Upstream #231
nihilism 😬, dinner party 🍽️, homogecene 🏭, the keys 🔐, fairies 🧚.
Right. Jesus. Well. I mean. It’s a little drier isn’t it? Not much mind. Still. Not too bad. Nearly March ffs. Feels painfully slow, and incomprehensibly fast simultaneously. Max temporal distortion. Lots of rugby, which has been great. And reading. Got to see The Crucible with Andrew McCarthy too. Fun. Right. Best push on. Let’s go.
"I have a kind of courage you do not understand. I am far from blind, far from indifferent, but I will not indulge in impotent, passive despair. I will not add to the despair of the world. I am working on counterpoisons… I create a space in which people can breathe, restore their faith and strength to live."
Anais Nin
culture // nihilism 😬
Young people in the US have mostly only known political and economic dysfunction. An ever present Polycrisis, and a future where home ownership, having children, and paying for stuff feels impossible, creates similar dysfunction in Ireland and the UK. Add to that a world where AI bro’s like Altman compare training algos to raising children. Where Pixar have turned digital anxiety into mainstream entertainment in Toy Story 5. Where enshallowfication and a magnet-like force is pulling us away from depth - of attention, of thought - and towards shallowness, superficiality or unseriousness. And where the powerful continue to act with impunity. No surpise that we’re in the internet’s nihilism crisis, where nothing matters anymore. Financial nihilism and prediction markets are also growing fast on sites like Polymarket, where you can bet on literally anything and nothing. Prediction markets have ballooned x130 in two years. kyla scanlon wrote in The Wall Street Journal “Faced with that reality, taking a gamble on Fartcoin or betting how many times Elon Musk tweets in a week can feel strangely rational”. She argues that this kind of nihilism is “an attempt to find personal agency in a system that’s increasingly denied it to them”. Maybe Baby Queen is right, maybe a life without meaning is a liberation. One things for sure, there's nothing more dangerous than someone with nothing to lose. And if that’s a generation, brace for impact.
brands // dinner party 🍽️
Matt Klein wrote a great piece on dinner party etiquette and brands. How the world is now “a tyranny of metrics, an optimization for spectacle, and a sacrifice of substance for visibility”. That “if it doesn’t register on the dashboard, it doesn’t exist”. That “if you are not loud, you do not exist culturally, politically, or socially. In the age of the algorithm, cultural value becomes synonymous with measurability. Dashboards don’t give a shit about merit, substance or even truth.” How the result is “A boring and exhausting arms race for loudness”. So we retreat and “go camouflage. Group chats, paywalled Substacks, three-hour podcasts, niche subreddits, and yes, actual dinner parties”. In these off grid spaces you can’t just buy or shout your way in, you need dinner party etiquette. You need to understand the guests, bring something they want, remember that you’re a guest not the host, and most importantly, earn the invitation. Which marries nicely with Ana Andjelic ’s observation that, when culture moves fast, you should look at the things that move slowly. The cultural metabolic rate has drastically accelerated. Easy come, easy go. Content factories don’t deliver the same value. Maybe it’s better to focus on legibility, than just attention. Maybe introducing beautiful inconvenience, could achieve that. And maybe slow and quiet, is the new fast and loud for brands? Maybe.
creativity // homogecene 🏭
This piece by Katie Jagielnicka on the homogecene, and why if capitalism breeds innovation does everything feel the same, was great. She writes that there are 20 to 30 billion chickens on Earth. 10x more than any other bird. Three per human. "We’re essentially Planet Chicken”. Since the 1970s, global wildlife diversisty has plummeted by 73%. She quotes paleobiologists who said "the age of humans is increasingly an age of sameness. Across the planet, distinctive plants and animals are disappearing, replaced by species that are lucky enough to thrive alongside humans and travel with us easily”. In the ‘Anthropocene’, humans now misshape the planet. Others call this era of homogenisation, the ‘Homogenocene.’ Across most categories a handful of companies now dominate. Spending on M&A in a decade has doubled vs R&D. VC money favours tech, which is increasingly samey. "Do most people really need another app, another subscription service, another AI chatbot, or do they need groceries that don’t break the bank, a place to live they can call their own, universal healthcare, and childcare?”. Does Capitalism’s promise of innovation really deliver? Or are we getting homogenous soup? Edward Cotton also wrote about the collapse of distinctiveness, as AI converges creativity, and averages everything. It enhances individual creativity, but reduces the collective output, and strips out uniqueness. We have to remember the importance of character and tone, and continue to defend it’s unique, messy and often inefficient nature. In art, in music, in places, and in people. Perhaps it begins with heresy. Hell yeah 👍, all for that.
technology // the keys 🔐
Mastercard completed the first agentic end to end transaction. Although I’m sick of talking about AI, it’s a big deal. New Zealand’s first Agent Pay transaction saw Mastercard use a Westpac debit card to purchase cinema tickets. Fully authorized with cardholder consent, and issuer, acquirer and merchant consent. In parallel, last week Google quietly released a preview of WebMCP (Web Model Context Protocol), a protocol that defines how AI agents interact with websites. It’s the building blocks of and the keys to, the agentic web. Instead of fumbling through a website, WebMCP lets publishers provide an “instruction manual” for AI agents. It moves the integration from the server to the browser. It’s a JavaScript-based API that allows a website to officially "hand over a map" to an agent. And with it, widespread agentic commerce, with interoperability and standards, for consumers and businesses. A world where AI can interpret intent, make decisions and take autonomous actions, including buying stuff. We’ve moved from an era where we "defend" sites from bots, to an era where we "optimise" them for agents. Hope we know what we’re doing.
five random (ish) things:
Nice - Ikea’s tiny chef 👨🍳.
A compendium of decks 📊.
Subway stop in a drawer 🚋.
AI song, it’s perfect 🤩.
Inside Ferrari’s EV dash 🏎️.
Listening // fairies 🧚
This is lovely. There’s a touch of Jeff Buckley in that voice. No bad thing. The Scottish singer songwriter was nominated for a Mercury Prize this year. Nice album too. Enjoy. And have a lovely weekend 😆.