Battle Royale (2000)

A class of ninth graders is gassed while on the bus for a field trip. They wake up on an island with exploding metal collars and a bag of random weapons, and are told they have three days to kill each other until only one student is left standing.

Battle Royale (2000) birthed a new genre of games and media: PUBG, Fortnite, and Apex all emerged within its lineage.

The film takes place under an authoritarian Japanese government that has lost confidence in its youth. As a way to curb juvenile delinquency, it passes the Battle Royale Act, a government-mandated annual event that ships a randomly chosen class of children to an island to kill each other. Presiding over the event is Kitano, a former teacher who was once stabbed by one of his students and cast off by his own family. He has decided that he has nothing left to live for, and the state has handed him a system that lets him act on it.

The mechanics of the Battle Royale Act describe a practically perfect multiplayer game: drop a large group into a confined space, give them weapons, and let the last one standing win. The genre it spawned has become one of the most profitable genres in gaming, now worth over $10B. What these modern games keep is the battle royale system, but they drop what makes the film so unbearable, and therefore meaningful. Nobody is gassed onto the island in Fortnite. The strangers who land there don’t owe each other anything. Battle Royale is the reverse on both counts. The opponents you kill are your own classmates, and the person who sends you to kill them was supposed to be your mentor and guardian.

In 2000, this premise was less of an exaggeration. In the 1990s, Japan lost confidence in its future and its children, an era now called the “Lost Decade.” In 1989, a man was arrested for the murder of four young girls and a vast collection of anime videotapes (amongst other media) was found in his apartment; the press named him the Otaku Murderer and built a panic around the idea that the media/culture had turned the youth into predators. In 1997, a 14 year old killed a younger child and the fear moved from blaming the culture to blaming the children themselves. Battle Royale entered this current; the year the film was released, Japan lowered the age of criminal punishment from 16 to 14.

The battle royale genre has been the subject of much analysis over the last 20+ years, particularly as a criticism of late-stage capitalism. The premise of the genre rests on the conditions of scarcity and competition—a closed island, a fixed ration of supplies issued at random, a single survivor. It’s a world where the economy has already collapsed and unemployment has climbed so high that most students have quit school, and the state’s response is to make explicit that there is a fixed amount of everything and exactly one seat at the end.

In his post “Survival of the Purest,” Patrick Carland treats the island as a working model of neoliberalism. The Battle Royale Act is how a system responds when it can no longer take care of everyone; and the justification it gives is that adulthood itself is a brutal exercise in Social Darwinism, where only the strongest and most cunning are worthy of survival. This is Mark Fisher’s capitalist realism almost exactly, the condition in which it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of the system. In 2026, this condition has been dubbed the “permanent underclass,” describing a class the economy ruthlessly leaves behind. It is usually attached to fears about automation, though what it names runs deeper than a single technology or single blame.

Deeper than the economic reading of Battle Royale is a relational one, which begins from the fact that the man carrying out the Battle Royale Act is a school teacher. A school is the institution a society uses to hand itself down, where one generation equips the next to take its turn. In The Disappearance of Childhood, Neil Postman argues that school helps hold childhood open; it keeps a boundary between children and the full force of the adult world, introducing that world slowly, in stages. Battle Royale tears that boundary down and flips the institution on its head. The classroom still remains the rite of passage, but is now an initiation defined by murder. The state builds a mechanism to systematically dispose of its youth, while the teacher simply gives up on them.

Across the institutions built to teach the young and carry down its practices, there is a throughline of generational abdication. Schools closed in 2020 and reopened forever changed—a cohort moved forward on schedule like nothing ever happened. The jobs students trained and credentialed themselves for are disappearing. Entry-level work, the rung of the ladder where every trade has always taught itself to the next set of stewards, is the first one automation is primed to remove. Civic life was supposed to model working order. Instead, a generation came of age during a time where the institution of government has not visibly worked within their lifetime, where neither party has delivered what it promised, and in-fighting and gridlock is the steady state. There is a shared sense among the younger generation that the machine is broken, and what they’ve inherited is institutional wreckage.

Each example of failed institution is Kitano’s gesture at scale. What gets called inevitable human nature is actually systems an older generation built and have stopped tending to. Battle Royale is best known for the genre it spawned, but the film’s true genius is what it understood about the society that made it. The economic reading sees a market and stops where Fisher does, at the conviction that the system cannot be replaced. But the film goes one turn deeper, to the institution a society uses to hand itself down, turned against the generation it exists to carry forward.

Backrooms (2026)

In Nighthawks (1942), Edward Hopper painted a diner in the dead of night—fluorescent light, a single customer and a couple sitting in silence, a dark, empty city outside the windows. Midcentury American painters often explored emptiness and absence as conditions of postwar life, and Hopper rendered it most precisely as liminal spaces: a room now empty of people, but still warm with the memory of their presence.

The internet began to claim its own version of liminality in 2019, on a 4chan board used to post and describe images that just “feel off”: an empty mall, a hotel hallway with the lights still on. One day, a user posts a photo of an empty fluorescent yellow office space, and the next day someone gives the photo a backstory and names it “the Backrooms”. Within months the Backrooms has its own subreddit, its own wiki page, and hundreds of contributors writing accounts of being trapped inside.

In 2022, Kane Parsons (16M) uploaded a video to YouTube called “The Backrooms (Found Footage)”. Teaching himself Blender and After Effects, Parsons rendered the original image in 3D and framed it as VHS-era found footage of a person navigating the Backrooms and its curiosities. The video hit 20M+ views, and Parsons turned the original into a series, which A24 then optioned for a feature. The film opened to $81M domestic and $118M worldwide—the biggest opening in A24’s history. 85% of the audience was under 35, and more than 50% under 25.

The original Backrooms phenomenon established liminal as a sort of hyperreal, internet-native aesthetic: low-res POV photos of unsettling spaces. In “In Defense of the Poor Image”, Hito Steyerl theorized that the dominant image of the 21st century would be exactly this: the sourceless, heavily compressed JPEG, reposted enough times that its degradation becomes part of its meaning. The Backrooms image is poor in exactly this sense. Its power comes from arriving both sourceless and from everywhere at once. When users try to trace the image’s origin, the investigation becomes part of the artifact, the circulation of the image constitutive of its meaning. It took several years and hundreds of online collaborators to pin the original image to a hobby shop in Oshkosh, Wisconsin.

The internet, itself, is a liminal space. It is the place you go through on the way to somewhere else, except the somewhere else has no end. Digital platform design since the early 2010s—infinite scroll, autoplay, algorithmic feeds—has been built to extend the liminal phase. The feed has no destination.

Video games, in particular, have been a massive influence on the spatial and aesthetic sensibilities of the online generation. While first-person video games are older than the internet, dating all the way back to Maze in the 1970s, the first-person camera became a dominant way of seeing for an entire generation that came of age on the internet.

In Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture, Alexander Galloway traces the first-person subjective shot through cinema. Film historically used the first-person almost always to signify an alternate way of seeing, an eye that was not quite human—the famous Hitchcock subjective shot, drugged and dreaming.

In video games, the subjective perspective is common and often used to achieve an intuitive sense of motion and action in gameplay. Games like Doom or Half-life or even Minecraft or Roblox all took the alienating cinematic shot and made it the standard way you traveled through space.

The liminal condition extends beyond aesthetic. The term liminal was originally coined in 1909 to describe the rite of passage. And more specifically, the awkward middle stage where a person is no longer who they were, but not quite yet who they will become—Odysseus on Calypso’s island, Frodo in Rivendell.

The traditional rite of passage moves a person across a threshold and into a community that recognizes them as transformed. While the contemporary rite has kept the threshold of the wedding or the graduation, it has lost the community that would have borne witness to the change. The result is a generation fluent in thresholds, but less convinced that thresholds actually lead anywhere or hold meaning. Posting an image of an empty hotel hallway becomes a way of saying aloud something that otherwise stays ambient.

This is why, in a Hopper painting, the empty diner registers the absence of people, but in an internet image, the dead mall doesn’t appear empty; it is the spatial form of an ambient condition the viewer already inhabits. The eye has been trained to expect continuation rather than arrival.

All these dynamics come together in Backrooms the film: an endless liminal space, rendered in the subjective perspective of a first-person video game, drawn from an image that traveled the internet for years.

The formal grammar of slow cinema is not new, but Backrooms, both in its production and its deployment is a groundbreaking artifact of an emerging generation native to liminality.

An older filmmaker could’ve understood the Backrooms intellectually, shot it beautifully, and probably would’ve more successfully drawn the Backrooms lore into a conventional film with plot, theme, and character development. But they still would have had to translate it into cinema from the outside.

Though fair critiques of the film, they miss what makes Backrooms interesting and why it matters. It is unmistakably the work of an internet-native filmmaker, made for an internet-native audience. Parsons’s influences, in his own words, are a product of the condition of growing up online rather than through formal training. The first-person camera moves with the player-eye drift that any player would recognize. The pacing refuses to populate space. He understood that the emptiness was the point. The film does not explain what the audience is supposed to feel because it sits in a register that they already inhabit. Backrooms is the first breakout theatrical hit to translate the internet’s liminality at this scale.

The film’s performance is evidence of an emergence more interesting than a one-off box office success. An online, distributed generation has developed a coherent aesthetic category for the embodied structure of contemporary, online life, and Backrooms offers a rare occasion for it to share physical, communal presence around a film that recognizes it. An audience coming of age has shown up to see themselves rendered.

Thank you to Eugene for feedback and always invaluable insights on film

Originally posted on X

Marc Andreessen believes that venture capital may be one of the only jobs to survive AI automation because “the art of picking” boils down to taste. Paul Graham has declared that “in the AI age, taste will become even more important.”

Something is shifting in how the tech industry talks about taste, and the artifacts are becoming uncanny: an AI-generated moodboard laden with TASCHEN books and a Chemex; an apartment staged with an Eames lounge chair in the foreground of a Vitsœ shelving system.

But when “taste” is deployed en masse, what is actually being bought and sold?

Emily Segal has named the most visible symptom of this phenomenon as tasteslop: what occurs when the visible signals of taste are extracted from the contexts that produced them and then are redeployed—“cultural capital after extraction, after it’s been through the blender.”

Segal draws on French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction (1979), which argues that taste is not spontaneous or natural, but systematically produced by class position, and that two dominant forms of capital that define these positions are economic capital and cultural capital. His later essay “The Forms of Capital” (1986) asks an even sharper question: Can economic capital transform into cultural capital?

Bourdieu’s answer is yes, but only with losses inherent to the process of conversion. Economic capital cannot transform directly into cultural capital, but it can purchase the conditions under which cultural capital might be accumulated through subsequent embodied labor.

The framework I often find myself returning to is that different forms of capital have different liquidity profiles. Economic capital is liquid and freely exchangeable, while cultural capital is illiquid by design; it actually degrades when its conversion becomes too visible. According to Bourdieu, cultural capital only functions as capital through its disguise, what Bourdieu calls “misrecognition.” Successful conversion meant the slow accumulation of cultural capital through investment of economic capital over time. The artifacts of cultural capital were downstream of the accumulation that produced them. This is the structural property that allows cultural capital to function as capital at all—that it is instead seen as natural taste, discernment, or legitimate competence, rather than a product of unequal power.

If the illiquidity of cultural capital is its greatest signifier of value, another question emerges: What happens to cultural capital when the cost of production races to zero?

The cost of signals of taste is a debate well-trodden throughout the history of technology—printed reproduction, photography, social media—but comes to a head in the age of AI.

Generative tools produce moodboards, brand identities, and the former artifacts of belabored reference-culling at near-zero cost and time. AI is able to identify and index organic cultural capital formations almost as quickly as they appear. The cost of producing signal collapses, while the rate at which authentic cultural capital can be produced accelerates in parallel. When the visible signals of cultural capital are acquired without the friction and misrecognition that allow them to function as capital, what is produced is not cultural capital at all. It is something else—visible, expensive, often technically accomplished, but structurally inert.

Can the System Itself Have Taste?

Cultural capital, on Bourdieu’s account, requires three conditions that AI’s mode of operation does not satisfy.

1. Embodiment: Bourdieu insists that the most durable cultural capital is produced by embodied life rather than by access to information. You can pay for piano lessons. You cannot pay for the cultivated ear. AI has access to the entire indexed corpus of cultural production, but not the embodied accumulation—the capacity to detect, through bodily disposition rather than pattern matching—that produces taste.

2. Misrecognition: Cultural capital functions as capital only when its function as capital is disguised. An LLM’s mode of operation is explicitly indexation and recombination; there is no disguise possible. The capital cannot be misrecognized when its conditions of production are advertised.

3. Time: The conversion work of embodied accumulation that Bourdieu describes takes lifetimes. AI’s mode of operation is its precise opposite: speed. Even if the system could somehow develop something like embodied judgment, it could not do so under the conditions Bourdieu identifies as necessary, because those conditions are themselves slow.

