Keely Adler

Sometimes when my Demon of Perfectionism is making me fret about how woolly my words are or how far away my “perfect” final product seems to be, I utter this mantra: “All I can do is my best with the resources that I’ve been given.”

Making systems resilient is fundamentally at odds with optimization, because optimizing a system means taking out any slack. A truly optimized, and thus efficient, system is only possible with near-perfect knowledge about the system, together with the ability to observe and implement a response. For a system to be reliable, on the other hand, there

social and cultural capital made merch the opposite of a commodity. Commodities are interchangeable (who can tell the difference between a Polo and a Tommy Hilfiger shirt if it wasn’t for the logo?); merch was a unique expression of a specific time, place, community, and context.

The Age of Reorientation

There is, as it happens, a word for this: zemblanity, the opposite of serendipity*.* Pandemic Time is suffused with zemblanity; it is a temporality shaped by a sense of certain doom, foreseen and amenable to some mitigation, but not entirely avertable.