Tag: Elite

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Aesthetics Politics

Day 1713 and Breaks and Ends

It’s hard not see every day as more of a beak with the past even as so much remains the same. No wonder the French have that handy slogan about “plus ça change” as systems remain even with violence. They really know how to balance being disgruntled with the past.

I was suggesting La Haine to someone earlier this week as the French movie that made an impression on Gen X and elder millennials who paid attention to Francophone culture. It’s hard not to think current problems are similar tensions recycled for a whole new era. Atmospheric, vulgar and dangerous are the keywords.

The Hate or La Haine by Matthieu Kassovitz

The addiction economy repackaged the same old things that kept our attention economy running. And they will keep running it till it is so refined and so well packaged you won’t even remember that Starship Troopers was meant as a satire of fascism.

We repeat so much. The Churn as the Expanse called it.

Amos: This boss I used to work for in Baltimore, he called it the Churn. When the rules of the game change.
Kenzo: What game?
Amos: The only game. Survival. When the jungle tears itself down and builds itself into something new. The Expanse

Survival breaks out into the only game all the time and we are always running a Red Queens race. So try not to get too distracted. Ween yourself off of anything that you’ve not got any reason to hold dear. Change to meet what you can so long as you can still see yourself.

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Aesthetics Media

Day 1710 and Speaking The True Name or Obfuscating To Remain Illegible in Bureaucracy

There is a tradition in certain corners of the internet of hiding in plain sight. Being illegible to anyone without the shibboleths of your chosen in-group protects you from unwanted attention. Or so we tell ourselves.

The downside of an implacable insistence on being inscrutable is that you won’t ever be clear enough to have your ideas spread.

Lack of clarity is an anti-mimetic just as surely as lack of speed prevents you from getting your ideas out into the world.

“I can write faster than anyone who can write better, and I can write better than anyone who can write faster.” AJ Liebling

Writing quickly in a language designed to obfuscate with jargon, keeps the those who search for clarity in the dark and your grip on communication tight. You should want to write fast and well and clearly.

One of the first rules of institutional cohesion is to develop acronyms and coin new words. And nobody is better at this than the military industrial complex. The RAND corporation feels as if it jas invented as many turns of phrases as a teenage TikToker and the Cambridge Dictionary combined.

So if you find yourself concerned that an obfuscated acronym like the DOD’s Department of Defense is getting a name with a bit more clarity as to its purpose ask yourself why?

Maybe a department of war is the proper name for the branch who commissions prime contractors to make weapons.

War looked different in the past?
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Emotional Work

Day 1696 and Unk-Unks

Older millennials from families that watched the news may remember the infamous Donald Rumsfeld quote about unknown unknowns.

I’ll include the full quote from the Secretary of Defense about the lack of evidence for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tends to be the difficult ones. Donald Rumsfeld

Much hay was made over how ridiculous this sounded at the time. It was the title of an Errol Morris documentary. Naturally the origins of this phrase are more complicated than a soundbite from a politician.

“Unk-Unks” was a term regularly used by defense contractors. Wikipedia sources it back to 1969 in a Fortune article about Lockheed. “For Lockheed, Everything’s Coming Up Unk-Unks“

I find it to be a pretty useful framework. I have to imagine the Lockheed folks are irked that their clever coinage has come to be associated decades later with Rumsfeld and the Neo-conservative boondoggle of the war on terror.

I feel as if I’m in a persistent state of unknown unknowns these days. It’s not a new feeling either. I know what I don’t know and how vast a space is contained therein.

I know precious little and find that I know less as I get older (maturity being a helpful tutor in that manner). Which admittedly sucks.

Being uncertain of what I don’t know is just the natural state of being. Yet I’m regularly trying to add more to the small set of known knowns in my life. I hate not knowing how to have less pain and poor health in my life.

The experimentation I do on my body is part of my attempts to shave off a few more of unk-unks by trying to add more knowledge. And I just wish I could feel even a little bit physically better. But that seems to be in the unknown unknowns these days.

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Aesthetics Travel

Day 1683 and Caftan versus Cutouts

I am doing a bit of coastal convalescence. Americans would be loathe to call a vacation anything but a euphemism. What are we French?

That said, sunlight is the best disinfectant and I’m sick of taking antibiotics after my exciting Istanbul surgery adventures after a physician was a bit cavalier about my request for preventative care given details in my case file.

