Thought provoking

Brooklyn-based art collective MSCHF describes this phenomenon:

"No one talks about the future anymore. Instead, everything accelerates the present to a fever pitch, intensifying and weirding the dysfunctions of the current moment. There’s a hole where the future used to be, and all that remains is the increasingly spicy present."

In the 1990s or 2000s someone created a social network designed to make it possible to tell that you were about to take a flight with someone with whom you have something in common. The idea was you could reach out to them and spend flight time in conversation with someone who might become a friend or at least a useful contact.

And it starts with a simple truth: To invent the future, you have to subvert the present. And the present is shaped by an invisible force few are trained to see: the monoculture.

But even in this era, patronage was conditional. Artists served the ideological aims of those who paid. The church demanded piety. The state demanded civic glory. The Medici demanded immortality. As a model, patronship has always involved a tension between creative expression and institutional ambition. The artist received funding but also instruct... See more

“But museums also choose what to display, what to let rest in the dark, and what to reveal again under new light.

They’re not mausoleums — they are spaces of loss and rebirth. Alive, even in silence.

We are like that too.

Full of rooms. Piled-up memories. Crookedly hung frames.

Ideas that need to come out of storage.”

But we have to acknowledge that when we remove friction from one domain, we're not eliminating it, we're just moving it somewhere new.

When systems that were designed for resilience are optimized instead for efficiency, they break.

simulated companionship

Think of it this way. We all agree that a cool person with panache can wear a garment we’d previously dismissed and show it to us in a new, positive light — freaking & redeeming a previously benighted garment. Ipso facto we must also concede that a person whose style, energy and gestalt we find repellent can wear a garment we’d previously appre... See more