Transmissions highlights of the year 2021
The floatiest of the flotsam
2021 was, as we all know, another strange year in a string of strange years. It’s the year that I started this newsletter. And against all likelihood, I’ve kept doing it once a fortnight.
This is the 27th edition, and we’ve got a lovely community of nearly 500 folks, who for some reason or another have subscribed, and keep on reading. I’ve really enjoyed the frequent messages I’ve got in response to these missives, so thank you sincerely for being a part of this weird corner of the internet.
With the year rolling to a close, I thought I would put together a list of some of my personal highlights. What follows is a longer than expected list of links to some great stories that appeared in 2021, plus a few from the archives: the floatiest of the flotsam.
All credit goes to the writers and creators who actually produced these: thank you dearly for making my life richer and more insightful and inspiring.
To the Transmissions community, thank you for starting out on this journey with me, and look forward to beaming out to you next year. If you’ve read some pieces that you’d like to share - send them across to me!
And a always, please do share this if you like it and you think others might too.
Enjoy your holiday break!
x
Marty
Links of the Year
🛸 Was Oumuamua an alien starship? Probably not, but astrophysicist Avi Loeb continues to argue passionately for the possibility of alien life.
🎨 Grayson Perry and Brain Eno conversing about the nature of art.
🆔 What happened to all the beautiful logotypes?
🌞 A utopian vision to get behind: Solarpunk. And a radical, beautiful vision of extreme planetary rewilding through consolidating our humanity into a single, sprawling 9-billion person city.
💿 A great post from perennial shit-stirrer Tom Goodwin arguing that companies need to stop hiding behind the visage of ‘digital transformation’ and actually get real about innovating.
📖 The best story wins. It does. It really does.
🦕 30 years later, Jurassic Park still looks great. This VFX deep dive tells us why.]
🎞 New Adam Curtis dreamscape/documentary dropped: I Can’t Get You Out of My Head.
🍄 Huge steps forward for mental health treatments through psychedelics.
☢️ Is nuclear power our friend after all? What’s worse, CO2 emissions or radioactive sludge?
🤔 An introduction to the philosophy of René Girard. “The true root of all desire, Girard and others argue, is never in the objects or the experience we pursue; it’s really about the other person from whom we’ve learned to want these things.“
🧧 A provocative essay that poses the question about China and, to a lesser degree, Russia: “What do we do if tyrants become competent?”
🦾 Bruce Sterling gives a mind-blowing hour long talk, Intro to Transhumanism.
🧑🎨 A lovely piece by my former colleague, Andy Polaine, with some sage advice for surviving as a creative individual.
🎧 In a world of Spotify and algorithmic sorting rather than record stores, the concept of musical genre is dying.
🌹 David Rudnick on the concept of ‘digital prime.’ Will our digital spaces take primacy over our physical ones? For some, they have already.
👟 In March 2021, I pondered whether Gucci selling AR sneakers for $18 was over- or under-valued. With Nike’s recent $33m acquisition of RTFKT it’s looking more and more likely it’s the latter.
🌏 Space10 looking to push beyond Human-Centered Design into a more planetary-centric model. Platitudinous? Or possible?
✨ Sparkling design fiction short story from Tom Lee looking back from a far-future to an alternate world of 2020.
🥻 Some wild dystopian/tech fashion: Hamcus, Demobaza, Guerilla Group.
🔪 Outstanding profile of Master Bladesmith Bob Kramer, whose obsessive pursuit to the make the finest quality knives takes him around the world, and features dozens of fascinating digressions.
👔 Six things design firms can learn from the fast lane of consulting
🐖 Extraordinarily touching story about a farmer in Wales. “I’ve had the same supper for 10 years.”
💣 How to Survive a Killer Asteroid. TLDR: You won’t.
🧔♀️ Popular Japanese biker @azusagakuyuki turns out to be a 50-year-old man using FaceApp.
🤬 Roughly 1 in every 10 words said by a Glaswegian is a swear word.
🏢 Decrying the state of modern architecture. How did we get to the present, where the world’s finest architecture prizes reward such a bleak vision of what is possible?
🧑🔬 Lab leak. Possible? Probable?
🏛 From the archives: Lessons in public narrative construction, from the tornado of misinformation, bullshitting and arse-covering in the days after the killing of Osama Bin Laden.
🌠 As Ben Evans put it recently, ‘The blockchain may not lie, but you can lie to the blockchain.’ How many layers of copyright infringement are in Emily Ratajkowski’s new NFT?
🎾 Andre Agassi could tell which way Boris Becker was about to serve by watching his tongue. Not only that, he sometimes went the wrong way on purpose so Becker wouldn’t catch on.
🕹 Life is essentially one big videogame.
