semi-charmed kinda life 🥲

Defining the aesthetics of charms as a path toward a brighter future and mapping a global music genre that mashes sounds from the past and present, all through the radio.

Oct 26, 2025

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🔮 BARCELONA: the next Trend Report Live™ is November 2!! Bring a friend and see you then: RSVP here!!!!
🦿HIP REPLACEMENT🦿 this week featured Patrick Kho, who chatted with Ben Dietz and I about why young people are obsessed with saving for retirement, the aesthetics of vulgarity that mark these times, and the divine basicness that much of the world inhabits. Listen now on Spotify and YouTube!

Common error caused major AWS outage

On one hand? Bless this mess, because I was able to leave the caves of Substack and Canva to go to the gym because I couldn’t do shit. On the other? It’s very concerning that half the internet can go down at once because it’s all tied to a monopoly, which is a reminder to myself to migrate to Ghost (among other reasons). I can draw a direct line from this outage to ongoing IT issues with air travel and the blackout in Spain, Portugal, and France, which illustrates how fragile these systems are — and that we may be entering an era where such outages become normal. A la: consider if sites like an AI data center or cloud system become zones for activists to take offline. This feels like the perfect pipelines to act out against (unless said pipelines brain rot themselves).

The Trump Supremacy
The East Wing is gone
Bannon: ‘There’s a Plan’ for Third Term
Trump nominee withdraws after texts
The dark side of US political group chats
Platner Controversy Hasn’t Rattled Voters (Yet)

Big monarchy vibes this week — Obviously. — which collides into the ongoing Nazi vibes, which is repeatedly upsetting and sad but also so uninteresting given that it’s 1.) an ongoing stain on Millennial irony culture that now has become actual Nazism (a la: the difference between Paul Ingrassia and Graham Platner) and 2.) it’s zombie culture to the extreme, so feeble minded and uncreative that they copy old fascism instead of forging their own, not that either is “good” by any stretch. Then there are like Vogue legitimizing the moment, all as accounts like LibsOfTikTok continue the goose step, proudly taking on the Nazi title. Vile!

Peru’s president declares state of emergency

Of interest and concern, that state militarized power worldwide is making big moves. I am admittedly not up on all the context here, but hearing this in reaction to young people demanding action is a red flag, particularly as American footprints are all over the continent.

Countering Russian hybrid warfare in Africa

This story is long, which I didn’t read all of: a fascinating online war is being waged in Africa regarding misinformation, fuelled by Russia. As if we thought 2016 was bad enough! A reminder that these meddlers meddle everywhere —and have sharper tools.

Does Earth have 2 moons? Not quite.

Depending on who you ask, we have a second moon through the 2080s — but technically we don’t.

Peanut Allergies Have Plummeted
“Biggest public health success”

A lot of talk this week about the peanut allergy crash in kids, which is interesting but also feels very MAHA to rally around this as a win, all so that you “don’t have to” worry about extending best allergy practices to people. If you want to science out, read this story about how Covid vaccines protect from cancer.

Mosquitoes found in Iceland
Bear toll reaches new high
Coral collapse signals tipping point

Three small horse people of the climate apocalypse: mosquitoes on every landmass but Antarctica, rising bear attacks in Japan, and the loss of a major coral reef.

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Paintings from hundreds of years ago, realistic but not hyper realistic, where your mind fills in the blanks to make the unreal real. A Chanel ad from 1998, featuring a vault made of real bottles and a real dog cast as a wolf. “Before 2000. everything was more with soul and colorful,” someone comments. “This is what robots are supposed to be doing not writing scripts and making art,” someone comments on a video of smart cleaning technologies, most of which involve human cooperation. “You can’t separate these samples from their history and purpose in society and from their enclosure or armature, which is the archive,” Daniel Lopatain (Oneohtrix Point Never) says of his new album, in Tone Glow. “Some of the strangers on the path did stop to ask questions, and I told them about Two-Step and all the pigeon life under that bridge,” Brian Buckbee wrote about his rescue pigeon, Two-Step. “When you need comfort the most, that is when it’s hardest to find. But then the strangers arrive, brought to you as a result of the cosmic intersection of pandemic and bird.”

