Mind Tavern Edition #4
Welcome to the 4th edition of Mind Tavern. Thank you for subscribing to this free newsletter, I don't intend to capture any data, but do consider sharing it on your social networks if you like it! Let’s dive write in.
We really need a revolution in Architecture
Nathan Robinson in his usual meticulous style writes in this essay that buildings around us are becoming bland, boring, tasteless, drab and disharmonious from history, nature and culture, all in the name of minimalism. He starts with examining the recent Pritzker Prize winners, the highest award in architecture.
See for yourself
I genuinely believe that a new design revolution is possible, one that rejects some of the dogmas of the last decades about what can and can’t be done, and that breaks free of the idea that architecture has to “look like its time.” There are so many incredible possibilities for architecture, but the minimalist consensus has got it stuck in a rut, spinning its wheels, producing weird new shape after weird new shape, because people are afraid they’ll be called backward if they admit they like mosaics and gargoyles and friezes and stained glass and other cool stuff. I like pretty colors or I like old things makes you a child, an idiot, someone to be laughed at.
Is the Internet just for Investment Bankers now?
Ian Bogost with an excellent piece about the financialisation of not just the internet, but also our immediate, real-world environment. Viewed through this lens of financialisation, Web3 sees investment assets everywhere: whether it’s songs, parks, stars or even colours. Read here.
..like any security, an NFT’s worth has less to do with what it is than what it might be worth. Just as the pork-futures commodity trader is not principally interested in taking delivery of pig meat, so the NFT trader is not necessarily concerned with the usefulness or even the symbolic value of an ape.
“First the internet made it easy for people to conduct their lives online. Then it made it possible to monetize the attention generated by that online life. Now the digital exhaust of all that life online is poised to become an asset class for speculative investment, like stocks and commodities and mortgages. ... It is, in a way, the most honest turn of the internet epoch. From the start, online businesses have presented themselves as making culture, even as they really aimed to build financial value. Now, at last, the wealth seeking is printed on the tin.”
What happens when the experience of a celebrity becomes universal?
This Newyorker article is a really good read into our behaviour on social media, especially in this era of doomsday scrolling and the quest for that extra bit of dopamine hit (more on this later in this post) that never is enough. Read here.
In his lectures, Kojève takes up Hegel’s famous meditation on the master-slave relationship, recasting it in terms of what Kojève sees as the fundamental human drive: the desire for recognition—to be seen, in other words, as human by other humans. “Man can appear on earth only within a herd,” Kojve writes. “That is why the human reality can only be social.”
In fact, this fundamental paradox—the pursuit through fame of a thing that fame cannot provide—is more or less the story of Donald Trump’s life: wanting recognition, instead getting attention, and then becoming addicted to attention itself, because he can’t quite understand the difference, even though deep in his psyche there’s a howling vortex that fame can never fill.
So here we are, our chins pressed into the metal holster between the fennec-fox ears, the constant flitting words and images of strangers entering our sensory system, offering our poor desiring beings an endless temptation—a power we should not have and that cannot make us whole.
Washing not Laundering
Professor Galloway in this week’s blogpost has written about money washing, kleptocracies and the fluidity of law that enables them. He talks about how the dirty money finds its way to museums, universities, food banks and even buying nobility to provide public legitimacy to the donor. Read here.
Money laundering is done in secret, because it requires hiding the source of money. Money washing hides in plain sight, because that’s the point (appearances). Money washers merely ask the broader community to ignore the money’s origins.
Oligarchs have taken stakes in everything from aluminum producers to Big Tech companies. Russian oligarch Mikhail Fridman’s LetterOne holds $25 billion in Western telecoms and oil companies; in 2016 it invested $200 million in Uber. The Saudis are prominent Valley investors as well. Sports teams are another target. Roman Abramovich’s ownership of Chelsea F.C. is only the highest-profile example of Russians owning or investing in soccer teams. Three out of the four clubs in last year’s Champions League semifinals were owned by oil sheikhs or Russian oligarchs.
London became money washing heaven on purpose, and it’s been doing this longer than anyone — since at least 1799, when King George III introduced the non-domicile tax system. It’s still in force today, with only limited reforms. Anyone living in the U.K. whose “real home” is abroad doesn’t have to pay taxes.
Are you really in vicarious trauma about the Ukraine war?
I recently came across James Greig’s essay ‘Stop making the Ukraine war about you’. Greig offers a compelling counter-argument to the popular self-care advice, suggesting that a victim mentality simply prioritises our own entitlement not to feel troubled. Taking a break from news media is important if only to develop a better understanding of our emotional response to it. The mindless doom-scrolling is neither good for our mental health, nor for our ability to experience real empathy. Read it here.
“The invasion of Ukraine is not something that is happening to us, and I don’t think claiming to be traumatised secondhand by it is suggestive of real empathy. It is, in fact, a corrosive impulse to make yourself the victim of a tragedy which is happening to other people, to hear about their suffering and prioritise your own self-care.”