Bourdieu’s description of embodiment rests on a deeper philosophical one. In The Tacit Dimension (1966), Michael Polanyi argued that all knowledge has a dimension that cannot be made fully explicit: practiced judgment, the trained eye, transmitted through embodied apprenticeship rather than instruction. Through Hubert Dreyfus and his book What Computers Can’t Do: A Critique of Artificial Reason (1972), this becomes the strongest claim against AI’s capacity for skilled judgment: what cannot be made explicit cannot be encoded. AI has access to what has been made explicit. The tacit dimension is absent not because it has been overlooked, but because it cannot, in principle, be there.

A Bourdieusian Precedent: Zombie Formalism

The clearest recent precedent for tasteslop is Zombie Formalism, an art trend from the 2010s. You’ve absolutely encountered Zombie Formalist works in the wild—large-scale abstract paintings that are gestural, muted, industrial in finish. Works that photographed cleanly for the new Instagram age or were compatible with compressed digital displays optimized for online circulation. Zombie Formalism thrived within legible market dynamics. Visibility reinforced demand; demand reinforced visibility. Value accrued through circulation rather than through the slow consolidation of meaning.

The resulting artifacts carried the visible marks of how it was acquired. The critic Jerry Saltz, writing in New York Magazine in 2014, complained that the work was “modest, conservative, and maddeningly recursive.” Using a Bourdieusian lens, Zombie Formalism was a textbook conversion failure. Economic capital attempted to acquire cultural capital through accelerated market infrastructure that bypassed the conditions of artistic development and community that historically produced stable cultural value. This was the art world registering that the misrecognition had failed.

“New Media” and the Editorial Borrowing

The Zombie Formalism phenomenon was largely isolated to the art world, but we see similar dynamics emerging in tech, an industry that has positioned itself against institutional authority for decades. This antagonism has now turned toward the editorial class, treating journalists as adversaries and the institutions that employ them as illegitimate sources of cultural authority.

And yet across the contemporary tech media landscape…TBPN borrows the visual language of ESPN. Colossus borrows the house style of The New Yorker profiles. There is a construction of an insular media universe with the tech industry as its cultural center, borrowing the aesthetic authority of legacy editorial to project seriousness onto the project. Some efforts succeed more than others. Where a tech-native publication has done substantive editorial work, the borrowed visual register has more to rest on, and the conversion lands closer to genuine cultural production. The general case is otherwise: imitation at the level of signs without the institutional labor that produced their meaning.

The most extreme version is what I have come to think of as the Marina Abramović-ification of podcasts. Sparse staging, ritualized stillness, dramatic lighting, an air of self-serious gravitas. Guests that look uncomfortable, populating sets that look aspirational rather than authoritative. The cinematography is real, and the writing is often genuinely good, but the attempts often fall into in the same uncanny valley that AI-generated moodboards do. Each pairing is a Bourdieusian conversion attempt of economic capital purchasing the production values that historically signaled editorial cultural capital.

The tech industry is now embedding generative systems into every layer of production—engineering, marketing, design—at the exact moment when it requires editorial legitimacy. The promise of AI to automate creative labor threatens the credibility of any artifact it produces.

Audiences trained by AI-mediated feeds now read certain visual cues as signal—the typography of The New Yorker, the framing of a long-form documentary—decoupled from the cultural histories that produced them. The legitimacy crisis trains its own resolution. AI floods the feed; the feed trains audiences to read borrowed signals as authoritative; the audience’s confirmation licenses more AI; more AI deepens the crisis. The loop closes.

AI is the first technology of cultural production that can produce signals without a producer, it does not occupy a position, inherit a tradition, or contest a canon. It generates from no origin in no relation to the material it recombines. What survives, if anything does, will be the cultural production that retains the conditions taste used to require—and the audiences capable of registering those conditions produced under friction rather than at scale. There is a great deal the tech industry could learn from how legacy editorial institutions built authority—through slow editorial judgment, the discipline of being right when others were wrong, and the willingness to inhabit institutional forms rather than route around them.

I agree with Andreessen and Graham that taste will matter more in the AI age. But what I believe they miss is that the same technology elevating taste into a moat is dissolving the conditions under which taste can function as one. The pressing danger before us is not that AI will have bad taste, but that taste will become indistinguishable from its most reproducible signals—and that, eventually, fewer people will remember there was ever a difference.

Paul Klee, Bauhaus Ausstellung Weimar 1923, 1923

In December 2025, Tyler Cowen and Patrick Collison published “A Call for New Aesthetics,” a call to action for “artists, architects, and designers who are consciously working to define New Aesthetics,” invoking Bauhaus as a movement that “[defined] an aesthetic for the twentieth century.”

In conversations I’ve had with artists, many, if not all, pointed to the internet as a major turning point for aesthetics, irrevocably changing how we think about art and culture at-large.

The question is not whether contemporary art still produces shared aesthetics. The more slippery question is whether it still produces formations durable enough to become historical objects (movements), rather than ephemeral alignments (trends).

Art history once relied on the assumption that such objects could form: that artists could cohere around shared ideas and eventually be sealed together within a linear historical trajectory. That assumption now feels unstable. People register this instability as cultural weightlessness. What Cowen and Collison seek is a coherence—something capable of organizing art, technology, and social ambition into more than a series of blips in time. Whether such coherence can still emerge under current, contemporary conditions is the question I’d like to explore.

In his book After Art, art historian David Joselit argues that networked culture (digital networks, globalization, etc.) fundamentally altered how cultural value accrues. Under earlier conditions, artworks gained value through historical positioning—their ability to sit within successive, legible narratives of development and stake claims on history.

Art movements were the primary mechanism for organizing cultural debate around what mattered, what counted as innovation, and what marked progress. Dada marked the collapse of faith in rational progress after World War I; Minimalism emerged in direct response to Abstract Expressionism; so on and so forth.

Within networked culture, however, value accrues through movement itself—visibility, reach, and speed. When circulation becomes the primary source of value, context loses its leverage. Images now gain power through their capacity to be remixed and recontextualized as they move between nodes in a network. While sustained discourse was previously essential to establishing an artistic movement, rapid convergence becomes the key to reducing friction and accelerating transmission.

Bauhaus is an interesting historical case study. Founded in 1919, Bauhaus emerged from a shared artistic question: How should art respond to industrialization? Bauhaus artists rejected past notions of academic pedagogy and romantic individualism, and instead experimented with simplified, modular design, and mass production. Its recognizable style emerged from a sustained process of debate between its artists: How should form relate to function? What social purpose should design serve? This coherence depended on institutional structure—shared training, sustained collaboration, and relative insulation from immediate commercial pressure.

Walter Benjamin’s analysis “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” helps to explain the erosion of the conditions that enabled Bauhaus as a movement. Writing in the 1930s, he argued that mechanical reproduction reorganized cultural authority by detaching images from their context. Consider a religious painting viewed in a church. Its cultural authority and meaning derive not only from the work itself, but also from its lineage and tradition within the church. A photograph of the same painting could now circulate freely, detached from the church. Viewers no longer approached the work as something embedded in a historical lineage, but as an image available for repeated, decontextualized consumption. Cultural experience shifted accordingly.

In the mid-twentieth century, this shift remained compatible with the formation of art movements because mass media distribution was still centralized. Institutions like film studios, publishers, and museums functioned as chokepoints that controlled and slowed circulation.

By the 2000s, internet speed saturated culture and circulation became instantaneous. Under these conditions, coherence no longer needed to pass through sustained discourse to become legible. Historical positioning gives way to movement as the dominant source of value.

Hito Steyerl takes this analysis further. In “In Defense of the Poor Image,” Steyerl describes that images that move online are structurally designed to degrade as they circulate—compressed, resized, stripped of metadata, and detached from any fixed source. This condition has implications for how art movements may attempt to form. Debate requires objects stable enough to be discussed over time, but “poor images” resist this stabilization by design. Their aesthetic properties become inseparable from the velocity of their circulation. Steyerl treats this condition neither as a loss to be reversed nor a gain to be celebrated, but as the material reality through which contemporary images now circulate.

In late aughts/early 2010s, Post-internet art emerged as an art movement that adapted digital-native conditions. Rather than a particular style, post-internet artists organized around the question of how to make art once the internet had become infrastructure rather than a novelty, encountering one another across internet forums and platforms like Tumblr instead of a structured space or market.

The internet not only became a new vehicle for distribution and legibility, but also enabled entirely new forms of artistic collaboration and aesthetic experimentation. Artists worked in public, interdisciplinary practices in digital, collective iteration with other artists. These formations rarely stabilize into movements, but they share a common set of technical conditions (platforms, networks, speed) that redefines and reorganizes how art is created and encountered. A quote from artist Parker Ito comes to mind: “Post-internet was the last true movement in that it was a group of people who organically came together with a shared belief system and semi-shared goals. All the movements since then have been market-driven.”

Zombie Formalism was another phenomenon that took shape parallel to post-internet art, but with opposite logic. Where post-internet art emerged as an design space spread across different underground venues online, Zombie Formalism formed immediately within legible market dynamics. Often described as a movement, it is perhaps better understood as an aesthetic convergence; large-scale abstract paintings that were gestural, muted, industrial in finish. Zombie Formalist works photographed cleanly and were compatible with compressed digital displays that gained additional online circulation. The rise of Instagram further amplified these tendencies. Visibility reinforced demand; demand reinforced visibility. Value accrued through circulation rather than through the slow consolidation of meaning.

At the institutional level, key figures openly embraced and applied internet-driven market logic to contemporary art early on. Jeffrey Deitch was both an effective and controversial figure precisely because he treated internet visibility as a viable and important form of artistic legitimacy. Many viewed Deitch’s practices as bringing wider audiences and making fine art more accessible. Those within fine art institutions saw the adoption of market momentum not as a natural evolution, but as a short-sighted substitution of more pure, intentional forms of curation.

There is a broader tension at stake within the discussion of art and aesthetics: strategies that successfully synchronize art and markets can generate immediate coherence, but often struggle to sustain the depth and internal differentiation required for movements to endure.

“A Call for New Aesthetics” risks misidentifying the problem. The issue may not be the absence of sufficiently ambitious aesthetic programs, but a disconnect between the “movement” Cowen and Collison search for and the infrastructural realities that govern cultural production today. If something like a new Bauhaus is imaginable, it will depend on structures that slow circulation enough for disagreement to matter. The harder task is to confront what would have to change—about markets, platforms, and cultural history itself—for coherence to endure.

A Call for New Aesthetics

IN CONVERSATION WITH: Parker Ito

After Art

The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

In Defense of the Poor Image

Elmer Wachtel, Mt. San Gorgonio, 1927

Before it was an industry, before it was a political force, California was a disposition. Joan Didion once wrote, “California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension; in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things better work here, because here, beneath the immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent.”

Didion’s California believed that the future could be willed into existence, that rebirth was sufficient and necessary. It was also haunted by an urgent sense that the frontier may not just promise escape, but a cliff at the end of the world. With the pulsing energy of optimism ran a quieter undercurrent of societal decay, a shift from a rooted, agrarian past to an untethered society organized around suspicion and motion. What unsettled Didion was not ambition itself, but the way belief replaced structure, and motion stood in for continuity.

When technology took root in Northern California, its culture embodied this ideology: that individuals should be liberated, systems minimally governed, and that movement was inherently progress. The history of counterculture to computing is often told as a rupture, but emotionally it was continuous. The suspicion of authority that animated the counterculture took root at the heart of this new locus of industry.

By the 1990s, this mood had hardened into something explicit. The resistance to explicit forms of coercion slowly morphed into an aversion to any sort of social or market intervention. Language began to shift. Systems became friction, markets became networks.

Barbrook and Cameron called this worldview the Californian Ideology in their polemical essay of the same name written in 1995. The Californian Ideology was a bridging of techno-utopian promise and countercultural self-expression in one corner and market libertarian discipline and anti-statist economics in the other. The Californian Ideology code promised transcendence without politics. The implicit claim was that digital systems, if left open and unobstructed, could promise better outcomes—more freedom, more expression, more equality—without the need for institutional intervention. Barbrook and Cameron’s critique was that the ideology presented itself as liberation, while reproducing the hierarchies it claimed to transcend. This was the lowercase california that Didion wrote about, now capitalized.

By the 2010s, the Californian Ideology had become prevailing common sense. Silicon Valley stood side-by-side with Clinton/Obama-era Democrats who embraced globalization, growth, and hands-off regulation. Technology could move fast and break things, and the state could claim modernization and cultural progress without getting directly involved. “Pay taxes, support gay rights, get praised” was a win-win.

However, the alignment that was once viewed as common sense was revealed to be deeply fragile. Post-2008 financial crisis, markets that were once viewed as neutral, self-stabilizing markets now marked institutional fragility and manipulation. The 2016 U.S. election revealed how easily internet platforms could be exploited to control attention, sentiment, and even political legitimacy.

In the aftermath, progressive politics began to finally wave an iron fist—labor law, antitrust, compliance, content moderation. The same disdain for bureaucracy and faith in speed that originally made Silicon Valley feel progressive had now made it deeply incompatible with this new political turn.

