go girl give us nothing
Looking at the many ways we've all become so boring and so smooth-brained, and chatting with a small business brain about what's popping for entrepreneurs.
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🦿 HIP REPLACEMENT 🦿 this week is all about COLLEGE!!!!!!!! Ben Dietz and I are joined by Tade Oyerinde of Campus to chat about the state of higher education, why students are booing at AI chatter, and the Backrooms. Listen in now on Substack, YouTube, and Spotify!
Becerra advances
L.A. mayor’s race could be a holy war
Raman closing in on Pratt
I am so mad at the California election. I voted for Steyer and Raman, obviously, but it seems like a third of the state and of LA took cuckoo desperation pills or committed to their “counter-cultural” Republican bits and…here we are! And we’re still rooting for Nithya Raman!! As I said Tuesday — and as others pointed out — this has all felt like the 2020 Democratic primary but worse. At least the memes are good! (While on the subject of Los Angeles: why is the army doing “urban warfare” training in Pasadena and Long Beach?)
Poor Ivanka Can’t Build $1.4B Resort in Peace
Albanian ex-military base into luxury resort
“mysteriously acquired island”
“what’s happening in Albania”
Sure, Trump has dropped his “anti-weaponization” fund, but Ivanka and Jared stepped in to say “lol we’re buying an island” and have drawn rage from European coasts to American coasts. Evil! The island’s positioning and history is…interesting.
How to fight back against Gen-Z socialism
This dumbass Economist story is definitely rage bait, or at least it represents what certain people think about pushes for equality or “socialism.” It’s classist and agist, which makes my blood boil — and I’m not alone on this!
How Japan Lost 3M People in Five Years
Looking for a glimpse into the future of declining populations? Look to Japan, where there are two deaths for every birth, as rural areas hollow out in favor of cities. This is seen as a big signal for developing countries, which I do not imagine shit like AI is going to help given job losses are not a baby boomer.
Americans Have Grown Dramatically Anti-Data
Tech Sector Announces Most Job Cuts in Two Years
“90% of companies using AI to screen applicants”
The first one is a huge log to add to the people-hate-AI fire, whilst the second and third adds lighter fluid. Again: this is a defining political issue of this moment! And few seem to be latching onto it!! No wonder Sam Altman is sucking up to Bernie Sanders as the industry is growing desperate to become more appealing. (Ahem, Reese.) (And, ahem, Argentina.)
A religious exemption from using AI at work
The way I will pick up my crucifix and become Catholic again if that means getting to opt out of the AI hellscape — and so will many more people!!
Some Christians See Vexing Questions — and Demons
Archbishop removes priest for saying UFOs are demons
“UFO disclosure was coming”
Remember #Rapturetok? Buckle the up because it appears the government — and leaders like JD Vance — are priming Christians to connect aliens with demons. See also: the people who think Disclosure Day is “predictive programming.”
“conservatives dying at significantly higher rates”
Political polarization of health outcomes in the USA
I don’t think anyone will find this surprising, that right wing beliefs correlate with premature deaths due to anti-science thought.
Ovarian cancer drug: more time, better life
Cooking meal a week at home reduces dementia
Now for some good news!
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“I’ve experienced every single highly regarded piece of art and culture from the last 50 years,” a viral post goes, illustrating a mind locked into a cage of high culture. “why aren’t I happy yet?” Perhaps that is the wrong question. A better one might be “why am I still bored?” I assume everything in question — the Criterion films, the matcha, the Le Labo, the Artforum — came to them versus participating in such sites and sources. This is curating what was already curated. Experienced, no: ingestion.
This reminds me of the stories I hear about kids not having interests, of nothing “grabbing” them. I hear this from my mother, from my aunt, from strangers online: some kids — like some of us — don’t have any idea what they want. They coast on uninteresting waters, blank-faced and uneasily impressed. “We giving them more,” basketball player Tyrus Thomas said a few months ago, “and they doing less. They don’t got the passion for it.”