🍄 A big year for fungi. TIL: If the mycelial threads in just a teaspoon of soil were unravelled and laid out, they might stretch anywhere from ‘a hundred metres to ten kilometres’.
🐸 ‘Real toad stranglers' and other wonderfully evocative colloquialisms, jotted down from a Texan grandmother, born 1905. A ‘toad strangler’ refers to a particularly heavy rainstorm.
🏞 The Strange, Soothing World of Instagram’s Computer-Generated Interiors
🚗 Worlds within worlds: role-playing games inside Grand Theft Auto.
👽 A legendary Reddit thread: UFOs were supposed to arrive on July 8th. I marked it in my calendar. Sadly, predictably, nothing happened.
🧶 Incorporating textiles into computer hardware design.
⑂ Charles Kellogg, a man who had an uncanny ear and a remarkable gift for vocal mimicry, who was also able to create sounds out of tuning forks that could actually extinguish fires. He also carved his own car out of a single fallen tree.
🎳 The wild world of asymmetrical bowling ball cores.
🧒 From Lil Nas X to cheugy: a guidebook to Gen Z. I am old.
🐢 A turtle’s shell is actually an extension of its ribs: a visual explainer.
🏜 The Australian outback, as rendered in 5k in Unity.
🙇♂️ The blowback and the limitations of design thinking. Can we at least fail fast to succeed sooner?
💿 From the archives: a classic conversation with the extremely forthright Quincy Jones. “What were your first impressions of the Beatles?: That they were the worst musicians in the world. They were no-playing motherfuckers. Paul was the worst bass player I ever heard. And Ringo? Don’t even talk about it.”
🧵 An extremely satisfying subreddit dedicated to very neat cable management.
🌳 The Miyawaki Method: A Better Way to Build Forests? How an ex-Toyota engineer is rewilding the world.
🪦 The extraordinary story of a French woman who has been trying for 17 years to prove to authorities that she is, in fact, not dead.
👩💻 A whistle-stop tour of how design and politics have intertwined across the 20th century. From Gropius to Sottsass and back again, to a kind of neo-modernism.
🌽 Learning to Love G.M.O.s. Questioning the sometimes reflexive narrative of ‘big and complex = bad; small and natural = good’.
🏺A primer on Roman chariot racing. Everything changes, but everything stays the same. Of sporting rivals: “The Blues hated Greens, not because they were lower-class or heretics—but simply because they were Greens.”
♦ Great moments in film production design. From Terry Gilliam’s Brazil: the Executive Decision Maker.
🎬 The incredible world of hand-painted Ghanaian movie posters.
🧱 Why don’t we have robotic bricklayers yet? Not for lack of trying, but edge cases are a bitch.
📱 Kosher phones are a thing.
🤔 File away for retirement, or excessively languid long holidays: a beginners guide to cryptic crosswords.
🏡 250 Things An Architect Should Know. A classic from Michael Sorkin, the esteemed architecture critic who sadly passed away last year from COVID. Poetry as a listicle. Each sentence sublime in its brevity.
💻 💻 Some people are taking the opportunity of remote working to secretly do two full-time jobs at once. Article Link and an incredible how-to resource.
✈️ My son started a YouTube channel for his paper plane obsession, video production by his sister.
👨🏻🏫 Don Norman wants to kickstart a ‘design education revolution’ and design-twitter goes bananas.
🪙 Probably the article that has stayed with me most from this year. Former Blackrock Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) investor supremo Tariq Fancy reasseses the value of an investing strategy that aims to reduce the harms of capitalism. It’s not that easy, unfortunately.
🐒 Status monkeys – that’s us, btw – have a brand new tool to project our relative superiority: NFTs.
🔗 The other big acronym of the year in tech: DAOs. What they are and how they work, and what happens when things go awry.
🚢 Strange happenings in the world of supply chains. An unfolding story that tells us a lot about how the world is run. More here. And even more. Yet more.
🔌 A tender and beautiful essay exploring how infrastructure binds us together.
🌍 The real metaverse is already here - travelogues to wondrous places like Lagos.
🚀 A milestone in infographics: The Wildly Detailed 100-Year Plan for Getting Humans to Mars
🇨🇳 The is the incredible story of Wang Huning, the supposed philosophical mastermind behind China’s recent lurch away from Western ideals, toward a new kind of sino-puritanism.
🔦 Escape from a flood in the world’s deepest cave. Ripping yarn.
🤌 The story of a woman whose inner monologue is voiced, hilariously, by an old Italian couple constantly arguing. Link
🧐 An introduction to philosopher Lewis Mumford who “sought to acknowledge the genuine plentitude that technological systems make available to many people, while emphasizing that this is not an offer of a gift but of a deal.” A magnificent bribe.
💻 How chip-maker ASML continues to make computers faster and faster, pushing hard at the edge of physics.
