things right now 021
week of 01.27.25
Zombie Trends or bourgeois normcore
The New York Times cosigns my bourgeois normcore take from last winter: normcore is still here it just got more expensive. I think there are three slightly different trends butting up against one another here: the original normcore trend from 2014, which was decidedly not about luxury; its zombie sibling bourgeois normcore, which grew with Millennial incomes into a stealth-wealth double of the original; and the neo yuppies of our boom boom era. Can you wear Aimé Leon Dore x New Balance sneakers with Levis blue jeans and a Lemaire trench? Absolutely. Fashion is messy and style even more so. But each points to a slightly different aesthetic.
This look however, which The Times captions—“At Lemaire, some pieces beamed with opulence”—is not related to any of the three. While it may have a runway sheen, I’m not sure I would categorize that as opulent. The references are firmly planted in the brief euphoria of the globalizing millennium: the slacks, the three-button leather blazer, the A-line tank, and most of all, the dainty silver choker. This look could’ve dated Carrie Bradshaw in the second season of Sex and the City.
Its outlook is decidedly downtown.
Post-AI Moats or capital-havers v. capability-havers
I love this argument against the common doomer perspective on AI—”no one will have jobs”—maybe these tools will enable people with imagination more than it will enable people with money. Let’s hope Lars Doucet is correct.
He compares AI to a “magic genie”—and a genie that is cheap and accessible to the masses at that! From the piece:
The technical term of art for the situation we now find ourselves in is called not having a moat. A more casual way to put it is, "the dust cloud you see rapidly forming on the horizon evidences a band of rapidly approaching competitors hell-bent on violently eating your lunch for breakfast."
All those annoying programmers you just fired? Guess what, they have magic genies too, because genies are cheap. And while you leveraged your genies to fire all your staff, those fired staff members leveraged their genies to fire the concept of having to raise money, which used to be the chief barrier to entry that differentiated wagies from bosses.
At that point, the winner becomes whoever knows how to deploy their magic genies better, a contest that comes down to whoever has a better understanding of the customers' needs and wants and has a better vision for the product. In short the winner of a magic genie contest is whoever asks better questions.
RIP David Lynch or DFW on Lost Highway
David Foster Wallace’s 1996 essay has been saved for posterity on Lynchnet.com—a blast from the past in terms of its graphic design—have a look.
AN ACADEMIC DEFINITION of Lynchian might be that the term "refers to a particular kind of irony where the very macabre and the very mundane combine in such a way as to reveal the former's perpetual containment within the latter." But like postmodern or pornographic, Lynchian is one of those Porter Stewart-type words that's ultimately definable only ostensively—i.e., we know it when we see it. Ted Bundy wasn't particularly Lynchian, but good old Jeffrey Dahmer, with his victims' various anatomies neatly separated and stored in his fridge alongside his chocolate milk and Shedd Spread, was thoroughgoingly Lynchian. A recent homicide in Boston, in which the deacon of a South Shore church reportedly gave chase to a vehicle that bad cut him off, forced the car off the road, and shot the driver with a highpowered crossbow, was borderline Lynchian. A Rotary luncheon where everybody's got a comb-over and a polyester sport coat and is eating bland Rotarian chicken and exchanging Republican platitudes with heartfelt sincerity and yet all are either amputees or neurologically damaged or both would be more Lynchian than not. A hideously bloody street fight over an insult would be a Lynchian street fight if and only if the insultee punctuates every kick and blow with an injunction not to say fucking anything if you can't say something fucking nice.
The Party Deficit or America’s ongoing loneliness epidemic
The return to “normal” socializing has been a slog. Things have improved substantially though—at least at the places I frequent—but I didn’t realize quite how grim the situation remained for much of the country:
Only 4.1 percent of Americans attended or hosted a social event on an average weekend or holiday in 2023, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics; this is a 35 percent decrease since 2004. Last month, Party City, the country’s largest retailer of mylar balloons, goofy disposable plates, and other complements to raging, announced that it would close after years of flagging sales and looming debt.
I wonder how much this is an American phenomenon though. Is the severity mirrored in other developed country? Or is spiraling loneliness something that has uniquely infected the United States? Any tips on studies about this are much appreciated.
“The Cruel Kids’ Table” or the boom boom aesthetic
New York Magazine’s Brock Colyar covers New York and DC’s inauguration parties.
Our Sputnik Moment or China’s DeepSeek launch
The new Chinese AI product, DeepSeek is challenging American dominance in AI. Wall Street and investors are rattled.
Tentacular Thinking or logarithmic spiral robots
As one X user implies, sex robots won’t necessarily be humanoid.
This is just a hypothesis, but I suspect the car centric nature of the US means the spiralling loneliness is less of a problem elsewhere.
In most of the US, you have to actively choose to have an interaction with another human being. In the rest of the West, you get that from walking to the local shops (and you're also likely to be walking distance from a bar).