So why not get a little bit of time off with the loved ones and see some sights. A spot that particularly captured my imagination has two distinct demographics with widely divergent tastes.

A resort a thousand feet above the Ionian Sea

There are a number of beautifully styled women in their prime forties and fifties with gracefully maintained skin, silk caftans and sunhats. They seem to have children and husbands and are otherwise living their best life.

And then we have the younger crowd who I’ll call the cut-outs. In an ideal world, this would be Norma Kamali technical fabrics showing off her pioneering swimwear. That would be very sexy.

But it’s mostly different ways of showing off suggestive swathes of bare skin in clingy clothing. Lots of neon colors and odd cutout areas that get close to the action (side boob is popular) but still count as being covered. It is also mostly skintight but occasionally some volume is added to let some other salacious details pop.

These appear to be gaggles of girlfriends mostly. They don’t have men with them that I’ve seen, though I’ve seen a few couples where a young man has a woman dressed like this on his arm. And they are all made up in full beat makeup that would make a drag queen think “not very demure.”

When you make odd choices for travel and off the beaten path you sometimes see a hospitality culture that is both expensive enough to attract the tasteful but with enough flash that it plays on social media so the Instahoes aspire for picture. And believe me this spot is extremely Instagram friendly.

I am neither caftan Parker Posie mom nor young beautiful aspirational influencer (or OnlyFans star depending on who you ask) so I am staying out of the culture clash between richer hipster travelers and “it’s expensive so let’s show off” personas.

I am in a more wrap dress and kimono style woman when pools and beaches are involved. I am happy to enjoy the salt room and infrared sauna before a massage without styling my every single fit for the occasion. That said I did feel as if I nailed the vibe. All cotton and silk with one floral kimono for the pool. Even I need to live a little.

I got captured taking a selfie during golden hour before dinner
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Aesthetics Travel

Day 1682 and Hipster European Vacation Activated

If there is one complaint Americans have about Europe (and no this isn’t about air conditioning) it is their insistence on playing the worst kind of nightclub music absolutely everywhere.

You are getting your morning espresso and it’s trashy club music. You go eat at a normal neighborhood spot for a quiet dinner and you can feel the beat drop as they place your first course. Domenico Modugno isn’t on any Italian menus these days.

If you are by a hotel pool you better be ready to enjoy some Kylie Minogue nostalgia-core. Which I actually enjoy but I’ve been honest about maintaining my own nostalgia for Hotel Costes delivered by noise canceling headphones. It’s trashy but so is blasting up-temp remixes when I stare at the sea.

The more tourism because contentious in Europe, the worse the problem seems to get. It’s the belief of most proprietors that more local guests and tourists alike prefer this kind of cacophony. When you ask them about turning things down or towing on a playlist better suited to cuisine it can be hit or miss.

Especially if you are the sort to seek out the foodie destinations of a town. Nothing is quite the let down of eating a Michelin quality meal with a backing track of bad house music.

I am sure some tourists have furthered these stereotypes (I’m looking at you Britain). But assure you, Americans do not prefer this especially if your tourism is made up of the first wave of cultural hipster.

Once you go high margin (again apologies to the Europoor tourist) you do bave a very different customer base and they hate this shit We can tolerate your aversion to ice but not an aura assault.

If you have cultural touchstones in your own musical history, we’d much prefer that over dinner.

Authenticity is all anyone will have left in any smoothed over algorithmically perfected middle ground. And guess what it’s not Swedish House Mafia and no one wants Miami or Ibiza to be everywhere. Tallinn and Tirana have their own vibe.

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Aesthetics Culture Politics

Day 1679 and Avoiding the See and Be Seen of Luxury Travel as Post-Liberalism Nears

The lingering live embers of Venkatesh Rao’s charnel age have left me with deadened impression in my bodily sensorium. Tasting, breathing, and seeing the culture of now feels somewhere between spoiled and not quite ripe.

One of my minor affectations is periodizing my writing into sardonically named 6-year eras…We’re about to enter the last year of the third age of Ribbonfarm, (2019-24), and I finally have a name for it: this is the Charnel Age. December 21 Ribbonfarm

I have been known to drop an Antonio Gramsci joke from time to time. This is harder to make a joke about though. The age which was being born as Gramsci was imprisoned by the fascists from 1929-1935 surely felt as filled with morbid symptoms and putrefaction.

