in which we became an edging culture. One rooted in “pre-”.
With AI, I suspect we’ll be able to play with the compression of anticipation with software objects well. Teasing an idea on Twitter, seeing it’s response, putting that prompt in AI to generate just enough code for the resemblance of the thing → and that reaching consumer hands much faster.
Perhaps anticipation culture is the wedded partner of instant-gratification culture. It’s the only thing that allows us to microdose the gratification of the object before we actually have it. Constantly watching trailers, or runway shows, sneak peaks, etc
I find this all lines up incredibly well to VC culture. The discussion is 90% weighted on the raise
The anticipation is lost as its material reality fails to hold any long term attention. Even if it was the exact promise. We simply love the build up. The image of the thing.
The “pre-”, other than consuming behind the scenes content of an artist’s process, is all mental. As I participate as a dancer in the audience, I can only (if I care to) construct fiction of the worked anticipation of the overall performance. But 90%+ of the audience only cares about the anticipation of the next drop or track. The loop is built in.
To bring it all the way back to the tweet that launched this post. Anticipation is exhausting. It is built around uncertainty, and the quelling of said uncertainty by the fragments of the objects chosen to be presented.