The Californian Ideology, Revisited

When progressive Democrats became the face of bureaucratic decline, factions within tech began to more clearly form.

the “Tech Right”

The emerging “Tech Right” is often considered to be an embodiment of conservatism, but is better understood a displacement of the Californian Ideology. The shift exposes that the industry’s attraction is not to a political platform, but to an ideology of action. One that values decisiveness over deliberation, instinct over process, and results over legitimacy. The reality of this shift has been unpredictable at best. Political volatility has ceased to feel abstract. Rather than freedom, it feels erratic—unilateral power exercised without process, boundary, justification, or pause.

Abundance Liberalism

The other path, often described as abundance liberalism, is rooted in the premise that the fundamental issue with government is not one of ideals, but of capacity. Abundance liberalism rejects the idea that constraint is inherently anti-progress. It treats systems, procedural legitimacy, and durable institutions as throughput growth multipliers, whereas others would consider them friction.

For now, the Californian Ideology finds deep roots in the two emerging political paths we see the technology industry self-organizing around today. One prioritizes speed at the cost of political and social volatility, while the other promise that it can achieve legitimacy legitimacy without surrendering frontier pace momentum. Political allegiance becomes a tool rather than a principle. The split reflects a deeper uncertainty about where technological power derives its political authority and how it sustains it.

The rise of Anthropic is uniquely significant and of-the-moment here. It is perhaps the only market-leading AI lab to remain openly liberal-leaning, institutionally cautious, and explicit about the risks posed by its own technology. As other tech leaders have moved closer to political power, Anthropic has done the opposite, opposing regulatory rollbacks and declining to participate in the usual displays of access.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s recent essay “The Adolescence of Technology” argues that advanced AI may be incompatible with autocracy, that democratic governance is not a moral preference but a practical requirement, and that the concentration of both wealth and political access poses systemic risk. Anthropic has scaled rapidly, while pushing the boundaries on the assumption that influence must be purchased through proximity to and alignment with power. Anthropic suggests, without necessarily resolving, that credibility and constraint may also function as leverage. Of course, this posture should be read as a test case, not an absolution; holding federal contracts while criticizing federal policy is its own form of access, and whether this posture survives contact with genuine commercial or political pressure remains wholly untested.

Seen this way, the split within the Californian Ideology is not about left vs. right, or regulation versus freedom. It is about where tech believes authority comes from.

Once the assumption that tech must always move with power begins to fracture, political allegiance becomes less automatic and more contingent. Seen this way, the split within the Californian Ideology is not about left vs. right, or regulation versus freedom. It is about where tech believes authority comes from.

The Californian Ideology

The Adolescence of Technology

tech right (disambiguation)

Thirty Years On, the Californian Ideology is Alive and Well

MAGA Might Have Gone Too Far for the Tech Right

A Reckoning for the Tech Right

A Woman Under the Influence (1974)

films

I watched ~100 films this year. These were my favorites, and more notably films that truly broadened how I view the function of film and what it can accomplish as a medium.

A Woman Under the Influence (1974) dir. by John Cassavetes: Gena Rowland’s performance in A Woman Under the Influence is the single best I’ve ever seen in a film. A woman whose well-meaning preoccupation and obsession with presenting as normal and happy completely upends her ability to interact with others. Watching this film is like watching a car that you know is about to crash, but not exactly when or how.

High and Low (1963) dir. by Akira Kurosawa: My immediate reaction to High and Low was, “this movie has EVERYTHING.” Kurosawa’s ability to traverse setting so seamlessly in the way he does in High and Low, thanks in part to his masterful blocking, really put me in awe of the technical mastery of the film. You may have also heard about the Spike Lee remake of this film that came out earlier this year that is fun, but not very…good.

Farewell My Concubine (1993) dir. by Chen Kaige: I don’t think I ever fully understood the magnitude of the speed at which China transformed during the 20th century until I watched Farewell My Concubine. Filtered through the fantastical, delicate world of opera performers, the volatile, fractured history becomes strangely sharper and more memorable than it ever could from a purely historical vantage.

House (1977) dir. by Nobuhiko Obayashi: A recreation of a child’s nightmare into a beautiful acid trip of a work of art—while still maintaining the humor and levity with which a child experiences the world!

capital-F Film

I often think about the tension between “democratization” and the collapse of intentionality and craft—take, for example, “the death of criticism.” As a film enjoyer, I decided to attempt to craft a syllabus of readings that would help me better understand film fundamentals—both in order to become a more informed film viewer, as well as to better understand how classical training/education improves the quality of criticism.
Three books that were particularly rich and educational in this regard:

What is Cinema? by André Bazin: André Bazin was a French film theorist and mentor to the filmmakers who would become the key figures of the French New Wave like Jean-Luc Godard and Eric Rohmer and basically helped shape how we think about film, and particularly cinematic realism. His collection of essays, published as What Is Cinema?, are some of the most important texts in film theory, written between the 1940s and his death in 1958. —> is the exact script I used as intro in a TikTok to summarize “The Ontology of the Photographic Image” and “The Myth of Total Cinema,” lol. A must read for anyone interested in film as a medium, IMO , in that it frames the crucial historical context in which cinema became an industry.

Film Art: An Introduction by David Bordwell, Kristin Thompson, and Jeff Smith: Extremely tactical, but you can clearly see the care and precision with which the authors wrote the text which is really encouraging.

Cure by Dominic Lash: I aspire to one day write as detailed and intricate of an analysis of a film as Dominic Lash does with his text on Cure, the 1997 film by Kiyoshi Kurosawa (one of my favorites).

books

Getting Lost by Annie Ernaux: I would not consider myself a Yearner so this was honestly brutally difficult to read, but I think it was very impactful to see someone think and feel about people and life with such reckless abandon…and then write about it.

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath: Perhaps a basic one, but it’s an extremely striking read—I sat outside in my building’s courtyard in the dark for an hour after finishing it in order to decompress.

The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch by Philip K Dick: I think I bought this by chance at an airport, and I didn’t know much about Philip K Dick except he wrote Do Androids Dream of Electric Sleep (which I haven’t read). The book was great, but I’m more so fascinated by people who have such broad bodies of work and devoted fanbases. I definitely plan to delve deeper into his work, starting with Ubik.

misc

Traditional Chinese Medicine (Acupuncture, Herbalist): I met a girl at a Lunar New Year party who was raving about her acupuncturist who conveniently was located in my neighborhood, so I decided to try it out (I had never done acupuncture or anything really TCM prior). It’s been about ~2 months, and I’m surprised how helpful it’s been for general energy/emotional regulation; it’s quite subtle, but very grounding.

COROS Pace 3: I got a COROS to get more accurate readings for runs, but also I compulsively check my HR… I used an Oura ring before but I like the ease of just looking down at a screen, as opposed to opening an app. I also find that Oura doesn’t update HR very often (every 10 minutes, I believe).

Kingdom Hearts Final Mix: I never played Kingdom Hearts as kid, but I would often see commercials for it on TV and I believe trailers on VHS tapes (which doesn’t quite make sense to me now, so maybe I’m misremembering). My boyfriend bought a Steam Deck and has been wanting me to get more into games, so because I am an adult who has disposable income and can Just Do Things, I bought Kingdom Hearts Final Mix. Thoughts: horrible gameplay, terrific vibes.

Silent Hill F: Related to the above, a coworker recommended that I check out Silent Hill F because I famously love 1) Japanese and 2) creepy-psycho-thriller-ghost-horror aesthetics. Silent Hill F surprisingly broadened my perspective to the immersion/story-telling capabilities of video games (as someone who only ever really played handheld games), as well how truly powerful UGC/community really can be around contemporary games. I, however, have not finished the game because it is too… scary.

Chicago Daily Tribune, 1893

Every day is an infinite scroll feed—an endless churn of bot posts, betting lines, and the ambient casino of Discord channel notifications. Everyone is their own minor hedgefund, betting on everything from political races to the next celebrity scandal to the next world war. It’s tempting to view this wave of hyper-speculation as a product of the digital age, but the history of speculation actually trails back much further.

The first formal futures markets were born in Chicago in the late 1800s. They were radical, new contracts that let you buy and sell commodities such as wheat, pork, and corn without having the assets on-hand. You could profit (or lose everything) based simply on your hypotheses about the future, instead of being restricted to only what you could physically store in a warehouse. Anyone—from farmers to merchants, to urbanites—could make a wager on the price movement of these material goods. Bucket shops were the street betting parlors where the action took place. Within them, there was a sense of a kind of collective fever—rooms packed with people, reading old newspaper accounts, watching the ticker, rumors swirling, fortunes made and lost in an afternoon. Bucket shops were proto-prediction markets.

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Politicians railed against the financiers and speculators who profited off of the volatility, but in the background they often adopted the tools themselves. Moralists and journalists debated what this could all mean for the future of society. Was this a new way for ordinary people to claw back a little agency in a rigged system? A new form of financial empowerment? Or was it simply just a more efficient method of separating people from their savings?

At the very least, it created as much collective anxiety as it did collective fantasy.

All of this feels like a prologue to our current moment. However today, instead of betting on bushels of wheats, we bet on abstractions and social signals. The commodity has dematerialized. The bucket shop is now a Telegram group, the wheat future is a memecoin. From Debord: “The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.” The old futures market was a spectacle in this sense. Today, it’s Discord servers and Twitter timelines.

We like to think that betting on dog coins or the outcome of a Supreme Court case is a product of the digital age, but it’s really just the latest round in a very old game. Speculation is how capitalism metabolizes uncertainty, how people try to make meaning (or at least a quick bag) out of the chaos. Speculation has always been an undercurrent of our inherently social world—the hope that if enough of us buy in, we can bend reality, or at least ride the wave for a while.

Speculative Communities: Living with Uncertainty in a Financialized World by Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou

The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord

Moving (1993)

things I was obsessed with in 2024 and by that I mean, I think about each of these individual things at least once a week:

Shinji Sōmai: In 2023, I saw Oldboy (2003) at IFC Center. Before the showing, there played a trailer for an insane-looking movie with a bunch of half-naked Japanese school children running around in the rain called Typhoon Club (1985). I thought to myself in that moment that if I ever got the chance to see that film in the future, I would take it. A year later, Metrograph would play Typhoon Club, as well as a selection of Sōmai’s other work. I was shocked I had never heard of Sōmai before, but it seems the US distribution rights for his films were only just acquired in 2024. While I was blown away by Typhoon Club, Moving (1993) was even more moving (ha). I contend it is one of the best films I’ve ever seen. The masterful thread of Shinji Sōmai’s work is his ability to weave between the unbounded childhood joy and the wrenching devastation of more mature topics like suicide, depression, and heartbreak in a way that isn’t uncomfortably projecting those themes onto children for some sort of juxtapositional commentary (Licorice Pizza) or romanticizing the angst of teen hood (Eighth Grade).

Dylan Henner, You Always Will Be (2022): This album + Aphex Twin were my music grails this year! Enjoy!

Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees by Lawrence Weschler: This book was a birthday gift from Sean, and I remember thinking that it was an extremely random gift given I had never expressed any interest in American art or biographies, and if anything had previously expressed distaste for both (lol). However, the book was a truly transformative read. An intimate portrait of a stubborn, forlorn artist (Robert Irwin) who spent his life attempting to capture the impossibly pure beauty of light and space (and betting on horseraces). It also provided a fascinating glimpse into the burgeoning art scenes on the American east (NYC) and west coasts (LA) during the later 20th century.

The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: I read The Little Prince in high school French class, and for no particular reason felt the urge to re-read it at the beginning of the year. It’s a very amusing read, but also puts into humbling perspective just how silly many of the vices adults choose to obsess over are. I particularly love this passage and think about it often.

Balenciaga City bag: I was very graciously given this bag as a gift for my birthday. It really does live up to the hype, I fear.

Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979) dir. by Werner Herzog: There are some films that remind you how magical the visual medium of cinema is. That’s all there really is to it with this one.

8 1/2 (1963) dir. by Federico Fellini: Recommendation from Eugene. For thoughts, see the above item, but also the whole time I was thinking to myself, “AI could never.”

“Inside the Sinofuturist Universe with Lawrence Lek” by Katie Chiou (lol): I learned more during this conversation than I think I did during any other conversation I had this entire year and it’s a conversation I think about almost every day.

AMC A-list: After about a year of different friends badgering me about it, I finally got AMC A-list in July. It’s surprisingly freeing to be able to book a movie and really not think twice about it (you can cancel tickets at any time). Movies I saw with AMC A-list this year: Wicked, Gladiator 2, Conclave, Anora, We Live in Time, My Old Ass, Saturday Night, The Wild Robot, Alien: Romulus, Trap, Longlegs. Seeing all these films normally would’ve cost $220 and I saw them for a total of $125 :D

Kill Bill Vol. 1 (2003) dir. by Quentin Tarantino: Ugh! I love women!