These technologies — a painting, a film, a robot, a song, a pigeon — have one thing in common: charm. They twinkle and glow with literal and metaphorical life, covered in the fingerprints of the living. Patience is required to create the item (A film commercial.) or to interpret the item (A painting.) or to live with the item (A pigeon.). They’re of interest as times have become so charmless: paintings like music like pigeons have been cannabalized by corporatized private equity and tech conglomerates and whatever algorithmic creation is being hoisted upon us as a “quick win.” This is why the conversation about old tech swirls every few months, no matter if people really are using old tech as its influence — flip phone revivalism, multicolored showgirl vinyls, corded headphones — is everywhere: it represents not just a longing for tactility but for items that you can see working, items that have a touch of complication while solving unnecessary problems (an always on screen, sound quality, battery power). When everything is glossy and slick, mirrored to tell the truth, there is nothing to interpret. There is no thinking. “Friction isn’t the enemy anymore,” byooooob posited on Instagram. “It’s the filter. It separates the casual from the committed.”

Thus, a definition of charm: items that require human collaboration and friction, less in the sense of life being hard but that you are better able to slow down to savor the juice because you squeezed it from the fruit yourself. When something — art, a tool, life — is too easy, it becomes boring, mindless, flattened, a widening yawn that sucks you into a brain and bed rotted state, a Wall-E person. Just like nonfiction becoming documentary becoming a livestream, interpretation is the mark of charm. This isn’t to say “Read books and never go on social media!,” nor is this a call to turn back the clock: no. But — to the point of our shared zoochotic feelings — there is the creeping sensation that so much of the tools and gestures of contemporary life are a plurality of vulgarities that go beyond the real and into a space of inhumane and unreal optimization: the joy of staring at yourself whilst masturbating from within a box lined with mirrors is only fun for so long. “The Vulgar Image is the expression of machines, and those who have had their brains scrambled by machines,” Dean Kissick explained in Spike this summer, defining charm’s opposite. “It is the true image of our time: the image of how we are corrupted and changed by images.”

I was chatting about this last weekend with my friend Andrew Bellamy, which started as our mapping tech and larger cultural disconnects (Or dislikes.) occurring between audiences (“consumers”) and brands (“tech”). When we compare “high quality” and “futuristic” expressions of modernity like a Marvel movie or whatever AI can generate with something like the Diego Velázquez painting Las Meninas and string works like “Cello Sonata nº 1” and “Butoh Baby” and dance — be it “The Rite of Spring” or “The Tortoise and the Hare Race Again” — the charmers are obvious to discern. This does and doesn’t relate to conversations about most products now being “poorly made” as the connective tissue here is the loss of integrity, that pushing the easy button of capitalism for so long has resulted in everything around us having the shortest half-lives: it’s not just that your social profile is likely to disappear at any moment, taking with it enter portions of your history, but that all the photos on your phone go unlooked at and will, at some point, be lost in cloud shuffling, hardware crashes, or the casual history killer that is “running out of data.” All modern tech products — online and off — were designed to disappear, further revealing how century’s old paintings are a far superior information technology compared to computer files that disappear in less than a decade. “Media like film, video tapes, like floppy disks: all of these media inherently degrade over time,” conservator Jonathan Farbowitz of The Met explained, in a TikTok from last year that has haunted me for months. “We have to have a strategy for making these things viewable over time.”

