Published n. 2: Colorful Remix
Money, memes, and a bit of magic—we're all cultural Di-jays. I add the color commentary.
Potatoes are not the only mashed thing at Thanksgiving. The dinner itself is a mash-up of cultural traditions.
There’s no better place to capture the pulse of what’s going on in society than the dinner table with family and friends. However out of hand it could get.
We all want to take the pulse of what’s going on. It’s how we make sense of living. Culture is a meaning-making activity.
The remix in these letters is a deliberate act of storage and transmission to access the value in culture, ensure our survival.
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1/10 the most read and shared articles from On Value in Culture and a reminder for supporters that they can access more articles at The Vault (🔒)—I’m grateful for the patronage.
(🔒) Drinking Cultures Series:
In Part 1, I covered a brief review of the history of drinking, that of the places where we consume alcohol, and the role of specific glasses in culture.
For Part 2, I switched more firmly onto historical roots of the benefits to society, customs, and some interesting experiments from around the world.
Part 3 is a historical review of how we brand, package, market, and sell a promise to make it the most appealing, with selected libations from Northern Italy and Europe—including my favorite wines, beers, and digestive liquors.
Why we need to reclaim the art of making conscious decisions—The increasing number of choices that are decided for you.
A mile wide, an inch deep—Meandering the inner workings of the human psyche
You can’t reach the heart through the brain—Why we muck around with stories.
(🔒) How to Write for the Next Millennium—Behind Italo Calvino's magic curtain on literary value.
The cult of personality—How confidence turned into arrogance.
2/10 I’m in the camp of writing for humans by humans. Already in the 1960s, looking at the progress in automated writing achieved at his time, the writer Italo Calvino granted that machines one day would probably be able to write like humans do.
However, for him, the magic does not happen in the writing, but in the reading of a text. For Calvino, reading is the moment in which “unexpected meaning” is created. Through reading, we access “a meaning that is not patent on the linguistic plane on which we were working.” [see Language Machinery in Hedgehog Review]
This process of sense-making is not under the control of the writer, but of the reader. And it happens with an unpredictable access of a particular reader to what the anthropologist Daniel Everett has called the Dark Matter of the Mind.
3/10 Perhaps Erik Hoel is onto something when we says moralists are the problem. “I think moralists are far more to blame for the worst ills of history than psychopaths, as uncomfortable as that is to believe.”
The popularity of Osama bin Laden’s letter on TikTok is based on childish notions of evil. Because anyone can argue their case.
Essentially, what appears to be so shocking to TikTokers is that Bin Laden offered justifications at all. That he painted himself as the good guy, that he thought he was morally justified, and that he had reasons for doing what he did.
Beware of the person who stands on a soapbox and wags his finger about our lack of manners and principles says Hoel. It’s a very slippery concept that is hard to grasp especially when you’re distanced from what happened.
Screens and historical amnesia or denial don’t do many younger people any favors. What can we do to help (rather than wagging fingers ourselves)? Journalist Jessica Yellin provided some context for the words, beliefs, and actions of the ‘Letter.’
Osama Bin Laden claimed responsibility for the 9/11 attacks. On that day 19 hijackers flew four airplanes into three US locations, killing nearly 3,000 people, wounding 6,000 others. According to the CDC another 4,627 responders and survivors of the World Trade Center attack have since died after reporting illnesses related to chemical exposure on 9/11.
Bin Laden also oversaw the 1998 attack on U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya that killed 200 and wounded 4,500 people.
I watched what happened live. At the time I worked with a company that built digital portals for the financial services industry. I had colleagues on the ground who watched the shoes come off at the towers imploded. It happened.
Now about the intent behind the philosophy:
According to Bakos (past Chief of the CIA Counterterror Targeting Group focused on 9/11, Al Qaeda and Iraq), Bin Laden’s “intent with the letter and talking to the American public was to create a level of disinformation that would co-opt society into fighting against their own government. He wanted us to rise up against the government in the United States.”
Clearly we need to talk about these things. We cannot just let algorithms and amnesia do our work of being human in the world. It’s all to easy to orchestrate revisions. Context and cross-referencing reputable sources can keep news grounded in reality.
4/10 Color is a multi-billion dollar industry. Who picks the color for the year?
The business is nothing to po-poo. With the money we have a meme inside a meme.
As has since been immortalized in the words of Miranda Priestly in The Devil Wears Prada, Eiseman chose cerulean, a sky blue.
[…] They announced their selection. And the campaign exploded, making headlines across the globe and solidifying Pantone’s hold on public perception as the international color authority.
Leatrice Eiseman travels the world to meet with observers—designers, trend forecasters, and cultural detectives tapped into what the world will want to buy in the coming years. I’ve been about ten years ahead of trends consistently my entire life.
5/10 We’re all cultural Di-jays. The mashup of what we read and write moves to the next level of storage and diffusion. What do you want to read more of? We all know the importance of voting.
