Hello lovely email friends. I’m still quite shingly, so I’ve barely left the upstairs let alone the house. The upshot is a lockdown within a lockdown: bad for mental wellbeing but excellent for online learning and, only to a slightly lesser extent, putting together emails such as this. Shall we?
🛖 The Age of the Wood Skyscraper Is Arriving: The carbon cost of concrete is unacceptably high. But sprouting among our cities’ concrete towers, a growing number of wood high-rises points the way to a greener era of construction.
📈 The Future Of Work Will Demand These 8 New Skills: I have a bee in my bonnet about the skills I was taught at an age when you can acquire them with ease, and how few of them are really applicable. It’s been many of the things I did in my own time, it turns out, that are among the most useful. The reason is because we as a society are slow to adapt to the changes in demand for particular skills. We do badly at predicting what skills will be needed, let alone training them into people, and all received wisdom on the subject is being proven ineffective in the digital era. See also: The Robots Are Coming for Phil in Accounting: Workers with college degrees and specialised training once felt relatively safe from automation. They aren’t.
🏠 This four-bedroom terraced house for sale in Bristol is unremarkable in a dated kind of way, until you get up to the second floor and find there’s an actual pipe organ in the stairwell. The listing agent describes this ‘current configuration’ is something a buyer might want to remove. But if you manage to buy a terrace house with a pipe organ in it, only to remove the pipe organ, you need to ask yourself some serious questions.
💀 What do near-death experiences mean, and why do they fascinate us? Psychiatrist Bruce Greyson has spent decades talking to people about near-death experiences. His work raises questions about what happens when we die, and how we ought to choose to live.
🖼 Gilbert and George: “We don’t believe in looking at sunsets”: It’s a good week for interviews with world-renowned artists. Fifty years of making pictures, upsetting the establishment and sticking two fingers at the easily offended is no easy feat.
🎨 Defying the norm: Grayson Perry on what it means to be an artist: Told you it was a good week for it. I love Perry’s Art Club show on Channel 4; that’s a current highlight of the week. What is it about the British artist that allows him to connect with people across the board? We chat with Perry about public personas and how he built his “one-man culture”.
🙄 “The environmental issues with Cryptoart will be solved soon, right?” No, you blinkered idiots. The whole internet twisted its knickers this week at the prospect of embedding artwork in a blockchain as a way of synthesising value, akin to how the works of past masters trade for sums much greater than the artist saw for the original work. But, as this article makes plain, all this blockchain cryptobullshit is so wildly carbon-intensive that its value can never emerge from under the shadow of its enormous environmental and societal costs.
The people getting all wet and sticky about cryptobabble are the kinds of psychopaths who can only see success in terms of the amount of stuff they themselves acquire, as opposed to having the greatest positive impact. It came as no surprise to see societal fungus Jack Dorsey leap straight in with both feet. It’s equivalent to knowing your cruise-liner is sinking while delighting in the playpen you’ve fashioned for yourself out of planks you tore out of the lifeboats.
I tend not to bring cryptoarsewater into this email because it’d become a rant; as I’ve now broken that convention, can we all agree it’s all so damaging that anyone in favour should be confronted and, if necessary, pushed into a body of water. See also: The NFT Letter. See also also: Pseudophilosophy encourages confused, self-indulgent thinking.
The rebirth of the uncool
The internet arrived at precisely the same time as my adulthood. Both arrived abruptly, and to profound effect. But I’m old enough to remember when it wasn’t there, and I remember how it’s changed, and changed us. It’s happened quickly but already the network has gone through a number of eras, like the acts of a play, and it feels as if the cusp of another era is approaching.
The network first found me in a group of teenage boys crowded around a CRT screen, grappling with the implications of being able to search for anything. We paused, silently, pondering for what to search. But the drawback of being a teenage boy is you think you know everything already. We didn’t know much about girls, though, so I dimly recall we started there.
Smartphone adoption increased the network’s population rapidly: this upswing caused such a radical change to the environment that this ‘social’ era resulted in a kind of reversal. Whereas the network had enjoyed wide proliferation of online destinations, there rose up a handful of sites designed to commercialise interpersonal communication. But in doing so they drew eyes away from the long and diverse tail that had made network so interesting and distinct from the previous media landscape.
But this handful of giants hasn’t been entirely successful, as with scale comes mistrust. There are signals that the consolidated attention towards small number of massive providers may once again be inverting. Rather than giant, global communities beset with complex moderation issues, smaller, more intimate communities gated perhaps by subscription fees offer healthier places to hang out online. So while Twitter’s ‘Super Follow’ feature might appear like a step towards the OnlyFans world of fans paying for content, it feels more like a means of carving out distinct, more welcoming communities.
This is happening outside social media too, with the emergence of paid-for communities such as Array, a small Discord community of freelancers. While the overcentralised era made it possible, although unlikely, for dedicated participants such as YouTube users to raise their profiles to a global scale, longer term it’s not in stars’ interest to stick within the platform upon which their fame was nurtured. So the YouTubers are starting to set up on their own, where they can command their own community and financial model.
It’s not all about the money. The early signs are there of a renewed enthusiasm for the independent web, using simple tools, as an accompaniment to burgeoning communities of interest. Straightforward one-page sitebuilder Carrd has brought forth a large number of delightfully amateur little sites, capturing a zeitgeist in a manner reminiscent of GeoCities.
But whereas in the Nineties the precise purpose of the long tail was obscure, the rebirth has a stronger sense of purpose. A single page, built in Carrd, listing resources relevant to the Black Lives Matter movement rose to prominence last year: it’s impressive to think of this as a the work of a single, concerned citizen. Even more to think that the platform on which it was published is the product of just one guy. Compare this to the era of users (real or automated) piling onto an issue or hashtag by the thousand, on a platform run by a corporation with thousands of staff. It’s enough to make me optimistic that an era is forthcoming.
You don’t know and I’ve probably forgotten: the only way to find out is to follow blindly and hope for the best…