Take food, for example: when food is sweeter and hyper-colored, available at any moment, something like hunger no longer exists in our cultural vocabulary. “Small cakes and pies have become a staple, not a treat,” Helen Zoe Veit wrote of mid-century kid food trends in her book, Picky. “Researchers noted, with middle-class housewives describing [cakes] as a necessity on their grocery list, and children thinking of them as routine.” Before this, before refrigerators and pre-packaged food, something like a cake — or bread or fruit or any food, really — was highly perishable and fragile, to be baked and enjoyed quickly in one place given the irregularity of ingredients and inability to keep what was made, meaning less sweets were eaten because they didn’t exist. Kids and adults also shared the same diet, Veit writes, as there was no difference between the diets of the old and young: food was food. Kids and adults showed up to the table hungry, without debating likes or dislikes, no picking and choosing. You ate to live. We’re at the other end of the bell curve, where all of us are picky and every food is a comfort, each of us with a constant reservation at the kid’s table. Grazing boards, little treats, snack tins: save me from my stomach. Fill my mouth not with emptiness! The tongue has a job and it will never be unemployed. If it gets too bad? Fire every GLP-1 at will. Make it so I can still graze in teeny tiny ways. Give me minimal effort! Let me think not of proactive transformation.
It’s ironic, this lostness, as few of us are literally empty. Instead, we’re stuck in well organized hoarder houses akin to personal fulfillment centers. So many comforts that we are so badly bored by! I put the me in merchandise, we say, smiling, personalities dulled to nothing. Boredom, we write, of kids and adults, pulling images of melting clocks, leads to breakthroughs and innovations and yet: I’ll tell you what I want, what I really, really want — and it is everything and it sucks. “Part of culture is suffering from the ‘Oops! All Berries’-ification of everything,” someone on TikTok explained. “It’s taking a good thing and ruining it for cheap gratification.” “Are ‘algorithms’ making us boring?” we wondered two years ago, which is true but also the wrong conclusion: soft might be the better term. It has made us edgeless, rounded, capable of being rolled any way by anyone. We crave entertainment in everything (politics, healthcare, business) because we need such sugar and salt to make us feel anything. Unsurprisingly, a growing economy of content that battles boredom as if an endurance sport and rebrands loneliness as “solo life” rises too.
What was once one of the most interesting things about life — Learning! — has fallen into a similar rut. “Teachers noticed lower stamina, more distractions with cellphones, and sometimes a feeling that kids didn’t feel like they needed to show up,” Chalkbeat reported of New York City students last October, noting 78% of students “felt bored in school.” Brookings echoed a similar lack of challenge for students, as a study of Chinese college students connected boredom with an intolerance for uncertainty. Could we pin this to why kids are more difficult and less capable? Unsure, but — once again — look at the material: us. It’s not their fault college is easy and outdated, nor is it their fault that shame has gone extinct: we took sandpaper to our lives and demanded everyone “deal with” kidult adulthood. “Theatergoers today can sound like a laugh track in a television sitcom,” explains a recent The Wall Street Journal story. “Some blame the rising price of tickets, saying theatergoers feel entitled to misbehave in the same way sports fans feel the price of admission buys them the right to heckle players...Others say social media has made everyone the stars of their own plays.” “Some of you guys are…not really aware,” culturework explained on TikTok of what comes after parasociality: erotomania, a form of delusion where you believe others are obsessed with you. “The moment, which should be reserved for reflection, is replaced with the opportunity for immediate validation from the comment section.” We’ve lost our manners, the thinking goes, but also our minds, our intelligence, our ability to discern, all because we saw the pebble-less path to smooth-brained boredom and said GIMME. Every few months a new story about how dumb we’ve become underscores how we’re more humanoid than human, that we’re becoming “more efficient” due to our buying into what tech leaders sold as we give away any little challenge, any chance to prove your humanity. “Boring, repetitive, tasks that office workers complete daily are necessary to give our brains a break,” Fortune wrote a few weeks ago, chatting with psychologists about AI taking away “little” tasks. “Just because you have a tool to make you more productive, is your brain fully ready for that?” one of these professionals asked. You know the answer.
Yes, grab yourself a Brick, grab yourself a dumbphone, but grab yourself — and shake: wake it up. Your spine is dissolving, babes. You have become as passive as the income that you seek, which means everyone below us is fumbling toward such a life too, which is making them and us worse. “Most people are giving up too early,” Sarah Lewis wrote of achievement in 2015’s The Rise. “It is not talent, not even self-esteem, but effort that makes a difference in measurable forms of achievement.” Lewis notes self-esteem increased among American children in the 1990s, an improvement from the two decades prior. But measurable achievement? That lagged: “Higher self-esteem without higher levels of achievement means many American kids — particularly in the last couple decades — can feel really good about themselves without being good at anything.” Ouch.
“Let me ask you a very fair question,” the drag queen Bianca Del Rio asks us. “What do you do successfully?” We sit and we wonder, trying to pick apart our products from our personality, mouths filling with water, awaiting a snack to help us think, pushing down thumb to pointer finger to make this moment move at double speed. “Quickly,” Bianca snaps before we answer, saying everything by our giving nothing.
