Sarah Drinkwater
@sarahdrinkwater
Sarah Drinkwater
@sarahdrinkwater

A person’s choice of a spouse—or if they aren’t married, their closest lifelong partner—is much more revealing than anything they say or do in public. This choice tells you about their own innermost longings, expectations, and needs. It tells you what they think of themselves, and what they think
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Last year I began naming my seasons. The practice began when I declared it to be "Wife Guy Summer," a joking but real intention to manifest my life partner. It was a great comedy bit for the summer, but when I started dating someone seriously in September I thought that maybe I should name all my seasons...
Season-naming-as-manifesting is one way of doing it, but naming-the-season-when-you-find-out-what-it's-about is another….
Winter is upon us now, and I don't have a name for this season yet. But December and winter for me is always dream season, so perhaps I will call it that. Winter is for reflecting and clarifying, and dreams are for knowing and for inventing—for we know in part, and we prophesy in part. I have recommended to you the benefits of dreaming, and of naming your seasons. I hope that you join me in the great experiment.
late stage capitalism and shifting culture
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.

Breakdown: what’s a brand?