Err… thanks ChatGTP.
It’s Human Marty here. Non-pirate style.
So… what happened this year?
Looking back, 2022 was a year of things that didn’t quite happen: crypto/web3 definitely didn’t gain mass adoption and looks set for a slow death (or at least a long hibernation), the metaverse showed promise but is spluttering with the general tech malaise. We didn’t see the New Right overrunning the US midterm elections. We didn’t get a conclusive answer on the covid origin story, nor did we get a defintive ‘end’ to the pandemic – just a slow, gradual fadeout. We didn’t create sentient AI. And the slow cancellation of the future seems to be grinding out in some weird disintegrating way.
But some things really did actualise. There was of course a tragic war in Ukraine. Applied AI hit mainstream: ChatGTP forced us to redefine the Turing test, and a profusion of text-to-image models forced us to question what to value in visual art. The pace of advance is so quick that this post from 3 months ago seems almost quaint. There was the strangely named ‘Inflation Reduction Act’, which perhaps presents a glimmer of hope in the climate stakes. There was La Nina.
Personally, I moved on from many years in design consulting to take up a role as design director at the wonderful Culture Amp.
So what is Transmissions? In its usual form it is an ongoing fortnightly newsletter that collates some of the more interesting stories, links, quotes and other curios that float my way. This is the yearly wrap. Enjoy it!
If you’re new here, then sign up now to get more of these in your inbox, and don’t forget to tell your friends!
Science & Tech
👁 Second Sight made an incredible piece of technology – a bionic eye that communicated with the vision areas of the brain, allowing blind people to see again. Then when business went bad, it turns out that while patients may have thought they were buying their sight back, what they were actually doing was renting a service that supported the physical hardware that was embedded in their body. Link
🗣 How some words have a kind of synesthesic quality, where the sounds and textures and associations tend to reinforce one another across the senses. Link
🕎 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. Link
Society & Culture
🧠 Given our recent increases in population and prosperity, for some reason we’re not seeing that many new genuises. Link
🎙 Chuck Klosterman and Tyler Cowen in sparkling conversation, covering a wide range of topics from the slow cancellation of the future, to Seinfeld, to college basketball. Link
👨🎤 More future-cancellation: 14 Warning Signs That You Are Living in a Society Without a Counterculture. Link
👵🏻 The US president is very old. The average age of CEOs has increased by 14 years… over the last 14 years. What’s going on with this oldness? Link
☢️ This dive into 21st century media theory is a must-read for anyone seeking to understand the splintering of our social narratives. Link
🙀 ‘Algorithmic anxiety’: what is becoming the defining trait of a generation. How the strange ways in which our tastes have become part of a feedback loop that we feel vaguely: our behaviour alters ‘the algorithm’, ‘the algorithm’ shapes our worldview, and in turn alters our behaviour. And so it goes. Link
💭 We’re so collectively exhausted from living in ‘unprecedented times’ that we are simply blocking it all out; we’re unable to respond. Link
🇺🇸 Jonathan Haidt’s must-read take on the current zeitgeist: Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid Link
🧘 A critical take on how Buddhist precepts have found their way into 21st century corporate cultureWhat happens when we turn work into a religion? Link
🤔 Philosopher Agnes Callard: art is for evil; exploring the shadow side of what it means to be human. Link
🤖 A company using machine-learning to power the discovery of new drug compounds, decides to see what happens if they flip the switch and change the parameters from ‘help’ to ‘hurt’. The algorithm then dutifully obliges and produces a string of never before seen and highly dangerous chemical compounds. Link
☑️ On a Productivity Trackers, a new kind of Taylorist hell that is perhaps the natural reaction by employers to the working-from-home free-for-all that has become the new normal for many. Link
🪨 A meditative profile of Kurt Steiner, a kind of stone-skipping mystic. He once threw a a stone an improbable, almost magical, 88-skips (watch it here). He lives a strange, isolated life, almost entirely devoted to stone-skipping. Link
Music
💿 A valiant and quite extraordinary map of musical genre. Everynoise is an huge word-map that shows hundreds of different genres and their relative proximity/similarity to each other. Genres names include schranz, hololive, sovietwave and new isolationism. Link
🎶 This article sums up the general anarchy that is swirling around music these days. At the heart of it is this: no-one knows how to make a music star. Not record labels, not music media, not concert promoters, radio. Something strikes a chord on social media and they just kind of emerge. Link
