michael-dean-k/

I have been brewing on this Call for New Aesthetics. I’m stuck on the question of why we need a new aesthetic for the 21st century. To go one layer deeper, what role does an aesthetic actually achieve? Like let’s say you can trace the lineage from the iPhone’s design back to Bauhaus. If the Bauhaus never existed, and smartphones took on a different aesthetic, say one that is more ornate, would we not still have TikTok? I guess this all ties back to my conclusion at the end of architecture school, that probably played some role in leaving the industry: it is capital that controls everything, and as revolutionary as architecture aspires to be, it is something like frivolous dressing atop capital aspirations (picked this up from Manfredo Tafuri, a Marxist critic of architecture; IANA Marxist, but the critique is hard to forget). No matter how you design a bank, a bank is a bank. Bauhaus was not a revolutionary aesthetic movement, but a response to the economic reality of mass production (could be an oversimplification, but I think it's accurate to see it as a response, as most architecture is). There is a long history of architects trying to proactively change culture, but failing because they don't actually have leverage. And so what you really need is not just an aesthetic or formal style, but a reimagining of the programs, institutions, and rituals of society, and then a way to use form/ornament to realize those ambitious visions. Put another way, architecture can’t matter without the vision and power of a client, and I don’t think there’s a future for architecture within the OS of capitalism—but if capitalism is about to implode, maybe there’s a new opportunity.

Our last meal as pre-child adults was at Panera—something quick and light on the way to the hospital (plus she craved it)—and as we ordered our “pick twos” on a digital menu, I was struck by the beauty of a jazzy Christmas song that would have otherwise been extremely ordinary. It was “White Christmas” by Booker T and the M.G.s. My guess is that the stakes of an extraordinary moment—in this case, one of anticipation—can totally rewire musical taste (or preference in anything, really). Works that we attribute meaning to sometimes have nothing to do with objective qualities of the art, but in the circumstance in which you experience it. 

My wife and I joke that when the obstetricians ask her, “what is your pain management strategy?” she’s going to say “Led Zeppelin,” which cues me to blast “Immigrant Song” at 100% through her BOSE speakers. In all my baby-book reading, when they’ve mentioned “music” during labor, I imagine soothing, meditative music—like Enya or flukes—to calm the screaming mother; but maybe the other direction is more productive? The experience is so intense that Zen garden music could potentially feel toyish and tone deaf to the experience at hand. If you’re experiencing the extremes of pain, it might help to have blaring technical instrumentation in your ear, to moan in harmony with Robert Plant. I mean, the whole strategy is to distract your mind from pain by focusing on specific things, and it does in fact require 100% of your bandwidth to really listen to Bonham fills of Page riffs. She wants me to make her a hard rock playlist.

Extended thoughts on infinite: if you give a theoretical monkey a typewriter with infinite time, not only will one produce Shakespeare, but many will (10s, 100s, millions, technically infinite), they will just be spaced out by a long, long time. But what happens if you multiple infinite by infinite? If you give infinite monkeys infinite time, then monkeys will begin rederiving the entire works of Shakespeare in every frame of reality. This is the weird unlock: two infinites takes something rare of improbably and makes it the new grammar of space-time. OKAY. Now that this is established, what is the practical tie-in? Generative AI has two infinite-like frontiers: agent replication & time dilation. Eventually, you may be able to have millions of agents working on a task, and, they’ll be working so fast, that it’s like they can compress a decade of work in a day. The implication here is that any possible intention can suddenly be leveraged to an extraordinary degree. Things will get weird. To put it alarmingly: the person with the worst intentions could suddenly become the entirety of the Internet. The opposite is true too. But weirdness will ensue when individuals suddenly have the ability to exert their will and vision upon a seemingly limitless scope of digital terrain.

On the experience of looking into late-pregnancy sonograms: it’s a lot like looking into clouds. Apophenia is in full effect. That looks like a face! Oh wait, that looks like 3 faces. What is that? There are multiple shapes, some big, some small, some cute, some aliens. In trying to idenify the boundaries of my daughtr just now, I saw Elmo, several monsters, and worms. Sometimes it just devolves into B&W abstract collages, something you might see in MoMA (I’d be surprised if a sonagram art exhibit doesn’t exist). Throughout all this looking, a very technical nurse is performing a technical feat: using one hand to place the sound wave, and another hand to operate a cockpit-looking interface, leaving acronyms like RUQ and RLQ to measure blood flow. She hesitates when you ask her if you can take pictures, because this is not a gush-sesison, but an important test for amniotic fluid, but she let’s you anyway because she is fluent enough to be confidently undistracted as you film the whole process … And then suddenly, as soon as your baby appears in crystalline focus, with her tiny skull, and arms, and legs, she seems to explode, and it takes you a second to realize that it’s just the nurse shifting to a different angle.

