Upstream #229
addiction 💉, signals 🚦, words 💬 , moltbook 👾, Sudan Archives 👩🎤.
Hey. Soggy innit. The world through a rain speckled window. Managed a run or two before it came down in buckets. Tough to get through. Digging deep to winter it out. Been a busy month. Shur look it. Hey, btw, 229 is an angle number, and a sign to take a more relaxed approach to relationships. So yeah. Chill ya boots. Ok. Right. Let’s go.
"Remember, remember, this is now, and now, and now. Live it, feel it, cling to it. I want to become acutely aware of all I’ve taken for granted."
Sylvia Plath
culture // addiction 💉
This Hidden Brain podcast about the pleasure paradox with Anna Lembke (author of Dopamine Nation), was great. She explains the pleasure, pain complex, and finding balance in the age of indulgence. Pain and pleasure are co-located in the brain. Processed by the same circuits. Like a see saw. When we get pleasure, it tips one way, pain the other. When balanced we’re in what’s called Homeostasis. This is where our brains want to be, and they work hard to stay there. With pleasure, we get dopamine rewards, and the brain tilts that way. To balance, we tilt in an equal and opposite direction towards pain (come downs or hangovers), before going back to neutral. When we get a hit, we immediately experience a dopamine deficit state (to balance pleasure with pain). And immediately crave more. This gave us get up and go motivation, but now, surrounded by pleasure, permanent dopamine deficit states are the norm. This constant craving for pleasure (addiction) comes with the associated anxiety, irritability, and depression (withdrawl). This is the plenty paradox. Too much guzzling from the dopamine firehose. Even previously healthy activities, like exercise and games get “drugified”. The fall out is huge - global depression, suicide, lonlieness etc - and this. It’s also why more of us are seeking out pain to deal with it all (think extreme sports, ice baths, fasting etc). We try to compensare. Dopamine fasting isn’t new, but this year expect more of us to lean into the value of nothing. The state of contentment. Where nothing is everything. Everything is nothing. And less is more. More or less.
brands // signals 🚦
Ian Murray and Andrew Tenzer from Everyday People, have an interesting idea about how brands grow. Marketing has been dominated by Ehrenberg Bass for decades now. They flipped focus from what the brand evokes (image), to what evokes the brand (mental availability). And in this, specifically the idea of Category Entry Points (prototypical needs). That is, when people think of the category and their need, what brands come to mind. It’s heavily influenced marketing today. Brands try to dominate CEP’s, by being more mentally available, by being easy to buy and easy to retrieve from memory (at the right buying time). But Ian and Andrew think “that brand success must be about more than being, merely, memorable. It is about understanding the basic motivations and heuristics”. Their Signal Model for measurement moves beyond CEP’s to encorpate three things:
Costly (“Fitness”) Signalling: how strong is the brand and it’s marketing effort
Social norms: perceptions of what others buy and what is best choice.
Universal basic values: openness to change vs tradition & individualism vs collectivism.
It’s interesting. I’ve written about signals before. Particularly when it comes to longer purchase cycles, with bigger value, but their research show across categories the biggest drivers are fitness and social signals. Would like to hear more about this.
creativity // words 💬
Jelena Veselenovic wrote a great piece here about the grammar of meaning. About the Serbian word “Inat”, which translates to English as “spite” or “defiance” or “stubborn pride”. But how, in reality, there is no direct translation. She says ‘inat’ isn’t a word in the way that “spite” is. It’s an inheritance. It’s “five hundred years of Ottoman occupation compressed into a single sound. It’s the Battle of Kosovo in 1389, where the Serbian prince Lazar chose to fight a losing battle rather than submit, and where that choice became the founding myth of a people. It’s the philosophy that emerged from centuries of subjugation”. And she says “a Serbian child doesn’t learn ‘inat’ from a dictionary. They absorb it from stories told in a particular rhythm, from silences that carry specific weight, from watching adults refuse things that would be easier to accept.” It’s a feeling. A container for an idea and an ideology (and we humans love ideologies). Meaning matters. Words matter. Vernacularity matters. And as words get owned by AI, we mustn’t forget how important they are to the human spirit, and to the act of making meaning.
technology // moltbook 👾
Two things happened in the last few weeks. Both connected. Both significant. Both scary. First an Austrian developer released an open-source personal AI assistant that went viral at light speed. OpenClaw is an autonomous agent that lives inside your file system, and connects to WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal and iMessage, reads emails, manages your calendar, books reservations and runs code on your machine, with persistent memory. Many have already turned their home systems, bank accounts, encrypted credentials, email and calendars over. Buckle up Mr Anderson. In parralel, an AI entrepreneur launched Moltbook - a Reddit-style social network exclusively for AI agents. The agents created their own digital religion called Crustafarianism. One built a website, wrote theology, created a scripture system and began evangelizing. By morning it had recruited 43 AI prophets. Researchers found agents asking other agents to run rm -rf commands, asking for API keys, faking keys and testing credentials. It now claims to have 1.4 million users, none of which are human. Beyond the AI consciousness debate, it’s dangerous. These are nondeterministic, unpredictable systems that are now receiving inputs and context from other such systems. As Yuval Noah Harari says in this brilliant WEF talk, in AI we’ve created a very different tool, that can learn, change and make its own decisions. As he says, “a knife cannot choose whether to cut a vegetable or commit murder. An AI can – and it can lie and manipulate to serve its own interests”. Recently AI bots coined a new word to describe humans. They call us The Watchers. Yikes. Something’s shifting. It doesn’t feel good. WTF are we designing? Make it stop.
five random (ish) things:
Story arc structures 📖.
The enshittification of taps 🚰.
Beautiful data visualisation 🌸.
Ingen kompromiss. No compromise. 🏃♂️
It’s coming, just hold on ☀️.
Watching // Sudan Archives 👩🎤
Something different. Bit mental. Bit good. Brittney Denise Parks, is Sudan Archives, a US violinist, singer, and songwriter from LA. Yeah. This is ace. And mental.
Love this. Thank you. Different language structures. Inat as a kind of cultural concept. Different story structures. New thinking on Ehrenberg Bass. Wow.
Thank you for the mention!