How it compares to our current perverse extended gerontological Fourth Turning of death and rebirth is yet to be seen.

The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters

That quote is a translation of Slavoj Žižek’s which isn’t quite as pithy as the Slovenian made it sound.

La crisi consiste appunto nel fatto che il vecchio muore e il nuovo non può nascere: in questo interregno si verificano i fenomeni morbosi più svariati.”

Or for those lacking Italian skills (which as I do) here is it translated more literally.

“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”

Rao calls charnel vision “a tendency to see things from the perspective of natural processes of transience, death, and decay,” which can feel foreign to the long century of stability.

Americans enforced this order through its dollarization and the financialization . But empires change and even the longest institutional decay can be seen from far enough remove.

And so we have Swiss politicians running to Washington DC as the cosmopolitan upper classes try to enjoy an August off from the always on mania of this interregnum while also keeping an eye on matters.

As it turns out the extra mile to get to an esoteric Dolomite lake or a less well known riviera (might I recommend the Balkan coastlines to the more adventurous). If you need to find me, I won’t tell.

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Culture

Day 1678 and Fiat Prestige and the Inflationary Pressures of Credentialism

America has been rejecting practical workforce training like apprenticeships for over a century. Our military nudged the enlisted into skills but it was access to university education that helped Americans climb the social ladder.

The Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944 or as you probably know, the “the GI Bill” was so successful that by 1947, WWII veterans accounted for 50% of college enrollments.

Social mobility matters a lot to the mythos of America so it doesn’t surprise me that practical skills were not nearly so attractive once we made prestigious colleges more accessible.

When millennials were children the 1992 Higher Education Reauthorization Act (HEA92) made college loans available to all families, regardless of financial need.

And the trend in spending on education and the cost if higher education has been up and to the right ever since. Over the 59-year period from 1963 to 2022, college tuition increased nearly 300% when adjusted for inflation.

Educationdata.org

The effects of the cultural experiment in social mobility some call The Sort where children with good test scores were shuffled into universities and into the managerial class is driving spend and anxiety.

From Max Weber’s Bureaucratic Society of group status competition to Randy Collin’s work in the 70s on the rise of credentialism in the workplace, it seems as if modern industry drove a deep mimetic desire for prestigious university educations to stay ahead socially.

Having skills was not as important as being seen as having the right credentials. The old joke that Harvard launders the rich kids with the smart kids so no one knows who is who doesn’t seem so funny snore.

Last week a picture went viral of a table of Harvard and Stanford graduates in Silicon Valley (mostly Asian students) was all angst as their credentials mean something to them but not necessarily to employers or founders. So what is the point?

The data shows college education spending consistently outpaces inflation. But is it doomed to keep going up and up even if we are getting less from it? Walter Kirn had a turn of phrase in a tweet today I found apt. We have a problem with fiat prestige in America.

Power flows in the country — human, social & intellectual power flows — look bad for the legacy brokerages & gate keepers. Their services are of declining value, their cartel-like arrangements are dissolving & their ability to maintain their own mystique through circular credentialing & prize-giving — the issuance of what one might call “fiat prestige” — is failing. It’s unclear to me what moves they have left

Inflated currency destroys value. Our Federal Reserve worries about being over a 2% inflation rate and yet we let it happen. So why aren’t we more concerned with fiat prestige and its credentialist inflationary pressures? Our system of social credibility is under significant pressure and if I were Harvard I’d be terrified of going fully Zimbabwe on my social capital.

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Media

Day 1671 and Warenästhetik

I have a favorite book store in San Francisco is called City Lights. It’s an old Beat bookstore that carried the city through its left wing era.

They have a section called commodity aesthetics from which I treat myself to a fresh book from every time I visit San Francisco. I’ve got quite a collection from the habit.

Having spent the requisite time with the western cannon, I enjoy dabbling in critical theory and its decedents like commodity aesthetics as an adult.

The Frankfurt School has direct line from Horkheimer to the founder of commodity aesthetics Wolfgang Fritz Haug. Warenästhetik, in German, is the process of aestheticising products we make and consume.

Marxists go on about the seduction and manipulation of consumers in order to reinforce capitalist systems but it’s hard to ignore the impact of the field on what we make, use, and sell.