780 arrested after Paris Saint-Germain win
I love that this was a “We won! Yay :)” things that turned into an “AHH!! FUCK THE POLICE!!!!” things, even if it (sadly) resulted in the physical harm (and death) of bystanders. Naturally the right is having a field day.
A Stray Dog Became a Cultural Symbol
What Dogs See When They Look at Us
This week in dog stories, the first on a Brazil/Mexico fight for a genre of mutt and the second analyzing dogs in art history (via a book on the same subject).
Google requests permission to release mosquitoes
Flesh-Eating Maggots Are Back in the US
A tale of two bugs: Google is hoping to release mosquitos in California and Florida to combat disease while a gross maggots are making a comeback in livestock (which…Trump and his people are likely to bungle) (but dogs will save us from).
My Most Valuable Inheritance? My Granny’s Gay Gene
Peyton Dix’s essay on her grandmother’s queerness (and her own) is the best way to start Pride. Must-read of the week!
There Is No Sound Of The 2020s. Yet.
This is the other must-read of the week, about how there is no (electronic) music sound defining the 2020s and how this represents an issue of gluttony on the go, which squeezes out real scenes and real innovations. Very true, a la: culture recession!!
Art World Commentator Jerry Gogosian Dead
Shocking and sad. For the unfamiliar, Jerry — Hilde Lynn Helphenstein — certainly was one of the biggest social media art world breakouts, whose pulpy Instagram account told the truths of a once robust industry. A true star.
Pace Cuts Artists, Staff Amid Market Challenges
Don’t make me tap the sign.
United turns around because of speaker name
Reminder not to name your bluetooth device “bomb” and have it on while flying.
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I have told people for years that, at a certain point of being an artist or creative, you shift from actually making to becoming a business. I don’t mean that you “stop making” but that the effort you put into making becomes secondhand or easy as a craft has been developed — and then it becomes a matter of sales, of you getting people to buy in as you attempt to make a living while sustaining the practice into the future. This is something I have been very bad at, as my writing is no longer a worry but instead figuring out how to make the writing “pay” has been: that’s my challenge, and has been for the past year or two. The results have been mixed, mostly that my desire to make-more-money from writing is eclipsed by myriad forms of exhaustion and limited time from working freelance and running a project like this. My cup overflows with desire. But whose doesn’t? Such is life now.
Someone whose ability to turn ideas into action that I really admire is Daniel Giacopelli, an American based in London who formerly hosted Monocle’s The Entrepreneurs and edited Courier, who now runs the small business newsletter For Starters. While my writing is about everything and nothing, Danny has always been zoomed in on what makes businesses work. Now, he’s following what the next generation of small businesses and makers (or “starts,” as he calls them) behind them are doing. His work with For Starters is part celebration and part guide on how to start and maintain a business, no matter where you are or what you’re doing. When we met up literally a year ago, in London last June, this subject was something we went back and forth on: how do creatives scale? How does something like a newsletter become “a business”? How do you “make it work”? Products came up, as did simply asking for help, as did taking the same risks in business as you would in creativity. What’s holding you back? It’s brilliant advice, which I have kinda taken (Trend Report: Trend Report™!) and kinda not taken (My fear of economic precarity eclipses my ability to take business risks!).
I reached out to Danny about sharing his thoughts on trends now, which would be interesting in and of itself — but I was also curious about what he’s seeing in small businesses, in case that offers any guidance for myself or others. Where are entrepreneurs going now? Is the space being hijacked by bad tech? Or is an unoptimized, a more human return to form emerging underneath it all? Fortunately, his thoughts were as uplifting — and non-technical, literally and figuratively — as I thought they’d be. Read on, to hear about the trend of print subscriptions, why the word “aesthetic” has lost its meaning, how AI can be a small business tool, and why buying businesses instead of starting one may be the next thing.
Tell me about a trend you’re following that you’re really into.
I love these print subscription clubs that are popping up all over the place, in which someone writes letters or stories or creates art and sends them via snail mail to subscribers around the world, for a fee. There’s a pen-pal-esque nostalgia angle here, which I like a lot. Writer/artist Cody Cook-Parrott has got an ‘analogue newsletter’ called PROMPTS — for $11/mo they’ll send you a hand-mailed newsletter with a set of writing prompts. Also, this person writes a fantasy story every month and sends it to hundreds of people across the world for £6.79/mo. There was an article about this trend a few weeks ago featuring tons of other examples. I’m an email newsletter guy, but my heart was originally in print media. While an email can sound personalized, it’s still blasted to thousands of people instantly by a robot. With an analogue subscription, you know the person literally wrote/handled/put care into what you received, on an individual level. That’s cool. Long may it live.What’s a trend you hope never dies?