6/10 In Chiavari on the Liguria coast, I saw an exhibition of Paolo Mascagni’s Tables of Universal Anatomy. As the curator of the the Picture Gallery of the Economic Society, the extraordinary collection of anatomical tables was in a drawer for 200 years.
Mascagni began advising sculptor Clemente Susini who was working on a collection of human anatomical waxes in 1781. He completed the work in 1786—800 pieces.
Sardinian anatomist Francesco Antonio Boi became a student of Mascagni in 1801. Mascagni and Boi entered into a close collaboration as well as a personal friendship. The anatomical waxes are held in the Museo archeologico nazionale in Cagliari.
Thanks to a collaborative professor in Cagliari, images of the waxes were part of the exhibit miles away in Chiavari.
Imagine carving wax, then filling it with material and imprinting the result on recycled cotton from discarded apparel mashed into pulp, then color with ink. This is how the tables came to be. Though the collaboration of a physician and two artists.
Look at the dates, think of the painstaking work. Then consider that the Italian (Pisa) physician and anatomist was the first to discover the meningeal lymphatic vessels. As it’s custom, his findings were disregarded during his lifetime.
Here’s the parting money shot.
7/10 Tara Isabella Burton explains why a Silicon Valley culture that was once obsessed with reason is going woo—rational magic. Who are these people?
They are a group of writers, thinkers, readers, and Internet trolls alike who were once rationalists, or members of adjacent communities like the effective altruism movement, but grew disillusioned. To them, rationality culture’s technocratic focus on ameliorating the human condition through hyper-utilitarian goals—increasing the number of malaria nets in the developing world, say, or minimizing the existential risk posed by the development of unfriendly artificial intelligence—had come at the expense of taking seriously the less quantifiable elements of a well-lived human life.
These people are disillusioned “with the contemporary faith in technocracy and personal autonomy.” Whatever it is, we’ve run up against our own limits. What if the awe and goodness were not quantifiable?
Burton includes a handy primer of the ‘rationality community,’ which I followed loosely out of curiosity. The ‘truth-for-truth’s-sake’ mantra soon got corrupted by illusion. Which led to delusion. And depression.
He longed to form genuine friendships based on mutual affinity and understanding, rather than by screening potential friends for qualities that would “make them a good ally, which will contribute to you both working on existential risk together in an effective way.”
The thing is wherever we go, there we are. We bring our subjective into our ventures. Including where we think the price is right. We’d be fool to think that monetary value is objective in any way.
You won’t be surprised to learn that I’ve also been reading the blogger-luminaries of the post-rationalist community for years. It’s useful to know who they are by name. Take your time learning them. Because you’ll come across their stuff.
This is one piece of valuable cultural commentary. Burton’s writing is a joy. It makes me a better reader.
Our meaning crisis is a crisis of value in culture.
8/10 “Girls in the Windows” wasn’t made by an art world giant, but people keep buying it. Is this the world’s highest grossing photograph?
“It is the summer of 1960 and Gigli is in a rush. Demolition on the brownstones has already begun—that’s why there’s no glass in those windows—and the day after the shoot, the buildings will be razed. But the demolition supervisor has agreed to let Gigli commandeer the place for two hours during an extended lunch break, under one condition: The supervisor wants his wife in the picture. (She’s on the third floor, third from the left.)”
Gigli, a 35-year old commercial photographer just wanted to memorialize the building. He looked at it across from his studio.
People love the photo. They buy it via galleries or directly from the estate. Copies have been sold at auctions for serious sums. There’s a very robust supply of the image. People don’t mind owning something that is not scarce.
“The answer starts with the image, of course, which is a brassy, joyful combination of glamour and urban grit with a dash of “Mad Men”-era nostalgia. The building embodies a glorious slab of vanishing New York City, and those women look like they’re ready to break into song.”
About 100 copies are left, some in black-and-white. In case you’d like to get your hands on one.
9/10 In 1984, historian Melvin Kranzberg said, “Leaders in all fields are increasingly turning to historians of technology for expertise regarding the nature of the socio-technical problems facing them.” We keep forgetting history.
We have been hyperventilating about AI for about a year and a half. In all the op-eds, tweets, and hearings, how many historical references have you seen?
Me? I’ve seen approximately — give or take — zero.
Dan Garner has a point. So when you see someone wringing hands about AI and the Sam Altman case, remember it’s history, including the wrapping in politics.
P.S. I feel the same way Dan does about newsletters.
10/10 Because I started this article with potatoes, let’s end on the value of potatoes with Alistair Kitchen and the potato people.
Andrew Taylor was no longer obese. He had lost 117lbs (53kgs), or nearly a third of his body weight, in the year he ate potatoes.
See also the Potato Hack and best of the potato hack diet. I already feel less guilty about that second helping of potatoes.
[Divider image by Gordon Johnson from Pixabay]
Books. I'm trying to read more books. Particularly fiction as it's fallen out of my life and I'd like to bring it back.