This newsletter goes out to more than 1,000 ambitious frontier people. If you like it, share with a friend or support me on Patreon!
If you want to go deeper on these ideas, apply for my online school, Roote—a community of world-class systems thinkers looking to understand and build the future.
Hey y’all,
I was feeling sad this past week. Some combination of smoke, foot injuries, dating life, and procrastination. It could also just be the COVID blues. Sometimes we’re happy, and sometimes we’re sad. And that’s ok. ❤️
1) I’ve started a pro-Biden memes page with my friends Jacob and Adam. It’s called Malarkey Memes with Presidential Themes.
I usually don’t discuss U.S. politics in this newsletter. There’s enough attention on it already.
In fact, I mostly see nation-states as a legacy institution from the Industrial Age. Instead, I’m focused on other systems for public goods (liberal radicalism), evolving the current system (with an expanded House of Reps), and exploring GovTech and CivicTech (e.g. as networked nonviolent protest).
And yet, damn, the world would be so much better off with Biden instead of Trump. There’s only two months before the 2020 U.S. presidential election. Trump has a 30% chance of winning. Eep!
Plus, Biden is actually a great candidate. Jacob, Adam, and I wanted to make a case for “Pro Joe” while also upping our meme game. It’s been fun (and difficult!) to find great meme templates and then wordsmith dank memes on top. Here are two recent favorites:
Like the page on Facebook here: Malarkey Memes with Presidential Themes.
And whether you’re in the U.S. or not, please vote in your upcoming elections!
Now back to your regularly scheduled, non-political programming…
2) Here’s some feedback from my friend Gabby Hibbert on last week’s WAP article:
Without a doubt the onus of power & pleasure is placed on the male rapper (ex. in Playboi Carti's music video for Broke Boi, a woman is being held at gunpoint while giving him head).
Women like Princess Nokia, City Girls, Megan Thee Stallion, and Cardi B reversed the onus of power. Lil' Kim started it all back in the early 90s in the U.S. When I have seen people reference Lil' Kim, I see them casting a nostalgic lens on her work, even though she did many of the things that Cardi * Megan do now.
TL;DR: rap is like punk. It is vulgar, freeing to certain groups, and problematic to some.
LINKS
1) Art is one of the best ways to understand Metamodernism (which is a manifestation of Roote Pillar #3 Coherent Pluralism).
This 8min “Cute House” video perfectly shows the metamodernist stance. In it, a group of men get excited by their friend’s cute house. But one of the men has trouble with thinking of himself as cute. So the men stage a therapy session for him to embrace his cuteness.
Why is it metamodern? Because it’s both hilarious and heartfelt. It’s not “naively honest” (as modernism would be). But it’s also not purely ironic (as post-modernism would be).
Instead, it has both ironic and honest sides (ironesty). It’s metamodern!
Compare this to the controversial #MeToo Gillette ad. That ad is honest without irony. I’m not sure the best way to move towards more compassionate masculinity, but ironestly exploring boyhood socialization seems like a good start.
2) The New Progressive Agenda. This is a good overview from the Tony Blair Institute on a tech-enabled progressive agenda. It starts with the claim:
The institutions of the 20th century are fundamentally mismatched to the challenges of the 21st century.
Then highlights various areas of GovTech: predictive health for all, personalised education for all, universal digital inclusion, charter sectors, platforms for public services, networked institutions, and more.
3) I loved this critique of the tech industry: tech brain.
tech brain is a sort of constant willful reductionism: an addiction to easy answers combined with a wholesale cultural resistance to any kind of complexity.
4) Entropy Theory. This is a good overview (from Packy!) of how new internet protocols create abundance, which leads to new companies that need to “wrangle that entropy”.
5) The Onion: Spotify Celebrates 100th Dollar Given to Artists.
JOBS / OPPORTUNITIES
MIT’s Digital Currency Initiative (where I used to work!) is hiring a software developer to work on a CBDC (Central Bank Digital Currency) with the Boston Fed. Great team, cool project.
Lead Mozilla’s new Data Ventures Lab.
Join this Wikipedia edit-a-thon at 12pm EDT to increase the number of women in science represented on Wikipedia.
EVENTS
Weekly Bento (recurring on Sundays)
Effective Altruist Events Calendar (recurring)
Interintellect Salons (recurring)
The Stoa (recurring)
MUSIC
My brother John and I love talking about weird music. So we decided to record ourselves listening and bumpin’ to tunes we like. Check it here:
Here’s the show’s playlist. I especially recommend the jazz cover of Ain’t No Sunshine:
Hope you have a good week! Warmth, Rhys
❤️ Thanks to my generous patrons ❤️
Jim Rutt, Zoe Harris, Yancey Strickler, Jacob Zax, David Ernst, Jonny Dubowsky, Brian Crain, Matt Lindmark, Colin Wielga, Samuel Jonas, Andy Cochrane, Malcolm Ocean, Ryan Martens, John Lindmark, Collin Brown, Ref Lindmark, James Waugh, Mark Moore, Matt Daley, Coury Ditch, Brayton Williams, Jeff Snyder, Mike Goldin, Chris Edmonds, Peter Rogers, Darrell Duane, Denise Beighley, Scott Levi, Harry Lindmark, Simon de la Rouviere, and Katie Powell.