No one knows when to stand on the table to declare “this is canon” vs when to allow it to happen naturally.
Technologist have a fear, in my opinion, of standing on the merit of their ideas. In a landscape that prides itself on the virtues of iterating into success, it is a flaw of the culture.
But we don’t have much time here on this Earth, and this talk needs to be known. It is what breaks us out of the fog. Made by a scene drinking coffee while 99% of the population has been enjoying a decade long bender.
All immigration projects are ones of creative expansion. Religious. Economic. Philosophical. Sexual.
Mars is no different. Even more, it is the most ethical. As it doesn’t, from our current perception, include the displacement of natives.
Before I cleared my Twitter for the 50th time, I tweeted one of the best thing I’ll ever say: the mirror was the final product. Mars offers us the biggest mirror we’ve had since the internet. It is truly total. From Mars we can see all of us and everything. How our cultures move in and around each other. What is broken, and what will come with us whether we like it or not.
Mars is the largest creative opportunity of our time. This either speaks to you or it doesn’t. But when you recognize that being the creative director at Louis Vuitton isn’t the top job, the entire world of possibility should open in your eye.
Nuclear Energy needs a creative director. Deep sea exploration needs a creative director. Honestly, Ethereum needs a creative director.
Mars is the only image that casts us far enough off from our current point, to look at it with new clarity and push it where it needs to go. In doing so we create the secondary effects of actually making progress with our big problems like climate change.
People talk about the sense of rot that a lot of our institutions and cultures face, and there seems to be an inclination towards the rearview mirror. The turning back in order to fix what they see. It is that perpetual turning back that is causing the very issue you are trying solve.
The return of ambition is the way out. This design challenge ahead of us that is Mars, can chart a multitude of competing images of the future. And it is in that richness we will spring a new garden of cultures.
This exercise of promoting the talk is not one of trying to be convincing — it is about raw distribution of the meme for those that are already tuned into the frequency but haven’t heard the news yet. Below are more tools for them.
I don’t do edits really, so excuse typos and things that don’t make sense.
Thanks so much for giving me your attention. I hope it was worth it, if not… unsubscribing will not hurt my feelings, and will give you back time you literally cannot have back.
If you follow my playlists, you’ll know that every so often I’ll simply make a couplet. Two songs that perfectly capture something special. Enjoy this two track loop while reading.
I promise there is a reason I’m using this photo again, just get through the piece...
During the bull push on products like Superhuman. The term “luxury software” started to creep into the language profile of venture folks. And like many new language structures, the prefix of “luxury” felt like the suffix of “economy”. I remember my friend Toby saying something quite poignant about this phenomena.
In short, by utilizing luxury quite liberally to categorize the software they revealed an entirely new probe not mulled very often by technologists/investors: what level of design is necessary to break our typical pricing model of software.
LUXURIES & UNIVERSALS
A Coke is a Coke, and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking.
What's great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you can know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too.
— Andy Warhol
I love this quote because it’s in the same house of “the future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed”.
What happens when something is as distributed as a Coke, and the formula still resonates? In short (whether it’s healthy or not) equality. Coke is a universal.
Most of our most powerful software institutions can be categorized as universals. Particularly thanks, and I do mean THANKS, to the advent of advertising as the core UBI funder of information.
Google, subsidized by advertisement, made the internet searchable. Facebook created a free communications network. Youtube and Tiktok continue to kill network television. Even for Netflix to continue to grow they must turn to the cost reducing friend of advertising.
No one would consider these services luxuries, despite their services being super natural to our parents.
Where then does the potential for luxury sit for technologists? I point to where I always point → McLuhan. Technology shapes the senses.
The iPhone is almost like Coke. At least in America. Both the President and the janitor at the White House are utilizing the same phone. The difference between the iPhone and Coke is that one is an absurdly insane computer in your pocket. And that computer is massaging over multiple senses during the day. From smooth glass touch to nonstop visual pull to noise cancelling audio.
Software is the thing that tends to just dial in on a couple of these sense triggers. Instagram works over my eyes. Text works over my touch. TikTok works over my eyes and my ears. Etc. The point is the phone allows these organisms to exist within it, not the other-way around.
This is why I find luxury software to be a bit of a far call. Because the structures in which it lives in are nearly a universal good at this point.
***and now we get back to the speaker photo at the top of the piece
I have written about the Indie-fication of Hardware before. And since then there have been multiple new hardware companies breaking into the scene / silently incubating across different vectors of culture. Many of them taking one or a mix of the senses to new levels of manipulation / augmentation.
Recently at Eternal we worked with our friend Sora (pictured in the middle between Luca and myself) & Jon to design something special for the Eternal space.
Through the exercise and guided by my friend Sora, I began diving into hi-fi sound and it’s history. From sound clash in Jamaica to the halls of London where hi-fi speakers became the referential object for community politics when the current British culture didn’t care to highlight their news/happenings. Hi-fi sound is soaked in a rich history, and has turned into quite a luxury.
