Stuff I’m doing 👨🏻‍💻

My wife and I have been packing up furniture, cutlery, clothes, anything we think we might need for our new place in West Kelowna. We’ll be spending most of our summer there this year.

We’re trying to get everything packed into one U-Haul so we can do it one seven hour drive. 🤞

Stuff I’ve read 👨🏻‍💻📚

🤑The Age of The Double Sell-Out

In the 1990s, there was a single ethical principle at the heart of youth culture — don’t sell out. There was a logic behind it: When artists serve the commercial marketplace, they blunt their pure artistic vision in compromising with conventional tastes. This ethic was also core to subcultures, which were supposed to be social spaces for personal expression and community bonding, not style laboratories for the fashion industry.

As a child of the 80’s and 90’s I can confirm this principle did exist. In the early 90’s I got involved in the local Rave subculture. It was a tight knit community that very much believed in the ideas of peace, love, unity, and respect (PLUR).

The 20th century taboo against selling out was, at its heart, a communal norm to reward young artists who focused on craft and punish those who appropriated art and subculture for empty profiteering. Now the culture is most exemplified by people whose entire end goal appears to be empty profiteering.

He used Mr. Beast as an example of this. Where the entire point of gaining popularity is to sell out and then look for ways to sell out again.

If we want different outcomes, we can change the norms, which conveniently costs no money. If we want culture to be culture and not just advertorials for a sprawling network of micro-QVCs pumping out low-quality goods, an easy step would be to re-shift the norms towards, at least, “Don’t be a double sell-out.”

🤯My Brain Finally Broke

If you have time to read one article this week make it this one. It perfectly captures what many of are feeling since Trump took office. The constant deluge of information, news, and insanity. My worry is that this is all slowly becoming normalized.

At the root of this opacity might be whatever strange thing is currently happening with time. I mostly keep track of it on my phone, a device that makes me feel like I am strapped flat to the board of an unreal present: the past has vanished, the future is inconceivable, and my eyes are clamped open to view the endlessly resupplied now.

The phone eats time; it makes us live the way people do inside a casino, dropping a blackout curtain over the windows to block out the world, except the blackout curtain is a screen, showing too much of the world, too quickly.

I cancelled my Apple News subscription and I’ve purposely pulled back from most social media. It’s hard enough to stay sane when things are running relatively normally. However, we are not currently in anything close to “normal” times.

it’s easier to retreat from the concept of reality than to acknowledge that the things in the news are real.

🤖Jevons Paradox: A personal perspective

I hadn’t heard of Jevons Paradox until coming across this article. The paradox is applied to the rise of AI and how it’s effecting productivity and overwork.

This is the paradox of our time: the very tools designed to free us from labor are trapping us in an endless cycle of escalating work.

I’ve worked in Tech my entire life. As the tools we use have become faster and more efficient it hasn’t benefiting workers at all. Instead it’s simply added to how much we can get done in any given amount of time.

When an hour of work generates what once took days, rest becomes luxury taxed by your own conscience. Every pause carries an invisible price tag that flickers in your peripheral vision.

Have ever felt guilty on a day off? Or on a weekend? That nagging feeling that you should be doing more, accomplishing more, creating more? So many of us can’t enjoy time off work anymore. We can accomplish so much more in one hour than at any point in human history and all it’s given us is guilt and shame.

When technical execution becomes trivially easy, when anyone can spin up a startup, design a fashion line, or produce a film, the scarce resource becomes knowing what’s worth doing in the first place. And what’s worth doing is typically deeply subjective.

“What’s worth doing”. The answer will be different for everyone. It’s why my wife and I have started our own business. It’s why I’ll never go back to working for a tech startup again.

Stuff I’m watching

The Handmaids Tale: I fell behind and stopped after season 3. I’m determined to finish the last three seasons.

The While Lotus season 3: I don’t think I’ll ever be able to unhear Parker Posey’s accent.