The Erotic Economy, Bruce Springsteen, and the new Roaring 20s

The good news: The epidemiologist Dr. Nicholas Christakis predicts a lot of fun ahead. The bad news: not before 2024. In his view, it’ll take until then for the pandemic to no longer affect our lives. But ultimately, he argues, it will disappear and lead to a stark reversal of habits and extensive (if not excessive) social interactions, in other words: the new Roaring 20s.

But first, let’s focus on 2021 where the best we can expect is to be pleasantly surprised. As usual, many of our hopes rest on technology. Reading the tech predictions for the year ahead (Kara Swisher’s and Scott Galloway’s, John Battelle’s, Fast Company’s) is an exercise in deciphering acronyms (mRNA, Alpha-2, GPT-3, SPACs) that promise to be even more important in the new year.

At the same time, 2021 will be shaped by a universal yet simple technology that is well-known, but whose application remains vague: love. It is the key to creating a more beautiful economy, building more beautiful businesses, and leading more beautiful lives. The task ahead—for this year!—is to rehabilitate love, remove from it the dust of cliché and commodification, and free it from abstractions. Whatever form it takes, it must become concrete.

But what exactly makes love concrete in business? I jotted down some thoughts on “The Benefits of Concrete Love.” (“Concrete Love” will also be the theme of this year’s festival of the House of Beautiful Business from October 27 – November 2, 2021).

Read the full article here

Sensuous Knowledge and an Erotic Economy

Minna Salami, a Finnish-Nigerian writer, who runs the award-winning MsAfropolitan blog, writes about the suppression of Black women and women of color, drawing from her own experiences and inclusive perspective. In Sensuous Knowledge: A Black Feminist Approach for Everyone, her latest book, she takes aim at the narrow concept of knowledge propagated by the Enlightenment—a male, Eurocentric view of the world that frames knowledge as power, as something to acquire in order to exert control. Against this view she pits her concept of Sensuous Knowledge, which is inspired, among others, by the Romantic philosophers and artists—namely, the painter Caspar David Friedrich and his views on interiority—and their insisting on the truth of the imprecise, namely poetry and art.

It may seem a bit farfetched to draw a direct line from the Romantics (who like their Enlightenment counterparts were mostly white European males) to black feminists, but they appear to share a similar sensibility:

“Ultimately, we cannot become free unless we are subjects,” Salami writes—and the Romantics would agree with that sentence more than the part that follows: “And we cannot become subjects using Eurocentric, masculinist approaches to epistemology.”

“Again and again, black feminists have argued that because the reigning system is a soulless one, the remedy is a way of knowing that incorporates poetry and art, the language of love,” Salami writes. In this vein, Salami suggests that “If we applied Sensuous Knowledge to the economy, it would produce an ‘erotic economy’ of sorts, in which reciprocity and sustenance rather than surplus and scarcity would thrive.”

Bruce Springsteen: “I am being paid to be as present as I can conceivably be.”

When it comes to reciprocity and sustenance, I can’t think of a better figure to embody these qualities than Bruce Springsteen. Ever-so-romantic, he’s the incarnation of the honest worker who shows up when it’s showtime: intimate but also mainstream, never compromising his artistic integrity, giving his everything in abundance, every night.

I received the six-piece Live: 1975–85 box set of live recordings by Springsteen and his E-Street Band as a Christmas gift when I was 14, and I listened to the vinyl records with my headphones on, for hours, night after night. I couldn’t believe that there was music so directly speaking to my heart that was at the same time so immensely physical, so unhinged and raw. Springsteen was not afraid of being over the top, of being embarrassingly emotional. He wore his heart on his sleeve, and there was no filter, no irony. All the other music I listened to at the time—80s pop, jazz, classical—just didn’t seem as real in comparison.

The New Yorker just published a podcast conversation between Springsteen and editor David Remnick that they recorded in 2016, and it’s a heck of a conversation. Springsteen talks about his doubts and how he learned to embrace what his producer Jon Landau told him, “What is wrong with it is also what makes it great.” Springsteen muses on live performance as being an act of both “self-realization and self-erasure,” and how “losing yourself” was the primary goal, both for performer and audience. “People are coming not to learn, but to be reminded,” he tells Remnick.

Springsteen concerts are famous for being four-hour music marathons. “I get paid to be as present as I can conceivably be on every night I’m out there,” he says. When Remnick asks him whether age may take its toll and his performance style might become more subdued at some point, Springsteen responds: “The day may come…but not tonight.”

Leadership and Love: A Conversation Between Carola Rackete and Gianpiero Petriglieri

Gianpiero Petriglieri, associate professor of organizational behavior at INSEAD, wrote a great Harvard Business Review piece on Bruce Springsteen: “Artful Leadership and What Rock Star Bosses Do.”

Petriglieri also features in the latest episode of the Next Visions podcast series that I co-host on behalf of the House of Beautiful Business and Porsche Digital. The set-up for the series is for two visionary thinkers or doers to meet for the first time and engage in a conversation, without facilitation. In this case, Petriglieri, a psychiatrist by education who was born and raised in Sicily, meets Carola Rackete, an ecologist and German ship captain who works for the sea rescue organization Sea-Watch. In June 2019, she was arrested for docking a migrant rescue ship without authorization in the port of Lampedusa, Sicily. The result of their encounter is a fascinating dialogue about politics, courage, leadership, and love, and it is also very much an example of active listening.

Listen!

Finally, here are some of the things I loved reading this past week

Meghan Daum muses on the blessings of not being today’s youth: “How lucky to have learned to talk on the phone before learning to text. How lucky to have had Penthouse before Pornhub. How lucky to have been able to shout into the void, heard by no one, captured by nothing.”

Massimo Portincaso’s The Anti-Disciplinarian newsletter, a well-informed and detailed view on all things Deep Tech.

Monique van Dusseldorp’s Future of Events newsletter, a must-read for anyone producing events or eager to learn more about how the event landscape might evolve this year.

Monique publishes her newsletter on Substack, and it’s worth reading this in-depth look at Substack by Uncanny Valley author Anna Wiener. It takes us full circle: to the “passion economy.”

Happy new year!

Tim