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Anil Dash:

Email’s been here for years. But the reason Substack wants you to call your creative work by their brand name is because they control your audience and distribution, and they want to own your content and voice, too. You may not think you care about that today, but you will when you see what they want to do with it.

This is me posting to a thing that is 100% absolutely not my Substack.

Oliver Burkeman, author of the self-help productivity philosophy book Four Thousand Weeks, Time Management for Mortals, in his newsletter today:

I don’t need these people’s psychodramas in my head anymore. The closest thing to a political point I want to make is that I’ve dedicated far too much brain-space, in recent years, to marinating in the psyches of the angry, cynical and damaged men currently ascendant in our politics – which is basically what you’re doing when you spend time on Twitter, idly surf online media, or consume most TV news. I’m not talking about people in general here. We’ve lots of work ahead to try to understand how large swathes of the population – people like us, in so many ways, who love their kids, and so on – could embrace viewpoints we find so bewilderingly abhorrent. And we’re going to have to be willing to accept the possibility that some of the failings might be, at least partly, on us. But these tasks won’t be aided in any way by remaining addicted to the feuds and fragile egos of the demagogues at the top, or their hangers-on in the commentariat, and the shocking things they say for attention and money. We can’t ignore the deep societal problems that have fueled their rise. But we absolutely can choose to excise from our lives all their distracting psychodramas, their whiny podium speeches, social media bloviating and related bullshit (which includes, by the way, the output of many of those building media empires by railing against them, too).

Emphasis his. Also mine.

Craig Mod votes from Japan.

I slammed my ballot down and shoved it into an EMS international airmail envelope and gleefully paid thirty freggin’ bucks or so to get that sucker to my utterly blue state knowing damn well that that vote won’t tip the scales in any meaningful way. And yet. And yet — AND. YET. — I wanna be on that ledger. Goddamn, you bet I want to be on that ledger. What else is there but the ledger in a moment like this? Pull the lever, cast your tiny pebble into it all and hope things add up. De minimis? Hell no. At the very least, you’ll be present on the cosmic scale, a little number at the end of a bigger number — one that wouldn’t have been quite as big without you. That’s not nothing, and when your grandkids asked what you did right now — in this mythic time of madness and infinite resources all seemingly used in the wrong ways, facing the wrong directions, directed at the wrong people — you can at least say you were present, doing the smallest of things you could in whatever way you could. Tick.

In this mythic time of madness…tick. Tick. Tick.

Rosencrans Baldwin sits on a Los Angeles street corner, practicing sixty minutes of focus aerobics. Traffic, planes, stoplights, graffiti, people walking by clutching things.

So many folks also openly clutch their phones. At least seventy-five percent of the women during the hour, and maybe a quarter of the men. Question: do you also find it silly to call our smartphones “phones” or “cell phones,” when that’s hardly their use anymore?

Maybe we need to invent a word for slot machine/anxiety-induction device. Or just call them drugs.

I’ll go with drugs.

Ben Thompson dissects Netflix’s earnings reports in today’s update, and I absolutely loved this chart, plotting revenue against content cash flow.

For many years Netflix’s investment in content growth tracked its revenue growth; as you can see on this chart, though, the key switchover happened around 2018, when Netflix’s content costs stabilized at around $4 billion per quarter. And, guess what happens when you keep costs steady but revenue continues to grow? You get expanding margins, and you start to look a bit more like a tech company.

Thompson goes on to compare and contrast Netflix’s “pay up front for content” model with YouTube (and Spotify’s) model, where content costs are directly connected to revenue.

YouTube has much more theoretical upside for creators: a hit video can generate millions of dollars on its own. That payout, though, is much less certain; that means the smartest approach is contant production, both to increase the chances of a breakout and also to build up a presence in users’ algorithms that delivers a baseline amount of viewing. That can make for compelling content, to be sure, but Netflix is right that its not really suited for more highly produced high cost offerings.

