Threads & Presentations
Unfortunately, shortly after tweeting this promise to clear my mind away from the hell hole that is Twitter. Mark decided to launch Threads… as if conscientious that I didn’t deserve a break from the content mines. The necessity to keep up with the ever fleeting nature of digital status poured from the lips of the internet hive, as the gates to a new purgatory welcomed us.
For research purposes, at first, I decided to hop onto the new product. Enjoying and obviously feeling slightly skeptical of the ease of onboarding and bridging my entire Instagram graph to the new medium.
Naturally all the takes came and went. Even some of my own about the future Congressional hearings sure to take place over Meta’s entrance into the famed “Town Square” of the internet.
But what was left over, was my absolute boredom.
I am having an insanely hard time trying to care about this app. It is, by most critical measures, good. And I’m bullish it will continue to get better. Zuck tends to have the ability to bend the energy output of the Meta-zaibatsu at will. I assume this will happen here as well.
After all the fuss with the new-product group, all they actually had to do was wait for the right time to clone Twitter for their next hit. And Threads is a hit… so far.
There’s an insane amount of disorientation happening on Threads. Seeing people I follow through a construction of image, suddenly find themselves in an arena where the output is entirely different, with the artificial pressure of genuinely believing they “have to be there”… it’s brutal.
Why is this? What is happening?
My hunch is quite simple: audience building / influence has become upstream of all other personal goals. How can I do anything, if I can’t broadcast it to anyone? If I build a chair but can’t post it, did I ever build it?
Still feeling the glow post Paris Fashion Week (mens), I left having experienced COMME des GARÇON, KidSuper, Entropy, USB Club, Spencer Badu, Aeliza, and more. Ranging from formal calendar presentations to galleries to showrooms.
Paris, and the broader structure of fashion week, reminded me of my belief in spawn points. Fashion week being the formal presentation of the spawn point that is the studio.
The intentionality of presentation, the shared general process, the emphasis on calendar… it all works to give an organizing social force that creates communal distribution and meaning.
These presentations, scheduled twice a year, obviously no longer move at the speed of the internet. What does this do to the hierarchy of influence, the intentionality of production, the ability (or lack there of) to produce meaning?
I like Jules a lot, but I think this general path of thinking has gotten to miss the pains of what the lean back consumption style of the algorithm has constructed as an environment.
My friend (a musician) made a point while we walked around Silverlake that “the influencer is our new apex predator in culture”.
The flattening of intent across algorithms has created a new competitive landscape. The musician isn’t competing for attention/fandom between others in their genre. An artist being forced to be an influencer before they are an artist is not a “I think we are good” software environment. Far from it. They are competing against a pornstar on a podcast, a standup comedian doing crowd work, a Rogan clip on aliens, and a hundred other things compressed to 1-minute clips while I have TV on in the background and thinking about how close my Uber Eats order is.
The algorithm creates perpetual tourist. Virgil talked about having to create an image powerful enough to stop someone’s thumb while scrolling. It’s rare for our current platforms to allow for tourists & purists. YouTube, in my opinion, is the only one that does both. Of course, you may come across something that hurls you off site and sends you down a purist path. (an example of a current purist site would be Arena)
I genuinely believe, like my current boredom with Threads, we are collectively reaching a general fatigue with our current platforms. Like being a tourist yourself, if you lived your whole life in that state of motion, you’d drive yourself into the ground. No matter how interesting the content of your environment is.
What might be the new platforms that don’t create this mass flattening, but continue to enrich across senses and create an intentionality + social organization reminiscent of presentation? I know of a few…
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