When we look at the world through the lens of charm, we can find commonalities — and ways forward. The Louvre robbery says this best: “In a world full of AI scams and crypto startups, it is so refreshing to see somebody get to work with their own two hands and make money the old fashioned way,” a viral TikTok observed, which was echoed and romanticized far and wide. Unrealistic video games are charming, which The New York Times’ Zachary Small explained in late 2024 in regards to Roblox and Fortnite’s popularity: “People are no longer so interested in graphical fidelity: they want a game they can play with friends anywhere, from an iPhone to a Playstation.” This ties into something like Instagram offering Myspace-like features, a vulgar move as it speaks to sales tactics versus charming customization and friendmaking, reminding how MySpace — like Instagram — died as big business swept in with the co-sign of Justin Timberlake. The “post naive” internet, digital spaces that are anti-corporatized like Perfectly Imperfect and Are.na, are inherently charming as they cure vibe homelessness by offering place and space for those in search of real people within the dark of technology. AI is obviously a wealth of vulgarity, in its slipperiness that carves away at you, becoming a literal and intellectual site of impoverishment. Compare this to crude Photoshopping, which continues to charm despite visual technology’s advances. “You want to see people’s skills,” a literal child said on Recess Therapy this week. “You have to think for yourself…You must think for yourself.” Cava and Wonder and Sweet Green: these are vulgar venture backed lunches, where food and private equity comingle in a bowl. A small, local restaurant? Cooking at home? Not using a delivery app? Making dinner for friends? Charm in every bite! House flipping? A vulgar evil, where original design is bulldozed for beige (despite unflipping movements). “Large swaths of the population now buy into the idea of making your own luck’ as a more literal virtue than it used to be,” Alex Danco wrote of the concept in relationship to meme stocks and other postmodern digital gambles and grifts. I could go on and on — adorkable 2010s creators versus optimized creators now, Polaroids versus printers requiring subscriptions, cotton versus polyester, the rise of the cassette tape versus the fall of Spotify, natural smiles versus perfect veneers, Millennial Y2K versus Millennial gray — but I’ll stop. (It’s to be noted: this is also how we end up with something like MAHA’s popularity or even MAGA, both longings for simplicity in over complicated times, of being able to eat a vegetable as a vegetable and not a food “product” with a cache full of chemicals. Through the lens of charm, you can see how and why the movement became captivating.)

I raise this as we are becoming exhausted by a life that is marked by its charmlessness, sold to us as ease as we become further disconnected from each other and from nature, all to encourage our viewing trees like animals like people as a resource instead of life. When you’re dumb and lazy, everything is impressive but also difficult, drool-inducing because every hole you have was trained to loosen so someone could plug you up. Doing a little work — reading, sewing, walking, whisking — is a means to pave a path forward, which is particularly important as techno optimism shifts to decided doomerism. When we look at the world through the lens of charm, everything becomes more beautiful, more meaningful. We’ve seen the future and it’s fine: that’s why we’re seeking a supernormal equilibrium.

The Goon Squad
“kind of stupid”

I feel like it’s been a long time since there was a zeitgeisty essay as such, and this one is good. Naturally, The Cut also started something as well, which I did not read. As the second link illustrates, I thought most of us knew about goon culture as such? I suppose this is where the extremely online and not differentiate themselves. All to say: if you haven’t read Tony Tulathimutte’s Rejection, now would be the time. (See also: The Guardian post-red pill guy.)

We’re Testing Comments
“can’t wait”

As a dedicated Pitchfork fan, I’m obligated to share this — but it also is a clever twist on the ongoing “Stans are dogwalking critics!” conversation, which will evolve Pitchfork from not only a music publication but Metacritic too.

Disney+, Hulu Cancellations Spiked

Playing into a 2025 theme that boycotts work, this loss of four million subscribers is quite the dent, even if that’s “just” 10% of subscribers. This is less a “Stick with woke!” thing but proof of the need to actually have a backbone. Stop rolling over, people-in-power!

Gen Z is resisting workplace emergencies

Love this, but Millennials definitely started this lol That said — and as we discussed in a Rosie Lee Group chat a few months back — I definitely push back when this logic is used as an excuse for laziness. Regardless, this story stands in contrast to the “996” propaganda going around.

A Tower on Billionaires’ Row Is Full of Cracks
“This tower is like any other”

The most infuriating architecture story of our times: the pre-post mortem of 432 Park Avenue.

Oatly blames ‘doom and gloom’ climate talk

I wrote about this a few weeks back in TR.BIZ, but the trend of “blaming climate change” for sales dips is really killing my vibe. See also: European governments bailing on sustainability!

Press secretary lets Democrats have it

This review of Karine Jean-Pierre new book is your must read for the week. It completely eviscerates the modern Democrat apparatus, showing that Jean-Pierre like the larger Dem establishment have completely lost the plot. (While we’re at it, this insane Janet Jackson 2020 post about voting is an all timer.)

