Substrate

At a 1962 conference at the Museum of Modern Art, conservative art critic Hilton Kramer denounced Pop Art as “indistinguishable from advertising art” because “Pop Art does not tell us what it feels like to be living through the present moment of civilization. Its social effect is simply to reconcile us to a world of commodities, banalities and vulgarities.” But perhaps the content of graphic design is exactly that: an evocation of “what it feels like to be living through the present moment of civilization,” with all its “commodities, banalities and vulgarities.” How else can we discuss the content of a typeface or why the typography of a surfing magazine suddenly becomes relevant? Or how a series of made-up or ‘self-initiated’ posters—already a medium of dubious functionality— can end up on the wall of a major design museum? Work must be saying something, which is different than being about something.

…

I can't help but think that if we were to start again with governments we wouldn't have what we've got now. I certainly think that our response to the climate crisis would be better if we took a more anarchist approach.

One hundred thousand per-cent this:

Our culture creates traps and opportunities. There’s social and commercial pressure to engage in activities and jobs that don’t serve us very well. If horror movies give you unsettling nightmares, don’t go. No matter how many times your friends invite you, no is a complete sentence.

…

Source: Mikey Burton

Tom's currently sharing photos of runs he's doing in the Austrian mountains, while I'm laid up with a self-inflicted calf tear after attempting to race my teenage daughter in our back garden.

So it's only fair that I use my time being mostly horizontal to do something productive. Hence TechFreedom Digest #5 is now available for your attention and enjoyment.

There's not many people who write long posts that are worth reading any more, but Adam Mastroianni is one of them. His latest is on the topic of "incentives" with his argument being that we as humans need to transcend our animal-like tendency to respond to incentives with something, well, more noble.

I'm back to work today so, in between client meetings, I've been working on doing the final edits to my zine Field Notes on Productive Friction.

A pocket guide to noticing the frictionless tools that remove your agency, containing eight patterns of capture, plus one self-administered audit. Making the case for reflection over convenience in a world of doomscrolling.

…

"In his pamphlet on Louis Bonaparte, Karl Marx struck a middle path between voluntarism and structuralism when he wrote: Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. And just when they seem engaged in revolutionizing themselves and things, in creating something that has never yet existed, precisely in such periods of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle cries and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this time-honoured disguise and this borrowed language. What happens in a crisis depends on a multiplicity of factors, and not just on revolutionaries and counterrevolutionaries. Revolutions are usually initiated by a minority taking advantage of an exceptional conjuncture which they have not created. If the revolutionaries triumph, they must establish an authoritarian regime to convince others of the righteousness of their aims, or they must give power (usually through the suffrage) to the masses; but if the masses are not in tune with the revolutionary minority, a process which no one had foreseen may develop."

…

I'm going to use the term 'affordance' in what follows, and I know from experience over the years that people misunderstand this term:

In psychology, affordance is what the environment offers the individual. In design, affordance has a narrower meaning; it refers to possible actions that an actor can readily perceive.

…