🧠 Mind-expanding presentation exploring symmetry, consciousness and psychedelics.
👃 Smells and odour. There’s so much we still don’t nose. (groan)
🌿 When we talk about sustainability, what do we really mean?
👄 An hilarious, scathing restaurant review leads to a deranged rebuttal from the furious chef, one that starts with a drawing of a horse and only gets better.
Quotes of the Year
"Nothing too good or too bad stays that way forever, because great times plant the seeds of their own destruction through complacency and leverage, and bad times plant the seeds of their own turnaround through opportunity and panic-driven problem-solving. The same story, again and again."
– Morgan Housel, Collaborative Fund
“When sceptics are asked to explain why people succumb to conspiracy theories, they tend to say they offer a strange comfort – they allow people to make sense of a chaotic world. But I think there’s another, more often ignored reason. You get renaissances of conspiracy theories when the powerful behave in conspiratorial ways.”
– Jon Ronson, Making Sense of Conspiracy Theorists, The Guardian
“It’s easy to respect the rights of people we like or whose habits we enjoy; the test of a true liberal is whether they can do the same for those they disdain or whose habits they find repellant.”
- Jacob Grier, A Smoke-Filled Room of One’s Own
“Kiers is one of several scientists whose recent studies have found that plants and symbiotic fungi reward and punish each other with what are essentially trade deals and embargoes, and that mycorrhizal networks can increase conflict among plants. In some experiments, fungi have withheld nutrients from stingy plants and strategically diverted phosphorous to resource-poor areas where they can demand high fees from desperate plants.”
– Ferris Jabr, The Social Lives of Forests, New York Times
The land required for solar panels alone to provide all global energy is 450,000 km2, 0.3% of the global land area of 149 million km2. That is less than the land required for fossil fuels today, which in the US alone is 126,000 km2, 1.3% of the country.
— The New Yorker, quoting a new report.
“Its names are as numerous as its aims: divining, doodlebugging, water witching, water smelling, peach-twig toting, well prophesying, rhabdomancy, and, from the lips of the most pragmatic among them, finding water with a stick.”
— Dan Schwartz, Into the Mystical and Inexplicable World of Dowsing
At the level at which we can watch bacteria, trying to make conclusions about them would be like trying to evaluate the well-being of France by counting the number of national monuments that were built over time in Paris.
— Anon., An Interview with an Anonymous Biologist
"Cultures do not change when people replace old ideas with new ones; cultures change when people with new ideas replace the people with old ones."
– Culture Wars are Long Wars, Tanner Greer
"Money buys happiness in the same way drugs bring pleasure: Incredible if done right, dangerous if used to mask a weakness, and disastrous when no amount is enough."
– The Highest Forms of Wealth, Morgan Housel, Collaborative Fund
"The passage opened into a chamber, and at its center there were two huge rings made up of hundreds of stalagmites. They’d been broken up deliberately, sometimes glazed in small fires, and arranged like the sign for infinity: ∞."
Describing a Neanderthal cave left undisturbed for 176,500 years.
– The Highbrow Neanderthal, Dean Kissick, Grow by Ginko
"Human noses can detect some compounds at as low a concentration as thirty-four thousand molecules in one cubic centimeter, the equivalent of a single drop of water in twenty thousand Olympic swimming pools.."
– Entangled Life, Merlin Sheldrake
Instead, they see Wang’s America: deindustrialization, rural decay, over-financialization, out of control asset prices, and the emergence of a self-perpetuating rentier elite; powerful tech monopolies able to crush any upstart competitors operating effectively beyond the scope of government; immense economic inequality, chronic unemployment, addiction, homelessness, and crime; cultural chaos, historical nihilism, family breakdown, and plunging fertility rates; societal despair, spiritual malaise, social isolation, and skyrocketing rates of mental health issues; a loss of national unity and purpose in the face of decadence and barely concealed self-loathing; vast internal divisions, racial tensions, riots, political violence, and a country that increasingly seems close to coming apart.
– The Triumph and Terror of Wang Huning
“Gooooooooooal! Gooooooooooal! I want to cry! Dear God! Long live football! Gooooooooooal! Diegoal! Maradona! It’s enough to make you cry, forgive me. Maradona, in an unforgettable run, in the play of all time. Cosmic kite! What planet are you from? Leaving in your wake so many Englishmen, so that the whole country is a clenched fist shouting for Argentina? Argentina 2, England 0. Diegoal, Diegoal, Diego Armando Maradona. Thank you, God, for football, for Maradona, for these tears, for this, Argentina 2, England 0."
– Uruguayan commentator Victor Hugo Morales, on Maradona’s second goal vs England in 1986. From Beautiful Chaos: The Passion of Maradona.
Thanks for reading this year! 🤞 for a positive and productive 2022!