#culture (158 links)
- Good Taste is Not What’s Oppressing Us in 2026 culture.ghost.io
Poptimism has become the perfect example of Gramscian hegemony™—where late-stage capitalism has so commandeered the human value system that well-meaning liberals believe their full-throated defense of art-for-money's-sake is somehow chipping away at the class structure.
Cultural-political mic-drop.
- Caitlin Moran: social media went from utopia to hellhole in a decade – if you want to feel hopeful again, get offline theguardian.com
Stop listening to emergency podcasts; stop doomscrolling; go for a walk and talk to people; buy your local newspaper – and, finally, stop believing that we are living “through one of the most difficult, anxious and chaotic times in human history”.
- Temperature Zero for Culture: Why Everything Is Starting to Look the Same laurenleek.substack.com
A world that keeps removing the unlikely also removes the things that could have become the next likely. Ecologists have known this for a long time already and even priced it: they call it the insurance value of biodiversity, the standing reserve of rare species that cost energy and contribute nothing, until the climate shifts and one of them turns out to be what survives. A monoculture is efficient right up until the weather changes.
- ‘It’s absolutely criminal’: US tipping culture has reached the UK – and is causing chaos theguardian.com
Many of those I speak to think tech has pushed this change forward – and rapidly. The shift away from cash towards card and digital payments is usually framed as removing “friction”, says Prof John Vines, the chair of design informatics at the University of Edinburgh’s School of Informatics. “It’s about being more convenient. This is all a trend towards making it easier for us to spend our money.” The software in point-of-sale terminals prompts the customer for a tip. “These systems are presented as a way of making giving a tip easier. We don’t have to think about it too much, we don’t have to fiddle with coins and notes. But, really, it’s about encouraging us to spend more.”
- The Organization Is the Bottleneck oreilly.com
An agent with access to your codebase and no constraints is an autonomous team with no guardrails: it will move fast, but not necessarily in the right direction. If you’ve already built those guardrails for your teams—coding standards enforced in CI, architectural decision records, templates for new services—you have a serious head start because those same artifacts become the constraints that keep agents on track.
- Learning on the Shop floor simonwillison.net
Tobias Lütke describes Shopify's internal coding agent tool, River, which operates entirely in public on their Slack. This is brilliant, similar flavour to radical openness of early 2010’s (GDS, Slack itself) but from a different cultural background.
- TBM 417: Before You Fire All Your Glue People Because of AI cutlefish.substack.com
When organizations say “AI can do what the glue people did,” they are looking at the output layer and missing everything underneath. The risk isn’t just that the AI-produced artifacts will be lower quality. It’s that removing the people and assuming AI covers it eliminates the judgment, social infrastructure, and adaptive capacity that made those artifacts matter, while creating the appearance that everything is still being handled.
Oops.
- The Entire Internet Is a UGC Reaction Video Now joanwestenberg.com
There's a phrase you hear in marketing: "everyone is a creator now." It sounds democratizing, hopeful even, like the whole internet has become a Renaissance workshop where artisans and thinkers reach audiences directly. In practice, everyone is a marketer now. The "creator economy" turned out to be an economy where the thing being created, more and more, is demand for more of yourself. Your aesthetic, your opinions, your morning routine, your trauma, your fitness journey, your face: all raw material for the content machine, all measured against growth metrics that would make a mid-career product manager feel right at home.
- "Collaboration" is bullshit. joanwestenberg.com
When you strip away the product marketing and the dev relations and the blog posts and the funding rounds and the fuckery-upon-fuckery of it all, we’re left with a simulation of collective engagement - but very little else. Transparency got confused with progress, visibility got confused with accountability, and being included in the thread became the same thing, socially and organizationally, as owning the outcome.
- The Death of Spotify: Why Streaming is Minutes Away From Being Obsolete joelgouveia.substack.com
- The Pro-Pop Ideology, from Ashlee to Addison culture.ghost.io
Sanneh’s full embrace of commercialism was, then, the cultural equivalent of Mark Fisher’s idea of capitalist realism. In accepting that pop culture is fundamentally an industrial product — and often at its best when in pursuit of extremely cynical financial goals — it became illegitimate to discriminate against pop musicians for being "manufactured." Good pop is good business — and vice versa.
- 576 - Using LLMs at Oxide / RFD / Oxide rfd.shared.oxide.computer
Measured take, love the public RFDs.
