make some NOISE!!!
To be modern is to experience personal and social life as a maelstrom, to find one’s world and oneself in perpetual disintegration and renewal, trouble and anguish, ambiguity and contradiction: to be part of a universe in which all that is solid melts into air. To be a modernist is to make oneself somehow at home in the maelstrom, to make its rhythms one’s own, to move within its currents in search of the forms of reality, of beauty, of freedom, of justice.
— Superstructures, Notes on the Experimental Jetset / Volume 2
“It’s the business of the future to be dangerous.”
We are on the path to danger. We can all feel it.
Disruption is not a peaceful transition of power. It’s a coupe. The government felt this reality with Facebook too late. They mistakenly wrote it off as a little website, the Figma/Adobe blocked merger shows they’ll be careful never to make that mistake again. And with that recognition, they’ll look at new technologies earlier and earlier. They’ll continue to drag OpenAI and Anthropic in front of congress. They’ll serve Coinbase and Uniswap notice after notice.
But the expansion of individual freedoms is always framed as dangerous to the government / present powers that be.
So what to do? Where does that doing lead? This is the tricky part. It doesn’t fit into a neat list. I’m not even sure if the lists coming later are clean enough for my standards. But a hurricane’s path is predictable… perhaps the current storm is as well.
So, what to do? What have I been doing?
Set your squad → set your origin point → set your patterns.
My squad should be quite clear at this point → Yatu & Sean. Our origin point is NYC. Our current pattern is bridging NYC to SF and making noise each time we are out there. See Terminal SF (VIDEO). See our recent trip to Config.
And that’s not my only squad. Obviously my relationship with Luca (my cofounder) is one of the most important partnerships in my life that isn’t my relationship with my wife. And our energy (mine and Luca) gets directed at the squad that is Eternal. And through the years we’ve made a lot of noise surfing the maelstrom: our show Exit Sign reaching millions of viewers a month, irl presentations with Teezo Touchdown & Heron Preston, and most recently launching new embodied interactive AI experiences.
In the short term, these motions won’t break you (or me) out of the maelstrom… because the maelstrom isn’t something to be broken out of. It’s something to be felt, to be experienced, to take stock of how your peers behave.
So then what is the maelstrom for? What is its path?
It’s about clearing the way. Breaking down old buildings. Clearing out trees. Resetting well trodden paths. And that becomes the canvas in which your squad gets to build new ones.
Someone that has done inspiring work that shows what’s possible with this framework is Maran Nelson through Interact. It’s acted as an origin point for squad making. A very unique function.
WHERE IT LEADS YOU… US…
Work is a social function, digggggggg it!!! Doing all of this means nothing if you’re not doing it with the right people. Wavering from trend to trend isn’t going to get you there, digggggg it!!! Most of us need a good core squad to make sure we aren’t sliding on sinking sand.
Where does it lead you? Grounded with an ecosystem of collaborators. Ecosystem over egosystem.
Where does it lead us? Filling a new canvas post-maelstrom with institutions categorically different than the previous ones.
What’s at stake? The current ruling class perpetuating the culture we are already tired of.
Telling people they are in the middle of a storm is similar to a “this is water” effect or pointing out the nature of breathing. Immediately, people’s breathing changes. But that’s also the opportunity to teach someone how to use their breathing for meditation.
What are the elements of the noise we are in? How can we contribute to it? Where does it lead us?
THE ELEMENTS OF THE NOISE:
A lot of direct competition. A lot of people are doing the same thing, but saying they are doing different things. NOISE!
Overproduction of MOMENTS because they want to reinforce that their noise is more important than THAT noise.
Unrooted individuals moving city to city in search of the signal. Crypto conference hopping is a good example of this.
Nonstop city comparison of what place is better to choose to be unrooted from.
Shallow reference culture, causing present production to be rooted in the same pool of objects/moments/styles.
Large class of elites combined with cheap capital combined with nearly instantaneous tools of creation (AI Coding, crypto token generation platforms, etc)
Nonstop wave riding. Crypto to AI to whatever whatever. In the maelstrom the waves and trends avoid pattern matching logic.
CONTRIBUTE TO IT, BY REVERSING IT:
Recognize whatever you produce is contributing to the noise. Remember the core Thiel-ism — competition is for losers. Break out of competition.
Recognize that moment production is a marker of time, but how it’s done is the differentiator. In a world of conference keynotes and videos, be a debate stage at a church with phone cameras taped over.
Deeply rooted friendships that build together through — bridging their city/scenes through happenings, share + develop references, remixing tools for each other.
Create your formulas together. Give a method to the madness.
MAD MEN
I’ve been diving into the man Howard Gossage, known as the Socrates of San Francisco. After an already deeply interesting career, he was diagnosed with cancer and given 6 months to live. To which he responded with relief that he could do whatever he wanted. And went on to do some truly iconic projects.
His agency’s firehouse in San Francisco welcomed those that were also tapped in on the nature of their maelstrom of the 60s. Marshall McLuhan, John Steinbeck, Tom Wolfe, and more.
He formed his squads. He had his origin point → San Francisco. And he had his patterns → producing a sort of noble advertising.
I feel like I experience a sort of micro-death every few months. Some idea I put into the world is confirmed by the maelstrom, and simultaneously one of my priors gets absolutely ripped apart by the noise. My only lesson here is that I should be producing a lot more so my winners can compound and my stinkers teach me new things faster.
But I’ve come to believe something, through these micro-deaths and hearing the story of Gossage’s diagnosis. We only have 6 months to live at any given time. You only have 6 months to do, anything. And that THIS truth is the environment of the maelstrom.
I’m not being extreme. Extreme would be “we exist in a new world everyday”. It’s not that bad. But we do exist in a constant storm, and the tune of that storm isn’t THE SIGNAL. Searching for the signal in the storm is a fool’s errand, and too many technologists have made that their dominant analytical personality. “I sift signal from noise” type mfs.
The tune of the decade, as you should know by now, is an aggressive garage noise track. And the best news is → we can sell it, we can harness it. Just like the modernists did.
I had this idea that maybe we could just sell creativity.
Jesper Kouthoofd, Founder of Teenage Engineering
So take a deep breath. You only have 6 months to live and you’re in the middle of the maelstrom.
What noise will you make? Who will you make it with? And when the maelstrom dies down, the old institutions are trying to see the damage done, and the previous paths are wiped clean… know clearly what you will build together.
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