Palantir is a fascinating conundrum. A company "everybody" hates, unapologetically right-wing, nerd-y and striving for coolness, both (the "chore coat" is a dud but the "software that dominates" tagline is not; the sheer cheek of it!).
It releases (derivative merch), hosts pop-ups in Seoul. It is essentially a poster boy for the whole “taste is the... See more
My professional background is in design & development, community & economic development, urban governance & public policy. I also practice in the fields of seamanship, horsemanship, poetry, theology, & symbolism.
When life is so entangled with the internet, why shouldn’t images reflect the sensation of being online – its fury, its melancholy, its psychedelia? Why shouldn’t artists respond by going deeper, making not just new images, but new fables, protocols, values?
McLuhan was the prophet of cool, and as much as he personally despised contemporary media culture, he knew that the only way to critique it was to ride the wave; hence, The Medium is the Massage , a beautifully designed book of aphorisms condensing the ideas he worked out in detail in Understanding Media .