“Wry, world-weary apocalypticism has become the most viscerally annoying genre of internet humour. Apart from anything, it’s just boring, trite, and unfunny to be tweeting about ‘living through the literal end of days’, when you’re sitting cosy in your flat, ordering Deliveroo and watching Netflix. It’s an expression of real anxieties, I think, but there’s something smug about it. It’s gallows humour for people who aren’t really on the gallows.”
Something Beautiful yet thought-provoking
In this fantastic photo series called the Daily Bread, Gregg Segal visualises the impact of global warming on diets across the world. In his other series, Undaily bread he brings awareness to the refugee crisis of Venezuelan mothers and their kids who aren’t getting enough to eat. Something Beautiful yet thought-provoking
Dopamine and You
A very short read on how Dopamine affects your behaviour. Interestingly, dopamine spikes are the sharpest when the probability of a reward is around 50%, not when it is guaranteed. In other words, you get a larger dopamine hit while gambling than you do while waiting for your salary. That is the principle behind slot machines and why Instagram moved away from using reverse chronological order for photos. Read here.
Something Fascinating
Check out this mind-blowing and kinda scary visualisation of how many humans have ever existed and how many there might be to come.
A book you should check out: Jobs
This 600 odd page book by Walter Isaacson is one of the most elaborate biographies of our generation’s greatest marketer and innovator. The author is known for telling a coherent, cohesive story and most importantly he doesn't feel the need to hoist his subject on a pedestal with his pen. Unlike Ashlee Vance, he humanises Jobs and talks at length about his personal failings as well along with the numerous stories of his genius while building Apple, Next and Pixar. Highly Recommended.
On the day he unveiled the Macintosh, a reporter from Popular Science asked Jobs what type of market research he had done. Jobs responded by scoffing, “Did Alexander Graham Bell do any market research before he invented the telephone?”
Atop the brochure McKenna put a maxim, often attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, that would become the defining precept of Jobs’s design philosophy: “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”
Both could be rude, but with Gates who early in his career seemed to have a typical geek’s flirtation with the fringes of the Asperger’s scale, the cutting behavior tended to be less personal, based more on intellectual incisiveness than emotional callousness. Jobs would stare at people with a burning, wounding intensity; Gates sometimes had trouble making eye contact, but he was fundamentally humane.
“The reality distortion field was a confounding mélange of a charismatic rhetorical style, indomitable will, and eagerness to bend any fact to fit the purpose at hand,”
Thread(s) of the week: Obesity, fats and sugar
Ever thought about when we started to blame obesity and heart ailments on saturated fats, which we as a species were consuming for centuries. It all started with a study by an enterprising professor named Ancel Keys in the aftermath of an incorrectly diagnosed Eisenhower’s heart attack. As it turns out, the study was fought with inconsistencies and cherry-picking of data to suit the narrative. So what did we do when we took the fat out of our food? We supplemented with sugar and vegetable oils that were "fat-free."
So what did we do when we took the fat out of our food? We supplemented with sugar and vegetable oils that were "fat-free." This resulted in sugar consumption skyrocketing in the US, and eventually everywhere. Read here.
Bonus: Dr Sheree Bekker in talks about the history of segregation in women’s sport here. She talks about the same in detail in her space, Holding Space as well, where she presents evidence of how women are actually beating men in many disciplines especially ultra-endurance racing and shooting.
Internet is Beautiful
Fun stuff for you to click on
You're Getting Old - A summary of all the interesting things that have happened since you've been born.
Not all maps are created equal; great thread on how the New York Times has changed its approach to mapping the Ukraine invasion.
Over 100 self-portraits to celebrate Women’s History Month.
Very cool Netflix blog post on the origins of the “Skip Intro” button, which is pressed around 132 million times a day.
Intriguing story of crony capitalism and Patanjali’s Ruchi Soya.
A fascinating story exploring the connection between what words look and sound like. Learn more about the evolution of words.
Trivia Corner: A couple of word origins
Serendipity: The word serendipity was invented in 1754 by Horace Walpole, the son of the first prime minister of England. He was kind enough to explain exactly how he had come up with the word. He was reading a book called the Voyage des Trois princes de Serendip, which is a story of three princes from the island of Serendip who are sent by their father to find a magical recipe for killing dragons. Walpole noticed that as their highnesses travelled they were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of.
Though the story of the three princes that Walpole read was pure fiction, the Island of Serendip was a real place, although it has since changed its name, first to Ceylon, and then, in 1972, to Sri Lanka. So serendipity is really a Sri-Lanka-ness.
Echo: This word finds its origin in the Greek mythology. Echo was a famous nymph and Zeus as a philanderer he was liked to screw everything with a pulse.
So in one of history's yet another case of victim blaming, Zeus's wife Hera blamed her for seducing his beloved husband. She made her only able to speak the last words spoken to her. So when Echo met Narcissus and fell in love with him, she was unable to tell him how she felt and was forced to watch him as he fell in love with himself. This is where we get the word Narcissistic to describe the person with excessive egotistical traits.
If you loved the stories, you would enjoy these books for your daily dose of fun etymologies behind the common English words.