All of Chuquimamani-Condor’s music — whether as Elysia Crampton or Los Thuthanaka, a mix or a compilation — involves a clear reference: the radio. A Lil Jon “YEAH-YUH,” the gravelly radio jingle pur of expressions like “authentico,” the FM radio merging of the melodramatic piano on Bruce Hornsby’s 1986 hit “The Way It Is” with the pan flute of Águilas de América’s 2015 “Por Ti” to create a fusion of the two: the experience of their music is one in which time and geography merges, as if a cosmic radio allowed you to seek the space between stations, to hear songs and jingles and commercials that tell of the past and the present, all while making the future. That’s what makes Chuquimamani’s music exciting: it’s a layering through the history of twentieth and twenty-first century music, finding a beauty not only in the musically quotidien but in the ensuing cross-culture. Their radio wasn’t my radio but may have been yours and, no matter if you no longer listen to the radio, their music and mixes is a time capsule to a more charmed moment in music when you were your own DJ before you knew how to DJ, when mixing songs and sounds was happenstance, of you in the passenger seat of a car, speeding down the highway, windows down, hoping that you caught the station at the right time, when the disc jockey would say the title, the artist, the context that you wouldn’t otherwise be able to find.

Chuquimamani is also of-a-kind, an artist that is post pop edit but in conversation with something similarly accessible: they’re carving the space for a very contemporary genre I’m calling regional radio, which I stumbled into earlier this week in chatting with Philip Sherburne (video coming Wednesday, by the way). These are artists working in on the fringes of mainstream music — locally and internationally — be it because they come from a place or community that isn’t particularly close to the western or northern hemisphere or because their genres are hard to categorize as they’re so interwoven with a local sound, which creates a novelty for listeners but also an opportunity for musicians aware of what’s happening on America’s internet. A few breakouts in this space: the synth pop of Keanu Nelson is informed by the history of First Nations and Papunyan music, rolling together Indigenous radio with the development of electronics; the work of Kampire fits perfectly here, as she helps to surface new and old works from East and South African cultures, offering an alternate history of music that answers what else was happening in the world of synth pop in the 1980s outside of the highly exoticized Japanese City Pop; Nyege Nyege Tapes surfaces not only regional African music from Uganda but makes space for international breakouts like Brazil’s DJ K and western India’s DJ Smiley Bobby while Hakuna Kulala works similarly, championing global artists like Venezuela’s DJ Babatr and Russia’s WULFFLUW94; Brazil’s DJ Ramon Sucesso seems to singlehandedly be defining “bubble beat,” taking baile funk into scratchier, fuzzier, and more mangled territories of samples and references to favela culture. There are many others within this universe — Miami’s La Goony Chonga and Kenya’s Slikback, for example — that take influences from near and far to create something that isn’t quite fusion of influence but definitely is standing on the shoulders of history, which is why phrases like “genre bending” are used again and again to describe these artists.

While the radio itself is more apparent for some than others, this sound is an example of how cross-culturalism continues to bloom, to excite, to create reverential collabs that honor others while pushing sound forward. I raise this as the larger trend happening now is one of cultural recessions and electronic music’s stagnation, where “everyone wants to be a DJ” but “no one wants to dance,” as the viral thought goes. The space of dance music — and music in general — has become vulgar, where dancefloors are sites for financial analysts to perform culture. Berghain is no longer a source of inspiration but a playground for the Drakes and the Elon Musks to flex knowledge of a culture that was authentic a decade ago, all as terms and concepts like “soft clubbing” colonize the rave. “Somehow techno got absorbed into the New York experience economy,” Emily Witt observed of aspects of the scene in 2024’s Health and Safety. “It became entertainment. A younger crowd who needed to photograph themselves as much as they needed food…The music got faster and littered with pop edits, and I would go to parties and think that this was what must sound right if you’d been taking Adderall since you were seven years old.”

Regional radio and all its various subgenres within and without are a salve: it’s dance and not, it’s history and not, it’s listenable and not. It suggests plurality during a time that seeks to minimize multiculturalism, that seeks to reward the already rewarded. And yet: these sounds are what will carry us forward, not just as “things to listen to” but as examples of artistic process and community creation. “These remote dispatches carry a vital new voice from the heart of the desert, where tradition and sonic experimentation delicately converge,” concludes the description of Keanu Nelson’s latest release. These are gluttonous times where so many things sound the same, where culture has become a copy machine and we the exhausted secretaries forced to read every page that comes out of its warm mouth. Step outside and tune into an alternate FM: embrace the regional radio.

If you’re looking for essentials — or at least listen to my favorites — start here.