The Weekly Roundup (week of 1.1)
happy new year dear readers. new piece dropping soon. i promise. For now, please enjoy these things i compiled.
1. Live Players Pt. 2 from Sean Monahan
Alright, so this one you gotta pay for but I promise you it’s worth it and you should 100% support this work. In his report,
(Sean) dissects and identifies an updated model of trend behavior. The internet has completely changed the way that we interact with and create, mostly in the cultural realm.We’re addicted to 19th century myths. We presume the present is more alive than the past. Industrialization did cause a break with the past. We called it modernism. We expected the big breakthrough of the 20th century, digitization to have the same explosive, creative effect. Yet, we find our fully digitized culture producing either stasis or churn, not progress. Change still comes but it feels more like a hack, a remix, a mash-up— which in and of itself feels like a return to the eclecticism of the early 21st century hipster.
hold up let him cook…
Sean goes on to describe and identify various archetypes and fashion trends, their relationship with the past, and their overall lifecycle, but what’s interesting is his unique ability to synthesize cultural and political headwinds and make astute observations about their impact on cultural output. He rightly points out that being stuck in the past is a relatively new phenomenon enabled by modern mass media and technology. I highly recommend reading the full report here and paying the money. It’s worth it!
2. Brad Troemel’s AI Report
Art and cultural critic Brad Troemel is back with another video essay on AI’s impact on culture and art. This is just a preview, go check out his IG for some other clips of the report and if you really like what you see you can pay to view the whole thing on his patreon. Sorry, there are so many pay-to-play pieces on here this week but sometimes you should think about paying people for their work……..
3. Has Gratuity Culture Reached a Tipping Point?
Clever headline from the New Yorker. The obvious answer is yes. We’ve all observed the rampant and pervasive impact that tipping culture has had on consumerism. I went and got a few things from the Martine Rose x The Hillbillies merch collection at Camp Flog Gnaw and the tee shirts were already insanely expensive, but to top it off I wasn’t paying attention and accidentally tipped the guy who grabbed me tee shirts 18%!! I’m still salty about that.
The most recognizable, these days, is the iPad pirouette, evoking an upturned palm. Gerard Knight led the design team at Square, one of the major tablet-payment providers, when it first rolled out its tipping feature. “Turning around the interface to say ‘Give me money’ can be kind of an obnoxious gesture,” he told me. Originally, the designers used a Trojan horse, of sorts. “The idea was you turned it around anyway, to capture a signature”—most credit cards at the time required one—“and in that process you prompt that customer for a tip.” They considered options besides the three-choice menu. “Things like sliders, where you slide from ten per cent to twenty per cent,” he said. “All of those things just seemed gimmicky.”
4. THE CROCS-IFICATION OF STANLEY CUPS
In an overstimulated attention economy, even the most ordinary items are eventually yassified into veritable status symbols. Hey, it worked for cushioned foam clogs, why not reusable water bottles?
If you occupy a certain corner of TikTok long enough, you'll find them: the Stanley cup collectors. I'm not talking about fans of the giant trophy given to NHL champions, mind you, but folks who obsessively stock up on the Stanley Quencher tumbler.
Read about the crazed obsession with Stanley cups here.