I was able to get a glance at the price sheet of Devon Ojas’s speakers and… let me tell you, it’s luxury.
But why??? Because it is a 10x+ on the senses.
This has all been one big plea to realize we need to get back to hardware investing and building. The same way we couldn’t have predicted the form of the computer that sat in everyone’s hand, we did believe in the immense value created when we would get there. And that proved true.
I believe the same is even more true today. What would happen if there was a hi-fi speaker in every single residence in America? What does that internal change look like for someone, for everyone over time? Asking these questions is what leads us to “bicycle for the mind” moments.
SPEAKING OF BIKES
I tweeted this jokingly but I really do believe I could turn Peloton around. They already have done the hard part. Get a great hardware product into a bunch homes, paired with great content.
But it’s like the iPhone at launch → NO APP STORE.
Peloton needs to do 3 things:
BUILD THEIR “APP STORE”, WHATEVER THAT LOOKS LIKE FOR THEM.
EXPAND INTO NEW MARKETS. THEIR INTERNATIONAL PENETRATION IS WEAK.
PORNOGRAPHIC LEVEL MARKETING (NOT LITERALLY SEX ON A BIKE) BUT JUST LIKE APPLE LEVEL SHIT.
WRAPPINGGGGG THIS
This ended up being the follow up to my indie hardware piece in ways I didn’t fully expect, but that’s alright.
I haven’t been writing too much publicly these days. Eternal is so incredibly busy, and I’m so proud of everything we are doing and have planned.
I find myself quite withdrawn from technologists, and also quite frustrated by their lack of ambition. Their manipulation of language as to shift the perception of the reality of their actions or lack there of.
In my previous piece Towards A Body of Work I discuss how we might find ways to produce at a resonant interval beyond “scale big blue app”. And that has led to so many great meetings and discussions with folks that read this newsletter or just stumbled on it from Twitter.
I want to encourage more of that thinking, as I believe it is severely underrated. If there’s anything this newsletter is for → it’s for encouragement. Often times for myself, as I reread my own writing to remind myself that I do in fact believe this and it’s real because I wrote it publicly, and of course for you. Trying to do something differently despite the inherent difficultly that different always presents us with.
I don’t do edits really, so excuse typos and things that don’t make sense.
Thanks so much for giving me your attention. I hope it was worth it, if not… unsubscribing will not hurt my feelings, and will give you back time you literally cannot have back.
It’s probably my Christianity that gives me a slightly unhealthy obsession with death. I look forward to it in some ways, and I think about it often.
Who is it that I become on this journey? What do I leave behind… and how long will that last, stay relevant, and where?
Yesterday I went to the Virgil exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. Walking around and through some of his work. Flirting with museum lines, putting my face as close to the objects as possible. “QUESTION EVERYTHING” printed on a white flag hung above my head, while the original Pyrex video played above a table of Off-White x Nike sneakers.
Virgil leaves behind a stunning body of work. From architectural pieces - collections at Louis Vuitton & Off-White - DJ sets - talks / presentations - and more. We can take it off the shelf, rotate it, listen to it.
Equally as important, he was a chronic documenter. Open sourcing the references that fed into his frameworks, designs, and collaborations.
Walking throughout the Brooklyn Museum, this was all on display. Both awe inspiring and leaving us with the definitive feeling that we can do it too. Not only that, we are doing it currently.
I think that software can be too abstract. Too under the hood. Too inviting to be touched and reworked. Where other materials have an end point in their pliability. The paint drys. The hem is sewn. The ribbon is cut.
It presents a very interesting problem. How does a technologist begin to look at their body of work... can they even without hardware phased out like Apple. An investor looks at their portfolio and memos. Founders hopefully get one long lasting organization… incredibly rare. For most, it’s a resume of contributions.
Naturally this is the course of 99%+ of working lives. But this isn’t about holding ourselves to those confines, it’s about having your own multidisciplinary portfolio while coming from an entirely different starting point. It’s not the resume, it’s the retrospective.
When constructing something large, when constructing something reallyyyyyy big ~ are you thinking about the one chair, the room, the car ~ or are you thinking about the framework in which you might build each one of these things through.
It reminds me of when Ye was frustrated with the wider flow of capital in an interview. In short lamenting “these guys in Silicon Valley, they wanna fund a guy that has one idea. I have a non-stop flow of ideas.”
Towards a body of work.
What is it supposed to speak to? It should be, I hope, beyond the scope of scaling one app. It should be, I hope, in constant dialogue of bridging past, present, and future.
I think, at least what I’ve been meditating on for the past 7 months, is that we have to look towards designing an organization that allows the ability to build out that body of work. Still venture back-able. Not just a design studio reliant on client work or a large art practice.
Cracking this holds an entirely new model for intersectional work. Not just scaling the big blue app. But creating software as infrastructure. Media disseminating a stance on cultural construction. A chair. A speaker system. All sharing a through-line opinion.