You can, if you squint, see the classic Internet barbell concept here: on one hand you have a large platform [Netflix] that, thanks to its large user base, can provide funding with a fixed upside to creators; on the other you have a large platform [YouTube] that, thanks to its astronomically large userbase, can provide huge variance in outcomes. One wonders how much room there is in the long run for something in the middle, i.e. the old Hollywood model, where creators could make ambitious projects with a lot of funding and still get a share of the upside. On one hand the companies stuck in the middle need these models, because they need to produce content at a somewhat lower cost; on the other hand, if they keep giving away upside they may never grow big enough to overcome the distribution advantages Netflix has by getting to scale first.

Ezra Klein makes the argument that what is wrong with Donald Trump is his complete lack of inhibition. It’s a long essay, and I encourage you to listen instead of read, because the audio clips interspersed are reliably jaw-dropping. Klein’s conclusion – that this disinhibition is incredibly dangerous because he’s planning on removing all the checks on his power – is spot on, and terrifying.

This bit really hit; emphasis mine.

Over the years, I have interviewed I don’t know how many politicians. Talking to them is different from talking to anyone else. It’s why I don’t just fill this show with them. Politicians are inhibited. Before anything comes out of their mouth, they are running their response through this internal piece of software. Some of them are really good at it. Pete Buttigieg, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama — the software is so fast and efficient as to be almost seamless.

The politicians we sense to be inauthentic — it’s often that the software is slower and buggier. You can see the seams. You can watch the calculations happening in real time. But what that software is doing is inhibiting. It is running their words through a filter of what they shouldn’t say, given who they are and what they are doing and the weight their words carry. If your words move markets and launch missiles, you choose them carefully.

But there is something undeniably electric to watch someone unchained from the bundle of inhibitions the rest of us carry around. Watching someone just say it. There is something aspirational about it. What if I was without fear, without doubt? And if I can’t be without fear, if I can’t be without doubt, what if I could at least be led by somebody who was? Protected by somebody who was? Fought for by somebody who was?

It is Trump’s absence of inhibition that makes him a great entertainer. It is Trump’s absence of inhibition that makes him feel, to so many, like not a politician — the fact that he was already the U.S. president notwithstanding. It is why the people who want to be like him — the mini-Trumps, the Ron DeSantises and Blake Masterses and Ted Cruzes — can’t pull it off. What makes Trump Trump isn’t his views on immigration, though they are part of it. It’s the manic charisma born of his disinhibition.

Even if it’s real it’s fake, courtesy of Charlie Warzel.

The images of Trump’s McDonald’s stunt—in which he jiggled the fryer and handed burgers out of a window yesterday—are uncanny. There’s Trump, face contorted in the appearance of deep concentration, tilting a fry basket to the heavens; Trump hanging two-thirds of the way out a drive-through window, waving like a beleaguered Norman Rockwell character; Trump, mouth agape, appearing to yell into the middle distance of a fast-food parking lot. The shadows of the McDonald’s kitchen, the interplay between the sheen of the stainless steel and the cast of the nugget-warming lights, give the very real photos a distinct Midjourney aesthetic. … In his own way, Trump has shown us all the limits of artificial intelligence. Computers, at least for now, cannot quite capture the crushing surreality and maddening absurdity of modern electoral politics.

I finally got around to reading Mandy Brown’s excellent Coming Home. There’s a lot in here that I’m chewing on, including the feeling that she describes in the lede…

I’ve written before about the restlessness inherent to screens, the inability to ever linger or pause or catch your breath. It’s a strangely disembodied experience, a sense of ceaseless, rustling motion when nothing is moving at all: electrical pulses flash and gasp beneath the oceans, your mind strains to catch up, your body remains still save for a few twitching digits, the shell that’s left behind when your spirit evacuates for the mirage of higher ground. We become as smooth and reflective as the screen itself, all glassy surfaces and metallic edges obscuring the hollowness within. No need to fantasize about what it might be like to upload your consciousness to the machine – most of us are already there.

