Transmission #35: Lost Code, Magical Guitars, the New Right, and the Origins of Polarfleece.
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This is Transmissions by me, Martin Brown. Father. Husband. Design Lead at Craig Walker, sometime lecturer at RMIT. Marty to most.
This is an ongoing fortnightly newsletter that collates some of the more interesting stories, links, quotes and other curios that float my way.
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Design
His software sang the words of God. Then it went silent
S.I. Rosenbaum, Input Mag
A tale of clashing timescales: when an eternal culture hits software redundancy cycles. Thomas Buchler spent decades single-handedly building a software resource that taught people how to sing the torah. And then he died, leaving the source code on a computer somewhere, unable to be updated to run on modern operating systems. So when Windows pulls the plug on ancient code, and creaking machines splutter to an end, so dies a treasured library.
The Legend of the Music Tree
Ellen Ruppel Shell, Smithsonian
Epic story of a legendary mahogany tree, felled in Belize in 1965, then retrieved from a ravine decades, and now being crafted into $30,000 guitars. The tree had a genetic mutation that gave the wood a gorgeous, unique marbled grain. Does it sound any better than regular wood? The jury’s out, but Slash owns one, and seems to think so.
How Polyester Bounced Back
Virginia Postrel, Works In Progress
Polyester, once derided for its garish colors and unique ability to trap sweat and odour, is making a comeback, thanks to innovations in the shape of the fibres, and the worldwide trend toward wearing athleisure for almost any occasion. If you’ve ever wondered how polarfleece came to be, then this is the story for you.
Ideas
Inside the New Right, where Peter Thiel is placing his biggest bets
James Pogue, Vanity Fair
Cut out and keep, for when the Republicans storm over the Democrats in the US midterms, and the likely return of Trump (or Trump-lite) in 2024. This is a sober look into the New Right. Not the lunatic fringe of the conspiracy addled far-right, but a new political sensibility that seems to be emerging as a response to America’s deep malaise.
This group encompasses everyone from rich crypto bros and tech executives to back-to-the-landers to disaffected members of the American intellectual class, like Up in the Air author Walter Kirn, whose fulminations against groupthink and techno-authoritarianism have made him an unlikely champion to the dissident right and heterodox fringe. But they share a the basic worldview: that individualist liberal ideology, increasingly bureaucratic governments, and big tech are all combining into a world that is at once tyrannical, chaotic, and devoid of the systems of value and morality that give human life richness and meaning—as Blake Masters recently put it, a “dystopian hell-world.”
Quote of the Week
Primitive communism is appealing. It endorses an Edenic image of humanity, one in which modernity has corrupted our natural goodness. But this is precisely why we should question it. If a century and a half of research on humanity has taught us anything, it is to be sceptical of the seductive. From race science to the noble savage, the history of anthropology is cluttered with the corpses of convenient stories, of narratives that misrepresent human diversity to advance ideological aims.
– Primitive Communism, Manvir Singh, Aeon
Chart of the Week
Maybe John Maynard Keynes was right after all?
Other
👾 What will visual design look like once all styles can be commodified through AI-generated systems like DALL-E 2? How will we signal premium and expensive when everything is cheap? Link
💣 On the occaision of his 70th birthday, Kevin Kelly’s list of 103 pieces of advice he wished he’d known earlier. Link
😷 Chilling stories emerging from locked-down Shanghai, where mysterious popups on travellers phones are sealing their grim fate. Link
⌚️ Post mortem on the Pebble watch and why it ultimately failed, from its founder Eric Migicovsky. Link
🍏 Is Apple’s product development just mainstreaming the ideas of the legendary computer scientist Alan Kay? Link
If you like what you read, maybe somebody else you know will to!