Thought provoking

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.

simulated companionship

“to hone sensory receptivity to the marvelous specificity of things.” I would argue that this is another way of talking about learning to pay a certain kind of attention to the world. In so doing we may find, as Andrew Wyeth once commented about a work of Albrecht Dürer’s, that “the mundane, observed, became the romantic”— or, the enchanted.

“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.”

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.

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."

This got me thinking that, ultimately, it's the totality of those “nodal points” that indicate one's own unique perspective. It doesn't matter if you specifically sought out the nodal point or not, it’s the recognition that counts. When you encounter a piece of life-changing information (no matter how large the change part is), you are simultaneous... See more

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