Upstream #233
maxxing & mogging 🏋, omotenashi 🛎️, stupid 🤡, control 🚦, wolf 🐺
Well. Right. There’s been some Madrid. Lovely city. Busy. But nice. But not Nice. Ah here. We’re still in this liminal space. Neither one thing, nor the other. Between no longer, and not yet. Spring not springing fully. Anyhow. I’ll keep it brief. Hope all is good. Rightho. Let’s go.
“In order to grow...you must betray their expectations.”
Hayao Miyazaki
culture // maxxing & mogging 🏋
So, in my view discussing attention seeking morons, in some way supports their objectives. So I’ve been hesitant to even acknowledge the “manosphere”. Whatever that means. But I'm reminded that just like Dubai, regardless of your views, you can't ignore it. So here we are. Mogging (emasculating other men through your attractiveness). Maxxing (optimising). SMV (sexual market value). Looksmaxxing. Jestergooning (funny and mind numbing to attract attention). Chad’s (white frat boys). High-tiered Becky’s. Tate-Pilled boys. Cortisol spikes. ASU Frat. Androngenic. Clavicular. What the actual? This is the kind of indecipherable nonsense that’s circling the globe. Language born online, from incel communities. Christ alive, look at this absolute nonsense. As Theroux’s piece observed, and as Jeremiah Johnson points out, not only are they all faking it, but they all look “like an AI-generated male sex doll and talk like their brain is made out of mashed potatoes”. And these mogging saga’s are designed like soap operas or wrestling. Kayfabe. Click bait. Beyond the obvious issues of hyper-narcissism (Clavicular hits himself in the face with a hammer to improve his looks), the pedalling of incel ideology, an intimacy crisis, and the fact that kids are exposed to and sharing this shite, the bigger question, obviously, is why this incel language has mainstreamed. In short, the answer is even sadder. Attention. Stick a word from this dialect into a post, and it gets more of it. JFC. We need to wake up to what we share. For all our sakes.
brands // omotenashi 🛎️
I haven't been to Japan (yet), but I’ve always loved their philosophies. They always feel considered, profound and timeless. Not sure this is the lived experience today, but I think it is. They have a word for a particular kind of hospitality which is practiced called Omotenashi. It’s the art of wholehearted, selfless hospitality, focusing on anticipating a guest's needs before they arise, without expecting rewards. It is selfless attention to detail and meticulous care. It is Ichigo Ichie, the philosophy that every encounter is unique and will never happen again, so should be cherished. Colin Nagy wrote about Omotenashi in this excellent piece. He notes that the dominant digital paradigm is personalization, which is the opposite of omotenashi in almost every important way because it announces itself (“Because you watched...”), it benefits the platform first, and the user second, it mistakes behavioral data for understanding, and it arrives with a kind of transactional visibility that Omotenashi specifically refuses. Omotenashi does exist in places like Google Maps’ lane guidance, which tells you the lane to be in a mile before your exit. No gimmick. Just help. Unannounced. He goes on to say that "the ugly contrast is that most of what we call personalization is extraction dressed as service. Knowing and selling are inseparable. Omotenashi, in its Japanese form, has no such ambiguity. The host’s anticipation is entirely in service to the guest. Omotenashi is real value creation, not simply value extraction. We need more of this.
creativity // stupid 🤡
Enjoyed this by Sharif Shameem, on how a willingness to look stupid is a genuine creative moat and how looking foolish is underrated. He writes “Good Ideas, and I mean this in the broadest sense – research directions, startup ideas, premises for a novel – almost always sound stupid at first. They often make the person who came up with them look stupid. So if a truly Good Idea always starts out by looking unserious, then the only way to have one is to get comfortable producing stupid things”. So, we have two options he suggests. Overshare, but look stupid. Or undershare, but never do anything interesting, where you’re afraid of looking stupid, so the exceedingly few ideas that you do share end up being incredibly bland. Jasmine Bina also wrote about forming her thoughts by sharing her thoughts, she says “I personally have to write about something publicly 5 or 6 times before I even really know what I think about it”……And “If you want to break through to the next level of your thinking, it may be time to suck it up and let people misunderstand you for the sake of getting to where you want to be”. As E.M. Forster said “How will I know what I think until I see what I say” and Audre Lord wrote “I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood.” So as Sharif writes “Your goal shouldn’t be to share something good. It should just be to share something at all. Even if it isn’t good. A half-baked blog post. A silly demo. A weird project. I’ve been doing too much selection, and not enough production”. That’s my goal this year at least. Brace yourselves.
technology // control 🚦
One of the things about tech that I feel inflicts society, is the absolute lack of control. Apps preying on us without controls. Content consumed uncontrollably. And we’re now falling into AI with that same lack of control. We are incapable of drawing the line. Incapable of putting it away. Incapable of seeing through it. We’re falling for it all uncontrollably. As it inches and creeps further into our lives, and our chats. No surprise then that British MP’s are now using AI to write speeches. That journalists are getting accused of using AI to generate articles, including the ex CEO of one of Ireland’s largest media organisations who was suspended for using fabricated quotes produced by AI. Worringly too that recent research has found that the number of AI chatbots ignoring human instructions is increasing. Uncontrollably creeping forwards. Agents taking our agency. Who could have ever predicted such a thing?
five random (ish) things:
Kyoto in snow ❄️
Tiny puppet chill (choons) 😎
Watch The Plastic Detox 😔
Highly addictive jumping 🕹️
Amazing, IVF journey UX 😲
Listening // wolf 🐺
Take a trip down memory lane (least for me). I can smell my school bag listening to this. The satchel with band names scratched all over it. The whiff of pencils. Arcade games. Cigarettes. Kisses. Quiffs. Bubble toe docks. The joy. Anyway. Good luck.