2026-08-11 19:11:09
Here's a major tension I see at the heart of modern media:
I don't see how we can consistently get all three.
There's only a few possible models (that I can see) for media.
The first model is the fabled broadcast television oligopolies of the 50s-80s: there was a technological bottleneck (the genuine scarcity of usable broadcast frequencies), which meant that there were only a handful of channels in each country,[^1] which meant that
1) people who wanted to make shows were gatekept by the few, powerful producers of these channels
2) people who wanted to watch shows could only (easily) watch the things that the channels chose to broadcast
3) people could very, very easily co-ordinate to watch The Same Things Your Friends Were Watching, and have common ground to discuss with strangers at the pub.
The second model is what now exists with books, since Kindle and self-publishing came around: there are an unbelievable number of books, supposedly 4 million each year, of which 500k are traditionally published and 3.5m are self-published. This means that
1) anyone who wants to can write a book
2) you can find a book for any particular eight-modifier personal interest
3) it's maddeningly rare to have any pieces of media that are popular enough to be co-ordination points for any meaningful % of the population.
In a sense, this whole thing is just a microcosm of the problem of modernity: the conflict between individualism and community, with everyone wanting the privilege of doing the things they like at the time that's convenient for them, but also wanting the community of doing things with other human beings. I don't see how we solve this, truly? I don't see how we can get both.
[^1]: This might be a fake memory but I'm pretty sure I remember the launch of UK Channel 5, which happened only in 1997 (!), and required a massive campaign to fix 9 million home video recorders that used the necessary bit of spectrum they were budging into before the channel could go live.
I don't remember this directly but the first broadcast was apparently The Spice Girls doing a cover of Manfred Mann's 5-4-3-2-1, which is nice.
2026-08-06 19:11:52
In the Terry Pratchett novel Men at Arms, the character Sam Vimes proposes the ‘Boots’ Theory of Socio-economic Unfairness, which goes as follows: a bad pair of boots costs ten dollars, and only lasts a year or two, while a good pair of boots costs fifty dollars but lasts forever. Poor people can't afford the expensive boots, only the cheap ones, but over time they end up spending more than the rich, and they get soggy feet to boot.
I find this theory plausible about positive/negative spirals in general: one of the most radicalizing moments of my adult life was finding out the special mortgage rate my wealthy friend was paying, seemingly because the bank wanted to make sure he gave them all his money later in life when he went from wealthy to ultra-wealthy. There are definitely domains where rich people can afford to take a large one-time cost that saves them money in the long run.
But I don't actually think Vimes Boots theory is true about boots, at least not at any level of spending that I have yet been able to access. As best I can tell, 80% of manufactured clothes at this point in history are trash, and maybe 20% are actually good, and that this is weirdly true across many different price levels. As I get richer I have nicer stuff on average, which I appreciate, but it's still luck-of-the-draw whether a given pair of shoes will last 6 months or 6 years, and going from $15 to $150 for a pair of shoes doesn't seem to affect the odds much.
Maybe if you can spend $1500 on boots you do get a guarantee of quality – readers in the know please shout in the comments.
2026-08-04 19:11:35
One thing I've always found pretty neat is Jane Austen-era collar-and-cravat combos – you know, like Colin Firth in Pride and Prejudice. Every so often I think of buying this getup and wearing it around. It's not that weird, I tell myself – at the end of the day, it's a white neckerchief on a white shirt.
But this is obviously lies. If I wore this in public in 2026, people would notice and question it. Which makes dressing like this (or any other kind of interesting way) a bundle of two preferences:
1) do I like how this style feels/looks?, and
2) do I like the amount of attention it would get me?
Similarly I have lived for a time in places where it's common for men to wear skirt-like wraps, and I have worn those wraps, and they are far more comfortable than pants.[^1] And then I have returned to pantsylvania and immediately ditched my wrap, because my desire to be normal is greater than my desire to be comfortable.
This is reasonable! You can very reasonably decide that, even though you like the style, the attention that goes with it isn't worth it for you. And therefore go back to wear khakis and plain-colored tshirts.
Of course, other people who would like to wear non-normative items but don't like being a cynosure will also constrict themselves as a result, and therefore the Overton window never expands, and we will remain collectively in the gutter. I therefore think it is an act of supererogation to dress (where possible) further towards the edge of weirdness that your personal comfort level allows, thereby nudging the window open, and encouraging the world towards freedom.
[^1]: cf David Foster Wallace on the Cool and Genitally Unsquishy American Tomorrow, skip to halfway down p.14, A key point..... Now that I look it up that whole essay basically prior-arts basically everything in this blogpost, oh well.
2026-08-03 19:11:02
There are times in certain people's lives where they come to feel strongly that they're doing everything wrong.
You may desire to argue with me that nobody is ever actually living their life wrong, and I would like you to put that aside for a second: without debating the normative claim, it is simply true descriptively that some people at some times FEEL like their life is wrong.
And I would also like to claim to you that – descriptively – in many of the social circles, at least, if one was to say the words "I feel like I'm living my life wrong," then all one's friends and relations will gather round and say "absolutely not; there is nothing wrong with you at all."
And again, you may believe normatively that that's true– either for this specific person, or for all people in general.