Gladiator (2000) dir. by Ridley Scott: I only watched Gladiator because I felt morally obligated to watch it before watching Gladiator 2, but holy shit. The acting was remarkable. It’s also just such a singular experience to watch something for the first time and immediately recognize the lineage of references that came after it. Joaquin Phoenix really is that girl.

Nasthug set, Boiler Room Tokyo 2024: I spent a lot more time on SoundCloud this year than I have in previous years, and this was my most played track (well deserved). A much-needed reminder that serious music can also be very fun.

Olympus Stylus Epic Zoom 80: After many years of being too scared to become a film photography bro, I finally got a film camera! I haven’t felt the giddiness I had when I got my first set of film rolls back in a very long time. It’s a very recent development, so I’m excited to see how the hobby evolves in 2025 :)

Tsai Ming-liang, Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2003)

From the moment you step into the American education system, you are placed on a 13-year trajectory with a single directive: survive and get into college.

When you reach the end of the ride, you are promptly swept onto another one, shorter, just four years, but infinitely more complex. Possible goals begin to splinter; the clarity of youth begins to blur. Still, most keep their eyes on the same target: pick a career, secure a job.

Fresh-faced and stumbling off the 17-year path set forth from the moment I was born, I arrived in New York, eager to begin the life I had prepared my entire childhood for. 

Three months later, I quit my first job. It mercilessly dawned on me that the next 20 years of my life would look nothing like the last.

In a totally casual and chill panic, I asked my infinitely older, wiser, wealthier friends (mostly 27, 28, 29 year olds) when they had begun to actually feel like an adult or at least like their prefrontal cortex had fully formed.

They’d raise an eyebrow, glance upward as if watching their lives rewind in cartoon thought bubbles. After a beat of halfhearted introspection—and maybe a sip of a strong cocktail—they’d throw out “26” like it was an inside joke with time.

While most of my friends thought the question was simply fun dinner fodder, I quietly took their answers to heart, internalizing 26 as the year I would have, maybe not all the answers, but at least a clear trajectory for where the rest of my life would be going. Until then, fuck it, we ball.

26 is now a week away. Four years, four jobs, three relationships, and four apartments later. I’m attempting to tackle the Big Question: Did my prefrontal cortex actually kick in?

Since I first posed the question with the uniquely dramatic fervor of a 21 year old, my feelings towards it have shifted. It’s absurd, of course—who feels their brain rewiring in real-time? But still, it set some vague timeline in place for “getting my life together,” a way to pace myself, to give grace. I set more concrete goals: save up this much, stay at a job for this long, the kinds of benchmarks that made the whole “quarter-life crisis” bit feel a little more grounded.

I’m proud to say I have hit all my paper goals, and weirdly enough: I do think my prefrontal cortex has kicked in.

I instantly knew the moment my prefrontal cortex had kicked in because I was talking to a college student on an existential ramble, and I responded much more apathetically than I would have even a year prior—that is to say, a well-intentioned eye roll and an exasperated “please calm down.”

When you’re 21, every decision feels life-altering, like you are scrutinizing every single thread to make up the core fabric of your life. Over time, these decisions begin to narrow. Time and circumstance are obvious factors, but your own personal preferences also begin to harden. Your center pole takes shape. I’ve found, over the past year especially, that making decisions is much easier—partly because I have much stronger inclinations, but also because I acknowledge that circumstances will always change and so each decision feels much less daunting (and also because psychedelics!).

I’ve written about this before and will quote an older, wiser 36 year old here:

“This is something I still grapple with, and you’ll continue to grapple with it for the rest of your life. What begins to soften the unrest is that you will accumulate so many examples in your life of things that only happened because of timing, both good and bad. And you’ll learn to appreciate them.”

When I started to notice my own gut appear (emotionally speaking, lol), I was thrilled. New skill unlocked. But I quickly found that there was a catch. When your core seems rather solid and decisions much more minor, moments feel much less consequential, much less memorable. 

Everything is different, but also strangely the same. I am always changing, but also somehow unmoving.

Moments slip by more quietly now, leaving fewer marks behind. They’re harder to notice, harder to define, slipping through before they fully take shape. Changes creep in slowly and meaning feels just out of reach, like trying to catch smoke. Months later you notice you’re an entirely different person—and you have no idea exactly when or how it happened.

In another totally casual and chill panic, I once again turned towards much older, wiser friends (this time, 30s, 40s, 50s). Luckily for me, they responded with much more empathy than I did to that college student. I asked if they ever noticed their memories slip by and how to hold onto them, how they clock and respond to change. 

An (paraphrased) answer from Andy: “Maybe noticing that a change took place at all is more important than knowing what exactly was at the beginning or end of it.”

Nick’s response revolved around watching his toddlers grow up and experiencing the journey all over again, though from a very different perspective—and knowing that’s all that really matters.

As for Eugene, we talked about prolonged adolescence—the societal state of adults wanting to remain children as long as possible.

While this post was originally centered around asking whether my prefrontal cortex developed, I’m not quite sure anymore that that is the question that actually matters. 

When I talk to Nick nowadays, there’s always a part of the conversation that goes something like this:

Me: “Listen to this silly thing I heard a younger person complaining about, please tell me I wasn’t like that when you first met me [21].”

Nick: “I mean, yeah, you kind of were.”

I think a lot of growing up, particularly during the internet age, comes with an implicit individual pressure to accumulate, retain, and iterate upon knowledge, both about the world and about yourself. 

When I talk to Nick and Andy about how they remember their early adulthoods, they both admit they don’t remember much with precision. But they can see glimpses of themselves in the younger people around them, as if looking through a time-lapsed mirror. Sometimes, in those reflections, a piece of the past clicks back into place.

For most of my life thus far, my goal above all else has always been to rush towards adulthood, that life begins when I reach some level of all-knowing self-assuredness. I think, now, I realize how limited and imperfect the individual mind is. Growth is not an individual journey, not as simple as accumulating memories and searing them to mind. We exist as nodes in a shared web of connections. As experiences circulate between us, we recognize ourselves in others. Collective memories reshape our perspectives and inform our paths forward. 

“Self-actualization” or whatever is a worthwhile goal, but I’m beginning to wonder if it’s a misguided one. As the years pass, the slope of change begins to level out, and time, along with its memories, slips through our grasp. To cling to those memories in hopes of extracting some metaphysical insight feels futile—an attempt to hold onto something that’s already dissolving into the past.

a lot of people I could thank here, but I’ll settle for Nick, Andy, Eugene, Jacky, Mathu, and Vivian

I asked some people for a movie they think everyone should watch before they die, here’s what they said:

1. Blue (1993), Derek Jarman - Alex

2. Casablanca (1942)*, Michael Curtiz - Andy

3. Woman in the Dunes (1964), Hiroshi Teshigahara - Sean

4. Videodrome (1983), David Cronenberg - Katie

5. Three Colours: Red (1994), Krzysztof Kieślowski - Anna

6. 8 1/2 (1963)*, Federico Fellini - Eugene

7. A Matter of Life and Death (1946), Emeric Pressburger, Michael Powell - Reggie

8. Before Sunset (2004), Richard Linklater - Jackson

9. Legally Blonde (2001), Robert Luketic - Maya

10. The Matrix (1999), Lana Wachowski, Lilly Wachowski - Seyi

11. Dil Se.. (1998), Mani Ratnam - Raihan

12. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Stanley Kubrick - Neesh

13. Shame (2011), Steve McQueen - Ruby

14. Akira (1988), Katsuhiro Otomo - Lawrence

*mentioned by multiple people

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In middle school (circa 2011), I was an active power user of Polyvore, a pre-Instagram, Pinterest-adjacent social website where fashion enthusiasts styled outfit collages and published them for other users to “like” and “comment” on. Polyvore was founded in 2007 and had several acquirers during its lifetime; it was eventually shut down by its final acquirer, SSENSE, in 2018.

A natural question to ask is why a suburban 13 year old would be using Polyvore, whose primary demographic was 20s-30s upper middle class women who aspirationally worshiped designers like Herve Leger and Marchesa (heyday designers around 2011).

There was a more niche corner of Polyvore where far fewer people lived that used the platform for a, most likely, very surprising and unintended use case: fanfiction. This is the corner of Polyvore where I lived. 

At the time, I was also an avid reader of The Clique, a YA book series about wealthy middle school girls who lived in Westchester, New York (think a PG version of Gossip Girl). I forget how exactly (I think from the author’s weekly blog?), but I learned that there was a huge community of fans of The Clique who lived on Polyvore. They would write fanfiction and publish it on the platform alongside collages of imaginary outfits their character would wear during the scene of the story. The Clique wasn’t even the only fanfiction community on Polyvore, but also usual suspects like One Direction, Harry Potter, etc. 

The Polyvore post editor was surprisingly sophisticated, allowing internet image search and grab, image uploads, custom font text, unlimited length post captions, etc., making it actually a very flexible, generalizable platform.

Eventually, I expanded my horizons beyond The Clique universe and discovered that users even created their own fictional universes on Polyvore. A user would post a general story premise, a list of character briefs, and other users would “apply” to fill the role of a character. The original creator of the story would then select which person would fill each role based on their writing portfolios (which was essentially their Polyvore profiles). Each story would then unfold in real-time as the 5-6 users who each “played” a character would publish stories from their character’s point-of-view, carrying the plot forward.

While I remember very few details about my time on Polyvore, I remember discovering the XX during this time and listening to “Intro” for hours on loop while carefully crafting my post collages. I remember my best friend on the platform was a user who went by something like hottiecheerleader9 who claimed to lived in Indiana and be 16 (how much of that is actually true, I have no idea). 

I don’t even remember when or why I stopped using Polyvore, though I imagine it was because I was about to enter high school and felt embarrassed that I was still participating in a practice called “fanfiction,” which felt so shamefully childish at the time. I think the only IRL person that I have ever told about my second life on Polyvore was a crush that I skyped every day the summer before ninth grade (peak Polyvore-usage) because he had just moved states. 

I have since tried several times over the last decade to track down my Polyvore profile and revisit my own posts, but I had forgotten my username, had long lost access to the original email I used to register on the site, and the platform was eventually shut down anyway blocking any future attempt at resurface. Now, the only remnants of Polyvore you can find are images of posts there were later posted on Pinterest or Tumblr.

There aren’t necessarily any groundbreaking takeaways to glean from this story, but I do think it speaks to the power of a few perhaps more existential topics that I often think about (even over a decade later): decentralized media, fandom, and emergent behavior.

When I’m wearing my investor hat, I often become extremely skeptical. I’ll advise consumer builders to be opinionated about what they build. If you’re building for everyone, you’re building for no one, so they say. Or I’ll tell them that users’ attention is extremely shallow and fleeting so they must spell out intended user actions/flows explicitly.

While I truly believe those pieces of advice, my experience with Polyvore is constantly grounding. It reminds me to never underestimate users; that it is part of the human condition to look for connection and opportunities to share our stories; and that strong, often decentralized communities will always surprise you with their passion and creativity.

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Mind Game (2004)

short love letters to my favorite discoveries of 2023:

Mind Game (2004) dir. by Masaaki Yuasa: Mind Game was recommended to me by a girl I met by chance at a dinner party and never saw again. I watched it on a whim, but it’s a film that really struck my soul. It’s absurd, disturbing, chaotic, but also incredibly lighthearted. I really don’t know how to properly describe this movie other than by saying I think everyone should watch it before they die (though it’s definitely not for everyone).

Rap Capital: An Atlanta Story by Joe Coscarelli: Culture owes so much to the city of Atlanta, GA and its homegrown artists. Ambitiously covers 20ish years of history and does a pretty damn good job. If I retroactively could have only read one book this year, I think it would have to be this one.

“The Question Concerning Technology,” Martin Heidegger (1954): Read this in a book club of friends who are much smarter than I am, which crucially helped my comprehension lol. A work more resonant today than ever before, evaluating man’s relationship to technology in a way that is somehow simultaneously critical, realist, existential, and hopeful. Highly recommend reading in tandem with this analysis by Hubert Dreyfus.

Memoria (2021) dir. by Apichatpong Weerasethakul: Memoria, famously intended only to be watch in theater, completely upended how I think about watching movies. Immediately became one of my favorite films of all-time.

Noriem: Stumbled upon this brand at one of their store locations in Paris and they have the best pants I’ve ever worn in my life. I could live my entire life in Noriem pants. I both love and hate that you can’t shop from them online.

The Flowers of Buffoonery by Osamu Dazai: A prequel to Dazai’s infinitely more popular No Longer Human, and it reads as such. A relatively quick, but deeply stirring read about finding moments of levity in a world filled with grief and misery.

Max Richter, The New Four Seasons - Vivaldi Recomposed (2022): We love a masterful rework (for the second time). “Autumn 3 - 2022.” That’s it.

Marie Antoinette (2006) dir. by Sofia Coppola: The girlest movie to have ever girled? What more could you ask for? Also the anachronistic music choices? So fun.

