Upstream #197
parasites ??, corncrakes ??, soviet style ????, fosbury??, chappell ??.
Hey. How’s everything? Trucking along? Autumn’s beginning to Autumn Have you turned the heat on yet? Nearly. I’ve been running, training for a big one. Might ask for your support. Hope you can help. Right, let’s go.
“Most geniuses—especially those who lead others—prosper not by deconstructing intricate complexities but by exploiting unrecognised simplicities.”
Andy Benoit
culture // parasites ??
Few things colliding this week.?Firstly, to coincide with the launch of new age preacher?Nick Cave's new album,?there’s a piece about?the rise of cultural christianity, and a growing sense of?"wanting to believe in something that is supernatural, and therefore more exciting and interesting than a merely material world.” For some that’s fandom, which according to a Gallup, is replacing religion as our source of?collective effervescence. Others ask is culture dying? Is globalisation, neoliberalism, individualism, secularism and the internet flattening it? As the author writes?"culture used to be something we did for its own sake; now we do it to position ourselves vis-à-vis other people". And Ted Goia discussed how digital platforms have become?cultural parasites,?leeching off human creativity and culture, producing nothing (except enormous profits). We need to remember that culture isn’t an algorithm. Meaning matters. Until it doesn’t.
brands // corncrakes ??
Listened to ornithologist Sean Ronayne talk about?corncrakes with Blindboy. How common they were in Ireland, and how much they’ve declined over time (killed by combine harvesters). Sean talked about?shifting baseline syndrome. How things can gradually change generationally, and accepted declines become a new reality. When you live without Corncrakes, you forget they were ever here. Same for brands. Recruiting new (younger) consumers, by staying relevant, present and alive is key. Easy to forget this, and die on the vine. Guinness has been so good at consistently evolving for the next generation (social media helped). Stout could easily have become the Corncrake, Guinness too. But they focussed on building future demand. You have to keep sowing seeds, for a future crop.
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creativity // soviet style ????
This was a great piece from Rory Sutherland on the rise of what he called?soviet style capitalism, which he describes as the obsession with shareholder value. How businesses have become like Soviet Organisations, obsessed with targets, measures and numbers. Hugely risk adverse, with no incentive to do things differently. With a massive expansion of the bureaucratic class (who add little value). He believes that we now select for, promote for and train for reductionist thinking. So, there’s a huge deficit in the economy, caused by the narrow pursuit of efficient measure or just quantification in general, at the expense of experimentation, imagination and invention. Feels all too real.
technology // fosbury??
Ben Evans recently wrote that "It’s not that we have the wrong answers, it’s that we’re asking the wrong questions”. It’s about forecasting technology. He makes the point that?"With fundamental technology change, we don't so much get our predictions wrong, as make predictions about the wrong things”. The internet was hard enough to predict, but how it transformed EVERYTHING, impossible. Trying to predict the evolution of fixed line phones in 1990 for example, was the wrong thing. We think in iterations, this, to that, to the other. It’s easier. But technology (and innovation) often works to obsolete its predecessor. Like Fosbury’s high jump.?This is where we're at with AI (maybe). We’re thinking in evolution and iterations, but the change will be exponential. We just can’t see it yet.
five random (ish) things:
watching // chappell ??.
Chappell Roan is the drag alter ego of Missouri born Kayleigh Amstutz. In just 8 months, she’s gone from an unknown, to become one of the biggest new pop stars on the planet. She’s a Gen Z Tik Tok queen. And her fluid identity and sexuality, and brutal raw honesty is magnetic. She’s talented and interesting. Dig in.