But it struck me recently that there is a group of people that will happily tell you that you're living your life wrong. Namely, cults.
If your friend who feels like everything is wrong goes to a cult, the cult will say to her: "yes! You are so right! Everything you're doing is wrong; come join us, we will teach you how to make it better."
And it struck me right this second that it doesn't have to be a cult, either: it could be one person, say a romantic partner, who perhaps all the friend-group hates, but who is extremely willing to tell your friend that she's doing everything wrong. Which matches her self conception, while all her friends are denying it. Which might be a reason she's in that relationship.
So I think it's much more helpful – if one of your friends says they're doing everything wrong – to give them an answer that at least acknowledges the possibility of the premise. I'm not saying you should fully endorse it, just that you should try to give an answer that allows for the possibility rather than shutting it down.
You might say "I don't agree that you're doing everything wrong, but tell me more about where that feeling of wrongness is coming from?"
Or: "Whether or not you're doing anything wrong, let's talk about things that can make your life better."
I always want to end these kinds of posts with a caveat: there's so many different kinds of human experience, all-purpose advice is dangerous, some people need to eat more protein and some people are allergic to protein. What do I know? I might be wrong about everything.
2026-07-31 19:11:50
As you all know, I'm very interested in the question of whether it's possible to make true art with AI. (We all know it's possible to make slop with AI, but that doesn't determine whether art is possible too).
Many years ago I had a dream, or vision, of an egg breaking on a mountaintop, with the yolk as the sun. I always told myself that if I were an oil-painter this is what I would paint. And yet.... without the ability to sketch or paint it – and without even a strong enough visualization ability to explore it in detail in my own mind's eye – I never really explored it further. I didn't even fully imagine the image, what exactly it would be or look like.
I thought that now, with a new prosthesis, I might give it a go.
Is this art? To me I think the answer's yes: it captures something that was in my heart, and which I've never seen anyone else paint, and which I wouldn't know how to convey to another person in any other way. It's not quite how I wanted it, but if I painted it it wouldn't go quite how I wanted it either.
I don't know how it looks to anyone else, but then that's also the case for the (non-visual) art I make the old-fashioned way. And to me step one of "what is art?" might be: does this work make the artist feel something? There's a very long way to go from that to great art, but it's already not easy to get there: it's very possible to make things that mean nothing even to yourself. (Most AI images I see feel very clearly in that category).
A mentor of mine once told me your job isn't to make something good, it's just to make something true. I think this is one reason that children's art can often feel better than adult art, when the latter is technically proficient but utterly devoid of intent.
I think this egg-mountain image is true? I'm biased in its favour, you can tell me if you think otherwise, but I do think it's true? Not the truest thing ever made, but with some form of truth in it. I would look at it more than once. I wonder what the artist meant by it.
I'm not quite willing to commit to this as a definition, but I wonder if part of what makes art art is the possibility of embarrassment. At least, I feel like all the real art I've made in my life came with some degree of risk and vulnerability, that showing other people the thing I made also gave them a mortifying access to my mind or soul, an access to either understand or misunderstand me as a person (both scary, in different ways).
Maybe the thing that's so offensive about slop art (and stock photography, and scandi minimalism) is that the artist took no risks and revealed nothing of themselves.
I started working on variations. I imagine that if were a painter I would have made a hundred versions of this, like Monet and his lilies or Hokusai and his waves.
A thing I enjoyed – because I've never seen an image model do it before – is when Gemini changed her classic watermark (a simple four-pointed star in the bottom-right of every picture) into a bright shooting star with a long tail and little intercardinal rays. I feel like at that moment the model did something creative, congruent, unexpected and meta.
There's a legend – though I'm not sure it's precisely true – that the great Diego Velázquez didn't sign his paintings, as if to say "look at this work, look at these brushstrokes, who else but Velázquez could have done it?"
In one famous painting he put a little white piece of paper in the corner, as if it had accidentally blown up against a rock, in the place where the signature might have been.
I don't have to tell you what that cartellino reminds me of.
Another story is that in Velázquez's time the artist was considered "merely" a manual laborer, and that his work was unsigned because a tradesman doesn't get to sign his work. It's funny how it could be both: you don't need to sign your work because you're so glorious no-one else could have done it, or you don't get to sign your work because you're considered too lowly to do so.
2026-07-29 19:11:32
I've long had a theory that weird people sometimes get bonus-enjoyment from living in other countries because when you do/are something weird abroad, people tend to attribute it to your foreignness rather than yourself.
Perhaps there's a bonus benefit that when people are bothered by your weird behavior, there's now a socially acceptable way to tell you: "oh, over here it's considered rude to XYZ", which would be hard to do if someone is local and bothering you.
(For the people on the receiving end of the weirdness, I suspect it's often fine as well: most forms of weirdness are not directly harmful, they're just non-normative, so being able to think "oh he's like that because he's from X" gives you a way to realise when the other way of doing things is fine as well).
It recently struck me that this probably has broader applicability: weird young people might be more comfortable around older people in part because the older people have less-clear senses of what is current "young culture", and whether a particular behavior for a young person is weird or not. Or similarly for gender, or various other things. It's not that you "fit in better" with the other culture; it's that your not-fitting-in has an alternative explanation that everyone is ok with.
