Hello lovely friends, happy Wednesday. I feel it came around quick because of the public holidays and also I have no clue what day it is anymore. Journalists used to test whether politicians were “in touch” by asking them how much a pint of milk costs; a better question now might be what day it is. Hope all’s alright with you.
š§ Krisp is an AI-powered noise-cancelling app for voice and video calls, now with a free tier because, well, you know. Really good.
š Small Thing Big Idea: Designs that change the world. This original TED series celebrates the lasting genius of everyday objects so perfectly designed that they changed the world around them.
šØ Inside Tove Jansson’s Private Universe: Best known as the creator of the Moomins, Jansson was a creator of all sorts, whose fans clamoured for more of her strange and enthralling fictional worlds.
š¤Ŗ Plot Economics: Global narrative collapse events tend to have a very surreal glued-to-screens quality surrounding them. That’s how you know everybody has lost the plot: everybody is tracking the rawest information they have access to, rather than the narrative that most efficiently sustains their reality.
š± The Smartphone Has Ruined Space: Architectural critics anticipated that modern life would change the sensation of space. The airport or cafĆ© is also an office and a movie theatre, a knitting club, and a classroom. A proliferation of non-places wasn’t the problem: technology has allowed personal intimacy and connection to flourish too much, and anywhere. Now every space is a superspace, a place that might be fused together with any other.
šØāš©āš§āš¦ The Parents Are Not All Right: The pandemic is exposing the farce of how society treats families. This current situation is almost prophetically designed to showcase the farce of our societal approach to separating work and family lives.
š„ Signalling as a Service: What if the decisions we make are underpinned by a hidden, selfish motive: to show off and increase our social status? While the physical nature of material goods and services is perfect to visualise hidden signalling messages, there are natural limitations to distribution and amplification. But digital products have one crucial disadvantage over atom-based products and services: Intangibility. No one can see them except for you.
š Uber Wars: Since Uber launched in Argentina in 2016, taxi drivers have come out in force, torching ride-share cars, beating drivers, and shaming passengers. And they’re still angry.
š The Australian scientist who got magnets stuck up his nose should inspire us all: luckily, one side-effect of the emergency measures has been to leave a lot of people with the time and space in quarantine to be creatively bored. The compulsive play of those with time on their hands could well be the process through which some new conception of the good is able to emerge. And so creative boredom can become a form of radical hope.
š The History of Loneliness: Until a century or so ago, almost no one lived alone; now many endure shutdowns and lockdowns on their own. How did modern life get so lonely?
š¤ Marriage is dead, long live marriage: how will we couple up? Marriage is practised in every society yet is in steep decline globally. Is this it for long-term intimate relationships?
What do people do all day?
An advantage of being the youngest sibling by a lot is good hand-me-downs from the generation above. But it does mean that the cultural touchpoints of my youth are a muddle.
I’m a child of the Eighties but my idea of the working world was older, based on the works of American children’s illustrator Richard Scarry. In Scarry’s busy, busy world, every anthropomorphised creature has a job, be it fighting fires, delivering the mail or working the land.
Some of Scarry’s works have needed to be updated since the Sixties to correct outdated gender roles and racial stereotypes. But what’s been largely left intact is the sense that everyone has a clear professional role. A job. A workplace. It’s a simplified world for preschoolers to understand, but the reality is, of course, more nuanced.
I’m reminded of the Scarry universe and how few of his characters would be able to work from home. The simplest definitions of work, the way you’d explain to a toddler, are often dependent on place. This is parodied beautifully by BusinessTown, which satirically transplants contemporary, intangible jobs into Scarry’s world.
It’s curious that when we talk to kids about work, we ask them what they want to be, not do, when they grow up. It’s a question loaded towards the career they’d pursue rather than the life they’d build.