DJ Heartstring: I have a tweet draft that goes something like this: “artists like dj heartstring at their best sound like they should be playing over the training arc montage of an A24 high school coming of age dramedy movie.” DJ Heartstring is a perfect example of an artist (duo) who has such a distinct, consistent signature, but still always manage to surprise and delight with their music. Rec #1, Rec #2

Videodrome (1983) dir. by David Cronenberg: I think about Videodrome probably at least once a week, and not for any particular reason other than I guess I’m constantly thinking about technology and its consequences on the human psyche.

The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro: I read Klara and the Sun in 2021 and wasn’t a huge fan, but I’m really glad I came back to Ishiguro this year, entirely thanks to The Remains of the Day being so artful at playing with pacing and tone.

Running socks: Believe it or not, I was not aware of the concept of “socks specifically for the purpose of running” until this year. I used to regularly get blisters, and I just dealt with it, until finally I went to Brooklyn Running Co. and they told me I desperately needed new socks… oops…

Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda (2017): Watching behind-the-scenes footage of someone doing something they have dedicated their entire life to is deeply moving, especially when its someone as masterful and reverent as Ryuichi Sakamoto. Namely, I watched this after spending a day in nature which really drove the whole film home.

“Here for the Wrong Reasons,” Charles Broskoski: As someone whose job it is to read information-dense decks all day, Charles’ visual-forward approach to presentation and lecture was simultaneously refreshing and grounding. Immensely helped me think through my own philosophy on “axis thinking,” contextual reasoning, and life vision.

Mima: I adopted my cat Mima this year! Pets are so fascinating in that they often reflect back things you see in yourself. She has changed my life for the better :)

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Katsuhide Morimoto, Jun Takahashi, “Grace” - Expected Encounter, 2009

The simplest way I know how to describe a panic attack is by describing a classic scene that exists in every space movie. There's something wrong with the ship—an airlock malfunctions, an invisible figure or disease finds its way onboard, the ship’s AI control takes over. All the lights in the ship dim to a scary red hue, an alarm blares like a bloody heartbeat. Everyone starts running around in a frenzy (probably the worst thing you could do) trying to identify the source of the error.

When your mind begins to panic, it also acts this impulsively. It starts racing, commanding your body to defend itself by contorting in strange ways. Your heart rate speeds up, while your chest folds inward like steel double doors in slow motion. Your eyes flicker across your surroundings, classifying every object as friend or foe, identifying every door for escape. Breathing becomes strained, like sucking food through a straw with clenched teeth.

You ask yourself why you must be suffocated by your own body. 

From Daniel Smith in n+1 in perhaps my all-time favorite piece about anxiety: 

“This is how anxiety operates. I know that well by now. This is the nature of the emotion. It is a kind of solipsism machine. It is ingenious and rapacious in its ability to transform experience into self-involvement. With anxiety, even the most familiar and mundane stimuli—birdsong, an old photograph on your wall, the books on your shelves, an advertisement—can come to seem like direct indictments and private threats. The mind becomes a magnet for assaults. ‘And no Grand Inquisitor,’ Kierkegaard wrote, ‘has in readiness such terrible tortures as has anxiety, and no spy knows how to attack more artfully the man he suspects, choosing the instant when he is weakest, nor knows how to lay traps where he will be caught and ensnared, as anxiety knows how, and no sharp-witted judge knows how to interrogate, to examine the accused, as anxiety does, which never lets him escape, neither by diversion nor by noise, neither at work nor at play, neither by day nor by night.’”

I had a panic attack for the first time during junior year of college. I can’t remember why it started or what I did to silently calm myself down in the crowded auditorium, but I do remember it was during an awards ceremony. One of my best friends was receiving some award from the university, which he did often because he was an incredible student and overall person. He was one of the first people I ever communicated openly with about anxiety. Courtney would later be killed in a senseless act of gun violence a year later.

Anxiety has become a relatively less taboo term rather recently, maybe in the past five years or so if I’m being generous. I’d almost venture to say “anxious” is the shared catch-all word for anything simply Not Good. Why and how this came to be is its own, more investigative post, but this is not that post. Simply put, there are many things to be anxious about in this world today (ie: gun violence), many more ways to hear about them, and many conflicting ways to feel about them. Why the shared characterization of anxiety is still a surprising development though, is that anxiety and panic are incredibly isolating experiences. 

Again, from Smith: “‘For a person who actually experiences anxiety,’ I wrote then, ‘it is hard to accept the proposition that any time period can be deemed “anxious.”’ . . . Anxiety is not the purview of epochs. It is a personal, bodily state of being. It is an experience: a coloration in the way an individual thinks, feels, and acts.’”

When panic sets in, an odd paradox emerges. Your mind, while being so maniacally focused on physically preparing you for battle, is simultaneously violently severing itself from your body. The knives think they’re turning outward, when really they’ve turned inward toward your own soul. 

A common response to anxiety is distraction. Give your mind something else to focus on until all the lights return to a friendly, non-scary color. Drown everything out with your favorite hype songs, scroll mindlessly on your phone, whatever it takes. Rather than fiercely fighting your body, you essentially coax your mind into dropping any thought of it—or really the thought of anything meaningful at all—in order to numb itself.  

While a reasonable reaction, distraction further severs your mind-body and mind-body-world connection. Isolated in the chambers of your own mind, it becomes difficult to even understand yourself, let alone the world around you. The less you understand your body, the less control you have of it. The less control you have of your body, the more easily it is to spiral into anxiety. 

Control is at the center of my anxiety. I think it’s common, or at least not unheard of, for kids to be told growing up that in order to become mature, you must learn to control and surmount your impulses and intuitions. At first it’s simple things like don’t pick your nose, and as you get older, it evolves. In order to be successful, you must learn how to calculate your position in the world, how to strategize and analyze the million possible outcomes before making an optimal decision.

Put mind over matter.

I’ve found that, as I get older, putting mind over matter is not as simple. And when you witness your mind going haywire for the first time, it’s hard to know where to turn—to distract yourself, to consume everything you can on the topic, to rationalize and strategize your way out of the anxiety, etc.

The only possible long-term solution, I’ve determined after many years, is to give into the matter—the only way out is through as they say. Put your body at the center, rather than your mind. The more attuned you are to your body, the easier it is to be in communion with your thoughts and the world around you. This is much easier said than done. When you’re accustomed to acting entirely with your mind, giving up that control is extremely unnatural and discomforting. Listening to your body is not an intellectual exercise. 

Running is the practice that has made all of this thinking the most evident to me. Although I don’t consider myself a “runner,” when I do run, I am at my most calm; not because I’m not struggling or in pain, but because my mind is only preoccupied by running, nothing else.

Usually, I’ll run to very loud and very fast music to concentrate. Right after I finish a long run, I’ll sometimes even get hit with a wave of anxiety as any repressed thoughts or emotions I had been neglecting flood back in. 

I’ve started experimenting with running with no sound—to pay closest attention to my body when it's working its hardest. The first time I tried to do this, I caved halfway through. When I tried again, I wouldn’t say I reached a meditative state at any point, but I felt much more mentally at ease after the run than I often do.
I stole this practice from a friend who now runs only with no sound: “I run with ear plugs so that I can hear how my heartbeat feels more closely. I believe this intense form of somatic awareness induces a whole-body flow state which makes everything else, literally and figuratively, become ambient noise.”

From Haruki Murakami in What I Talk About When I Talk About Running:

“Most runners run not because they want to live longer, but because they want to live life to the fullest. If you’re going to while away the years, it’s far better to live them with clear goals and fully alive than in a fog, and I believe running helps you do that. Exerting yourself to the fullest within your individual limits: that’s the essence of running, and a metaphor for life—and for me, for writing as well. I believe many runners would agree.”

“Exerting yourself to the fullest within your individual limits” means doing so both physically and mentally. Running humbles you, forces you to bend to the will of your body; but running also requires a lot of mental resilience, teaching your body that it can when it’s screaming “I can’t.” 

To run well and safely, your mind and body can’t fundamentally be at odds with each other. They have to work in tandem, and you also have to be willing to submit to the randomness of it all. Some days, you rip ten miles no problem, other days running four miles feels like death.

Over the years I’ve learned to manage anxiety, but more recently I have really intentionally poured effort into fundamentally improving my mind-body connection.

I’ve also attempted to cut out music from other parts of my day: commuting on the train, walking, working, etc. When you first begin to break out of your own mind, notice small feelings in your body, or pay closer attention to your environment, it’s painful. There’s discomfort, flare ups, orange hues on the ship. In its worst moments, even more anxiety.

But as you become more attuned with your inner world and its surroundings, you also begin to notice and be genuinely moved by small things you may have otherwise missed. And those moment are what, I think, it means to live life to the fullest.

I will leave you with an excerpt from a post I wrote a year ago about being moved:

“I choose to be moved by small things: things that I know about myself, things that I know will continue to happen until the end of time, things that often have nothing to do with me. [...]

I’m not at all advocating for abandoning goals entirely. They are tools that steady us, keep us going. But I also believe that the practice of being moved should have no preconditions, that it happens at the most momentous of life's occasions, as well as the most mundane; that springs of joy can be found in driest of places.

I wish to constantly move and be moved.”

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Jun Takahashi, BORN, 2023

One of my first digital-native social experiences was in 2012 (I just barely fall outside of the age range to have been an AIM power user) on Spotify. I was in eighth grade and would send my LDR crush (he went to a different local middle school) song recommendations through the inbox feature; the feature was later removed in 2017, and quickly forgotten. But one of my friends has a theory: “They definitely got rid of DMs so they can funnel you to the curated playlists… that’s where they make money.”

I remain skeptical about the theory, but it at least has legs. Spotify-curated playlists like Pollen and RapCaviar have attracted tens of millions of followers. Before TikTok became a launchpad for music discovery, snatching a spot on one of these coveted playlists was a test of an artist’s ability to penetrate the mainstream. RapCaviar now has its own TV documentary mini series on Hulu. Spotify is even credited for coining the term “Hyperpop,” for better or for worse.

While it’s common knowledge that music discovery has become more algorithmic and less social, the full complexities of this shift remain unseen. Every day continues to generate new questions about how we engage with music and media at-large.

The Era of Streaming + Power Law

The value of an individual song listen is less than it used to be, largely thanks to all-access streaming subscriptions. Streaming accounts for more than 80% of total recorded music revenues in the U.S., and Spotify has over 30% market share of the global music streaming market (probably even higher in the U.S.). 

Not only are users today not buying music, streaming royalties are also arguably just broken. To give a simplified overview of how Spotify pays royalties, Spotify sums the total number of monthly streams on the platform and self-reportedly pays 70% of subscription and ad revenues out to rightsholders (distributors, labels, etc.) based on their proportions of overall streams for the month. Artists are then paid by the licensor based on their respective contracts. The exact terms of an artist’s contract significantly impact how much that artist is ultimately paid from streaming. 

With a typical record label, an artist may be paid an upfront advance that the label must recoup before it pays the artist any streaming royalties (usually 20-25%). Alternative distribution platforms like CD Baby offer options for independent artists such as a flat distribution fee ($9.99) + commission on streaming revenue (9%)—big s/o to Cherie from Water & Music for sharing these examples with me!

A few key observations to tease out here: 

1. Spotify doesn’t pay artists directly, it pays rightsholders.

2. Spotify doesn’t pay royalties per-stream, but instead by “streamshare.”

This also has a few major implications:

1. Spotify’s pro rata model means the lion’s share of payouts will always go to the rightsholders with the most cumulative streams on the platform. 

2. Spotify payouts mainly rely on flat, all-access subscription pricing that has only increased once in the past ten years. 

This isn’t to say that streaming is all Bad. Platforms like Spotify democratize access to potential listeners and fans. Nearly 80% of artists on Spotify have fewer than fifty monthly listeners. I love this passage from an article by Ethan Iverson for The Nation:

“Music streaming has done a lot of good. The old industry was a classic gatekeeper, and only a chosen few got a chance. Now everyone has a shot. One example from my personal files: After I included a delightful track by the Ethiopian nun Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou on a Spotify playlist for The New York Times called ‘5 Minutes That Will Make You Love Piano,’ notes poured in from everywhere, including from fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi and artist Christoph Niemann. I’m not the only one who has been talking up Guèbrou in the past decade, and our push has apparently succeeded: I’ve heard Guèbrou in restaurants, in airports, and in the Netflix adaptation of the novel Passing. Guèbrou died this year at 99; I hope her late-in-life renaissance has secured her legacy. At any rate, it makes a difference that Guèbrou is only a click away on the streaming services.”

Based on today’s model, longtail artists will likely never be able to sustain their music careers from streaming revenue. Only 0.41% of UK artists are expected to make a sustainable living from streaming according to a report by the UK Intellectual Property Office. To be fair though, streaming is often not the highest revenue stream for most music artists. The majority of a music artist's revenue is typically made from experiential, direct-to-fan offerings like touring, merchandise, and paid memberships, and/or from higher-margin enterprise deals like brand sponsorships and TV/film syncs.