The wider world of why and what commodify is ever changing even as it recycles the same archetypes and patterns over and over again. See the Sydney Sweeney’s “good jeans” remake of Brooke Shields infamous Calvin Klein advertisement.

It’s amusing to me that the Marxist have put in more effort to understanding the nuts and bolts of making and selling desirable goods than capitalists do. Maybe that’s what they mean by praxis? The criticism and the practice come together in one bookshelf in a basement of a bookstore in North Beach.

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Community Politics

Day 1669 and Seeing Without A State

We are entering an era where technology is liable to be the scapegoat for a number of problems that are all too human. Seeing state failures and institutional failures and deciding to blame something new rather than human nature is very much human nature

We are looking for someone or something to blame for human nature and the thing that makes the current world different from the hazy memories of childhood are an easy place to start.

The rate of change fights with the basic realities of being evolved apes. And the social dynamics of our ancestors are pretty gnarly so I don’t blame religion for wanting to obfuscate the evidence of our base nature. We have to believe we can be better.

The trade offs involved in providing communal protection has meant submissions to various forms of power and hierarchy and yet we still have social scandals over genes, jeans, semiotics and the perversion of our biology. It’s not a day to discus sex and advertising online.

I look at this chronology of my life and have pride in its daily discipline even as I know being myself online is a risk. I see day 1669 and want to make a nice joke. I believe in the commons and my freedoms within it.

It’s just getting more dangerous to be online. I am considering how I bring myself to a world where I’ve always be extremely present online under my own identity. I want to train the intelligences we develop on top of our digital commons and feel the pull of that responsibility.

Then I see another grid failure. I see a plane crash. We have terrifying realizations that we can’t rely on the systems of the past for where our future is headed.

We have European software developers now noticing what Balaji was pilloried for pointing out. The nation state and the network state are coexisting already as anarcho-tyranny increases.

In American and Western Europe we are already seeing daily examples of anarcho-tyranny. The state can hurt you but not help you. Communal needs we once enabled the state to run and provide can’t be counted on in water, energy, and infrastructure. You have to build systems for yourself where and when you can while you still can.

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Aesthetics Internet Culture

Day 1667 and Guess Goes Idoru

In 1995 William Gibson wrote a novel called called Idoru. The protagonist Colin Laney has a talent for identifying nodal points which are the concept undergirding Gibson’s most famous quote.

“The future is here, it’s just unevenly distributed.”

Nodal points, or as Gibson later called the process of finding them “pattern recognition,”is a type of useful apophenia in which you notice the emergence of trends before they have fully emerged.

You pick out the new and next amongst the now. In the case of Idoru, a rock star named Rez wants to marry a synthetic self Rei Toei who is an AI construct that is a massive pop star.

Thirty years later that future is here. Heck Lil Miquela debuted in 2019. But in 2025 we are in the very darkest depths of the uncanny valley and it looks more like a banal blonde with an ugly handbag than an exciting light show hologram in Tokyo.

Fashion’s primary value is in acting as routers of emerging nodal points, so I should have known it was only a matter of time before Vogue’s publishers decided to let one of their lower rent advertisers run a campaign from an advertising agency whose gimmick is creating artificial intelligence editorial spreads.

You’ve got to test the waters with someone who doesn’t really matter before it spreads to your editorial and luxury advertisers amirite? And it’s somehow less creative than your average Guess campaign.

A series of images in an advertisement for Guess featuring a blonde woman in a striped dress and a floral-romper situation are stamped with tiny fine print: “Produced by Seraphinne Vallora on AI.” via NYMag

Chevronesque patterns against Yves Klein blue couldn’t have cost more than their usual Rome dolce vita rip off campaigns but you do you Guess
Just when you thought photoshop was the worst thing for body dysmorphia now it’s AI

Anna Wintour learned her lesson a little late with the Internet and social media (thanks for the career Ms Wintour) but it’s hard to predict just how Condé Nast will bungle this next content transition.

You’d think with Cloudflare’s different rates for bot scrapers versus human Internet traffic would provide the ideal opportunity for a renaissance of valuable online creative content but maybe no one at Vogue knows about that yet.

The AI future at Condé Nast is not looking great based on this Guess advertising campaign but who cares it’s August and Guess right? When it’s Prada and the September issue I’ll grant them much less slack. If I’m paying for content, I expect it to be something better than derivative goods.