- Altoids by the Fistful § Scott Smitelli scottsmitelli.com
- The New Yorker Roundup culture.ghost.io
Thoughts on "our" culture in three pieces from Kyle Chayka, Kelefa Sanneh, and Joshua Rothman
The vast majority of people on earth are going to drown in a lukewarm bath of AI gruel, and there is probably no effective means of mass resistance on their behalf. The consequences will be very bad. But it also means we’re likely to return to the common pattern of cultural consumption from previous centuries, where sophisticates live in their own separate taste world that is not AI-dominated. I refuse to believe this is an “elitist” position when anyone with self-determination and curiosity is also free to join in this separate taste world, and its members should encourage others to do so.
The point here is that the cyberspace close to me is filled with these new, similar people. The people close to me in the real world are pushed away, because, by comparison, they are foreign, alien, strangers.
- TBM 366: Empowered For Delivery, But... - by John Cutler cutlefish.substack.com
For mission command to work, you need clarity of intent, high trust, coherence, the ability to escalate without penalty, and a culture that values the "process" of providing feedback and problem solving[...] By contrast, tech often adopts the language of mission command (e.g., autonomy, empowerment, intent) without investing in the hard infrastructure of trust, shared context, and safety necessary to escalate.
- GenAI is Our Polyester culture.ghost.io
Humans have no universal faculty to judge aesthetics: Our appreciation of beauty is highly-contextual and depends on factors other than the raw visual stimulus. Most tech-workers are unaware of this fact, and for them, the fact that AI-art resembles human-art means it must be pretty damn good. But AI art is already in very poor taste: not just because it recycles existing conventions in a way that looks outmoded, but because it's already overly associated with less-than-prestigious institutions. GenAI art has already reached polyester status, and this is just the beginning. Despite all the techno-utopian promises, our brains see it as ersatz.
- The Missing Piece in Conversations about “Cultural Decline” culture.ghost.io
Critics in the 21st century embraced mass culture in a belief that it would liberate audiences — but it's directly responsible for triggering the feelings of stagnation
- TBM 330: (Un)common Sense Playbook - by John Cutler cutlefish.substack.com
This is a great example of how a mix of common challenges can stymie the common sense playbook. The mix of optics pressure, a "guarded" toxic personality, low trust, and a swamped partner is hard to surmount. Even an experienced manager will struggle in this situation.
- The Great Barefoot Running Hysteria of 2010 • Running Shoe Score runningshoescore.com
- BICEPS palomamedina.com
There are six core needs researchers find are important for humans (both at work and in our personal lives). Each of us have a personal hierarchy for the six however: You might find that equity and belonging are most important to you, but choice and status are most important to your employee, your partner, your child. Getting to know them is a shortcut to better communication, as well as greater inclusivity at work.
- The Middle Management of a Design System Program sparkbox.com
The shape of your design system team and the hierarchy it falls within can greatly impact the way you approach the work. A key role to the success of your program is the middle manager.
- Earnestness versus Cynicism: Fashion, then Politics culture.ghost.io
The majority of thinking people continue to find “fashion” beneath serious analysis, which is ridiculous because so much of human life is conventional. Ideologies come in and out as a byproduct of social dynamics. The most important thing to understand here is the directionality: This nihilistic aesthetic is not the result of a right-wing conspiracy. The fundamental mechanics of fashion elevated the nihilistic aesthetic and turned it right-wing.
- You can never truly go back garbageday.email
But because of how information works in our new world run by digital platforms, the difference between the illusion of power and the real thing is vanishingly small. And in an attention economy, they effectively become the same thing over time.
In 2004, two years before the launch of X (then Twitter), Michael Goldhaber, an American thinker, published an essay arguing that the internet would produce a new type of human, just as printing had. Homo typographicus would be followed by Homo interneticus. His “mentality significantly altered” by the effects of intense internet use, interneticus would be unmoored from time and space, disrespectful of old sources of authority and facing a constant battle for his attention.
- Is There Any Escape from the Spotify Syndrome? newyorker.com
Artists have always fretted about the pressure to conform, but the data-driven, music-as-content era feels different. “You are a Spotify employee at that point,” Daniel Lopatin, who makes abstract electronic music as Oneohtrix Point Never, told Pelly. “If your art practice is so ingrained in the brutal reality that Spotify has outlined for all of us, then what is the music that you’re not making? What does the music you’re not making sound like?” Listeners might wonder something similar. What does the music we’re not hearing sound like?
The "culture" of a society isn't a blob of random human activity, but an orderly ecosystem arising from the interactions between particular subunits. To maintain ecosystem health, we must reject the cynical “poptimist” framing of culture as a mere vehicle for entertainment and commerce and instead promote the benefits of
Despite the fact that innovative cultures are desirable, and that most leaders claim to understand what they entail, they are hard to create and sustain. That’s because the easy-to-like behaviors that get so much attention are only one side of the coin. They must be counterbalanced by some tougher and frankly less fun behaviors: an intolerance for incompetence, rigorous discipline, brutal candor, a high level of individual accountability, and strong leadership.