Big Algorithm + The Death of Social Discovery

Discovery, whether for new music or new brands, used to be deeply social. Tastes and trends were local and contextual. Radio and TV were the first infrastructural leaps to make discovery more broad, with the internet following suit. I was no longer confined to the tastes of my suburban hometown, I could go online and check out what the people of New York City were into–even if it’s just by watching a dancing NPC outside the SoHo Prada store. 

Algorithmic feeds take this even further. Many of the platforms we consider “social” today aren’t even all that social… they’re also more broadcast-based (TikTok, YouTube, new Instagram, new Twitter). Broadcast and algorithmic platforms isolate you from local, social contexts so you rely more on your personal feed. Kyle Chayka writes more about this in a recent piece for The New Yorker, “Why the Internet Isn’t Fun Anymore.” 

To bring this point back to music, prior to the birth of what I’ll call “Big Algorithm” was the maturation of its older sibling the “Attention Economy.” During this shift, shortform content became king. Music albums as monolithic projects started losing power. I wrote about this in a piece from August about subcultures, so I’ll simply rehash it here:

“The album as we know it is dead. While albums used to be singular projects with clear narrative arcs, new albums are more often collections of disparate singles with banger potential or they’re shorter EPs. Artists are even teasing songs on TikTok to see which ones are worth releasing. A group who noticed and capitalized on this early was Migos in the mid 2010s (RIP Takeoff).”

From Joe Coscarelli in Rap Capital:

If you squint just a little, these loose threads begin to appear intertwined. 

People go online → the digital Attention Economy thrives → albums get shorter, individual tracks become the atomic unit → Big Algorithm springs up, individual songs gain even more power due to virality potential → the blinding speed of internet-native search and Big Algorithm means domination by instantaneous broadcast feeds.

Identity + Post-Criticism

You would think that if traditional social discovery is dead, centralized platforms for criticism and media would actually gain influence. People would need to look towards a mass center to find a social consensus for Taste. In reality, this seems…half true?

When records first became popular, music criticism was a core component of the music landscape. Before I spend time and money to buy a record, I should know if it’s good or not. Today, music is free. Post-record but pre-internet, music magazines broke artists, alerting listeners to who should be on their radars. Today, artists often break themselves–and not just through their music.

With the death of the capital-a Album, you optimistically have about 200 seconds to capture a listener’s attention with your music. In an era in which artists are discovered on “social” platforms, the focal points become the individuals themselves. Music artists who capitalize on this feature can experience major boosts in popularity. 

Troye Sivan and Renee Rapp are artists who are known to be TikTok power users, and they have both experienced massive gains from it, creating hidden inside jokes with fans who religiously follow their feeds (Troye Sivan’s masterful “Rush” promotion, activating kpop stans through a Hyunjin fancam edit).

Another way to frame this shift is that art and media have become much more identity-centric. 

Constructing identity–both as an artist and as an average listener–is complicated in a Big Algorithm society. I wrote earlier that broadcast and algorithmic feeds are isolating, but the method by which these platforms isolate you is not just by literally cutting you off from local content or discourse. Endless feeds and global search offer access to an infinite scroll of new contextual layers through which to view yourself. While then identity becomes more dynamic and fluid, finding platforms and communities that support these nuances becomes another challenge. Fashion commentator Bliss Foster describes this well in a video about subcultures: 

“You could moderate a subreddit for the Canadian punk scene while posting every day to a dark web Death Grips forum while being a massive Twitter advocate for a Marxist political candidate in Alaska, all while watching 24-hour news coverage of Formula One racing. Then that same kid could get up, put on a Nike tracksuit, and go to their high school where they play football and never talk to their friends about their actual interests.”

Artists are finding their own identities and sounds with newfound complexity, powering rapidly emerging niche, often internet-native styles of music–”Plugg,” “Nightcore,” etc.  Classifying new music today through legacy lenses like Rock or Hip-Hop is practically impossible, and new artists (see: Paris Texas, Jean Dawson) reject being placed into these boxes. 

It’s hard to imagine how any single media institution can accurately survey the genre-sprawling music landscape of today. Smaller, vibrant platforms exist to fill the gap across media (No Bells), radio (NTS), and more–but the growth path or ideal end state for these operations is not entirely clear. UMG recently bought a stake in NTS. Even Boiler Room is owned by DICE, which has raised over $50M in venture funding.

In this paradigm, media platforms and criticism still matter, but in a totally different way.

Music journalists must transform into more general “culture journalists” if they hope to cover the full breadth of an artist's work and impact. Cultural commentary more often than not lives on platforms like TikTok, meaning artist coverage is driven by paid influencers and devoted stans who have developed parasocial loyalty to their favorite artists. 

The artists themselves are also left to reckon with the question of who they would rather be engaging with and/or commenting on their music (see: Steve Lacy, Doja Cat).

From Ed Sheeran in an April 2023 Rolling Stone interview: “‘Why do you need to read a review? Listen to it. It's freely available! Make up your own mind. I would never read an album review and go, 'I'm not gonna listen to that now.’”

From Ice Spice in an October 2023 Complex cover story: “So, aside from the people in her corner, whose opinion does she care about? ‘The critics,’ she admits. ‘Because they actually study music and care about it. So I feel like I’d rather hear their opinion. ​​I'm more interested in that because at least it’ll be paragraphs explaining why they feel that way and I'll be able to understand the person better versus just one little hateful ass comment from a private page. At least there's an author and a face attached.’”

The question of criticism’s role in the modern music landscape is existential and pressing; so pressing that the music media scene recently erupted in outrage upon hearing that Bandcamp’s editorial operation was shuttered by its most recent acquirer, Songtradr.

In a post-Criticism world, who assumes the role of the critic? The same handfuls of pedigreed writers who take turns writing for the same tens of major publications or TikTok stan journalists who film content in their bedrooms? In a post-Media world, where does discourse live? In the comments sections and Discord servers of the Fantanos-type commentators of the world or in stan forums like KTT?

The colloquial title of “curator” elevates the average listener to a more critic-like role, but even then curation in practice usually refers to general lifestyle aspiration, rather than any specific mode of knowledge.

What’s Next

The modes that we currently have for engaging with music–including everything from listening, to distributing, to discussing music–feel more outdated everyday.

It’d be silly of me to claim that I have solutions to the sprawling, deep-seated problems within the music industry and media at-large. Instead, I want to highlight a few popular solutions I’ve come across and some notes for consideration:

Why don’t we move to a user-centric payment model? The premise is simple. Instead of a pro rata model, streaming platforms pay royalties per-stream. For the user, that means your platform subscription fee goes towards the artists you actually listen to, rather than to a general pool. The popularity of the model has fluctuated over the past decade, making a resurgence more recently (driven mainly by UMG). Spotify, Tidal, and Apple Music have all at least entertained the idea in the past, while SoundCloud actually implemented it in 2021. The discussion is nuanced, but the high-level argument against a user-centric payment model is that it removes the regulatory burden of fair practice away from labels and platforms, and instead puts it on unregulated, generally less educated fans. In many cases, smaller artists’ revenue may actually be subsidized by that of larger artists belonging to the same label. Brilliant music writer David Turner has written about streaming payment models several times for his music business newsletter, Penny Fractions–the latest being “The Payment Model Debate Isn’t Over.”

Why don’t we enable fractional song ownership/streaming royalties for fans? Over the years, there have been several  approaches to this type of platform spanning both Web2 (JKBX) and Web3 (Royal), but the general idea is that fans should be able to invest in songs by purchasing stakes of the royalty streams. For what it’s worth, I think the concept of music royalties as an alternative asset class is fine, but you’re not going to capture the attention of fans. And through an investing lens, the returns prospects of song royalties are highly debatable, especially considering the glaring fact I pointed out earlier that streaming doesn’t make most artists that much money anyway.

Music today exists in a landscape wildly different from the one of fifty or even only ten years ago. Streaming platforms like Spotify and social platforms like TikTok have completely upended the way music gets discovered, distributed, and monetized. While these platforms have done wonders to break and elevate new artists, they have stripped away many of the financial and social safeguards afforded to them by clear music ownership and pedestaled media platforms. 

I’m of the firm belief that the platforms that ultimately best support artists will be the platforms that, whether directly or indirectly, put money in artists’ hands. However, a false assumption I often see in discourse around platform innovation is that the features must be explicitly financial (and often explicitly speculative) in order to create meaningful capital opportunities for artists. The design space for empowering artists is much bigger than designing purely financial primitives, which brings us back to the role of media and social discovery. Designing new social-first experiences for music discovery, discourse, and engagement is crucial in a time where users won’t pay for music, but they will pay for connection and experiences.

While what the exact future state of these platforms look like is unclear, here are few concepts I’m interested in:

Platforms that spotlight a track’s social provenance, highlighting its often unsung songwriters and producers, and create rich attribution graphs and experiences around those social connections.

Platforms that spotlight a track’s data provenance, gamifying remixing and experimental AI creation while preserving attribution and data provenance.

Decentralized media and curatorial platforms, where media is sustainably co-created and co-distributed by the local scenes and communities that create niche scenes and sounds. 

Digiphysical platforms and experiences that sit at the interplay of live and digital.

If you’ve thought about any of these problems and/or just love music to your core, I’d love to jam with you. 

I’ll be posting a more solution-oriented PT II soon. Stay tuned.

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thank you to Cherie from Water & Music (go check it out!) for feedback and invaluable insights on the music industry and to Ruby, Anna, Reggie, and Sean for further review and feedback

Yameii Online, “Baby My Phone” (2021)

Greta Gerwig’s Barbie is now the highest-grossing domestic release in Warner Bros. history, overthrowing Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight released in 2008. It seems like everyday a new IP-based film is being announced, each source of material making less sense than the one before from Barney to Hot Wheels to…Pop-Tarts?

We can pull this thread even more, from Adam Mastroianni: 

“Until the year 2000, about 25% of top-grossing movies were prequels, sequels, spinoffs, remakes, reboots, or cinematic universe expansions. Since 2010, it’s been over 50% every year.” Last year, the top ten highest-grossing movies were all reboots or sequels. 

Tempting explanations for today’s apparent lack of original media are to point fingers at corporations for chasing greed or at audiences for being complacent in a decline in creativity. These explanations can both be somewhat true, but I’m more interested in exploring in the abstract how we got here and to answer a more existential question: Is culture dead? *vaguely handwaves* “it’s more nuanced than that”

To understand how we arrived at the current state of pop culture, it’s worth examining cultural trends of the past. It’s difficult to trace the exact origin of a culture, but a few recurring themes emerge:

1v1 Opposition

New subcultures historically appear in direct opposition to a dominant culture. Teddy Boys and Skinheads in the UK. Hippies and Bikers in the US. It also helps explain why youth drive culture and trends. Kids vs adults is an opposition as old as time. No one feels more helplessly alienated and misunderstood than a young person.

Local contexts

New cultures are best cultivated in intimate communities with rich context, often bonding around feelings of alienation and opposition as mentioned earlier. Chinese immigrants in San Francisco in the late 1800s created the signature style of Chinatown. Black and Latinx youth in the Bronx in the 1970s created hip hop. Both these subcultures, started by minority communities, are now mainstays of modern American culture.

Turning back to Barbie and the reboot paradigm. Both signals I’ve identified as precursors to subculture development—1v1 opposition and local context—have been wildly disrupted by the internet, irrevocably altering the way culture emerges and is ultimately produced.

1v1 Opposition → Omnivorism 

While subcultures surface in opposition to some dominant culture, identifying any single, dominant culture today is nearly impossible. 

Is anything “canon” anymore? Not really. 

The internet allows unlimited amounts of information to proliferate at such lightning speeds that the notion of a stable canon becomes a bit absurd. Instead, we have omnivorous taste where objective taste does not exist and every “niche” interest can be somewhat commonplace. 

Omnivorous taste is democratic in theory, but becomes messy in practice. If you can’t rally a passionate community around a strong message because there is no direct opponent and/or because you are competing with millions of other equally accessible concepts, it’s extremely difficult to gather any attention at all. In the end, people tend to default to a lowest common denominator (often monetary), ossifying monoculture.

From W. David Marx in Status and Culture:

Local Contexts → Mass Scale

Another example of why youth drive culture: they spend a lot of time together in close-quarters—in schools, sports teams, cultural groups, etc. Physical environments will always be an epicenter of community-building because there is more obvious, shared context. Take Atlanta rap culture as an example. 

From Pierre “P” Thomas, CEO and Co-Founder of Quality Control Music, the label home to Atlanta-native artists like Migos, Lil Baby, City Girls, and Lil Yachty:

“Other labels have these A&Rs and CEOs and chairmen, sitting in an office looking on the internet at numbers on SoundCloud and Spotify—they’re just into the analytics. That’s part of it. But if I’m being honest—and it might sound ignorant—I don’t own a computer. I’m really out here in it.”

While the internet turbo boosts communities to reach mass scale, scale is a double-edged sword. You are able to reach more people in volume and thereby likely to reach more people who share certain interests, but it’s much harder to share context around language, physicality, etc. The result is often some form of dilution and context collapse.

