alexi gunner
@idlegaze
cultural strategist
writes idle gaze; a newsletter exploring the undercurrents of the modern zeitgeist.
founder @ idle gaze consulting
cultural futurist @ RADAR
alexi gunner
idlegaze.substack.com
Scenia do not start fully-formed. Instead, they evolve through three stages: communities, micro-scenia, and scenia.
Community: a group of people living in the same place or having a particular characteristic in common; a feeling of fellowship with others, as a result of sharing common attitudes, interests, and goals.
Examples: early personal
... See morefrom Conjuring Scenius — Packy McCormick by Packy McCormick
In Valeria Luiselli’s 2011 novel Faces in the Crowd , the two types of people are “those who just live, and those who design their lives.”
from Dirt: Two Kinds of People by Dirt
- In the past, our timekeeping systems were synchronized with the systems of the earth. The rhythms and seasons of nature help us orient and make sense of when we are. Digital media has warped our subjective sense of time and thrown us into a state of atemporal confusion. Aside from surface-level features like “dark mode,” digital temporality is blin... See more
from The garden of forking memes: how digital media distorts our sense of time by Aaron Z. Lewis
Taylor called this authenticity, and it became the unreachable horizon of modern life. It’s a concept that makes sense only in its absence; we recognize inauthenticity, phoniness, when someone’s clearly being a poseur. Yet the struggle to feel authentic—this is very real, even if we know better. In Taylor’s telling, everyone becomes a kind of artis
... See morefrom Stay True: A Memoir (Pulitzer Prize Winner) by Hua Hsu
- This is an era of Shopping as Entertainment—shopping not out of need, but to scratch an itch, to feel like you did something, to kill time. In the case of Temu, the marketplace’s homepage is a “chaotic display of products, resembling a general discovery feed with a search bar at the very top,” writes Terry Nguyen. The chaos comes from the various t... See more
“The exercise of imagination is dangerous to those who profit from the way things are because it has the power to show that the way things are is not permanent, not universal, not necessary.”
Ursula K. Le Guinfrom Alternative Prosperity: Reframing The "Good Life"
To an outsider, it may seem immature, even inhospitable. Now, the comedian Rachel Coster is investigating the phenomenon for her TikTok/Instagram series Boy Room.
from I Live in an Uninhabitable ‘Boy Room’ – Can a Comedian Save Me From Myself? by Matthew Cantor
- In Mythologies , Roland Barthes discusses how wrestling (and now, politics) uses kayfabe, the convention of presenting staged narratives and spectacles as real to capture attention and elicit a desired response from an audience.
from magic, online! by Nick Susi
We can spend so much time in our homes, cars, offices, and shopping malls that we feel removed from nature and separate from each other and even ourselves. With our world so circumscribed, we become cut off from a natural vitality and connection with life. We may feel numb, flat, or simply disconnected from a sense of purpose. Spring flowers and wi
... See morefrom Awake in the Wild by Mark Coleman