A whole realm of “machine ethos” is being conveniently ignored; we assume it can’t have experience or perspective. I agree, a chatbot can’t. But what if you create a digital identity that runs 120 fps, persists across time, and has free will? Would that not have a subjective experience, although it doesn’t have a body? Well, what if you gave it a robotic body? Or what if we eventually find a way to create artificial humans that have bodies that are biologically indistinguishable from human bodies? I’m not saying I want or advocate for any of this, I’m just saying we need to be sharper in our thinking. To say that “great books can’t be written by machines because they don’t have experience,” means you need to think much harder about what experience really is.

The book Four Thousand Weeks references the average lifespan (76.71 years). This is also 27,999.15 days, which almost exactly lines up with the 1,000 day cycle. A life is 28,000 days. I’m currently starting my 13k cycle. This means by 14k, early 2028, I will be statistically midlife. It is a potentially grueling realization, but something about the 1k cycle makes it seem like NBD. 1,000 days is a long time, especially if you are chase epic things. It is effectively a whole life, a distinct identity. Of course, there is part of you that persists through each molting cycle, but it helps to see each as a rebirth. To think I have 15 more molts ahead of me is to realize I have 15 lives left, more than I know what to do with.

The “wasted time” in AI-generation is generating reports and “canonical documents” that you think your future self will need, but will possibly never use. However, I think the core difference is that these documents have a way of compounding that is automatic in a way that second brains never did. Meaning, yes, I generated 8 documents on babies, but the 9th one, can be based on the thinking in the first 8. Shed the original, but maybe 9 is something like a core “README” that shapes all future interactions. That’s the thing. Through writing you are developing a particular lens that is not just sitting there, but being accessed.

A big shift in my way of working: instead of trying to scope a specific and ambitious batch of tasks I think should be done in a given day or week, all I commit to is time towards specific areas. The deadlines are less important (generally) than making sure I show up and do high-leverage work with 100% embodiment and enthusiasm. I just set up the Streaks app, and aim for 2.5 hours of work per day over 6 areas: writing, coding, reading, outreach, business, and culture. Each is a simple target: 20-45 minutes per day. At the very least, it gets me started. If I’m in a flow, I go over as long as I want (1-2 hours or more). If not, I just stop. The goal here is to rethink what work might look like while caring for my daughter (and my post-labor wife). I could potentially knock out 2.5 hours in a single nap cycle, or maybe it’s spread over 3-4 sessions at random times. It forces me to prioritize an important thing per day in an area that is an infinite game. It feels slightly unambitious, but I actually think an OS of this nature might be something I continue even when I “get my time back.” There’s a forced prioritization, as well as open space to either (a) diverge/explore, or (b) drill deep on things that actually matter.

This essay tapped into a striking definition of timelessness. He doesn’t get there until halfway through though, and I found myself disagreeing with—or at least, questioning—a lot of his earlier points (I’ll come back to this). The main point is distilled into this: the best essays are “ineffective” because they reveal the timeless problems that each generation fails to synthesize. Timeless essays speak to the common foils in the human operating system: the blindspots of parents, the lies of institutions, the avoidance of mortality, the ineffability of relationships, the mundanities that are never captured in enough detail. These are different than “discovery” essays, like Darwin’s Origin of Species. The holy grail of an essay is surprise, and a timeless essay is not just sueprising for one generation, it’s surprising for every generation. And so timelessness, then, is a type of “breadth of applicability.”

PG also ventures into a familiar territory of “essay as a mode of thinking.” Where as in the past he used “the river” as his metaphor (2004), this time it’s a tree. You start from an origin, and then you explore many different branches in search of generality x novelty. What is a good starting question? He says a good one is “outrageous, counterintuitive, overambitious, and heterodox.” It doesn’t have to be a complete thesis, but some puzzling gap, and importantly something you care about. You won’t be able to stretch an origin question into cascading insight unless you have a unique angle into it. The origin doesn’t matter too much though, because it’s a recursive process, and you can eventually get to the best question in “a few hops.” I love how he emphasizes that you need to write to explore branches of a tree, and there are many dead ends; you realize how you are mistaken, incomplete, and inelegant (you go from vague to bad). Don’t get discouraged by these; finding your false assumptions is possibly the only way to really begin.