- Against the dark forest wrecka.ge
- Making “Social” Social Again ev.medium.com
Announcing Mozi
New Dopplr-like social network from Ev and friends.
- Cultural Stasis Produces Fewer Cheesy Relics like Rocky IV culture.ghost.io
A major part of cultural stasis, then, may stem from most artists refusing to embrace contemporary aesthetic choices. In fact, I would argue that the Nineties ushered in a paradigm of rationalized, naturalistic aesthetics anchored in the meta-knowledge that artworks have a longer shelf life when they feel “real” and avoid mannerist/over-indulgent faddish aesthetics.
- How our accessibility champions are creating a ‘can do’ culture digitalblog.coop.co.uk
Maybe they’re perfect reminders of how violently smashing bytes together on a thin, vulnerable plastic / magnet sandwich is still one of the most punk things you can do as a musician and artist.
- The State of the Culture, 2024 - by Ted Gioia honest-broker.com
The fastest growing sector of the culture economy is distraction. Or call it scrolling or swiping or wasting time or whatever you want. But it’s not art or entertainment, just ceaseless activity.
- Coming of Age at the Dawn of the Social Internet newyorker.com
Online platforms allowed me to cultivate a freer version of myself. Then the digital world began to close off.
- The Internet Is About to Get Weird Again rollingstone.com
Going back to the more free-for-all nature of the Nineties internet could mean we see a proliferation of unexpected, strange new products and services. Back then, a lot of technology was created by local communities or people with a shared interest, and it was as likely that cool things would be invented by universities and non-profits and eccentric lone creators as they were to be made by giant corporations.
- Is the web actually evaporating? - by Ryan Broderick garbageday.email
Which is to say that the internet doesn’t make sense in aggregate anymore and trying to view it as a monolith only gives you bad, confusing, and, oftentimes, wrong impressions of what’s actually going on.
The culprit is technically rising interest rates, but you could argue it began when founders and investors started to see the downside of swinging for the power law. The first venture funds formed as a way for savvy investors to help innovators create fundamental technologies like transistors, which required huge outlays of time and treasure before they could produce value. But in the past few years, causality inverted: Start-ups and entire markets were manufactured from whole cloth to meet the demand of overcapitalized venture funds searching for a home run.
- Optimizing for Taste cra.mr
There are many, many reasons I am opposed, but the one we should care about is how it fosters a culture of decision paralysis. It fosters a culture of decision making without having an opinion, without having to put a stake in the ground. It fosters a culture where making a quick buck trumps a great product experience.
- The Expanding Dark Forest and Generative AI maggieappleton.com
Proving you're a human on a web flooded with generative AI content
- Powering down: the story and legacy of PC Music | Loud And Quiet loudandquiet.com
The age of the record label as a buzzy, zeitgeist-shifting epicentre is practically over. Which is what makes PC Music, a label set up by producer A. G. Cook in 2013, such a unique entity. As it announces that after ten years of operating it will cease to release any new music, it leaves behind a legacy that is almost unparalleled in contemporary music.
- A year of new avenues robinsloan.com
I want to insist on an amateur internet; a garage internet; a public library internet; a kitchen table internet.
Subcultures were the main creative cultural force from roughly 1975 to 2000, when they stopped working. Why? One reason—among several—is that as soon as subcultures start getting really interesting, they get invaded by muggles, who ruin them. Subcultures have a predictable lifecycle, in which popularity causes death. Eventually—around 2000—everyone understood this, and gave up hoping some subculture could somehow escape this dynamic.
- A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden maggieappleton.com
- The X of Generation X culture.ghost.io
This brings us to today, where the loudest complaints about “cultural stasis” tend to come from Gen X adults whose cultural interests have long been anchored in obscure and openly-artistic cultural forms. From their perspective, today's cultural capital does feel very tame. Being "with it" requires listening to top-charting albums, watching blockbuster movies, and being well-versed in internet memes. Compared to Gen X, Millennials who grew up on the Backstreet Boys and NSYNC would have fewer qualms about a pop culture centered around Harry Styles fandom, Harry Styles albums, and Harry Styles cinema gossip. Meanwhile Gen Z, in its rebellion against Millennials, appears to appreciate obscurity as a virtue again, but this is a new obscurity, not based in artistic complexity and historical knowledge but the discovery of amateur videos lurking at the edges of the internet.