Slices of ideas

• Slow Cancellation of the Future

  It feels like culture is speeding up, but actually culture is slowing down, partly because the back catalog of culture is now so easily accessible, and partly because we don’t spend much time bored with our imagination. See Mark Fisher’s lecture.

• Constantly seeking alpha

  If you were to summarize what’s changed in culture in tech and social media over the past 10 years, it would be that all online people now behave like investors, constantly seeking and often repackaging what investors call “alpha”.

• Comfort in software

  The older I get the more I think comfort in software is the thing people most want, and the thing they want most urgently, even more so than convenience. Messaging over calling and the abundance of chat in AI interfaces are examples comfort exceeding convenience

• Loneliness

  People are unfortunately really lonely, and every product that serves the loneliness problem well will succeed. Many products that we don’t think of having anything to do with loneliness are actually loneliness products, such as Slack.

• Religion

  Religion—probably Christianity—will make a comeback. Religion declined as the world became more explainable through science and technology, and as it grows more intelligent than humans people will want to look outside the material to feel meaning.

  Plus people are really starved for places to meet people.

• The Sopranos

  The Sopranos is the best art we have. If you ask yourself, “What’s going on in America today?”, you’ll find that The Sopranos anticipated it all—the emasculation of American life; how much you really want to address past trauma—more than two decades ago.