Virginia Heffernan on the counter intuitive sin of despair:

But another way to see despair, in secular terms, is as a profoundly counter-adaptive philosophical position. Having no hope puts a living being in a terminal state. Why eat, if you have no hope of satiety? Why see people, if you have no hope of love or friendship? Why bathe or see the sun, if you have no hope for health? Why do anything but dull the pain and wither?

In our democracy, despair is also a hazard. If too many people despair, and start making the despair calculation—the why-bother, nothing-matters calculation—we find ourselves with an unsteady, unpredictable population who have given up faith in our collective American project. The despairing themselves might see themselves as harder to subjugate, and they’d be right. But fulfillment and joy and the pursuit of happiness are closed off to them too.

And just as individuals in despair can’t be brought around to hope or wellbeing by argument, or carrots and sticks, a despairing population can’t be brought around to sound citizenship with appeals to reason, passion, moral principles, or even self-interest.

For obvious reasons, I love this Syllabus Project from Rena Tom.

This syllabus explores the concept of fake objects, defined as material replicas of originals that are absent, fictional, immaterial, or otherwise unobtainable. Fake objects are created to satisfy the desire for things that never were. Their worth is not necessarily tied to the rarity of the original or the fidelity of reproduction. Value is found through fakeness, not in spite of it, giving the fake object the potential to be even better than the real thing. We’ll first look at what fake isn’t, then investigate examples of fake objects used to celebrate, mourn, and preserve moments in time.

Real dolls, the Cayce Pollard jacket, joss paper Gucci bags, fake melting ice cream cones, crocheted representations of coral reefs. Fantastic.

Not a new theory, but the golden age of streaming really was a ZIRP thing. I mean, Patriot anyone?

RIP Cool Rick.

“I’d like to be able to laminate a rope, but I just don’t know how to do this.”

I saw the Jenny Holzer show at The Guggenheim this week; close friends will know that I have a strange relationship with her work. The exhibition, which closes next week, is sort of a reprise of her groundbreaking show there in 1989. Here’s Roberta Smith’s review in the Times from December of that year (emphasis mine):

Ms. Holzer has been given the run of the Guggenheim, or more precisely half of it, and she has come up with a trio of installations that nearly strips the building of art yet fills it in her own way. She has focused her activities almost entirely on the Guggenheim’s great tiered atrium, leaving the walls of its coiled ramp bare. The museum has never looked, nor felt, quite like this.

In effect, the building has been turned into a vast darkened cave with glowing embers at its center: a 535-foot-long moving message that snakes its way around the first three tiers of the museum’s coil, offering a retrospective of Ms. Holzer’s writing as it goes.

This mixing of Ms. Holzer’s different texts emphasizes the range of her writing and the different voices she has called into service. She can offer wise words to live by, put you in touch with your most private memories or make you fear for the future of the planet.

In addition to the meaning of her words, there is the perceptual power and wonderful spatial disorientation of their upward-circling stream, which are heightened by shifts in color, typeface, speed and, upon occasion, direction. Standing on the ramp with the words moving above and below, the viewer feels like a small blip in some giant video game. As one moves down the ramp, the words circle at about the same pace - an effect that proposes each viewer as the center of a slowly revolving universe.

Fast forward to 2024, and the Guggenheim appears to have made some upgrades. Here’s Sarp Karem Yavuz in The Art Newspaper:

While the museum statement heralds Installation for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum as a significant archival project that involved reverse-engineering the LED screens used in 1989, the entire activity seems to eschew any practical consideration in favour of laborious reverence… or perhaps a kind of insistence on authenticity. Like a VHS-tape filter on a TikTok video, despite mimicking the form of the older installation, the new and improved LED screens feel lacklustre in their nostalgia. In 1989, using inherently commercial LED-screen technology to reimagine the Guggenheim’s exhibition capabilities was refreshing and innovative. This time around, the hardware is neither vintage enough to be quaint nor cutting-edge enough to be a commentary on technology or capitalism today.