Towards a body of work.
I want to publish this before midnight so I’ll pause here…
I don’t do edits really, so excuse typos and things that don’t make sense.
Thanks so much for giving me your attention. I hope it was worth it, if not… unsubscribing will not hurt my feelings, and will give you back time you literally cannot have back.
Much love.
Live in the light
Thanks for reading Product Lost by @hipcityreg! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
Scrolling through Instagram and I see a perfectly square post mashup of two globally beloved brands.
I don’t do edits really, so excuse typos and things that don’t make sense.
Thanks so much for giving me your attention. I hope it was worth it, if not… unsubscribing will not hurt my feelings, and will give you back time you literally cannot have back.
This is my favorite Marshall McLuhan quote that I believe defines the impact that truly genre defining technology compresses. But I want to hit the reversal on it…
My consumers, are they not my producer.
— Reggie James
Seeing the mixed response around the Stem Player has been incredibly interesting to me. A lot comes from a perceived lack of accessibility to the device and the content that it holds.
This is lazy and relies on an institutional stance that has created convenience for the consumer at the expense of a better handshake for the artist.
I want to present a different perspective on what is happening, and what I believe is the future of hardware divorced from the Apple (and subsequent web2 platform-ization of everything) world view.
Experience (for those that don’t know):
The experience is reminiscent of loading up my iPod when I was a kid. I jack in, I open iTunes, I load up, I walk away.
In a similar manner, you plug in your STEMPLAYER. The site recognizes it. And you have the ability to freely move about the cabin from there. Each track’s stems are broken out, each groove having touch controls over them. (with a host of other controls relating the touch-sound connection — also a good note of our increasing synesthesia)
The difference is singular and a major one. It’s the inversion of pure mobile consumption → the manipulation of your own consumption.
I can put any music that I have on it. Anyone that has dj’d and brings their usb around understands this. This idea has been widely lost in the playlist world of streaming.
It’s removing my reliance on Spotify as the sole distributor of my consumption. And putting my curation and ownership in direct relationship to both the artist and the tools I’ve surrounded myself with.
The question then shifts to → can this scale and what happens when it does?
Here are slides from an internal Eternal deck that pulls at the strings of this subject.
The Implication:
The closer we are able to compress consumption and reproduction, the stronger the cultural tool. REALIZE RIGHT NOW — CULTURE AND TECHNOLOGY ARE NOT SEPARATED. A lot of conversation I see in public have this weird distortion of thinking of these things as different forces. The reality is that it’s the double-helix-dna of our entire human experience.(bar)
Refocusing on the STEMPLAYER.
What we “lose” from the lack of distribution on platforms like Spotify, we gain in direct control of our new relationship with the work/media.
Every moment of consumption has the ability to be rethought, to find new thoughts, to record and distribute a different take of the shared base/reference point.
Sometimes it takes a series of tools to do this. The fashion house produces a line → we consume and style → we utilize our iPhone for capture → we utilize Instagram to redistribute and reset the context of the original line.
The reality of this chain is that it is getting compressed by our most dominant general purpose tool — the iPhone. But I would argue that the iPhone has really run its course on the tooling it affords (either in inspiration or the medium itself).
Compare this to the STEMPLAYER. DONDA 2 is released directly to STEMPLAYER. In playing it, I have direct remix and isolation and looping etc etc etc… This can be recorded and go anywhere as a proliferation of the original work.
Compression.
Where is this compression heading???
Below are graphics directly shared from the STEMPLAYER discord.
Culture is caring.
— Tremaine Emory (Denim Tears & new Creative Director of Supreme)
Which model above looks like it cares more about the producers of the life source that is music? Which model above gives you a more direct relationship to this artifact?
It feels so painfully obvious held side-by-side.
The next big thing often looks like a toy… yada yada
We’ve been so sedated by the ease of consumption we’ve distorted our very notion of production.(bar) The growth of the term “creator” has bastardized the very spiritual resonance of it.
I encourage some of you that really care about music/consumer technology/technology-at-large to get the STEMPLAYER. Recognize that it’s a public v1 (there was another model with Teenage Engineering that wasn’t released). Rebuild a tolerance for truly new technologies. It will put your relationship with music in an entirely new light.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that new hardware that has resonated culturally has come from well outside the scope of the Apple ecosystem / Silicon Valley. This isn’t an Opal Camera (shoutout to my homies) snapped to the top of your Mac. Nor is it an AR headset forcing you to believe in their version of the future floating screen in your face.
This is giving you a screen-less moment. A moment to center in with a smooth orb that’s soft to the touch. With haptics and light that relates to the audio that is surrounding your space.
This is something genuinely new and worth consideration that guides us in a very different depiction of our hardware/media relationship.
I don’t do edits really, so excuse typos and things that don’t make sense.
Thanks so much for giving me your attention. I hope it was worth it, if not… unsubscribing will not hurt my feelings, and will give you back time you literally cannot have back.