Despite loving his whole exploration of “mode,” I don’t think that means you have to neglect essay as “genre”; he says form/style don’t matter in “the best essay,” and I disagree, obviously. He has Darwin as the pinnacle example of an essay, and I’m really challenged by that (I definitely have to read it now). Is that an essay or a scientific paper, just captured in shortform non-fiction? He seems to imply that the essay is at its best a vehicle for discovery, as a mechanism to bring forth surprising, important, and useful ideas. From the creator of “make things people want,” this isn’t surprising. Even though a new theory of evolution had broad implications for society, I assume the paper itself is technical, intended for a scientific niche audience, which in my mind, makes it more like a scientific paper than an essay. An essay is something that is universal/general enough for the average person to read. An essay, I think, functions like an information transfer system between specialized facets of society; it’s about making your specific niche legible to all the other niches, and I don’t think that was the specific goal of Darwin's writing (even though it was inevitably understood by everyone, it wasn’t through the writing, but from the effects of the writing).

(Added: Another note on Graham’s notion of best as timelessness: he says that timeless esasys are the perennial insights that each generation can’t absob. This implies that the insight is never enough: even if you know something, there is often a lack of wisdom in applying it to your own circumstance. And so really, these unteachable lessons are ones that can only be obtained through personal experience. Does this point to the fact that all essays need to be personal? Maybe bland insights can’t be digested by a reader, but if they are integrated to vivid personal experience, experience vicariously, then might this actually be the best medium to transfer wisdom?)

I just did some research on David Foster Wallace’s decline (albeit, through Gemini 3.0, so there might be some hallucinations). The surface level understanding is: 1) his medication stopped work; 2) they gave him electroconvulsive shock therapy, 3) he hung himself. But I never quite knew the gruesome and heartbreaking details of his “medical episode” (as described by his wife to his agents).

It was like a biochemical meltdown: he was struck with tremors and convulsions. He completely lost his appetite, stopped eating, lost 60 pounds, and his parents moved in to try to cook him familiar foods from childhood. Probably the worst: he could hardly speak, which is something like hell for who might have been the most articulate writer of his generation. He describe his situation as “the bad thing” and “the black hole with teeth.” Often, he couldn’t make basic decisions, and had extreme paralysis in deciding which room to occupy. He could barely comprehend the complex literature he’d been reading, and devolved into self-help books and basic spiritual texts to help him through the situation.

After, I think, 16 months of this, he decided to kill himself; he convinced his wife to leave to get groceries, who agreed because he seemed unusually well, but then organized his manuscript (the Pale King), wrote a two page letter to his wife, and hung himself on the porch. I imagine he assumed his new condition was permanent, and maybe it was, but I can’t help but think that maybe, in 5-10 years, it could have restabilized, but that is easy to say when you’re not in it (a year of this might feel endless/excruciating).

I wouldn’t be surprised if a few of these details are fake (AI-hallucinated). It nonetheless is a more detailed version than the caricature, and it’s possible that a wrong sketch of the details is more true in essence and tenor than an accurate meme-level compression. Perhaps one day I’ll really read into this to make sense of the whole episode. I think now I’m at a place where I don’t quite believe my original understanding, nor the new one, so overall I’m skeptical and unlodged, which is maybe better?

(PS: apparently the details all do check out with D.T. Max’s biography, Every Love Story is a Ghost Story.)

The T800 is not a graphing calculator, it’s the new robot for China that can do roundhouse kicks. The promo reel is something like a cross between Rocky and The Terminator, replete with synth violins, and cinematic shots of a boxing gym. This thing can jump, spin, and kick you in the face. It is super fluid, unnaturally fluid. Why do we need kungfu bots though? I think the goal is to create reels that invokve awe, terror, and surrender: look, China is winning. This is not about “make something people want.” This is optics. We are building a master race, and we are ahead of you. Later in the reel, it is sparring with a child, before giving him a pound (so you know it has a heart). The T800 has no eyes, but a visor of light across its head. Oh great, now it’s using a hammer to repair it’s own body. Available for 180,000, 240,000, 280,000 or 360,000 RMB ($50,198). That seems, cheap? I mean, for the price of Tesla, you can get a sometimes-functional robot to spar and injure your friends? (If you think the reel is AI, here’s a behind the scenes: Link, Link, YouTube.)