Back to Smith in 1989:

While the moving-message piece is the exhibition’s main event, it is balanced by two installations using carved benches that provide a needed sense of stillness. On the ground floor of the atrium is a large circle formed by 17 red granite benches that suggests an ancient campfire or a church meeting. In the two-story gallery at the beginning of the ramp’s first tier, 27 white granite benches are placed in closely regimented formation like markers in a crowded cemetery. Carved with phrases that also appear in the moving-message sign, these bench works, as they might be called, point to the ancient communal rituals of storytelling and mourning that inspire much of Ms. Holzer’s work.

I wish the museum curators had reprised not only the snaking text work up the museum’s coil, but also what appears to be remarkably daring restraint with the rest of the 1989 show. I loved this year’s main event, but the walk up the ramp was forgettable. I don’t think Lee Quiñones added much of interest to the wall full of Inflammatory Essays; the Trump Tweet pieces were painfully obvious; the redaction paintings didn’t work in the odd Guggenheim galleries. Honestly if you’re in New York, you should step into the museum lobby, admire the snaking Light Line, snap a few pics for the ‘gram, and head to the Met.

I’ll never stop loving her work, though. For me, Holzer is all about the truisms. Here’s what New Yorker critic Jackson Arn had to say in his review from this year.

“Truisms,” a cycle of almost-aphorisms that Holzer began scattering across New York in the late seventies, has no signature color or typeface or look of any kind, with the upshot that it can thrive anywhere—walls in SoHo, T-shirts, Spectacolor signs in Times Square, a Vegas marquee, a Qatar airport. The words speak with the authority of whichever billboard they’ve crashed, only to squander it on advice that is either too obvious or too obscure to help us. What they reveal is not capitalism’s secret messaging so much as an absence of all messages, nothing but surfaces desperate for eyeballs.

I’d tell you to follow @jennyholzer on Twitter, but talk about surfaces desperate for eyeballs…

Greg Allen goes deep on Untitled (Yellow and Blue), a Mark Rothko painting from 1954 that is coming up for auction this fall. His write up of the provenance could be a treatment for a Wes Anderson movie.

Untitled (Yellow and Blue) is one of nine Rothko paintings Bunny and Paul Mellon acquired from Marlborough Gallery beginning in 1970, immediately after the artist’s death, and so right in the thick of the fiduciary malfeasance that prompted Rothko’s children to sue.

Some time between Paul’s death in 1999 and 2006, when it was shown at the Palazzo Grassi, Bunny sold the painting to François Pinault.

In June 2013, Pinault sold it through his auction house, Christie’s, along with a Fontana, to Eric Tan, a cutout for Jho Low, the Malaysian money launderer. [According to the Feds, the $79.5 million invoice was $36m for the Fontana, and so $43m for the Rothko.] In October 2013, Tan gifted the works, along with a $3 million Calder, to Low, with three copy & pasted “gift letters.”

In April 2014 Low borrowed $107 million from Sotheby’s Financial Services, pledging up to $285 million in artworks as collateral, including the Rothko, then he instructed them to sell artworks until the loan was repaid. Sotheby’s put the Rothko in their May 2015 Modern/Contemporary sale, where it was purchased by Russian oiligarch Farkhad Akhmedov for $46.5 million as part of his attempt to conceal $600 million while divorcing his wife Tatiana Akhmedova.

Tatiana was awarded title to the Rothko, other art, a yacht, and an apartment, in 2016, but some of the assets had been secretly transferred to the feuding couple’s son, and in 2020, she was still suing to receive them. When Sotheby’s publishes the updated provenance, perhaps we’ll know if Tatiana is the present seller.

I loved the Anna Wiener profile of Grant Petersen, founder of Rivendell Bicycle Works. Wiener has a way with paragraphs.