Kieran Press-Reynolds writes about this dynamic in music. He unpacks how streaming platforms and major labels often slap labels on underground music genres in order to make them legible to mass audiences:

“Music genres, like anything mediated through language, are composite signifiers carrying a multitude of meanings for different people. [...] It’s practically impossible to grasp a music genre or scene in its totality, aware of every manifestation and influence, but you can dig deep in the ground and turn over as many rocks as possible. What playlists do is rub sandpaper over a music scene so there’s no dimensionality left (just a top-down list, usually organized with new popular songs near the top) and no timestamps (there’s no archive for what the playlist looked like before).”

So what does this all mean for culture exactly?

Pop culture today submits to power law-like distribution. Attention consolidates around a few mega stars/trends like Beyoncé or Taylor Swift (whose careers took off pre-Youtube) and bottoms out drastically. In a power law-like paradigm, there’s two (not ideal) ways to break through for commercial success:

Go for the head. Obviously if attention converges around a head, you should build around it—mega stars, established IP, etc. What I find unique today though, is that revival IP today pulls from troves of 20+ year old material, which poses questions around where the cultural “head” even exists. 

Optimize for virality. Niche stars can still break through, but breakout moments happen more unpredictably than ever before, often driven by luck and virality. The concept of virality brings to mind images of TikTok and rags-to-riches stardom, but it’s also impacting how big budget media is produced.

Take, for example, the music album. The album as we know it is dead. While albums used to be singular projects with clear narrative arcs, new albums are more often collections of disparate singles with banger potential or they’re shorter EPs. Artists are even teasing songs on TikTok to see which ones are worth releasing. A group who noticed and capitalized on this early was Migos in the mid 2010s (RIP Takeoff).

From Joe Coscarelli in Rap Capital:

The eventual result of a power law-driven landscape is a culture that prizes media that 1) fundamentally sits at the lowest common denominator such as behemoth corporations that own decades-old IP or 2) churns out high volumes of micro-content engineered to catch viral lightning in a bottle.

Despite all this, culture is far from dead—a new era is rapidly emerging. 

In the absence of any singular enemy, omnivorism becomes the opponent. Subcultures have become more local, more niche, and more extreme, using internet tools for distribution. Regional rap continues to thrive, leaving digital trails on YouTube and SoundCloud. Teens seek community in extremely niche political Instagram pages. 

The final piece of the puzzle in this evolution may be a technological one. We need new digital tools built for a subculture-centric world. The first era of internet platforms was revolutionary. They enabled small creators to build monetized platforms and streamlined content discovery. But these platforms were also built to reward scale, where content should be optimized for short-form and creator rewards are distributed based on vanity metrics like clicks and views. While niche communities can now easily get off the ground, maintaining these communities is still largely unsustainable. A clear tension here comes to a head. There is a lack of alignment between the platforms built for a culture from a decade ago and the flourishing subcultures that exist today.

I don’t think it’s reasonable to tell everyone to retreat from the internet in protest. The internet gave us powerful tools for connection, and we should leverage them. But the next era of internet platforms must be natively built to serve the needs of smaller communities, enabling them to be sustainable but not necessarily scale. Only through that transformation do I think we’ll be able to completely enter a new era of internet-native creativity and culture.

thank you to Santi, Nabeel, Sean, and Andy for your thoughtful notes and feedback

Books that highly informed my thoughts on this post:

Status and Culture by W. David Marx

Rap Capital by Joe Coscarelli

Internet for the People by Ben Tarnoff

Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda (2017)

I wrote a year ago about taste and how it’s been outsourced to feeds and algorithms. It was an honest effort, but it barely grazed the surface of what has become a personal obsession: what drives taste and creation?

I recently watched a collection of documentaries about artists I deeply admire:

Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda (2017)

The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness (2013) (on Hayao Miyazaki)

Notebook on Cities and Clothes (1989) (on Yohji Yamamoto)

Choosing these artists was purposeful. I was curious to see how their artistic processes might compare given they share culture and era, but span different mediums: music, film & animation, fashion. 

I learned that Sakamoto, Miyazaki and Yamamoto are idiosyncratic characters, as artists often are. Sakamoto is reverent and hopeful, while Miyazaki rather flippant and dry, and Yamamoto exudes cool, withdrawn Parisian (where he splits his time with Tokyo). 

I gathered a few actionable notes: pay close attention to your surroundings, create with whatever you have around you. But the more compelling truth I discovered was that these artists create from unwavering first principles. 

Yamamoto: material and texture first, form second

Miyazaki: animation must be grounded in realism

Sakamoto: everything is music, everything returns to nature

Core beliefs are the kernels of taste. Once you become aware of an artist’s personal truths, you begin to see them everywhere in their body of work. Art hinges on these beliefs, subtly manifesting like hidden signatures.

Therein lies the inextricable tie between creation and taste.

Creation is an outward expression of your inner world, while taste is the interplay of ideas, beliefs, and convictions from which that world emerges.

Taste guides creation and in response, creation informs taste. 

I drew my own rough visual framework for how I think about the act of creation.

Beginning from the left, you first gather inputs, references, sources.
To quote my friend Ruby who has also written about taste (and is one of the most thoughtful and tasteful people I know):

“Turn off the computer. Go live in the world of objects. Go to the stores in your city or town. Touch things. Try them on. Sit on them. Peer, leer, jeer!” 

Then you must synthesize your findings; develop an intimate understanding of why certain objects resonate with you. Explore, ask questions, sit in wonder, and repeat, until you can uncover patterns and build frameworks around your findings. 

Next, create! The external manifestation of the world-building you’ve done internally.

Consume → Synthesize → Create

Though simple, this framework unlocked a lot for me. Visualizing this process helps me break down how I spend my time. This structure draws the relationship between taste and creation more explicitly, allowing me to better attempt to answer key questions: Is taste objective? Are accessible creator tools net beneficial or harmful?

Consumption looks wildly different today than it did ten years ago. This is not a unique insight,  people have been grappling with the consequences for years. At first, the protest was that there’s too much media to consume. Now, we’re tumbling headfirst towards media that is algorithmic and hyperpersonal. If there’s too much to consume, make sure people are efficiently served the “right” content. We’re even beginning to entertain a world in which people watch their own individualized versions of films (in my own words, hell).

Most people stop at consumption. This has always been the case, and will continue to be the case forever and ever, Amen. This makes sense, as it requires the least amount of effort. But the evolution of algorithmic and hyperpersonal content makes moving beyond consumption even more challenging. If I already enjoy the content I’m being served, why would I spend time in discovery or discernment (synthesis)? However, there is a critical, existential issue embedded here.

Synthesis is where taste develops. 

From Tyler, the Creator:

“We’re at a time where things don’t hold personal value anymore, it’s now for other people. Even a conversation about music now has changed. People just say something’s ‘mid’ but they can’t articulate why they don’t like it. They don’t have the vocabulary or the energy or the actual care. People don’t even talk about why they like the shit they actually like.” 

I wrote about this last year, so I won’t cover it much further, but I want to turn to how these trends impact the act of creation and the creator class. Today’s creators operate within the paradigms of two technological shifts:

1. Mass, personalized media consumption 

2. Accessible creator tools 

We addressed the first, now onto the second.

Modern tools make the creative act easier, period.

Take long form writing. Many contemporary writers I admire cite blogging as the start of their career. Bloggers in the early 2000s had to master a new, foreign medium. But they were willing to master the medium because they absolutely loved writing. I doubt that this is the case for the majority of online writers today. After all, I can create a new personal blog/newsletter/website and monetize it in less than ten minutes. If creating a newsletter was even 50% harder, I doubt I would even have a Substack today. This is not an argument against the democratization of creative tools.

Open tooling is essential.

Art is gatekept, helmed by legacy institutions and deep-pocketed kingmakers. Meryl Streep’s famous monologue from the 2006 film The Devil Wears Prada sums it up well:

“...that blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs, and it's sort of comical how you think you made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you're wearing a sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room from a ‘pile of stuff.’"

Accessible tooling and open media attempt to level this wildly uneven plane by giving young, diverse audiences and artists unprecedented power.

I’m reminded of Nam June Paik who pioneered the genre of video art by repurposing prohibitively expensive equipment to make it more affordable for himself and other artists. Or J Dilla’s innovative approach to sampling and hardware which inspired his contemporaries to approach music production in the same minimal manner. 

Beyond medium (tools, platforms), a creator must also master message.

Message sits at the heart of all creation. Message is meaning and belief.
Sakamoto, Miyazaki, and Yamamoto are artists who have distinct, decisive beliefs about the world. To create is to fiercely challenge these beliefs—to poke, prod, test them.

This is why taste is essential. This is not to say that taste is objective or static. Taste is intensely personal and constantly evolving. It is not the result of conviction in a single idea, but of the firm belief that you have a perspective on the world that must be shared. And as you engage in the creative act, your inner world reverberates loudly, leaving an indelible mark on the world itself.

Taste is the foundation of creation. Without it, you’re left a prisoner of imitation. 

Fashion is an excellent example of teasing out style that is imitative versus style that has personal taste.

Yohji Yamamoto (narrated by Wim Wenders) on style:

"Style can become a prison. A hall of mirrors in which you can only reflect and imitate yourself. Yohji knew this problem well. Of course, he had fallen into that trap. He had escaped from it, he said, the moment he had learnt to accept his own style. Suddenly, the prison had opened up to great freedom, he said. 'That for me is an author. Someone who has something to say in the first place, who then knows how to express himself with his own voice, and who can finally find the strength in himself to become the guardian of his prison, and not to stay its prisoner.'"

A more contemporary note from fashion writer Rachel Tashjian Wise:

A response from fashion writer Brenda Weischer.

In drafts of this piece, I referred to the process of creation as “the creative arena,” which confused initial reviewers. “Why would you use such a combative term?”

This was intentional. I wanted to stress that the creative act can be acutely painful. The arena has glorious lore. It’s violent, spectacular, thrilling. It’s also deeply mythical, social, dynamic.

To create—to enter the creative arena—is to pursue the divine. And to emerge from it, one must be armed with deep-seated belief. 

From Nick Cave:

“What makes a great song great is not its close resemblance to a recognizable work. Writing a good song is not mimicry, or replication, or pastiche, it is the opposite. It is an act of self-murder that destroys all one has strived to produce in the past. It is those dangerous, heart-stopping departures that catapult the artist beyond the limits of what he or she recognises as their known self. This is part of the authentic creative struggle that precedes the invention of a unique lyric of actual value; it is the breathless confrontation with one’s vulnerability, one’s perilousness, one’s smallness, pitted against a sense of sudden shocking discovery; it is the redemptive artistic act that stirs the heart of the listener, where the listener recognizes in the inner workings of the song their own blood, their own struggle, their own suffering.”

Medium was historically a determining factor in the arena; if you were willing to master the medium, you’ve already demonstrated high conviction. New tools make this less relevant. Of course, new mediums are accompanied by new challenges but the matter remains that the arena is constantly transforming before our eyes. 

Like taste, creation is deeply personal. Maybe the creative process doesn’t look like an arena at all, but a maze of curiosity or a contemplative daydream. Understanding the shape, surfaces, crevices, and boundaries of your own creative arena is crucial.

What does the creative act look like for you?

If consumption is a firehose, how will you refine your own taste?

What vectors challenge you to iterate, to reflect, to grow beyond medium?

No tool or platform can give you these answers.

This shouldn’t discourage people from becoming creators, not at all. But as execution becomes easier, conviction becomes even more vital. To create is to confront the fundamental question:

What are you willing to do to put your ideas out in the world? 

See you in the arena.

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thank you to Sean, Ruby, and Nikhil for your thoughtful notes, feedback, and inspiration

References (in order of appearance):

Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda (2017)

The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness (2013)

Notebooks on Cities and Clothes (1989)

Ruby Justice Thelot

All Star Series: Tyler Talk, Paris (2022)

The Devil Wears Prada (2006)

Nam June Paik: Moon Is The Oldest Tv (2023)

Dilla Time: The Life and Afterlife of J Dilla, the Hip-Hop Producer Who Reinvented Rhythm (2022)

Rachel Tashjian Wise

Brenda Weischer

The Red Hand Files

CAM International Market, Cincinnati, OH

Once a month, like clockwork, my family packs into our Honda Accord and drives several hours to the nearest city, Cincinnati or Atlanta depending on the year, to take stock of Chinese groceries. It’s one of the rare occasions we all participate in an activity as a family since we never eat meals together at home. Three hours is eternity to a child, so I prepare diligently. At 9, I pack my Nintendo DS lite. At 12, I pack books. By 15, my iPhone is usually enough to keep me occupied.

We leave the house at 9am, timed to arrive at peak dim sum hour. The ride is more or less silent, only punctuated by the radio and wind whooshing through the open car window. I do my best to shrink as much as possible. I slump because the headrest is set at an awkward height and I’m too scared to ask someone to fix it for me. I lean so hard into the door that I practically fall out of the car; breaching the invisible backseat median between me and my older sister could mean conflict which was to be avoided at all costs.