🎸 A modern tale of algorithmic ascendancy: why an obscure B-side (Harness Your Hopes) suddenly became the band Pavement’s ‘Greatest Hit’. Link
Art & Design
⏱ All engineering textbooks should be like this. Game designer Bartosz Ciechanowski takes us on a journey inside a mechanical watch, and meticulously walks us through, piece by piece, how it works. Link
🏠The art project as home: Robert Bruno, and the house he built himself, made almost entirely out of quarter-inch Corten steel. Link
🤑 The often yawning chasm between reality and a sales pitch. This story, thankfully, is set in the comparatively low-stakes environment of a ‘human-centred digital design agency.’ Link
🧴 A drifting, contemplative piece about plastic, which has ridden the waves of public popularity over the 20th century, and now, in the 21st, finds itself a pariah in the battle for a more sustainable future. Link (More plastic thoughts here: how polyester is back, yeah baby. Link)
🏡 Vale Christopher Alexander, who passed this year. An overview of some of his most influential ideas. Link
👾 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
🏹 In-depth essay about the construction of bows and arrows. There are hundreds of variations, but only a handful of unique and successful design approaches. Link
Climate
🧪We are destined to continue to rely on fossil fuels for the foreseeable future because they are so intrinsic to the creation of four materials we cannot imagine 21st century life without: cement, steel, plastic and ammonia (used in the making of fertiliser). Link
📊 ESG investing might sound like a great idea (make money and save the world), but it’s sadly not that simple, and what sounds like a great idea is, largely, not working. Link
🍌 The maddening counter-intuitivity of trying to reduce one’s carbon footprint through food. Link
🥶 ‘Refreezing Earth's poles feasible and cheap, new study finds’. Supposedly good news that reads like the start of a catastrophe movie. Link
🌏 David Wallace-Wells wrote a book in 2017 called The Uninhabitable Earth, which painted a bleak and ghastly picture of the future – but in the 5 years since, he has recanted some of his more extreme scenarios because there have been significant signs of positive change. Link
TIL
🍕 Leading indicators that something big is happening in the world: late pizza deliveries to Pentagon. Link
🚢 Before containerisation, the cost of hand-loading a ship was about $5.86 per ton. With McLean’s new shipping container system, the price dropped to only 16 cents per ton. Link
🤦♂️ A new study states that the entire positive environmental benefit of cycling over more carbon-intensive forms of transport actually reduces to zero… once you factor in the fact that cyclists tend to live longer lives. Link
✈️ Well blow me down with a feather. Catch Me If You Can, the book written by Frank Abagnale, a serial fraudster, about his life as a serial fraudster… seems to, also, be mostly a fraud. Link
🛖 Benin City was once the largest city in central Africa, with advanced planning and thousands of inhabitants. Nothing remains of it after it was razed by the British. Link
👟 We seem to have reached peak-long jump. No one has beaten Carl Lewis’s record since 1991. Except for Lewis, who thinks he did one better. Link
💿 A major computer manufacturer discovered that playing the music video for Janet Jackson’s “Rhythm Nation” would crash certain models of laptops. Link
🦀 Nature loves making crabs. The basic body plan has evolved at least five different times. The process is called carcinization. Link
🏁 How QR codes work. Strangely fascinating. Link
🕸 To communicate with spies in foreign countries, the CIA created 1-off, innocuous-looking fake websites that had secret messaging systems hidden inside them. Link
🤬 Many people believe that anonymity is the source of bad behaviour online, and that forcing people to use their real identities would fix this. Not true. Link. (The real problem is that some people are just assholes)
🌍 By 2100, Africa will be home to 40% of the world’s population. Link
Eye candy
🧱 People have built some really amazing things in Minecraft. Link
🇵🇱🇺🇸 There is a Polish LARP group that roleplays as contemporary Americans. Link
🌵 Artist Michael Heizer has been working on a desert megalith artwork for 50 years at a cost of up to US$40m. It is over a mile long and half a mile wide. It is extraordinary. Link
🎮 Japanese crew making real-life recreations of video game scenes. Uncanny. Link
🖥 Wonderful thread of Apple industrial design prototypes from the 80s and 90s. Link
📱 Remembering the many, many competitors to the digital music throne that Apple’s iPod vanquished. Remember the Zune? Well what about about the Archos Jukebox Series? The Diamond Rio? Link.
🤳 Also this incredible post comparing the wild experimentation of 1980s concept car interiors with the similarly experimental phase of mobile phones from the 2000s. Link
🏢 Dress right for hostile architecture. Link
Thanks folks! I’ll take some time off and be back in January!