#43 – It’s no fun to live forever, content crap, and our dopamine culture
Hello!
This issue is (partly) coming to you from Helsinki, Finnland. I haven’t been here since I finished my masters on the other side of the country, Turku. It comes with a special taste of nostalgia and sweet memories, but that was one of last week’s topics.
This week is about trends, youth culture, AI eating its tail, never dying, the loneliness epidemic, and the rise of dopamine culture.
I’m also working on a deeper dive into the world of A.I., partly because the APG UK has kicked off their A.I. working group, partly because Sam Altman said something provocative. More on that soon.
But for now: enjoy the links below.
Six Links of Inspiration:
What happens when AI eats its own tail? Last week saw the first big session of the APG UK’s AI working group. A timely post by Ethan Decker serves as a dire warning what can happen when AI will eventually start almost exclusively feed on itself. If the training material is the web and the web will be made up of 95% A.I. generated sod, then we’ll soon swim in a soup of content crap. (However, that might also happen - or might have already happened - when we don’t use A.I. at a larger scale, so maybe that’s a little bit of a mute point here.)
I Went to a Rave With the 46-Year-Old Millionaire Who Claims to Have the Body of a Teenager. I’m mildly obsessed with/amused by some people’s obsession of trying to reverse aging. The lengths they go to, and the joy they deprive themselves of. Or, what I’d define as joy. This article describes some of the regimes and routines Bryan Johnson follows to maintain his youth. Only to end on a revealing, slightly amusing observation: ”But dancing late, in violation of his algorithm and thus to the detriment of his life span, also clearly brought him tremendous joy—why? He contemplated for several seconds before responding. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I don’t know.’”
The Vice Guide to Culture. What does the bankruptcy of Vice say about their grasp of culture? There’s a German saying that goes something like the shoemaker should never be judged by his own shoes. And sometimes craft and commerciality are two very different worlds. So here is a nicely curated and terrible to read (in terms of UX) collection of trends in culture by Vice.
How the loneliness epidemic is fueling “stan culture”. This article is about loneliness and stan culture – but it also made me aware of a trait of our neanderthal brain that I haven’t thought about yet: “Our brain doesn't understand recorded music, our brain hasn’t evolved quickly enough to really even process the idea of recorded music. It thinks that what we're watching is live.” (There’s an interesting parallel to a book I’m currently reading: The Science of Storytelling. Worth a leaf through. I’ll share some nuggets from that book in the near future.)
The State of Culture, 2024. This is a great read, not because it’s 100% accurate but because it’s a 100% compelling argument, drawing parallels that haven’t fully played out yet but are absolutely plausible to happen soon. Ted Gioia is linking the crisis in the entertainment industry to the addiction traps architected by the CEOs and programmers in Silicon Valley and how all of this is an ever-accelerating downwards spiral that we can only ever break out if we…go for a month-long dopamine fast. Or a walk in the park, a long, long walk in the park.
The Money Is In All The Wrong Places. This is a challenging read, because its point of departure is defending the (legit) complaints of a millionaire about, if you want to be blunt, being treated unfairly. And the article returns to this point a few times. But it also lands a bigger, more troubling thought: ”I do not want to make a habit of defending millionaires. But people are making far more money than Sweeney for doing work that both demands and contributes far less. Why should any CEO make more than the actresses whose labor and beauty they sell? Why should a second-year management consultant at every major consulting firm make more than every single writer I have ever known? It's not even a question of principle. People buy things: services and products and experiences and feelings. How is it that the creation and provision of those things is valued so little, when it is so essential? It's a rhetorical question. The wealth that exists in this country does not come from making things that people love.” It’s raising a question about what we as a society value and reward. And how we treat the people who provide the things we value.
That’s it for this week.
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Read you all next time,
Maximilian