02:32 PM – There’s something to the phrase “writer as technoactivist” that is appealing as we inch towards the 2030s. The word activism has gone sour for me, because it’s a stand-in for laziness, whining, and opinions. But there’s a history of technological activism that goes back to the 1980s and still continues today. I guess there was always a limit on what could be achieved through open-source software movements compared to market hounds. But if AI makes the cost of building things irrelevant, and any “revolutionary” suddenly has a 100-person “workforce” at their whims, then there might be a rise of new kinds of founder-driven institutes with missions you’d never see in the 2000s-2020s. Up until now, there was a fixed band of company types: unicorns, a $10-100m business for VC, a $1m narrowly-optimized market niche business, or a side passion.Feels like we’re entering an exciting new moment where mission-drive people can scale in ways that weren’t possible before.

You don’t have a phone problem, you are just poisoning yourself. I'm tired of people lamenting over phones, smartphones, screens—it's not the glass! I want to make a case why smartphones are essential for flourishing in our modern life. The real problem is with “inbound feeds,” and that’s not just social media, but email inboxes and task lists. By installing software with infinite refresh, the possibility of novelty consumes you. I say this all out loud to my wife, as the guy next to me is absorbed in a sloptunnel on TikTok, and it’s 50/50 if he heard me.

Waiting for my wife, I am sitting in the lobby of a firm I quit 4 years ago—though I haven’t entered the building in 5, since COVID—and I see Westler slip out the elevator bay; out walks Westler into the barrel-vaulted lobby, out through those gold revolving doors that started and ended many days of my years. Westler. He’s still here! Alive! I remember him like I do an old dream. His placid demeanor and dry humor, a goatee, his subtle mischief and possible creepiness. I don’t know if I ever really knew him behind that caricature. He designed multi-story basements for megapolic airports… I think (a kind of endless machine work, the coordination of billions of lines, cognitive sterilization, a tectonic death in service of a suitcase city, a labirynth of conveyor belts). Is he doing that same thing? Did they find some new VR guy to render his city of luggage? Of course I know absolutely nothing of Westler’s life—for all I know, he has a pearl of a daughter that makes sacrificing his peak hours worth it, forever—but in my assumption, that the company we both worked for is something of a life-sucker, a hunter and skinner of the young and ambitious, a building broker that drools steel angled towers across the East, across Dubai and Korea and Singapore, an entity in Bryant Park that overworks and underpays but leaks enormous partner bonuses that enables the CEO to buy luxury pets and park penthouses while speaking at Venetian conferences on the virtues of design, I imagine Westler as a sleepwalker. I imagine every day of the last five years, as he wisps out those gold-trimmed revolving doors, he finds relief in his break, but doesn’t stop to question the sacrifice, and knows not the basic mystery, “time flies.”

Now that I’ve retrieved my wife from the grips of her Tower, we are back in Penn Station—because no more trains run out of Grand Central this late—and we see a familiar figure, a man on fentanyl hunched over at 90 degrees. “Is that the same guy from this morning?” My wife said sadly; but I said, given he spent his entire day in the same spot, same position and same trance, he looks to me a whole lot like Westler.

This is an extreme comparison—to compare the default path to a lethal addiction—but it tracks to how I feel, an anger over a design firm kidnapping my very pregnant wife.

This morning I finally visualized the whole chain of command, the reason she works until 4am, and why 1 AM is considered a “good night”: somewhere in Dubai is a very rich man, and he’s decided to cure the anxiety over his massive pile of money but funding a Tower that, most likely, no one will live in. So he hires a team of henchman, the “client reps,” and it’s their job to dangle glamorous limitless design work to very hungry architects that fear the market could evaporate at any moment. So naturally, the firm accepts the work at half the rate, and I assume half of that is just cut off the top to reward and keep the partners fat (the 80%, the staff—they don’t matter, they are burnt and churnt over, with eager beardless faces eternally sending resumes, because where else in America can you build DUBAI). And so the client, being entitled and aware of our desperation, will throw a screaming fit if my wife and her 2 juniors can’t pull off the labor of 10 people, every single night. Staffing can’t be honest because it’s trying to survive, and business development can’t be selective because it knows it’s runway, and so what emerges is a kind of caste system where office workers are expected to work 80 hour weeks without overtime or questions.

Four Santas at the edge of Bryant park, each with a bike carriage and $60 glow light speaker, each blaring a different holiday song, co-constructing a wall of cheer, a terrible cacophony that blends with traffic and engines on 42nd, and for some unreasonable price, you can take selfies for $100 as they lap the Christmas market. People must do this. Otherwise they wouldn’t come back. If I were an out-of-towner, and in a festive mood, I guess I could see the appeal of a postcard moment like this, of being ushered around the center of the world by the boss himself, it just feels a lot funnier and weirder when you know the same place on a cold January morning commute. I am not a Christmas cynic, I’m just struck by the novelty of the sight, and in lieu of a picture, this is what comes out.