The Idealist 001 - A Prototype 📰
The Idealist: Vol. 1
An idea is a new perspective on familiar challenges. An idea takes the world we all know and turns it around so we can view it from a strange but strangely enlightening angle. Ideas provide jolts of energy because they are profound, because they are novel, because they are clarifying, because they are contrary, because they are bizarre. Sometimes they can be all of these. Who can be sure? What you are sure of is that ideas are thrilling. And on most days this is enough.
This oddly profound and only slightly paraphrased quote comes from the spiritual guide that is a professional development personality analysis. Apparently I like ideas, it has masterfully deduced. And as preposterous as this description is, somehow it fits an idea of an idea in my mind.
Some years ago, as I was wandering through the mountains of Bavaria with a friend (Hi Fi!), we talked of artistic projects to be done... one of my less insane ones was a magazine. I'd always wanted to publish my own magazine (and my short-lived and defiantly photocopied football magazine as a 10 year-old did not count). I forgot about all this for a while until recently when, under the spurious guise of corporate content marketing and driven by another friend (Hey Joe!), I actually did just that (p.s. montag.wtf, y'all).
During this same period I have turned my back upon the trappings of social media, blogging and other public ways of connecting my brain to the cyberspace (yes, I'm reading William Gibson right now, okay?). While I miss none of the familiar nonsense that need not be mentioned, I do miss discovering and sharing interesting things. I also heard that personal newsletters are the new hot shit.
And thus The Idealist is born. The Idealist is an experiment with curation and creation instead of just consumption. It is an attempt to start a conversation around ideas from whatever diverse field is making me go hmmm at this precise moment (but it will probably be somewhere between philosophy, technology and the arts). It will be published roughly every two weeks, since monthly seems too infrequent and weekly too daunting. It will always be worth a click...
You're on this prototype list because I know you well enough to think you'll dig some of the ideas.
And with that said, enough intro-waffle, here they are. Enjoy....
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We're on the edge of a new earthly epoch, the Anthropocene, says philosopher Tim Morton in this Guardian Long Read. It's not just that humans are controlling and defining our environment but that we are the environment. And this has profound implications,... such as this:
We can experience hyperobjects such as climate in their local manifestations, or through data produced by scientific measurements, but their scale and the fact that we are trapped inside them means that we can never fully know them.
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The new Blade Runner film is coming soon and I, for one, can't wait. So now's a good time to check out this video about how integral the music of Vangelis was to the overall mood of the original. And (plug alert!) why not read the article about corporeal elements of it on Montag this week at the same time.
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I am embracing a new-found love of Patreon since they rebranded recently (and I'm not the only one). For the amount of free content I/we consumer online (news, podcast, youtube, music and more...) and as other content models start breaking down, directly supporting people who's work I love, seems to be the logical thing to do. I've started allocating just a small fraction of what I used to spend on media back in the physical days to Patreon creators.
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One of whom is Sam Harris. His Waking Up podcast, while always interesting, can sometimes be a tad impenetrable at two hours a pop. However, this conversation with Kevin Kelly, the technology savant, on the nature of human intelligence and the most two-sided debate I've heard on the benefits/risks of the coming AI revolution, is well worth a listen. Kelly's thoughts in more detail here.
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And to finish, this set of Nihilist Startup Haikus from the ever-reliable McSweeneys hits close, perhaps a little too close, to home.