About halfway through the ride, I came to a fork in the road. I didn’t know which path the others had taken, and I stood for a while, appreciating the shade of the oak trees, the quiet, the bandanna crisping around my neck. I tried to channel an essay of Petersen’s, written in 2002, on what he calls “underbiking”: taking a bike somewhere it isn’t obviously built to go. “Riding an UB changes how you look at any terrain,” he wrote. “You ride where it lets you ride, walk when it wants you to, and rely more on your growing skills than on the latest technology.” This struck me as a harmonic way of moving through the world – not my way, but whatever. I pushed off, found the group, and followed them down a steep, exhilarating slide. Dry earth sputtered against my calves. I loosened my hold on the brakes. Even in the heat, with friction shifters I didn’t understand how to use, I felt a flicker of my favorite feeling: competence. The wide tires were emboldening; the saddle height was psychologically fine. It was by far the longest, heaviest bicycle I had ever been on, and it moved with a surprising grace.

File under: land art, 2024 edition. Cards Against Humanity is suing Space X.

Seven years ago, 150,000 people paid us $15 to protect a pristine parcel of land on the US-Mexico border from racist billionaire Donald Trump’s very stupid wall. Unfortunately, an even richer, more racist billionaire – Elon Musk – snuck up on us from behind and completely fucked that land with gravel, tractors, and space garbage.

From the complaint:

SpaceX and/or its contractors entered the Property and, after erecting posts to mark the property line, proceeded to ignore any distinction based upon property ownership. The site was cleared of vegetation, and the soil was compacted with gravel or other substance to allow SpaceX and its contractors to run and park its vehicles all over the Property. Generators were brought in to run equipment and lights while work was being performed before and after daylight. An enormous mound of gravel was unloaded onto the Property; the gravel is being stored and used for the construction of buildings by SpaceX’s contractors along the road. Large pieces of construction equipment and numerous construction-related vehicles are utilized and stored on the Property continuously. And, of course, workers are present performing construction work and staging materials and vehicles for work to be performed on other tracts.

And I know this is just boilerplate, but after you read the whole complaint it’s really satisfying to read this:

CAH demands a trial by jury.

Having very recently experienced Doug Wheeler’s Day Night Day, I can report that it is absolutely mind-blowing.

Upon entering the gallery, the viewer first encounters two luminous, rectangular thresholds or “walls” of light, which function as points of entry into an expansive environment that simulates the experience of limitless space, or a “ganzfeld,” where light appears to shift from day to night and back again. The viewer’s perception is heightened to a degree in which, as the artist articulates, “space appears as a volume, almost as matter.”

On view in New York until October 19th. Go.

Dynomight does a deep dive on consciousness.

I guess life makes sense: For some reason there’s a universe and that universe has lots of atoms bouncing around and sometimes they bounce into patterns that copy themselves and then those patterns go to war for billions of years and voilà – you.

But consciousness is weird. Why should those patterns feel like anything? We understand life in the sense that we’ve worked out the ruleset for how atoms bounce. The ruleset that produces consciousness is a mystery.

I loved this bit.

Say I scan your brain and upload it into a computer that simulates the physics of every neuron. I then hook that simulator up to a you-shaped robot with cameras that mimic your eyes and microphones that mimic your ears. Finally, I ask the robot, HOW ARE YOU FEELING?

What will it answer? I assume something like, CONSCIOUS. TOTALLY CONSCIOUS! AM I A ROBOT? IF I’M A ROBOT PLEASE LEAVE ME ON.

How could the robot not claim to be conscious? After all (1) that’s what you would say, and (2) you’d do that because of the laws of physics operating inside your brain, and (3) the robot’s behavior is governed by the very same physics, just simulated.

By the way, if I am a robot (non-zero chance of this, TBH) please leave me on.

I like this framing of product opportunites from Jason Fried around “questions and answers” instead of “features and benefits.”

When making products, you can think of them as a collection of features or answers.

Some people may say “you mean features or benefits?” No, I mean answers. Answers are counterpoints to questions people have in their heads. Answers fill holes, answers snap into sockets. Benefits don’t have such places in people’s minds.

For example, you could make a feature that shows you which tasks are overdue. Or, you can build something that answers the question “What’s late?”

Emphasis mine.

I’m tired of the song of the summer, it’s time for the song of the fall, “They’re Eating the Dogs, They’re Eating the Cats.”