Links to Consider, 11/24
Christopher Mims on Video Media; Scott Belsky on enhancing remote work; Tara Isabella Burton on Peter Thiel at Novitate; Stephen G. Adubato on same
Social media is turning into old-fashioned network television.
A handful of accounts create most of the content that we see. Everyone else? They play the role of the audience, which is there to mostly amplify and applaud. The personal tidbits that people used to share on social media have been relegated to private group chats and their equivalent.
So it’s not really social media any more. Once again, the idealistic vision of decentralized, peer-to-peer communication collapses when it collides with reality.
regular off-sites have become an essential part of the cadence for teams with a distributed workforce. The only problem? Hotels aren’t really optimized for the goals: circumstantial collisions and relationship building. There is a need for a new line of “retreat properties” that are the opposite of hotels, designed for collisions with people as opposed to isolation and privacy. Imagine the facilities of the ultimate retreat center: Meeting spaces that are not random rooms but rather immaculately designed creative spaces with digital whiteboards to capture every thought, plug-and-play projection, seamless wifi, a wide array of snacks and fidget toys, and various options of rooms and lighting architected for focus or expansive thinking. Lodging would not be a random room but rather a cluster of rooms around a shared common area and snack kitchen. The gyms and activity spaces would flow into one another - making fitness circumstantially a group activity without needing to plan ahead. The dining facilities would be hands-on - teams could make their own meals together as bonding activities or sit in one of many private rooms for intimate team conversation.
I’m not so much into his “designed creative spaces” suggestions. But I agree that hotels designed for conferences are not the solution for offsite retreats.
The most important design issue with off-site retreats is coming up with the right combination of: facilitated interactive sessions; informal meetings over meals, walks, or field trips; and free time. Your goal is to facilitate the creation of emotional energy, as sociologist Randall Collins puts it.
Thiel’s ideology is, increasingly, becoming the ideology of much of Silicon Valley and the New Right alike. It is a conflation of libertarianism, reactionary sentiment, and instinctive anti-wokeism
…On this view, humans fall into two categories. On the one hand, you have the clear-eyed quasi-divine mages of technology, like Francis Bacon (who, Thiel reminds us, “saw that mastery in science was inseparable from the mastery in control of all things.”). Or, say, like Thiel himself. On the other hand you have the fools, the sheeple, the so-called NPCs, or “non-playable characters” who can be controlled by those who know how to control their desire.
She labels Thiel a techno-vitalist.
At its core, techno-vitalism is as much an aesthetic mood as a political one: liberal democracy has just made life plain boring. It saps even our desires. (“The baby boomers and Gen Xers were the last generations that could unabashedly want things,” Thiel has said, “fast cars, luxury houses, wealth. Millennials, and Gen Zs in the 2020s must be content with marijuana, Netflix, and social media.”)
Thiel recounted having recently asked a group of zoomers what they desire. Their answers amounted mainly to virtual or “interior” goods. When prodded as to why they didn’t long for tangible ones, they expressed that aspiring to things like owning property or an ideal relationship were “too dangerous and risky.” Thus, claimed Thiel, is the hold technocratic power has over “the herd,” who is easily controlled by narratives fed to them by hidden elites about societal conflict and its imminent collapse, and their subsequent promises of peace and safety.
I have a different take on what ails the younger generation. That requires its own essay.
substacks referenced above:
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Agency and scale are common themes in the past few posts. Given attentional and logistical constraints, decentralization is necessary for a sense of agency. This requires smaller-scale intermediating institutions (e.g. in no particular oder - families, churches, clubs, private group chats, offsite retreats...) As Arnold's post yesterday indicated, hierarchy and authority are strategies for coordinating at scale - strategies not conducive to individual agency.
Lack of agency seems like one of the problems affecting the younger generation. I guess materialism is a response - maybe Thiel sees materialism as more prosocial than seeking agency through controlling others via technocratic busybodyism or gossip (crabs in a bucket). But both approaches seem like empty distractions rather than real agency. We can do better.
As I guide high school students through the college admissions process and ask them about their aspirations, they almost always mention having “fast cars, luxury houses, wealth;" almost never do they mention making a difference. Almost all of my students are unabashed about telling me they want to become doctors or lawyers (or go into business or finance) to make a great deal of money. I have had one(!) two years ago who wanted to be a labor attorney. She is now at Princeton.
In the book The Privileged Poor, a rural student at an Ivy League university [Renowned], stated: "The biggest challenge [of being at Renowned] is the pressure to become one of them. When you come here, you become one of the elite. Like, “Oh yes, Renowned education, you’re going to have so much money when you grow up.” They just expect the goal of all this is to have money and be part of the upper class. People forget where they come from. They live here for four months and they’re not living at home and they forget what it means. Then, after four years, they don’t go back home. They go to New York. They’re just consumed! 40% of people go into consulting after graduation. 40% of people don’t come into Renowned thinking of consulting. People are transformed. It is just expected that one social class is inherently better than the other, more desirable.”