I eventually let whichever NPR show is playing in the background lull me to sleep. My parents are adamant about only playing NPR in the car. I wonder now if they even paid attention to what was playing, but probably not. When the ride is over, I spring out of the car toward the restaurant’s double doors, using all of my anxious energy to tug them open.

Shouting comes from every direction, carts weave between tables like high-speed traffic. The clanging of steamer containers drives the beat of the whole spectacle. A massive, upholstered dragon on the back wall is the production’s centerpiece, staring down at everyone with omniscient dignity. I dream of roaming the banquet hall freely after-hours—no people, no noise, just running my hand against the dragon’s sequins.

The reverie breaks when we sit down to eat. The chairs at the table are too high, leaving my legs flailing around uncomfortably midair. The pearl plastic chopsticks make eating nearly impossible; they’re much less forgiving than the wooden chopsticks we have at home. I fumble with them valiantly until resigning myself to stabbing my food, out of frustration as much as necessity. Ordering is equally painful. I avoid eye contact with servers so they don’t ask me questions that I don’t understand. I shyly point or simply hope that my parents remember what my favorite dishes are; sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t.

Mealtime niceties and intimate conversation are not our family’s strong suit, but we all solemnly appreciate the ceremony of monthly dim sum. It carries the decorum of a town hall meeting, the only socially acceptable time to make the month’s announcements. “I want to quit piano,” “I don’t want to go to the college you want me to go to,” “I’m dating a man much older than me.” The formality of the meal makes it politically neutral ground. Regardless of what anyone shares, one can’t argue, because we’re in a public establishment and no one wants to ruin the meal we’ve traveled so far to share together. Instead you tightly smile, stare down at your plate, and continue to fiddle with the goddamn chopsticks.

After lunch, we begin checking the items off our CVS receipt-length grocery list. All the large Chinese establishments fit in the span of a single thumbnail-sized strip mall. Their storefronts radiate a beige, all-American spirit, as if to assure passerby “There’s nothing to see here, move on!” The real fun hides behind the frontlines. Through an unassuming alley, an herb shop brims floor-to-ceiling with eerie substances like Solomon’s seal and Astragalus root; a beauty supply store markets youth regenerating elixirs with ingredients banned in America; a plant shed nurses entire forests in fluorescent lighting, inspecting both you and the plants under a giant microscope. 

By the end of the day, I have a migraine from the overwhelming sights and smells. My favorite and final stop comes when my dad and I break off from the group to go to the small, lone bookstore. While he surveys the front displays, I bee-line for the shelf hidden in the back corner. I like to think it was placed there like my own personal secret. The Sanrio shelf carries every 9 year old girl’s dream items. Puffy stickers that always bounce back no matter how many times I poke them. Bunny-embossed bento boxes wrapped in fabric bows. I imagine bringing one to school everyday like a staple accessory, ignoring the fact that I never actually brought lunch from home, opting instead for cafeteria styrofoam trays and paper milk cartons. I inspect the mechanical pencils like rare, black market merchandise. After all, you can only find 0.5 lead pencils here vs. the 0.7 you’d commonly find at American stores. The ones with the bells attached to the end would surely be too loud in class, but the ones with the heart-shaped erasers seem too childish. Even though I appreciated their charm, I also wanted people to take me seriously.

The shelf feels colossal in my memory, but upon reflection it was a pretty pitiful excuse for a shelf; you could probably scan its entire inventory in less than five minutes. But the silly little trinkets were comforting. These routine trips always left me with an unnerving feeling of insincerity. I visually blended into the background; I savored the food and shopped for groceries with dutiful muscle memory. But I still fumbled with the words and the practices. I grew up fulfilling the bare minimum for authenticity. I went to Chinese school on Sundays, but stopped going after throwing an epic temper tantrum in the third grade. I had plenty of Chinese friends, but couldn’t hold conversations with their parents. I never internalized the parables and poems, the order of the Zodiac animals. I didn’t know the dates of holidays by heart. My parents rarely talked about their relationship to Taiwan, where they had emigrated from in the ‘80s to get their graduate degrees. Despite my efforts, my performance never felt entirely convincing, to other people or to myself. I worried that if anyone inspected me too closely, they would be able to tell I was a fake.

And so every month, like clockwork, I returned to the Sanrio shelf in search of solace, to confess my fears and secrets. To the plushie toys, I prayed that next month, I would feel different. At least the inanimate cartoon animals couldn’t judge me—cuteness transcends language anyway, right? 

thank you to Santi for patiently working with me to find the right words

thank you to June and Austin for always indulging my mixed thoughts about being Asian American

you all make me better

Making coffee in the morning became a model commute in my head. Similar to a commute, most of the steps are as simple as muscle memory. Heat the kettle, tare the scale, measure the beans, bloom the coffee, etc., etc. But actually brewing coffee requires one’s full attention. Angling the hand, positioning your height and distance, adjusting the speed of the flow, maintaining tight circular pours, tracking the ratio of water to coffee, monitoring the timer. I’ve done this at home in the exact same fashion probably more than 500 times at this point; that’s over 40 hours of brewing coffee.

When I started working in an office daily last fall, I requested coffee equipment so I could bring my morning routine into the office. My team was kind enough to oblige. It wasn’t exactly the same setup as my own at home, a Chemex instead of a Kalita Wave, grounds instead of beans and a grinder—all very trivial differences. 

The kettle is also different. Not even perceivably dissimilar, just an alternative brand. But that kettle fucked me up, like I developed an actual animosity toward the kettle. Its heating mechanism is different, the handle is shaped differently, the spout is angled and cut differently. And to be fair, I have no idea how any of this affects the physics or quality of a kettle, I just couldn’t stand how it felt so unfamiliar. I didn’t know how to angle my hand, what height or distance from the Chemex to pour from, I’d splash boiling water onto my skin, accidentally overfill the filter, etc. I no longer even wanted to make coffee; it became a practice out of necessity. I started to zone out while brewing in order to forget about the entire awkward experience.

Earlier this week though, while using this godforsaken kettle, I suddenly realized that it didn’t feel awkward anymore. I was not burning myself by accident. My hand instinctively knew how to grasp the kettle’s handle, how to angle itself, where to pour from. I don’t know when it happened, but it had all become familiar to me. It was a very brief instant, but it was also very charming.

I remembered how there are some things that only become familiar with time like becoming better at your job or developing taste, how I had been working in this office for six months already after a weird vacuum of time that felt like it would never end, how the most insignificant moments can bring the most grounding learnings like my daily encounter with this annoying, little kettle.

You just need to be open to noticing them.

Liu Ye, Untitled, 2010

My closest friend and I seem like an unlikely pair.

In fact, multiple people have asked both of us, “What do you two talk about?”

H brushes it off coolly, disagreeing entirely with the premise of the question: “If I had nothing to talk about with someone, why would I even spend time with them?” I, however, can’t shake the thought for days (this example itself is a testament to how different we are).

H trusts his gut, and I’m not even confident that I have one. H considers themselves a romantic, and I, a rationalist. H and I can’t watch a movie together without arguing about the merits of the plot or which character is the hero or the villain.

I used to think that those differences actually drove our friendship, that our heated debates about life and love were what added fuel to the fire. Over the years though, those debates have tempered and slowed. Our conversations are calmer now. There are fewer prefaces and disclaimers, we’re more silly and less serious.

In his fantastic newsletter The Red Hand Files, Nick Cave offers a framework for how to think about friendships:

“First there is the friend who you go out and eat with, or get pissed with, who you go with to the cinema or a gig — you know, have a shared experience with.

The second kind of friend is one who you can ask a favour of, who will look after you in a jam, will lend you money, or drive you to the hospital in the middle of the night, someone who has your back — that kind of friend.

The third level of friendship is one where your friend brings out the best in you, who amplifies the righteous aspects of your nature, who loves you enough to be honest with you, who challenges you, and who makes you a better person.”

While I basically agree with this framework (and it was a big reason I originally put pen to paper on this), I want to offer an alternate one:

First there is the friend you pour into. What I mean by this is, you probably don’t see them that often, but when you do, it’s charged and intense. A lot of life updates, revelations, probably pretty cathartic.

The second kind of friend is one you trickle into. You see each other too often for intensity. Instead, growth is more subtle. It’s a collection of offhand comments, little observations about each other. There may be more silence, but accompanying the silence is an unguarded ease.

This framing is not revolutionary or even novel, but I believe the distinction is an important one. Young people in particular love to seek out intensity, whether that intensity is derived from a new person, a new place, a new feeling. It’s a difficult craving to ignore. But lately, I’ve been feeling particularly grateful for the relationships I’ve invested in over the years, both with my time and my consistency. I’ve alluded to this before:

“Understanding moves deeply beyond sharing with you what I think about so-and-so book or so-and-so place. It’s a lifelong journey. It means slowly revealing my unique constellation of reference points, the way I tend to bounce when I walk, why certain silly movies make me cry, the first thoughts I have when I walk into a crowd of people.”

Two very sweet comments (said months apart) from a different friend that solidified this thinking for me:

“Wow, you’re one of the few people I see often enough that I don’t really have any life updates for you.”

“I’m not sure why, but our friendship makes me feel safe.”

In a world that has devolved into context collapse and bad faith, feeling safe is rare. To see and be seen, even rarer. To get to a place with someone where you can relish in the silence, know the answer to a question before asking it, wholly accept each other’s faults, requires a lot of toil—but it’s well worth it.

I’ll leave you with a passage from Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow about the main characters’ lifelong friendship:

“To allow yourself to play with another person is no small risk. It means allowing yourself to be open, to be exposed, to be hurt. It is the human equivalent of the dog rolling on its back—I know you won't hurt me, even though you can.”

Xooang Choi, The Islet of Asperger Type - Ⅵ, 2009

This is not an essay about new year’s resolutions, though it will begin that way. The most common theme I noticed while discussing with friends our hopes and goals for the coming year was that everyone is tired. And rightfully so, the last few years were absolute chaos. We were shackled at home for a year, then suddenly everyone left their jobs, roamed city to city like ghosts, never staying in one place for longer than a few months at a time. “Home” became the websites we visited daily.

It seems we’re overdue for a retvrn—time to “touch grass” or “pretend I do not see” or whatever silly little phrase people are using now to mask the collective fear that we may all just be exhausted.

I’ve personally very much enjoyed just staying the fuck put (pardon my French).

I go to the same physical office everyday, and can very easily envision doing the exact same thing five years from now. I tend to my home, slowly accumulate small knick knacks here and there. I see the same friends on a weekly basis; the conversations are lighter, less charged, maybe even a little boring.

I have little desire to question where I am or what I’m doing, and instead I’m genuinely excited to craft life around what I already have.

These are all normal parts of growing up, I know.

I talk to college students often, and most of their questions boil down to: “How do I make decisions?”

I have never met a student who was not very outwardly anxious about this. In a sandbox of opportunity, it’s difficult to know how and when and even whether to narrow your choices.

My response is as much self-soothing for me as it is advice for them: “Your preferences will be revealed to you over time. The more you explore and lean into your hunches, the easier it will be to make choices without regret.”

There’s a lot to unpack there, but I think the hardest piece to wrap my head around still remains the role of time in all of this.

I’ve written about how there are things you can only learn over time, and not by any brute force. This realization continues to unlock a lot for me. I trust my own intuition and experiences more strongly. I trust that time will reveal to me what I need. These convictions make me more confident in my decisions.

The element that I still grapple with is knowing how to accept when time makes the decision for you. What to do when you realize you want something or that you’ve made a decision a little too early or too late.

I actually had a conversation about this with both a 21 year old (she) and a 35 year old (he) this past week. I gave her my spiel about how time is actually great and to not worry about it too much, and later that same day I expressed the opposite to him (lol): “How do you know when to accept timing vs when to fight it? What’s the difference between trusting that time will reveal things to you vs just lazily sitting on your laurels and letting it happen to you?”

His response went something like this:

“This is something I still grapple with, and you’ll continue to grapple with it for the rest of your life. What begins to soften the unrest is that you will accumulate so many examples in your life of things that only happened because of timing, both good and bad. And you’ll learn to appreciate them.”

Maybe that’s a non-answer, but as is most advice you get from other people. Until I understand for myself, I’ll self-affirm:

I know that there are things I won’t be able to make a decision about until the time is right.

Accepting that time will sometimes make decisions for me is a difficult pill to swallow, and that’s okay.

I find comfort in knowing that regardless of being 21, 24, or 35, we all struggle with time somehow.

I’ll leave you with a quote from Helena Fitzgerald:

“If we wait for things long enough, we almost always change during the waiting. Waiting for the thing we want, we end up living forward into our lives. It is almost impossible to arrive at something the way we hope and imagine that we will, because we cannot predict all of the other changes that come along with it, all of the constant bargains we do not even know we are making. Change is just the way forward motion happens; I can almost never have the thing that I want, because when I wanted it, I imagined the future in the conditions of the past.”

all the appreciation in the world to Jacky, Vivian, Mathu, and Nick. our conversations make me better everyday.