Starters being honest about the hard stuff. The cultural shift from the heroic, glossy myth of founders to more honest vibes — i.e. ‘this is how I fucked up’, ‘here’s how I made money last month’, ‘here’s how I’m struggling right now’. Not necessarily the bro-tastic ‘building in public’ trend, which is fine if not a tad cringe at times when it borders on humblebragging. I mean more just being honest about the day-to-day of building a business, warts and all.What’s a trend you are so over?
There’s a high risk of being an old man yelling at the sky here, but I can’t stand people using the word ‘aesthetic’ to mean ‘beautiful/pretty/cute’. I will die on this hill. A cafe can have an aesthetic appeal, or it can have a millennial aesthetic, but it can’t *be* aesthetic. I refuse to cave on this.What does the state of small businesses say about culture now?
Everyone’s starting a business these days. The biz application stats confirm there’s more businesses getting formed now than basically ever before. Gen Z are extremely entrepreneurial. Everyone’s got a side hustle. And everyone’s trying to ride the entrepreneurship train — Google searches for ‘how to start a business’ are at record numbers.But having said that, I gotta get off the starter hype train every now and then. It’s super important to dig into the reasons why they’re starting businesses. Mass layoffs are obviously contributing to new businesses getting formed, out of sheer necessity. There isn’t always a rosy ‘follow your dreams and do what you love’ narrative. It’s more ‘I need to pay my rent so I’m taking on an extra gig or two.’ It’s always helpful to be honest about the why. Of course, tons of people are also starting their dream business!
I’m also seeing two very visceral trends that sorta/kinda contradict one another. Tons of people are starting analog businesses — craft-based products, making zines, building IRL experiences, etc. And yet at the same time we’re seeing this enormous trend of laypeople/non-coders vibecoding apps and trying to make money from them. I’m convinced the magic is where these two trends meet: using AI to supercharge an analog business.
What’s the “next big” small business trend?
Two things come to mind. 1) I love this quote from Ashley Lukasik, founder of Murmur Ring, in Design Observer the other week: “The future does not need more speed; it needs more meaning.” Pretty self-explanatory. And 2) here’s another trend most people are sleeping on: millions of boomer small business owners are about to retire. Most of them don’t have succession plans or offspring who want the throne. There’s going to be an enormous wave of people buying these businesses rather than starting one from scratch. Sometimes it’s better to buy than to start.
Subscribe to For Starters here and follow them on Instagram. Follow Danny on Instagram too.
“first pride month without”
“first pride month without”
“spock at pride:”
“I was supposed to know?”
“transvestigating Adolf”
“represents mathematicians”
“Judith Butler will immediately teleport”
“DURING PRIDE”
“Lexi recerates her Pride month video”
“Happy Pride month”
“mood”
It’s Pride! And there are a lot of good memes!! And an allegedly queer Björk!!!!
“WTF timeline are we on.”
“literally in tears”
“I like painting.”
“this is the aesthetic”
“NO WAY”
Hunter “Twitter” Biden…the king that you are. Come over and let’s read his Tweets. Let’s recite them!
“random baby smiled”
This is how I always interact with babies, btw.
“they wouldn’t be breathing”
In case you were wondering why we have two nose holes, here’s a great answer.
“most controversial of all time”
“beautiful sentence”
A few posts about movies that I liked.
“I need my car”
“How do you remove a car”
“engaging in an act of creative defiance”
The Seattle person driving on the subway tracks really pissed me off. But what was worse? Potentially this woman’s subway elevator story.
“put my body dysmorphia to the test”
Why are we like this? I too always give myself such physical fitness tests to prove my beauty. I’m too old to be doing this shit!
“Chinese Restaurants In A Dark Wet Cave”
Chinese Restaurants In A Dark Wet Cave
“a dinosaur sleep talking”
Heal yourself by watching a parrot sleep talk.
And, finally, truly how every day feels these days.
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“People don’t got the passion.” Is sssuchhh an encapsulation and gotta be my new tattoo.
Fabulous stuff Kyle!! Just burned through like 3 posts and the links you included, can’t wait to keep going. This one and I think your most recent hit home in particular around boredom and creating a frictionless life - you really succinctly captured things my wife and my friends and I have been feeling and talking about. Can’t wait to keep reading 🫶🏼